love is blonde

I summoned up some courage today and logged into Fertility Friend to delete my pregnancy ticker. You know, that cute little thing that tracks down the days to 40 weeks. I tried to do it with my eyes squinted so I wouldn’t see the numbers, but it was too hard to miss.

31 weeks and 5 days pregnant. 58 days to go.

Except not, because Miller will never get to count any ages, not even to zero, and especially not past 26 weeks and 5 days.

Some days are okay and some days are hard. Actually, most days are okay but nights are brutal. Mornings are a close second.

I find myself starting to feel anxious for the test/autopsy results. I have an appointment with my RE next week, and my OB the week after that. I’d like some answers before those meetings.

Some days I want the answer to be “cord accident.” This would mean that it was a horrible accident, but probably one that wouldn’t be repeated in another pregnancy. It would mean that there was nothing I could have done differently to prevent the outcome.

But it would also mean that Miller wasn’t supposed to die. That he was a healthy baby — our lottery winning baby — and that a stupid, random accident took away his life.

Some days I’d rather hear that Miller had something wrong with him that simply made him not ready or healthy for the world. Maybe a genetic issue (even with seemingly normal chromosomes…) or some other underlying condition that we didn’t know about before. After all, he did have two left thumbs (did I tell you all that already? It was weirdly cute), the intestinal obstruction, an a two-vessel (instead of three) umbilical cord. All of these can point to bigger issues. But we did so many tests and scans and procedures and didn’t find anything else wrong, which doesn’t make sense.

I don’t want something to have been wrong with him. In my eyes he was perfect. He grew right on target and he was a beautiful baby. It’s hard to imagine what could have been so wrong.

I definitely don’t want to hear that something was wrong with me or my body. It’s not that I wouldn’t take the blame a million times over if it brought Miller back to life, but because I’d worry that any future pregnancy would be at risk. And I’m already going to be a huge anxious mess if/when we get pregnant again. I don’t need any more high-risk issues added to my chart.

The other possibility is simply “inconclusive.” I don’t really wish for this either. It gives us nothing. Nothing to watch for next time, nothing to answer our questions, nothing to explain what happened. And no peace.

So I can’t decide what I want the answer to be. But maybe I need to stop thinking that answers will make anything better.