It's been a while.... we are in Wales, we have been here since September, but I have been overwhelmed with rest and regaining strength from a taxing miscarriage. My body is weak from severe blood loss and I spent time at my mothers being cared for. But we are back in Wales now and living our lives! Our lives are very full with home schooling and the masses of families and meetings and activities available from them. It is full and good. I have my raw goat milk connection now (2 miles away - whoo hoo!) and my wool crafts and spinning session have been sourced and the ball is rolling with that. I started Astanga yoga but it is way to adventurous for me at the moment, hopefully after the New Year I will be stronger and can get back to my classes. The following are journal entries I wrote out and decided to slide in here as a new start to my blog. Lets see if I can keep it going this time! Photos of where we are in Wales and of things I mention are to follow.
Last Monday;
Having a rough day, it had to happen I know. The journey home yesterday was better than I expected, we were all in high enough spirits and stopped lots. We even stopped off at a ToysRUs store and bought Isaac a little hand held superman game for him to fiddle with - Felix wanted a teddy bear because all week my mum has been reading him this story about the Land of Lost Teddies and he wanted to act it out :) Isaac actually cried when we left my mum's house and started saying he wanted to go back, why could we all not stay and live with Nanny, that he loved her. It was pretty sad. He has spent a huge amount of intense time with her with me absent lately, poor little guy, I know that lump in the throat missing some one feeling so well.
I was totally shattered when we finally arrived home and had a bath and went to bed, but my heart was beating wildly and my chest was tight and I couldn't breathe properly. I wish I had pushed more for a transfusion. I was offered one because I lost about 3 pints of blood and my hb had dropped nearly five points but there was some tricky stuff happening about cross matching and getting a good selection and then they realised I'd just had a transfusion recently after Felix was born and they hit the hard sell on why not to have one, that I'd be increasing my chances of my body not accepting the blood, the big spiel on blood products being risky, that sometimes they missed the very things they tested for, that in years to come there would be diseases, new, that I might have contracted and not known about - they convinced Don easily but I remembered how lifeless I felt after Fe was born and how wonderful I felt as the blood dripped into me - sheer life bouncing me back up. But of course I was weak lying there this time and having a conversation left me unable to focus and bone tired. They said, no worries, two to three months and your body will make up the blood you have lost, take it easy in the meantime, eat iron rich take some iron supplements, rest, rest rest. Then after they left my room, as a kind of token of what was to come, I had chest pain (like last night) and couldn't find enough air to breathe so spent the rest of the day hooked to oxygen and also had an ECG due to low blood pressure and tacky, erratic pulse. So I know what to expect: Blood loss means iron loss, the body tries to nourish major organs and tissue the best way it can and uses other minerals (i.e. calcium leached from bone) to do this and help with the formation of new blood cells (my teeth have an unusual see-through look to them at the moment). That I can expect to have dizziness and nausea from lack of oxygen, so don't move to quickly (oh yeah, I forget I am looking after two small children, that'll be easy!) they say I might have kidney pain (check), lower back pain (check), aching joints (check) headaches and loss of memory (check)... plus some other 'symptoms' which of course - I've forgotten.
I could do with an oxygen tank. I wish I had had the transfusion, just for immediate effect.
I have been miserable for the first time this afternoon and it's my first afternoon looking after the boys alone (Don took them out this morning but then had to go to uni). I felt anxious for some strange reason (like have I never looked after my children before!) and decided to (ambitiously) set out collage materials with dried beans and lentils and glue etc, but then had to climb chairs to hunt things out which I had not considered (but can't back out of now since waiting eyes are hopeful). Exhausted I flop into a chair to watch and help if needed but they need me constantly and I get ridiculous looking around the kitchen seeing the day's food stuff still out, dirty dishes mounting (bending to unload the dishwasher is just an enormous feat I have discovered), we have lots of laundry and still not unpacked from our time away - so I look around and it is chaos and instead of picking some easy thing (like a DVD) why did I now choose something which involves a liberal scattering of red lentils and sunflower seeds over the entire house (yes they seep out of the room on clothes and hands and now I am just waiting for an invasion of mice and rats because the thought of vacuuming is way beyond my strength. I snapped a bit about the volume of peas and seeds not on paper or glue and felt terrible because it suddenly was not fun for them. So I ply seeds from gluey fingers and coax limbs and extremities into outdoor warm wear and usher them outside for trampolining and bike riding in the yard. Oh, I could fall asleep, I am hungry but too tired to make anything, now they are in and watching cartoons and I know snacks are wanted and drinks... This is my sitting down, and rest at the kitchen table, laptop on top of a chickpea collage of a head (I think). Emailing my sister about flight times (only two days whoo oo!).
