I couldn't move. But I felt everything.

Lately I've had something that happened to me a long time ago eating away at me. 

I can't explain why now but I've just woken up from a nightmare reliving it and I don't know what else to do except talk about it. 

When I was 17 I was already heading down the jagged path of low self esteem. Hitting rocks like alcohol abuse and risqué behavior head on. I was regularly hooking up with a guy in my grade, lets call him Richard. Well one night Richard invites me to a party. 

When I got there I immediately felt uncomfortable because the "party" consisted of 4 guys. Lets call them William, Clark, Brad, and ole faithful Richard. 

Now I had already been versed in the art of alcohol consumption and found it strange that after two tentative sips that my body began to feel numb so I stopped. But whatever pill that had me introduced into my drink was strong enough for that to do the trick. 

I was completely awake. I was completely sober. I was completely paralyzed. I could feel everything in a numbed manner but couldn't even blink my eyes. Or closes them to the horrors to come. 

Clarke caught on to what had happened and left. The rest? Well without getting into graphic details, they raped me. And videotaped it. Then they put me in my car, naked, and drove me to a back dirt road and left me there. 

I was afraid. I never told a soul. 

At 23 I told Danny. Tonight I'm telling strangers. 

9 months ago Brad found me on Facebook and messaged me. 

"I just wanted to show my wife the disgusting pig I made a sex tape with"

I don't know what will take this panic away from me. Or the pain. 

I guess I will figure it out. 

KNOWING the simplicity. Not embracing.

I'm at this weird point in thinking. I'm not sure if its illusion, dream, or reality. 

I'm stricken by this thought about my life. I mean, I'll write it out. Bullet point the struggles and joys, the pain and love but at the end of it all, what am I? 

I envision a hoarding parade at my funeral. All given a chance to stand up and tell their impression of me. Give an overall summary gathered through brief encounters and Facebook status updates. "She was funny" they'll say. "She was a joy, lit up a room upon entering". These delightful little snippets of delusion designed to distract my relatives from grief. But the truth of it all is that I doubt they know me either.   

No one truly knows enough about another to give a valid summary. Or is there a summary, a pairing of short words, to dictate the entirety of a life? 

I know the morbidity is suffocating at this point but I've managed to slither myself into this dark place. I worry that lives are too expendable. Memorialize by a $0.25 newspaper and a good picture, a room of suffering people. 

I'm just surrounded by the constant flow if comments of people assuming they have a sum of me. Assuming they will know my feelings  my behaviors. My thoughts. My mind reaches into the darkest depths of this falsehood. 

I'll lose sleep over it. 

I'll fear that I'm caught up in becoming this mask of someone else. This chameleon enveloped completely in what people WANT to see. That no one would care to get closer. People accept face value. Clutch it and pray that complications never arise. 

Knowing my story is being told. Knowing my hardest hardships are being displayed publicly. Who is there? Who reads?  

Who stands up aside from the morbid curiosity of my struggles?  Or cheap  entertainment?  

I know I'm just crawled up in my mind right now but I'm struggling with the dimensions of all of this. The simplicity. 

When a life burns out. Who cares to KNOW more than the face? Of anyone ever? 

Who has that courage?  That time?

Healing and Dealing

Sorry readers for being so in and out lately.
I feel so energy zapped right now.  Terrible twos is in full swing.

Anyways, back on track.

So I've just had this tiny wrinkled Benjamin Buttons baby and he's been med flighted to a hospital about 45 mins away.  About 16 hours after my emergency c-section, the Dr. comes in the room.  I was in horrible pain and I felt clammy and awful but I smiled and lied.  Soon I was discharged and headed to see my baby. 

The neonatal staff was amazing. They made me up a room to stay in just down the hall from where jude lay sleeping.  I could go see him anytime that I wanted to. And I did.  I put my hands in the small port holes on his box and laid my hand on his little orange back covered in fuzz.  I cried. I loved him so much and hadn't been able to hold him yet.  He got better as the days went by. 

