Full Circle

If you can get your emotions out of it, it's easy to appreciate how interesting life is.

Today I drove to the hospital -- the same one that helped us conceive and bring H into the world. I've been having killer heartburn (not just a little gurgling discomfort -- real, out-of-my-mind pain that's nearly sent me to the emergency room) since my third trimester of pregnancy, finally realized I couldn't will it away and went to the doctor, who ordered a test called a barium swallow. On my way to get the test this morning, I thought about going there exactly a year ago today, for a very different reason: because I was bleeding. Badly. At 28 weeks' pregnant.

I will never forget that drive from my office to the same hospital, that feeling of total vulnerability, that the universe could be at that very moment taking away what it had finally, finally granted. The sick anticipation that I might be about to endure my greatest pain yet. The sadness of telling my unborn baby that all would be okay, when I actually had no clue that it would be.

The whole story is recounted here so I won't numb your skull with the same details. But after an ambulance ride to the hospital downtown, a few days of evaluation and the 13 weeks of bedrest that followed, baby H came out when he was supposed to (a week late, even), healthy, hearty and completely unscathed by those events. Which made every second of those days and weeks so. Totally. Worth it.

Later this morning, I swallowed the vile barium in various positions with the very same radiologist, coincidentally, that administered my first IF test -- the hysterosalpingogram -- and himself had seen my RE with his wife. I was thrilled to tell him that I had been successful in my efforts to have a baby. It truly felt like coming full circle.

I then went upstairs to visit a close friend whose husband is a patient on one of the floors. When I came off the elevator I saw that the special care nursery was housed on the same floor. And all I could think was, "There but for the grace of God...." I mean, it really could have been us. Easily. And H could have had such a different babyhood.

So today I'm thinking a lot about the past year, how the intense fear of last November 4 became hope, then confidence, and ultimately insane, boundless joy. How the entire process of bringing H into this world has made me a better mom, a tougher person. I hope I've absorbed the right lessons from emerging alive. Sometimes I think the incident and bedrest were gifts, granting me the down time I needed to finally relax about the pregnancy.

No matter what else I was meant to learn, I know this: My gratitude is endless.