I need to chill out and relax I can't be super mum anymore and but it feels horrible. (See I am not quite as Zen about the near death experience changing my outlook)
Don is terrified to have sex with me. Is that understandable? I think probably. We are used to daily ness yk and it is strange this different sort of tenderness that is about me being so fragile.
I don't feel good today. Sorry to unburden here, I want my 'normal' back but it seems so far away. Everything has changed, everything. It is like someone shook up my life and dumped me back out.
But at least I have a life. How do women cope who have this happen to them and then have to walk seven miles a day to carry water to drink? How do they survive? Do they? I think about this all of the time, these faceless women who bleed away. The terror without saviour and I don't know what to do with these thoughts except ply them into a shape of gratefulness.
Today, Sunday:
Am having that one-step forward then two steps back experience happening. I have a day where I am not so tired and manage to play and do the odd bit of housework but then the next day can't get up or spend the day on the sofa. All of us, including my dear sister have a had a tummy bug which has wiped us out. Even Felix was throwing up yesterday and saying 'mummy I am gurgling again'. Then an hour later he was fine again, really fine and with my sister in bed and Don and Isaac out he wanted me outside using his bow and arrows (I also lugged out some wet laundry and pegged half up), then painting at the kitchen table where I began chopping veg for dinner. By 7pm I was so exhausted I had to go to bed. It is so humbling to be so dependant on others - literally my own bodily health and the care of my children. I want to say - I don't do it that way, or please don't feed them so much bread, or it's ok he can go out without his hat don't force it on him etc but then who wants a witch shouting down orders from her bed? So I button up and hunker down and wait it out, relaxing myself into knowing that we will all survive without my constant imput.
My days are full of the tiny things that assume a greater importance than I would normally ascribe to them. I can't formulate a shape for my day like I used to, involving us all, like swimming, then pottery class, dinner... the day is this big stretch of time where everyone else have plans and my day is little bits of time that I get to choose how to fill. It could be empty and lonely but I am turning it in to being time for the things I wouldn't normally have time for. Yesterday I decided to make my friend's four year old dd a doll for Christmas. I thought about that for a while and then decided it would be a female version of one of my son's dolls, so I knit a little pink and purple sweater and found some flannel flowered material to make a dress or nightgown with, since actual doll making was out with Don also being out and his strength needed for lugging the sewing machine. That bulked out my day between sleeping and the odd bits of time with the boys.
I am living a strange limbo living where I am only half myself living half my life and another woman – my sister – living out the other bits for me.
Twice I was moved to tears yesterday and the reasons were birds.
When we first moved here, the first very first day, I saw one magpie sitting on the wall and thought jokingly - ha! Great omen! Every day I saw this bird. It lives about two hundred metres from my bedroom window, in a hedge. Every day I came to dread opening my bedroom blind and seeing this black and white demon spreading it’s sorrowful invisible curse (which it had worked itself up in my mind to be).
And then yesterday, I opened the front door and sitting on the gravel not two metres away were two magpies, they stood staring at me for a second and then took off and flew away. And I laughed and cried at the same time. The one for sorrow turn to two for joy.
While waiting for my family to return to me I sat muffled up with a million scarves and hats on the bench outside the front door watching the vast sky and the fast moving clouds when from the north a gigantic flock of birds flew straight over my head. There were hundreds and hundreds of small birds, their wings humming a single sound together, like bees. It was magnificent and there I was, turning instinctively to someone to motion toward the sky but remembering simultaneously that I was alone. Still staring at these birds flying further south to startle someone else, perhaps alone in their gardens too, and my eyes squeezed with tears. The happy sort.
