Monthly Archives: July 2013

In Memoriam…

I remember how I felt when they told me that I was pregnant. My first reaction was shock. I had been through a year and a half of pure hell: the gut wrenching pain, the rollercoaster of emotions, the bad reactions to the super hormone injections, the tearful taxi rides to the hospital and then back to work as if nothing had happened. My body reacted horribly to the treatments each time, and each time a treatment failed, I swore it would be the last time I tried. I was beyond my breaking point many, many times, at times even suicidal. The added stress of being off my Thalassemia meds and knowing that my iron levels were rising while I continued to receive blood in order to stay alive was enough to make sleepless, tearful nights the norm.

My husband Jim stood by my decision to try for a baby, even though it was painful for him to see me like that. I knew that I would always regret it if I did not try to achieve something that I wanted so badly. I had grown up believing that I could do anything that I wanted to do. And I did. I went to university, I got married, I worked hard at following the medical treatments, sometimes painful and exhausting, that were necessary to keep me alive and healthy.

Of course, living with a chronic illness, Thalassemia Major, makes having children extremely complicated. With the current generation of Thalassemia patients, women are actually living long enough to get married and have children for the first time. This was never the case before, and so this is all new territory. Some women have attempted it and have succeeded, but of course, every person is different, and the level of reproductive tissue damage varies from patient to patient.

Jim kept telling me that it was a miracle that I was even alive, and that he would be thrilled if he could just have me for life. The thought that the medical treatments and potential pregnancy could cause my health to fail, and that he could eventually lose me, terrified him.

I couldn’t even allow myself to hope that any of this would work. I knew it would crush me if it didn’t, and I was trying to prepare myself for the worst. And then, one evening at work last Fall, the nurse called and told me that my blood test was positive. I was pregnant.

Jim and I were shocked. The odds that this would actually work had been so slight. We went out to supper that night and were in such utter disbelief that we mostly just stared at each other, speechless.

I told a few close friends and family the news, and they were thrilled. I was cautious. I was extremely nervous about the upcoming ultrasound, though I told myself that I was probably overreacting, that the biggest hurdle had been overcome. Sometime within that two week waiting period, I actually let myself feel a bit hopeful and excited about what was to come.

At the ultrasound appointment, the technologist bluntly announced to Jim and I that the growth of the embryo had stopped, and so I was given a prescription to induce a miscarriage. We weren’t at all prepared to hear that, and were both shocked at the news. I cried so hard that I could barely see. We saw our doctor afterward and he told us to wait an extra week, just in case.

A week later, the situation was the same. We were then told to wait yet another week. It was like an act of deliberate cruelty. We both felt that we were going to go insane waiting. I scheduled an extra blood transfusion to boost my hemoglobin level, continued on my pregnancy diet, and continued taking the hormones that made me feel physically ill and depressed. I knew there was very little chance that the pregnancy was viable, but even if there was only a 1% chance, I had to do everything that I could.

Finally, after the third ultrasound, we were told that the pregnancy, at two months, was definitely non-viable. I could stop the hormones and wait to have the miscarriage naturally.

I was living a nightmare. One evening at work, my body started hurting all over. I felt extremely sore and weak, and my best friend, who luckily works with me, sent me home in a taxi and I went straight to bed. The miscarriage started the next day and continued for a few days after that. And then it was over.

Except that it isn’t. Six months later, the thought of what could have been still hurts. Six months later, I still love the potential life that could have been our son or our daughter.