Author Archives: Kadia

Spring

Posted on by
Reply

Everything moves too damn slowly. The weather. My work. The HCG hormone levels in my blood. As much as I often wish that time stood still, that a particular joyful moment will last forever, I generally like the experience of movement. Not necessarily a linear and predictable progression towards a desired goal (though I wouldn’t mind some of that now), but change, surprises, things being in flux. I associate the experience of (physical and emotional) movement with growth, vitality and feeling alive. (I recently discovered that Daniel Stern, an American psychiatrist and a psychoanalytic theorist, wrote his last book, published posthumously, about forms of vitality. He defines vitality as an integration of the experiences of temporality, force, physical space, intentionality, and movement, assigning the latter a primary role).

My previous (and only) post was about the early loss of my first, hard-won, pregnancy. In the few months since then I’ve been somewhat productive in that area, though the product was not fully satisfactory. I recovered from the miscarriage relatively quickly. It was nice to rediscover my body as healthy and functional after enduring months of dispiriting news about my fertility. And like the first time, I became pregnant again, naturally, right before I was supposed to begin fertility treatments (maybe I should develop a new method for conceiving based on scaring your body into pregnancy. Or could my body have that known and prevalent problem of procrastination?)

To make a very long story short, my pregnancy turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy (outside the uterus), which can be dangerous. I had to take a medication, Methotrexate, which is a very low dose of chemotherapy. My body wasn’t too impressed with the first dose and I had to take a second one. Due the medication’s adverse impact on the body and especially on the liver I cannot do certain things for the next few months, including intense workouts, drinking alcohol, and the big one – trying to conceive. In addition, right now, until the HCG hormone levels go down to zero, I cannot engage in any physical activity, except for walking (yes, that includes sex). Fun times. I am being followed at least twice a week (which means waking up early to get to the clinic for blood tests) to monitor the hormone levels. And so far, my hormones are taking their time.

I sound pretty grumpy, don’t I?  I realize this is not the end of the world and I have not completely lost perspective. I am just feeling frustrated and exacerbated at the moment following another discouraging phone call from the clinic about my slow-to-go-down-hormones. If this slow progression continued, I might be one of the  rare cases who need a third dose, which means increased risk for adverse side-effects, or alternatively end up with a surgery. I am also anxious to resume some of my routine activities. I have been trying to not let the attempts to conceive take over everything, but it has been challenging to not feel like my entire life revolves around it. I am someone who exercises regularly and greatly enjoy running, alcohol, sex (not in that particular order). Most symbolic to me is that right now even the dancing I often enjoy at home (too rarely, in a club) is not recommended. Dancing, to me, epitomizes the idea of movement and vitality – a form of self-expression and creativity, experiencing the body’s vigor and force, occupying and moving through space. There is a quote by Nietzsche that I love about dancing that goes something like, we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. Amen.

But frustration can be good sometimes. It did mobilize me to write a second post. I haven’t written anything since the first post as I was struggling to find a voice that I was content with. Being a psychotherapist, I have to be mindful about self-disclosure, which poses limits on sharing personal information. That is, I need my identity as a blogger to remain anonymous so my therapy patients/clients could not identify me. I do not mean to say that I wish to remain unknown to the people with whom I work in psychotherapy. I do not think it is possible or helpful. As therapists, and people, we reveal information about ourselves unintentionally and unknowingly all the time whether we like it or not. In addition, when done carefully and thoughtfully, sharing with patients our thoughts and experience, especially as they pertain to the therapeutic process, can enrich the work tremendously. The popular, by now caricaturist, notion of the psychotherapist as a “blank slate” – the stoic, always silent, psychotherapist – is no longer an aspired ideal (this is true for psychoanalysts as well).  That been said, we, psychotherapists, do strive to be mindful about what we choose we share with patients so as not to burden them with unwanted information. And I’m pretty sure that what I write here goes beyond what many of my patients would choose to know. I realize it is not likely that one of my patients will come across my blog and yet when I write I feel the need to consider the personal information I include. Thus, a few times, I ended up not finishing or posting posts that I began to write. I had ideas for other posts that were more reflections and observations about cultural affairs, but these required an investment of time that I currently don’t have. I considered not identifying myself as a psychotherapist but it is so inherent to my identity and sense of self.  Thus, I began to wonder about my desire to maintain a blog and to question if there was a place and need for it in my life at this time. I thought that maybe it was better for now to go back to writing in my journal (which I haven’t done in a while), where I experience complete freedom. And yet, now in my frustration, I chose to write about it here. Maybe it is my way to surprise myself and create some movement.

Reflecting now on the transition from writing about my medical issues to my experience writing this blog, I realize that the common theme is the limitations I currently experience on self-expression– either through bodily pursuits or writing – and my need to push against them. I am thinking about my impatient anticipation for the arrival of spring. I love that time of the year when the days become increasingly longer, the weather is getting warmer, and the flowers begin to bloom. Especially in New York, with its cold and l o n g winter, it is impossible to not experience a sense of rejuvenation, renewal and self-expansion, to feel part of the awakening nature. I tend to get impatient in March when it starts to feel like spring should really be here by now and it is still cold as hell. So, there is nothing too new here. My special circumstances just exaggerate the experience of hibernation and I am ready and yearning for things to change. They do. Just too damn slowly.