The entire time I was there I felt this undeniable vague feeling that I "didn't feel good".  I was weak and exhausted. I couldn't eat or sleep. The worst part was the horrible consistent cough. If I laid down I felt like I couldn't get a breath down.  The nurses in the unit urged me to go down to the emergency room but I couldn't leave my baby.  What if something happened and I wasn't there?

After 7 days I finally got hold him.  His weight was hardly noticeable.  His little body plugged into IVs and wrapped in a blanket in my arms felt golden.  I loved him with every ounce of my soul.  He was beautiful to me.  He opened one small blue eye and stared at me. I kissed his little hands and his little feet and felt whole.

My superhero baby made it out of neonatal 3 months premature at a whopping 4 pounds in 11 days.
I took him home that morning and coughed all day long.  My mother finally convinced me to go to the hospital at about 9pm.  In triage they rushed me to the back and began sticking me with needles and shoving oxygen masks over my face.

My mother just stood looking terrified holding the car seat carrier with a tiny baby sleeping soundly.  As the strong pain medications flooded my body I began losing all thoughts of the seriousness of the situation.  I lived in the shining flow of opiate illusion. It felt lovely. Like laying on clouds covered in butterflies.

The rest is an absolute blur.  I was put into a chemically induced coma and onto a ventilator.  I had severe congestive heart failure and kidney failure. My gallbladder was full of stones.  My kidneys had stopped filtering calcium at some point and my organs were partially calcified.  It was a total shutdown.

I was out for 6 weeks.  My mother took over the care of my son. When I awoke I cried and cried. I had missed so much.  But I held him in my arms the day I got out and loved him like I had never skipped a moment. 

A living baby, a new heart beats, and terror unfolds

Okay readers. Sorry I've been kinda incognito lately.  I've been on hibernation vacation for the past few days.

So lets continue on with the watered down- bullet point life story.
So I'm laying in a hospital bed, blind from over-high blood pressure, and a singular thought pounds into my mind with every bump of my pulse. "dead baby, dead baby, dead baby."

I'm having mild hallucinations of a grotesque baby corpse exiting my body old school and planning my heroic stand off with nurses to hold him for days.
Its really quite horrific. But you can't control your own mind.

Soon I'm rushed into the OR. head swimming from delightful drugs.  Belly tumbling from a mixture or said delightful drugs and a turkey club.
My mother goes into the OR with me.  A nurse asked me to hug her while another administers the spinal block. 

Fast forward one horrific half hour and my mother is spattered in partially digested turkey and I'm listening to the doctor commentate the procedure of doing a hip bone to hip bone c section extraction when the baby swims up too far. 

And suddenly a relief washed over me. My baby swam up. A dead baby doesn't swim. My baby was ALIVE. A love filled me that I had never felt before. One that I didnt believe I could feel. 

A few morphine coma moments passed with patchy memories and dreamy recollections. My mother crying and smiling, a nurse urging me to look right for a quick peek at the tiny still orange infant and the bleak silence of not hearing that "I'm a healthy baby" cry. 

And again with the push of morphine I was out again. 

I awoke in my hospital room with my brother next to me. Absently clicking away on some handheld gaming system. I silently stared at my mother in the corner. With tear filled eyes she said "he's beautiful". I croaked "alive?"  She just nodded, a quick flash of worry in her eyes. 

Soon they rolled a big glass box into the room containing a tiny (3 pound) orange fuzzy little old man. Wires and hoses plugged into his tiny body. His eyes taped shut, still and unmoving. The only indication of life was the monotone beeping of the many monitor screens attached to his box. 

I filled with dread. My heart shook. My mind raced. I felt my heart breaking. For this child who had morphine before milk. 

Who would soon ride in a helicopter before he rode in a car. 

A pregnancy straight of the exorcist.

