I have talked before about THE QUESTION (Do you have children?)
It seems stillbirth leaves you with more questions than answers. Another question that can cut like a knife is… Are you going to try again?
I must admit I wasn’t expecting this question after Lukas was born, and I wasn’t expecting people to ask it so soon. I guess it seems logical to other people that we would try again. However, getting pregnant for me is not a walk in the park, loss or no loss. When J and I started down this path we told no one. For close to a year I didn’t mention that I had stopped the pill and I definitely didn’t talk about the fact that I was going to need clomid (I ended up telling one person about 10 months in). I felt like it wouldn’t help anything to talk about it and I didn’t want others asking questions about our personal life. So, I definitely wasn’t ready to give an answer to, are you going to try again?
In the first few months after Lukas was born (8-11-10) I could not think straight, I could not even remember a day when I hadn’t cried. J and I did not even mention trying again to each other. We were grieving, just trying to keep our heads above water. For me there were far more important questions that needed to be answered. First off, WHY? Why had my perfectly uneventful pregnancy ended in stillbirth? Why us? WHY? WHY? WHY? I still find myself asking these questions, and I don’t think that will stop any time soon.
By November the dizzying grief had become slightly more tolerable. I went to have my blood drawn for a hematology work up at the beginning of the month. I had an appointment with Dr. L about 10 days later. I wasn’t expecting for her to have the results, and I had already decided that the blood work was going to be normal. That we would never know WHY Lukas died. So when the work up showed that I was heterozygous for Factor V, MTHFR, and PAI I was in shock. This was the answer we had been asking for?
I still think that If we had not found out what the likely cause of Lukas’s death was that we would not have been able to talk about trying again. I feel very lucky to have an answer because most babyloss couples don’t get answers. I will admit that in the back of my mind there is doubt (doubt that blood clots were the only thing that caused the end of my pregnancy). I think doubt and second guessing are never going to go away, but without great risk there is not great reward.
