You know you are over something when you can finally talk about it and not cry.
I usually hate to find ‘relatable’ posts online. But this time, I felt conflicted. I remember hurriedly scrolling back up after my brain had half-registered the sentence. I felt a weird sense of catharsis and a heavy feeling of guilt at the same time. So here I am, years after my last blog post, to pour my heart out.
12 September 2014
This day two years ago, my life was near-perfect. Deep and I were all packed up and ready to return home to Assam for good the next day. I was all of 16 weeks pregnant, and we could not wait to begin a new chapter in Guwahati – with his new job, my family, and a baby on the way. I knew I had opportunities galore as far as my job scene was concerned.
I did not have an ultrasound scan scheduled before 18 weeks, but my gynaecologist still suggested I go for a routine check-up before I travelled by flight, seeing that I was already a high-risk pregnancy with a previously ectopic one (a sob story for another day). It was a nuisance, to go for the scan in the midst of last-moment packing and cleaning, but the prospect of seeing the little one on the screen and hearing its tiny heart beating excited me. So, I happily left home on a September morning in Delhi, took an auto, and reached the hospital. My sister met me there, and for some reason that I cannot recall right now, she had her guitar with her. She was also pretty kicked, to be able to see the tiny one on the screen. The radiologist met us outside the ultrasound room and ushered us in.
As I prepped for the scan, lying on the bed, raising my kurti up, and letting the doctor smear the cool gel on my slight bump, she kept up a cheerful chat with my sister – talking about music and playing in college bands.
She then turned to me with some routine questions, while she kept moving around the ultrasound wand over my tummy for quite some time, her eyes glued to the screen, before turning to me and saying, “Priyankee, there is something wrong. I am very sorry, but there is no foetal heartbeat.”
Most of what followed after is a hazy blur, but I remember pleading the doctor to do something, crying non-stop in the waiting lounge till Deep came. Calls were made to our families, second opinions advised, another hospital visited, another scan done, reasons looked into, guesses made, tests done, advice given – with me coming to terms with the fact that the life that was growing inside me for over four months had suddenly gone.
Having not slept well that night, the next day’s flight had me thinking delirious thoughts.
It dawned on me that I was carrying a dead foetus inside me to Guwahati. Would the airline have charged extra if it was outside me? Would they have allowed me to carry it at all?
I got admitted into a hospital in Guwahati that very day after landing, and the D&E was carried out the next day. When people today tell me that I do not know the pains of labour as I have had a caesarean, I stop myself before I can blurt out, “Oh, but I do know.” Even if it was an induced labour to evacuate my uterus, it was one where I grunted through the entire night – the waves of pain seizing me intermittently as I drowned in them rather than put up a fight. When the tiny angel did leave me, it was all too soon and all too painless.
The doctor scooped me out with clinical precision while the nurses, with all their training, couldn’t help but give me looks of half-pity, half-curiosity – while I lay there in a messy pool of death and despair.
Not for long, though. They cleaned me up, gave me fresh clothes, and after a round of scans and blood tests, pronounced me fit to go home. Given my spartan response to all things sad, I seemingly bounced back soon enough – whilst dying every night. The hardest part was informing friends about the news – not because I had difficulty bringing up the matter, but because I just could not deal with all the sympathy. Not right then. No f**king way.
I don’t remember when Deep and I were ready enough again to get back to being intimate, but a spontaneous act of love and passion before now turned into a deliberate attempt to convince ourselves that we were healing, while an air of guilt and despair hung heavy in the bedroom.
But like all things, this too passed.
I slowly stopped being sad on the 12th of every month, I mentally checked out on 15 February 2015 – the due date that would have been, I slowly stopped blaming myself for what happened. The doctors could not foresee it, I could not prevent it. I started accepting it. Just like I had accepted my previous loss, after which I lost my right fallopian tube, and, thanks to my doctor’s words, any hope I had of conceiving naturally.
The talks of IVF still continued, drunken weekend nights still turned into shouting matches, the two of us still licked our wounds in private sometimes. However, the sun would come up the next day – and all the monsters of the dark were laid to rest.
The wound was still too raw and the hurt, still too fresh, to take out of my system and hurl it out on blank pages – something that had always calmed me before. But this too passed when my rainbow baby came along.
No woman needs to measure her self-worth by society’s standards – it is something she sets for herself. For me, I had always been fascinated with the power of a woman’s body to create new life, even when I was infamously expressing my apathy towards kids in all their bawling glory during my younger years. So when I was finally ready to experience that power for myself and had my own body fail me – not once, but twice – I could not help but feel a virtual hole inside me. And this too passed when my Zoe came along.
It is never easy to share one’s experiences of miscarriage and loss – and more so in the society I come from. Such tragedies are kept quiet, swept under the rug, and dealt with behind closed doors. You are lucky if you find actual support groups. But this is my catharsis, clumsy words tip-tapping out of my fingertips into my screen, after years of picking up the proverbial pen. I am finally letting go of my pain, and even while I hug Zoe to sleep every night, I know there are two other unborn angels out there who I will always cherish in my thoughts.
(A social media manager by day, Tweep and blogger by night, and a mum 24x7, Priyankee writes for both comic effect and catharsis. You can catch her penning away at The Sassy Mom)
All photos are courtesy iStockphotos
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