Flotsam

{Part One}
{Part Two}

Part Three:

In November of 2004 you become pregnant.
You have morning sickness and cramps every day of your pregnancy, cannot sleep at night, can only eat plain wheat bread, bananas, and strong ginger ale for most of the day.
But you are calm for possibly the first time in your life. The anti-anxiety medicine you have taken before bed since you were 18 is contraindicated during pregnancy,
and when you stop taking it you are ready for horrible, shuddering waves of terror, but they never come. You are doing something important, constructing a tiny spine and necessary organs; you have better things to do than nervously analyze the contents of your own skull.
However, when your morning sickness abates slightly, your anxiety creeps back. Your midwife reminds you that she put you on ginger capsules and vitamin B to cause your morning sickness to abate. You dismiss this as irrelevant and get a second opinion from Dr. Google. When you call your midwife, panicking, she says you read too much. You request an ultrasound.
There is no heartbeat, and the gestational sac seems to be collapsing.
Your HCG levels have fallen from 1244 to 1230.
You miscarry two days later on New Years Day.
Happy 2005!

You do not leave your house or talk to anyone besides The Nearly Fiance for two months. You are heartbroken, and ashamed that you were foolish enough to be so dangerously happy. You are sure everyone pities you, and cannot bear that.
When your period returns no one will take the risk of putting you on estrogen, what with your severe migraines, and so you are put on a progestin-only minipill. The pain and lengthening cycles return—when you collapse with cramps The Nearly Fiancé wants to take you to the emergency room but instead you do some Yoga breathing exercises and drink gin. Your cycles are 31, 35, then 47 days long. You do some research, find a doctor, a specialist, schedule a laparoscopy consult. You begin reading blogs, and start one of your own. You write a long and tediously self-involved account of your suffering, which you call “Not Without My Uterus.” It seems the least you can do. After all, without the stories of other Internets, like her, and her, and her, you would probably still be sitting on the couch in your housepants, gnawing on a block of cheese and watching Law and Order reruns through a thin film of mascara and tears.

The End.