Ectopic Loss Quotes

The child's heart beat: but she was growing in the wrong place inside her extraordinary mother, south of safe...she and her mother were rushed to the hospital, where her mother was operated on by a brisk cheerful diminutive surgeon who told me after the surgery that my wife had been perhaps an hour from death from the pressure of the child growing outside the womb, the mother from the child growing, and the child from growing awry; and so my wife did not die, but our mysterious child did...Not uncommon, an ectopic pregnancy, said the surgeon...Sometimes, continued the surgeon, sometimes people who lose children before they are born continue to imagine the child who has died, and talk about her or him, it's such an utterly human thing to do, it helps deal with the pain, it's healthy within reason, and yes, people say to their other children that they actually do, in a sense, have a sister or brother, or did have a sister or brother, and she or he is elsewhere, has gone ahead, whatever the language of your belief or faith tradition. You could do that. People do that, yes. I have patients who do that, yes... One summer morning, as I wandered by a river, I remembered an Irish word I learned long ago, and now whenever I think of the daughter I have to wait to meet, I find that word in my mouth: dunnog, little dark one, the shyest and quietest and tiniest of sparrows, the one you never see but sometimes you sense, a flash in the corner of your eye, a sweet sharp note already fading by the time it catches your ear.

Something profound happens when you wake up in a calm green pasture on the other side of the treacherous storm that you thought would end you. You discover who you are beyond the unimaginable. You discover what you are made of. Suddenly, the thing that may have broken you becomes the very thing that empowers and emboldens you.

Depo-Provera is a powerful poison, with a devastating inventory of wretched side effects: Under federal law, the Depo-Provera label must bear FDA’s most stringent Black Box warning—due to its potential to cause fatal bone loss. Furthermore, women have reported both missed periods and excessive bleeding; blood clots in arms, legs, lungs, and eyes; stroke; weight gain; ectopic pregnancy; depression; hair loss; decreased libido; and permanent infertility.73 Some studies have associated Depo-Provera with dramatic increases (200 percent) in breast cancer risk.74 The FDA warns women not to take Depo-Provera for longer than two years, but Gates’s program prescribes at least a four-year course—or indefinitely—for African women and goes to great lengths to avoid warning Black women about the concoction’s many drawbacks.

In longing and heartbreak, in devastating test results and failed fertility treatments, in miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy and recurrent loss - through the worst of your waiting, God is with you and for you.

I wish I’d fallen softly. Light and graceful like a feather drifting slowly to the earth on a warm and dreamy summer’s day. I wish that I’d landed softly too. But there is nothing soft or graceful about that devastating moment when the worst has come to pass. The unavoidable truth is that it is hard, cold and brutal. All that you know to be true and good in life shatters in an instant. You feel like a delicate pottery bowl violently tossed from your place of rest, watching yourself crash and scatter across the hostile dark earth. The sound is deafening. Time stops. Inside, the quiet ache of shock and heartbreak slowly makes its grip known. They cut deep, these jagged edges of broken sherds. You gasp for air hungrily, yet somehow forget how to breathe.

Is there any point in breathing if this is what the world is asking me to face?’ You think to yourself. Somehow though, whether through madness or magic, you find a way to. You keep breathing even when you don’t think you can. You surprise yourself.

The fall is hard – the crashing, the breaking, the scattering of your broken clay body. What I found however, is that the mending is slow, soft and although somewhat ungraceful still, you sense yourself being held by an unseen force, something greater than you wrapping you in its balm. Remember this on those days when it feels like healing will never come.