I've been dreading this entry and I'm afraid I'm just going to chicken out and re-post what some of you may have already read in the livejournal version or heard during the initial volley of emails.
Here goes...
I went into very early labour at very early Saturday morning, due to what we think might have been an infection, but we have no information yet. We got to spend the next twenty four hours practicing pain techniques whilst the midwives turned into angels before our eyes.
We tried everything to stop the contractions, transferred hospitals halfway through, tried everything a second time, and finally dealt with the reality that this was not going to stop, that I was going into labour, and that 21 weeks was just three or four weeks short of the baby having any chance at all of survival.
He was beautiful. So incredibly beatiful. I got to hold him and watch him for a while, and then he was gone and we were crying and then there were needles and drugs and I woke up in the morning to an incredible sense of loss, and Dave's hand was the warmest most loving thing in the universe to me, and it hasn't let got of me once.
They kept us another day and night, each new nurse a new shade of patience and sympathy, looking for signs of further infection and there doesn't seem to be any at all.
We also spent that time, and will probably spend far more of that time looking into each other, and so far we're both feeling grieved but brave and definitely want to try again as soon as we can -- although that may not be until six or eight months from now.
I have a thousand good thoughts to hold onto right now, positive byproducts that we learned from the labour, tidbits from the midwives about how much easier labour will be next time, about how well we handled the pain, how well we held each other up, how well my body works and how well the system seemed to work for us. We have had every possible fortune, from the best emergency obstetrician in the universe to the sort of midwife who stopped at home to bring us brownies while we were transferring hospitals, and who say up with us all through the next night even though the second hospital would barely recognize them.
We're home again, and working through the grief, crying jags come and go and I already miss him so terribly much, but we'll be okay. There's so much busywork to figure out in the meantime, work leave and coping with changes and all sorts of things, that there'll be something to occupy our fingers while our minds slowly figure out how to cope.