Morning rolled in, we all rose a bit later than usual. I returned to the hospital to have more blood drawn then drove in to work for the first time since. I knew I had to get two sets of documents drafted and have lunch with a peer that I’d postponed on Tuesday. I couldn’t face the challenges of the day. Or so I thought. I finagled in my mind how to get things done in the office without my presence. The first step was postponing lunch. Again.

I turned on my computer and the email was already in my in-box: “I’m still on for lunch. Are you?” And I couldn’t bring myself to be weak and say no. Again. So I said yes. And then I got busy drafting my documents.

And work was my saving grace. The time zipped along. It was lunch time already. I met my new friend. We exchanged the married with kids info. He asked, “Just one? Are you going to have another?” And the pang to be honest beat in my chest — tell this stranger about your week, thought I. “Nope, just the one is enough for us,” I answered, not revealing too much to this unsuspecting stranger. “I think that’s great. My mother was an only child. And all the only children I knew did quite well. I am not sure why folks make such a big deal about only children.”

And just like that. My train was put back on its tracks. I felt normal. I wasn’t thinking about what had happened. I was sipping a glass of wine and enjoying the talk of family, law, nice weather in NOLA.

This “it” affected me, is affecting me, in ways I never could have imagined it would. But time is doing its job. And my train is on the track again, chugging along, even if slowly.

Things DO work out. Heh. What a wild ride this week has been.

It began to sink in that although my body DID allow me to get pregnant, it still failed in some way in not maintaining the pregnancy.  That choice I felt so strongly about the night before was gone again.  I have no choice.  This body is broken.  Even if it’s broken in a way that coincides with what my choice would be.  See how I can turn something positive into something wrong with me?

We didn’t know I was pregnant until I had already lost it.  So to me this was just a medical issue.  Not a miscarriage.  I struggle to apply that word to what’s happened.

My mother-in-law came with me to the doctor.  She was there when the forceps were requested.  When tissue was removed.  When yet another vaginal ultrasound was taken. When I was told I may in fact not have lost the pregnancy yet.  Then when I was told that in fact I had.  When I was told it wasn’t a tubal pregnancy or one that would require a D & C.  And when they took blood to compare to blood they will take tomorrow.

She loaned me her strength.  Her courage.

On the drive home, she got a call from her job informing her that she’d not have to work next week.  She jokingly told her employer, “You mean I can stay an extra week in New Orleans?”  And when she hung up, I was hungry for her to tell me that that’s what she’d do.

I asked her to stay.  Maybe even implored a little.  Then I got CS to ask, thinking it’d mean more if HE told her how much I needed her, she’d stay.  “No,” she repeated, “I’ve gotta get home.”

Then today I overheard her asking her husband if HE wanted her to stay an extra week.  In other words, if he wants her home, home she’ll go.  He said stay.  And she is upset because she now thinks he doesn’t miss her.  And now she may stay.

And now I just don’t give a shit either way.  And somewhere in here, when I explained to my husband that I’d call a friend to watch Sun today and he responded, “Why?” I got pissed at him too.

So much for being on top of things emotionally, eh?

So today when my period turned angry and stopped me in my tracks, I assumed it was what I’m told about ALL my new ailments: It’s yet another sign of aging.

Then the flow got really heavy.  No worries, just a desire for good meds.  Then clots appeared.  Doubt crept in. Could I have been…?  Am I now…?

My mother-in-law is staying with us, and we canceled our afternoon plans so I could wear sweat pants and suffer at home.  She also got me to call my doctor.  He asked if I was sure I wasn’t pregnant.  And then the math hit me.  I mean, it was possible, albeit improbable.  So he asked that I take a pregnancy test and if positive go to his office tomorrow to be sure “nothing’s left behind.”

I called CS at work and explained things and asked him to bring me home a pregnancy test.  And that damn thing showed “Pregnant” faster than I had time to even come close to bracing for such a result.  Stunned, I walked out of the bathroom.  My mother-in-law was walking past the door.  I tossed the stick to her.  She read it and said, “NO WAY.”  Then she brought it to CS, who was running Sun’s bath.

I then went into the bathroom where CS was (and Sun wasn’t yet).  We stared at each other.  Stunned.  Then we talked a bit.  And I realized that CS was under the mistaken impression that I was carrying a viable pregnancy.  I clarified there was NO WAY I wasn’t losing it — hadn’t already lost it.

Then I went to the den and sat down.

Stunned.

Dazed.

Relieved.

I know I’ve posted about our decision to have no more children.  To do no more fertility treatment.  We were coasting along on a “if it happens” mentality.  But when you KNOW it won’t, can’t, happen, you accept it.  And although we felt that we DID have the ability to have another child, and it WAS our decision not to, there was a nagging hint of doubt.  What if we could easily get pregnant?   Have we just decided we don’t want another because of the stress/cost/etc. of fertility treatment?  Were we just “deciding” what was already a foregone conclusion without intervention?

