Don't Tell Me

In two hours, Mr Wren and I will go to the fertility clinic for yet another WTF meeting.  It will be the 8th time that we have dragged our defeated selves through those doors to sit in Dr S's back office and discuss why our expensive, invasive, complicated fertility treatment didn't work as anticipated.  Science has failed us and we've failed it.

This will be the first time, though, that we have to discuss a might-have-been.  After 8 different procedures, I only got pregnant this once.   This was my first miscarriage.  I had the d&c so baby could be tested for chromosomal abnormalities, because I want to understand why it happened.   If there was something wrong with baby, then there was nothing I could have done to save it.  But if that turns out not to be the case, and baby was normal, then, well, it's pretty much my fault, right?  For some reason my body rejected baby.  Or baby rejected me. 

Baby stopped growing the same day I stopped taking the additional hormones, the estrogen and progesterone I had been taking 3 times a day to help me stay pregnant.  Did the hormones sustain an ultimately unviable pregnancy longer than nature intended, or did my little one just need more time and help than we gave it before it started producing those hormones on its own?   Would staying on the meds for another two weeks have kept baby alive?  Some fertility patients take progesterone through the entire first trimester (or so people on the internet tell me.)  I stopped at nine weeks.

I'll find out the answers soon enough.  I'll probably even find out what gender baby was so I can start using the appropriate pronoun when I talk about it.

But here's the thing:  I don't want to know.   

Well, that's not entirely true.  I want to know.  I always want to know.  I've been hungry for information since I was a little kid - I was that annoying little kid who was always asking WHY?   I need the world to make sense.  I need to understand.  

But I don't know if I can handle it.  I'm beyond humiliated to return to that clinic, where just 3 weeks ago everyone was cheering and hugging me, all so excited that I was graduating to the OB and telling me to bring my baby back to visit them.  I know they'll all be giving me the sad eyes today and that makes me cringe.  But I can feign stoicism for long enough to get through the awkward encounters with the receptionist and lab techs.  The thought, however, of sitting in that back office and finding out what went wrong - or possibly finding out that WE DON'T KNOW for certain what went wrong which in its way is even worse - either way, having to discuss how my baby lived and died, the entire arc of its too-short existence, well that just makes me want to put my head in the sand and blow off the appointment entirely.