***

I began writing this post last Friday. Since then we switched to daylight saving time and we had two days of Spring. A taste of what’s to come…

On Losing a Pregnancy

Posted on by
Reply

I have played with the idea of writing a blog for a few years now. Every once in a while I would get excited about the idea of sharing my thoughts online but I never came to materialize it. My last-year resolution was about self-expression. More specifically I set myself the goals of finally publishing my dissertation and starting a blog. The publication of my dissertation is going to be part of 2014 and so I figured I should at least have my first post out before this year end.

I would never have guessed that my first post would be about undergoing a miscarriage. I learned that I was going to lose my pregnancy at a regular checkup in which my husband and I expected to hear a heartbeat for the first time. The pain I felt upon this news was as intense and penetrating as was the miraculous feeling of containing life within me. While my husband was saddened by the loss, he did not share the extent of my heartache. Like me, he experienced the loss of a long-awaited pregnancy and a future we began to imagine. But I, first and foremost, lost a child; a very particular child whose spirit occupied my body and heart and whom I already loved. Deeply. I was devastated.

It was not easy for me to conceive. I am reproductively challenged in more ways than one. Prior to the glorious morning in which the two lines appeared on a stick were several months of processing the upsetting news about my fertility problems. Delaying childbearing until my late thirties and genetic misfortune combined into a grim prognosis that was painful to accept. I am often told that I look much younger than I am; closer to late twenties than late thirties. I certainly feel younger. I have been known to lead my life in a manner that attempts to defy time (on that in other posts). My reproduction system was not in match with the rest of my body and spirit. How was I to make sense of the unappealing diagnosis of “premature ovarian aging,” a term undoubtedly conceived by men?

The news about my reproductive challenges was also accompanied by numerous medical appointments and overwhelming information that are part of the wondrous world of fertility treatments. I found myself struggling with feelings of inadequacy, which penetrated all aspects of my life. My husband and I also went through a roller-coaster of feelings, intensified by the fact that I was the reason we have waited this long. The looming possibility of having to use an egg donor and never learning what the combination of my Sephardi origin and my husband’s Ashkenazi genes could create was painful to entertain. All this was happening at a very challenging and demanding time professionally. The day I was supposed to begin taking hormones for my first fertility treatment I got completely overwhelmed and broke down crying. My husband and I decided to treatments by one month. “One more month is not going to change anything,” my husband reassured me as I was feeling guilty for some inexplicable reason.

I didn’t say anything to anyone, but I had a feeling… My close friends often joke that I’m some kind of a witch as I my wishes often come true. I thought it would be typical of me (of my body) to escape an unpleasant situation and slip into a desirable one in the last minute. It would also make for a lovely story. Secretly, I even thought of a “pregnancy name” for my future child. If I got pregnant naturally, I decided, I would call him/her Hanukah (I’m Jewish) as he/she would be this miracle that happened to me against all odds.

My friends and family felt my pain and were sympathetic to my loss but there was also some urgency to accept the loss and focus on the future. “Things happen for a reason;” “You’ll get pregnant again.” Yet I was completely overwhelmed by the searing pain of losing my child; my first child. During the brief period in which I knew I was pregnant I could not find the words to describe how I felt. I kept using the word “miraculous” as a way to capture the out-of-the-realm-of-ordinary-experience nature of this feeling. I am similarly at a loss for words now as I am trying to describe this loss. This failure of language to convey meaning made it difficult to share my pain with others. The attempt to translate my feelings into words left me feeling alone and misunderstood. In contrast, whenever I got to talk to a woman who went through a miscarriage herself I immediately felt supported. We did not need words to explain why the loss of a seven-week embryo of whom I have known for two weeks can be so heartbreaking; how one falls in love so quickly and so deeply. Similarly, I found solace in websites about miscarriages that were thoughtful to acknowledge the meaning of this loss. Words like “devastating” were surprisingly validating and comforting. I was tremendously grateful to the women who shared their experience in different forums; women who understood. They called these babies “angel babies” and considered them to be an eternal part of their family, regardless of how many more children they already had or went on to have. I began to have the sense that a miscarriage is a topic we are not supposed to talk about too openly. It is something we women are supposed to bear; share with one another; quietly.  It is the powerful experience of feeling comforted by these women who I will never meet that created the impetuous to finally give birth to this blog.

****************

What makes a loss so painful? Is it longing for what was? Is it pain over that which will never happen? Are we grieving the lost person or the parts of us that only come to be with this person; the mother I would have been and never will be for this particular child? People sometimes say that if we cherish what was most important to us in a person or a situation then we have not lost at all. I disagree. Something remains, but something precious is forever lost. I will never again experience the particular visceral and sweet sensation of carrying this specific child. The ability to enjoy my early pregnancy and love my growing child fearlessly, without protecting myself (despite the known risk for an early miscarriage) may also be lost. But something has endured. This child gave me the gift of experiencing myself as someone who can conceive life naturally and for a while carrying it; someone who can love deeply and unconditionally. And his/her spirit continues to inhabit me – not as vividly as before and that I continue to grieve – but present nonetheless. My angel baby, Hanukah.