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Today is my first *milestone* day in the antepartum unit.  In addition to being the end of my first week here, I am also 24 weeks now.  Still hoping to be pregnant for quite some time here, but as the nurses are constantly telling me every day counts.  You can see where the previous resident of this particular room marked off her *every day*.  From marks on the previous page, she was in hospital for 3-4 weeks total.

During the day today, I had a *surprise* (which I suspected was coming) consult from the hospital dietician.  Apparently there are some concerns either from my ordering records, nurse comments on everything I’m not eating, the fact I’ve lost weight in the last week, or a combination of all of the above.   I wasn’t sure what to tell her other than her food is not really food and for someone who eats almost nothing that I can’t identify where every ingredient came from it’s basically worse than McDonalds.  When I expressed my concern about the protein content of the meals, her response was to tell me to drink a carton of skim milk with every meal.

 I just don’t even know where to start even with how I feel about that.  I feel like I’ve had a crash course in how to create an appropriate balance of nutrients from products that have been made to look like food but are comprised of very little real food.  Thankfully we just ordered a 1/4 beef and Tim is already marinating some fresh jerky for me and I asked him to bring me some hard boiled eggs for my fridge when he gets the chance.  He also brought me a salt grinder with sea salt so I don’t have to use the micrograins of chemical iodine that taste nothing like salt on my meat and vegetables (when they send me stuff that didn’t come out of a can).

I also had a long talk with my doctor about my history, the future, and other things.  She told me the same thing that my regular OB has told me in the past, which is that my case is unusual because while I have a complicated OB history it is all stuff that hasn’t repeated itself.  It’s like we can predict something will be *off* but not know what it is.  So we talked about that, and how various scenarios with this pregnancy could impact my ability (safety, practicality, and even as far as possibility depending on how things go) of future children.  Not something that I want/need to be thinking about right now, but yet something I can’t seem to stop thinking about.

Our only desire has always been to be open to whatever life God chooses to bless us with, and that hasn’t changed in the least.  ON the other hand, however, we are talking about actual scenarios that might physically prevent me from having more children in the immediate or longer term future and that TERRIFIES me.  As Catholics we hear a lot about prayerful discernment of situations when it would be appropriate to avoid pregnancy, but there is this understanding that it’s this thing that shouldn’t really need to happen often.  I am 33.  I am in my tenth pregnancy and I have 4 losses and one baby who is working really hard to beat the odds but I have to know might not.  Everything that shouldn’t really need to happen often has already happened to me.  Even though I try to stay positive, and most of the time do ok with that, sometimes I feel like that probably means this will all happen too.

In addition to the milestones that my calendar is telling me about today, there is another milestone of which I am painfully aware.  Tomorrow was the due date of our baby who passed away earlier this spring.  I think there is a possibility if I was having a normal/uneventful pregnancy I wouldn’t even do more than acknowledge the date but not be excessively sad.  Instead I’m stuck here with nothing but time on my hands to think about it.

I guess the long story short is that today was not my best day here.  In fact, it might have been the worst.  It was definitely the day I shed the most tears.  Thankfully shortly after Tim left, I had a surprise phone call from a friend in Utah and her kids were nice enough to let us chat for a good long time.  That was enough to get me through dinner, but then as I sat down to write my little update Kylee called me to tell me that she wanted me to come home.

I wish, baby.  I wish.

Day 7