And before I took that pregnancy test I thought, it doesn’t matter what it reads.  Either way, I am NOT having a baby now.  It won’t MEAN anything.  We have no attachment, no expectation.

And then I saw the one word. “Pregnant.”  And my hand shook a bit.  And my nerves shook a lot.

And I sat on the sofa.  Marveling at my own girly parts.  Our fertility doctor had said that if we’d wanted another baby, we’d maybe not even have to do fertility again because my hormonal dysfunction could sort of “re-set” itself after a healthy pregnancy and delivery.

And then I realized that for the past 3 or so years that I thought, no matter what that fertility doctor may have said to me, that I’ve ALWAYS been infertile and could NOT have another child without intervention, that I’d been wrong.  That yet again I’d underestimated myself, my body, and assumed the worst.  That I was just temporarily infertile!  That we really DO have a choice to have another child.  That our decision NOT to have another child is real.  And that decision is mutual.  And right for us.  So instead of tears, there was a small smile.

Tonight, I was liberated.

I CAN, DID, get pregnant without a doctor in the room!  And we really, truly, choose for me not to get pregnant, for us not to have a baby, again.  That nagging doubt?  It too flowed out of me today.  Once and for all.

The day I was given the (erroneous) news that I had a severe infertility problem, I boarded a plane for a weekend in New York.  That flight was delayed and we sat on the tarmac for what seemed like hours.  I was working on one of those skull caps for a friend.  My gauge was off.  Way off.  I knit several inches worth then ripped back to nothing at least four times sitting on that miserable tarmac.  All the while, my ears were plugged into my iPod listening to Bob Dylan.  And tears ran down my cheeks.  I couldn’t bother with what the 50-something business man thought sitting next to me of the mess I was.  What could I say to him to excuse my bizarre behavior?  No eye contact was the best bet.

After a few days, months, I would try that cap again and again.  My gauge was never right.  I’d check my gauge before starting, a task I loathe, and still seemed off.  I ripped out this cap another four or so times.

The yarn I had selected for my friend began to show signs of my struggle.  It was fraying, cracking, and in time, breaking.  After a year, I threw the yarn away and decided CS could knit the cap for our friend.  (He’d learned to knit Sun a blanket).

More years have passed and CS still has not knit that cap.  I am now picking that project up again.  I have a new ball of yarn.  Different colors even.

And yet.

My gauge is off again.  The size 8 needles I used so easily the first time are way too big.  Even 7s won’t do the trick.  I will be testing 6s this evening.  And as I knit 4, purl 4, I am reminded of that damn day in the plane.  And the sting of disappointment I’ve endured with this cap.

I am realizing I should have knit this cap years ago.  So now I am determined.  I will knit this cap.  I will exorcise this demon.  I will release that tension.  Once and for all.

We stepped into the shop, me lugging a sleeping 4-month old Sun in her carrier and Wendy holding Sam’s small hand. As usual, I heard, “Noooola!” The clerk recognizing me said, “Ooooh, you had the baby! Did Dr. Socks deliver her?” and with that she turned her head and pointed. To Dr. Socks. Who was standing in the very spot where I’d met him. Talking to a clerk about needlepoint threads.

Deep inside, I screamed. On the outside, I answered the clerk with an icy, loud, firm, “No.” I then turned to Wendy and said under my breath, “That’s him. That’s HIM. THAT’S HIM.” The blood was beating so loudly in my ears I couldn’t hear anything or concentrate on anything. Except him. I couldn’t stop looking at him. Waiting. Waiting for the right words to come to me. Waiting for him to see me. Waiting for him to see Sun. Waiting for him to realize he had been wrong. Waiting for him to speak to me.  Waiting for him to apologize.

He gave me the quickest of glances and returned to his work. Looking back, he focused an awful lot of attention on his work. He did see me, although I couldn’t tell if he’d recognized me. But then I thought, of course he recognized me! He recognized me in his office after one short meeting of him in this very shop. I’d seen him in his office no less than ten times as his patient. Was he… could he be… surely he wasn’t… IGNORING ME!?!

My mind raced. Do I SAY something? Do I NOT say something? Do I make a scene? Do I embarrass him? Will I embarrass myself? WHAT SHOULD I DO, DAMMIT! What would you have done?

What did I do? With shaky hands, I picked up Sun in her carrier and walked over to the table Socks was working over. I tapped into all the courage I could muster and called to him in a sing-song voice, “Ohh, Dooooctor Soooocks, looky what I have!!” And I rocked the carrier back and forth with a large knowing smile on my face.

He looked up, looking decidedly caught, and meekly said, “Congratulations.” Then he turned his head back down to his work.

That was it.

