In six days it will be one year from when my wife and I lost our baby. My friends and family would say it was the day that my wife lost her baby. It seems that people seem to forget that I lost something too. I remember calling my dad to tell him what happened. He said he was sorry and then he changed the subject. Let me go over that again. He said a quick I'm sorry and then he CHANGED THE SUBJECT! When I told my "best friend" he didn't know what to say. He invited me to go out a couple of weeks later then he didn't call me for six months. When people who knew decided to ask me about it they would ask how my wife was doing. Um......hello? Did anyone happen to notice that I'm hurting too. Why doesn't anyone ask me how I'm doing. As a guy I guess I'm not supposed to hurt. Nobody wants to ask me how I'm doing because I'm not supposed to express any emotion but anger. Well I have good news then. I have anger in abundance. I feel as though I'm sitting in the dark while watching a movie of my wife being induced. People talk to me and I'm aware that they are there but my eyes are on the screen. My wife is next to me and I know she's watching the same thing. We can talk about it but the movie is still there and we're both watching it. There is a room around me but the screen fills my perception. When I get up to go to work or to pretend that I care about being social it gives no more of a break then going to the kitchen for a refill of pop. The image of my dead baby's body is so etched in my brain that I can't fully focus on anything. However the screen is blurry. I can't seem to fully focus on the image no matter how hard I try. So I just sit in the darkness.
If you are reading this blog to find some glimmer of hope or a path to find a light at the end of the tunnel then I'm sorry. This would be another futile example of the blind leading the blind. Don't get me wrong, there are good days. Some days I wake up and feel normal but that's a very fragile state. The moment I realize that I feel normal it reminds me that I didn't the day before. That realization is enough to bring me right down again because it reminds me of why I was down yesturday. So again I'm sorry if you were looking for something a little more upbeat but I'm writing this from the darkness. I don't see myself taking the time to write on the good days. I have far to much to do in those brief moments of focus.
If you have had a similar experience then I truly am sorry for your loss. This experience is so horibble that I would do it 100 times a day if it could keep anyone else from going through the same thing. Ironically the things that I'm most angry about are the things that people did with good intentions. The doctors who breezed over our questions because they didn't want to worry us. The nurses who pushed the Catholic hospital's views on us without asking what our beliefs were. Let's not forget all of the people who assumed that I would want to be left alone. Now here I am a year later still being left alone. Everyone else assumes that I'm back to normal because I've gotten better at pretending. So where's my Oscar.