So i finally mustered up the backbone to tell my mother of the life growing in me and to my surprise, she was ecstatic.
I shouldn't have been shocked. She needs an adoring audience and i had outgrown that particular habit.
Don't get me wrong. She loves him, truly. But she always has and always will have ulterior motives for EVERYTHING.

Back on subject, as soon as It really sunk it, I really didn't know how to feel. I had tried to be excited but deep down I just knew I was going to go through the same nightmare as before. I was going to have to walk around with a dead baby inside my body an try to feel anything less than completely suicidal.
I waddled through my pregnancy completely mentally checked out. I would feign excitement but I walked, hands clasped, with dread. I took a momentous amount of pregnant belly photographs. I hadn't done that with Gage and I thought "I'll have something to remember this one by."
The physical aspects of the pregnacy were positively horrendous. I vomited constantly. The doctors tried every anti yakking concoction known to man.
Nothing helped.
Even as a big girl, it still wasn't normal to lose 30 pounds in 3 months of my first trimester. It also wasn't normal that one day i would have the belly of a 8 month pregnant woman and the next I would be back to normal. My friends jokingly called him "the phantom baby". My right leg would also swell to ridiculous proportions. The doctors had no way of explaining it. I spent the majority of my pregnancy in the hospital. I had bled alot. My blood pressure was sky high. And I was sick as fuck.

I knew he was dead or dying.
I recall being delerious on pain medication once, sternly glaring at the doctor and my mother saying "If it dies, take it out right away. I'm not waiting."

I felt him moving constantly. I waited for it to stop suddenly. At every ultrasound i would stare at the screen and ask questions like "Is his head shaped normally?" And "is there anything wrong with him that you can see?"

One day at the hospital my blood pressure suddenly shot to double over stroke requirements and wouldn't go down with medication. It was 3 months before my due date and we had to get the baby out.

Someone had to live through it.

Another life growing within a body of sin.

Today has been a bit of a rageful day in my mind.  Emotions I can't explain clawing at me from the inside.  Any little ounce of frustration at work has sent me into fits of clenched fists and irritation.  I've tried breathing it out but I need to find a way to calm down.

Well back onto my train of thought..

After the loss of Gage, I found it hard to focus.  I spoke almost nothing.  I drank almost a fifth of liquor  a day.  I worked no job, had few friends, and no one really knew how to speak with me about this tragedy.  I was in so much internal pain that I wanted to be outside of myself.  The only way I could touch that rendition was to drink until I passed out, wake up, and repeat.

I ate one tuna fish sandwich a day.
I lost weight yet looked unhealthy.

I decided to get a job for the sole purpose of funding my alcoholism.
I started at walmart overnight stocking shelves.
It sucked.  It was hard work but I slowly got used to it.  And I had the added perc of being one of the prettiest girls there.  Because I have all of my teeth.

With slim pickins at walmart I chose a severely alcoholic 38 year old loser that lived at home with his mom and had severe mental issues.

I chose the path to booze.
I moved in with him and his mother shortly after we started hooking up.  Right away we were fighting. After about 6 months I caught him shooting meth into his arm and threw my shit in the car.
I headed right back to mama's.
About 4 weeks into my return home I had a horrific thought.
When was my last period?

I ignored this notion for about 2 more weeks but I consciously stopped drinking cold turkey.  I got sweats and felt terrible constantly but that slowly waned.  I finally got up the courage and bought one of those $1 pregnancy tests from a local grocery store.

I took the test and it said negative.  To hide the evidence from my mother I stuck the tiny little stick in my pocket and went about my day.  Later on that night as I was taking off my blue jeans I heard the tick of plastic against the floorboards of my bedroom.  I continued to get dressed for bed and quickly picked up the trash and walked outside to throw it in the dumpster.
Absently I just glanced at the results to celebrate a small victory.
I didn't want to be pregnant.  It was horrible, it hurt, and I would probably kill it with my body just as I had done Gage.
I squinted at the result window to make out that singular negative line in the harsh light of a street lamp.  To my shock suddenly there appeared a line crossing over it, positive.