I didn’t know what more to do. He couldn’t think Sun was adopted; he had to have heard the conversation I had with the clerk (it’s a tiny shop). He had to know, in that moment, that my decision (against his advice) to go to a local fertility specialist had been the right thing to do. I don’t know how much he’s thought of me and my case, professionally speaking. I don’t know if he questions the diagnosis he gave me. I don’t know if he feels badly or guilty or anything at all about his care of me.

I do know that I have thought a lot about him. And the mistake he made.

In the end, I am living happily ever after. And part of doing that requires harboring no ill will. Blogging about him for the past several days forced me to deal with my feelings over the whole debacle. And I can finally say with honesty that I feel no more ill will towards Dr. Socks. I feel nothing for him at all. Plus, I learned that sharing a love of needle arts and 1850′s Victorian British novelists is not a basis for choosing a health care provider.

I knew the chance of my running into him at my local yarn shop sooner or later was high. I hadn’t given much thought, however, to what I’d say to him when that day actually came.

Today, I’d tell him this:

Dr. Socks, I think you are a good gynecologist. However, you are not a fertility specialist. And you did me quite the disservice by not sending me to a specialist straight away. You should not have performed any test on me for which you needed the expertise of another doctor to interpret the results.

You relied on the radiologist’s results of my hysterosalpingogram. You admitted to me that you never looked at the HSG films yourself. You based your diagnosis of a very serious condition on that film without setting your own eyes on it because you told me you trusted the radiologist to know what he saw. Radiologists aren’t fertility specialists either. You should have had a fertility specialist look at those films before you gave me the results. Or better, you should have had a fertility specialist run the appropriate tests and not you. You should have had enough confidence in your own practice to know what you didn’t know.

But, Dr. Socks, I forgive you. Because you taught me to trust my own medical instincts. My broken wrist taught me to get a second medical opinion. You taught me that doctors won’t tell you when they are in over their heads. You taught me to be more assertive about my medical care; to question; to follow my gut and KNOW when to seek another’s professional advise. You taught me that I cannot rely on my doctor to refer me away, that I must be hyper-diligent about my own medical treatment.

And best of all, Dr. Socks, your being wrong was the best mistake for me. It FINALLY got me to the specialist that could get me pregnant with my daughter. But still, in the future, tell your patients that there is a place for fertility specialists; that women shouldn’t be reluctant to seek expert advise about an area of medicine that is highly technical and very specialized; that there is no shame in having a fertility problem. And remember, first, do your patient no harm, and that includes giving medical care beyond your expertise.

What did I actually say to him? I’ll post that tomorrow.

/koʊˈɪnsɪdəns/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation(koh-in-si-duh ns)

syn·chro·nic·i·ty (sĭng’krə-nĭs’ĭ-tē, sĭn’-) -noun

1. The state or fact of being synchronous or simultaneous;
synchronism.
2. Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related,
conceived in Jungian theory as an explanatory principle on the
same order as causality.

* * * * *

I was watching a murder mystery show the other day and one of the detectives said about clues, “I don’t believe in coincidence.” And that got me thinking. Do I, really, believe in coincidence? In synchronicity?

This past Monday and Tuesday, I posted about a senior partner that died over five years ago. He isn’t mentioned much at my firm these days. Wednesday, while at the office, one of the attorneys I work with brought him up—he’d gotten a piece of mail addressed to the deceased partner on Tuesday.

Or the day of the deceased partner’s funeral, when I was stuck recalling to the IRS how I had calculated this crazy tax loss deduction for a client and after eight hours of not recalling it or being able to get my math to work, I asked the deceased partner to give me the answer and within minutes the answer came.

Or post-Katrina when I needed a new OB/GYN (mine fled to Atlanta never to return) and I found myself in my favorite knitting store and was introduced to Dr. Socks, an OB/GYN. I saw this as a sign. I became a patient of Dr. Socks, and it was the biggest mistake of my life. Or was it? He misdiagnosed me (or the radiologist did and my doc didn’t actually look at the films himself to realize the radiologist was wrong) and sent me down a spiral I wish I never see the depths of again. But that led me to the fertility specialist that gave me Sun.

Or the first date I had with Captain Sarcastic. He saw Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” on my bookcase and asked me to marry him. I said no. Two years later he’d ask again and I’d say yes.

As a student of law, you learn to look for the “but for” in strings of events. As a genealogist, you look for things to ring a bell: a name on a gravestone, a date on a ship’s log. As someone who is logical and methodical, I tend to look for threads. But, to be honest, as I get older I tend not to give meaning to coincidences. I tend to be of the persuasion that if you look for some “deeper meaning,” some “sign,” you’ll usually think you see it. But that doesn’t give things independent meaning. Sometimes two roads intersecting are just two roads intersecting and not a sign to take a turn.

And I also think that believing in synchronicity discounts a person’s ability to discern. Like that dead partner giving me the answer? A miracle? Or just me finally giving my mind a rest from the stresses of that crazy week for me to refocus and see things clearly? Or my journey with getting to the fertility doctor? I’d already been referred to that doctor and even been to his office but I hadn’t been ready to accept that I had an “infertility problem.” By the time I had dealt with the aftermath of Katrina and the debacle of Dr. Socks, I was in a different mental and emotional state. I was ready to be rational and seek help for a physical problem. CS asking me to marry him on our first date? Frankly, it creeped me out and made me think he was a bit desperate. But I liked that he at least liked HST and I kept an open mind about him.

What do you feel? Do you believe in coincidence or synchronicity? If so, what’s the coincidence that convinced you they have meaning? If not, why not?

A week before Katrina hit, CS and I went to my gynecologist to discuss with him the fact that I’d been off birth control for over a year and had not gotten pregnant. That was the first day the “F word” was thrown out to me–we had a fertility problem. I shut down before we reached the elevator. My doctor referred us to a fertility specialist. I had previously decided that I was not one of those people who’d ever go through the hormone treatments and shots and in vitro. I didn’t want to know who had the problem–CS or me. This was the end of the line for me. I walked out of that office and into my own personal storm. Then Katrina hit and made it easy to ignore this “problem.”

Upon returning to New Orleans, my trusted gynecologist, along with countless other doctors, had relocated out of state. Not knowing what step to take, I made an appointment with the fertility doctor my gynecologist had recommended. I was not ready for this, though, and stormed out of the waiting room unable even to complete the new patient forms. What did me in? The question of whether this problem was negatively affecting my marriage. It was.

I decided I’d start over. I found a new gynecologist–one that would do the initial screening some gynecologists do prior to sending their patients off to a specialist. This felt safe. To make a very long story short, he diagnosed me as having a “T”-shaped uterus. He didn’t know what caused this deformity, other than I was born with a defunct uterus. He explained that getting pregnant would be extremely difficult and maintaining a pregnancy would be all but impossible.

My world fell apart. Completely. It was like Hurricane Katrina ravaged the insides of my body and no one knew. The fault was mine, not CS’s. My body had failed me; I had failed myself. My shock, disappointment, and pain were palpable. I could barely function. Work was the only thing I even attempted to focus on, and, I assure you, that was very difficult. Most days, it was all I could do just to get out of bed, bathe and put clothes on (and some days I failed even at this). I had never felt depression the way I felt this.

Then I was told that a relative was pregnant. And a good friend’s wife. Understandably, I did not handle this type of news well. My family was never brought in on our secret. It was way too painful to explain to them, so instead I wore a mask when I could not avoid them. A few very close friends who had had their own problems in having a child were told, and these friends became my lifeline during this very trying time. The despair was all I knew. I was upset and embarrassed and ashamed. I felt cheated and angry and at the same time deserving of this shit. I mean, wasn’t I the one that had said a decade ago that I never wanted children? Wasn’t I the one that put my education and career before settling down and having a child?

Then my gynecologist recommended that I see a specialist in New York to perform surgery to “stretch” my uterus. This was out of the question for me. It would not be covered by our insurance and I suspected it wouldn’t do any good anyway. If we were going to spend copious amounts of money (or, to state more accurately, go into serious debt) on having a child, it would be in the way of adoption–where we’d be guaranteed a child in the end. But I was struggling with the idea of adoption as well. It was my guilt in not being able to give CS “a child of his own.” I got really good at beating myself up.

Again, long story short, against the advice of my gynecologist, I made another appointment with the local fertility doctor recommended by my previous gynecologist. I wanted to know with certainty that, as I suspected, there was no hope. If, however, he agreed with my new gynecologist that surgery was a viable option, then maybe I needed to reconsider it.

At our first visit with the fertility doctor, he looked at my HSG (hysterosalpingogram) film and said this to me: “Your uterus is ‘T-ish’ shaped. It isn’t technically T-shaped. I see them regularly; this is not one.” I didn’t believe what I had heard; I couldn’t believe it; I wouldn’t believe it. Omitting the details, after 5 months of fertility treatment, I was pregnant. And it is with great relief that I can report that things have gone quite smoothly in my pregnancy.

Now, there is a LOT I can (and, in time, will) write about this whole experience. But the part that sticks in my throat, and I suspect always will, is that pain. All my heart-wrenching pain came to the surface last night when I saw that similar look of pain in my friend’s eyes. The reason for her pain may have been different, but the depth of her pain was the same. I know because once you experience pain that deeply, you can recognize it in another. It’s universal.

I know that her pain is her own, and my pain is my own. And neither of us will ever really know the dark corners of each other’s suffering. But I equally know that real pain, raw pain is universal. And I have learned that the best salve for this type of pain is the help and support of your close and trusted friends.