I stood for a moment, stock still and staring in confusion. I bit my lip and raced in my mind for a simple explanation.  That something in the laundry detergent in my jeans had caused a false negative.  That it was a fucked up test.
All I could really make out clearly in this jumble of thoughts was "How could something that costs a buck determine my future?"

I didn't go back in the house. I didn't think.  I walked to walgreens and bought 3 pregnancy tests.  Different brands.

I went home and drank glass after glass of water, just staring at the test on the counter waiting for the result to go back to negative.
I took the first test.
Positive.
I took the second test.
Positive.
I took the third.
If you guessed positive then you would be RIGHT!

I just walked into my bedroom and went right to sleep.

The next morning I awoke to a line of positive pregnancy tests on my dresser and more thoughts in my head than I could deal with.
The main thought at that time was "He's going to die. Just like Gage."\

My poor child's death, and the birth of a worsened me.

I went to the appointment alone.

I read diligently in "What to Expect When You're Expecting" so when Gage's active manner suddenly fell flat I recalled a passage saying not to panic, that sometimes the baby just moves when they want to.

During the ultrasound I stared at the unintelligible blob on the screen with a silly smile.  Recalling just a few days before picking up that onesie that said "Mommy's little jelly bean".  I didn't notice the alarmed look on the ultrasound tech's face, I didn't notice her smashing the "record" button down, or the look or pity as she wiped the gel from my belly.  I just looked at the baby in my tummy on the screen and loved him with all that I had.

I could love him.  And that was my world.

After returning to the sterilized smell of the examining room I sat blissfully ignorant on a paper scrunched table waiting for the doctor.  He walked in with the darkest look of pity a person could possess.
I still smiled.

He put his hand on my shoulder and said "I'm so sorry, Ms. Wire"
I only regarded him with a look of smiling confusion.  In my mind I thought "Sorry for what?"

He then began to explain to me one of the horrific mysteries of the body.  Something called a missed miscarriage.

Gage had been dead in my body for weeks.  His heart had stopped beating altogether.  He stopped growing. He stopped thriving.
My body and mind had starved so much for the pregnancy that it refused to let it go.

He scheduled an appointment for a vaginal ultrasound right away.
I believe I had a thought following his words. I think that I just set a row of denial in my head a mile wide and refused his "medical" news.

My mother took me to the ultrasound. Her face grim.  After a short wait my feet were in stirrups and they had begun.  My mind clung to Gage so tightly that through THIS ultrasound I could make out the gentle slopes of chubby cheeks and curled eyelashes.  I just stared in love again.  I was told that I was I staring at so preciously was a dead baby.  Malformed and under grown, decaying within my body.
The soonest appointment would be in 3 days, I recalled hearing someone mumble to my mother.  I made it a maybe ten quick and determined steps before I hit my knees with the realization.

My mother could understand an ounce of my pain, as she had had a traditional miscarriage with twins when I was 16.  She gathered me from the floor and put me in the car.  I spent three days in zombie mode. Not eating, not drinking only sleeping and clutching my belly, begging him to move.

I went into the D and C appointment comatose without emotion.  Somewhere in my mind I was convinced that they would get in there and find a living normal healthy child ready to be placed in my arms when I awoke.

I awoke to a room with my mother's pitying face and empty arms.  My heart shattered.
I screamed and cried until I fell asleep exhausted.

For the next several years and a few times to this day I've had a reoccurring dream.  I'm standing looking at myself.  My second self is naked and largely pregnant. standing before a mirror.  She caresses her swollen belly and smiles.  She admires her adorable pregnant body for a while but then the bottom of her belly takes on a grey green hue.  And with no reaction from her, its obvious that her flesh is rotting away.  It degrades all the while she is smiling and admiring until a grey and swollen baby arm, mangled and deformed flops out of the side of her rotting stomach and I awake.  I'm covered in sweat and shaking. I'm nauseated and crying.
It is an unimaginable pain. It is something I cannot even describe.

It was another hell.