Diary | And I might be OK, but I’m not fine at all…

[TRIGGER WARNIG / CAVEAT: I wrote this post as a diary entry back in December 2016, when I had just been diagnosed with, and was receiving treatment for, an ectopic pregnancy. If you’re reading this now, you should know that I suffer from extreme health anxiety, and have a crippling phobia of surgery, both of which made my reactions to this situation much more extreme than might otherwise be the case. So please read with kindness, and be aware that this post may be triggering for people who are pregnant, have experienced pregnancy loss, or who suffer from anxiety related to health and medical procedures. Thanks for understanding. If you’d like to read the full story of my ectopic pregnancy, you’ll find all the posts here.]

I’m sure you’re all getting sick of me saying this by now, but I feel I need to thank you once again.

Thank you for reading all 2,000+ words of my last blog post. Thank you for commenting, for being there, for sharing your own experiences, as painful as I know that must have been. I haven’t been able to respond to each comment or email individually, and I feel really bad about that, because I honestly want to hug every single one of you right now. It would be awkward, obviously (Unless there was wine involved, in which case it would only be retrospectively awkward. I’m not sure which is worse, actually…), but I think you deserve it, so please consider yourselves hugged… in the least creepy way possible.

I also wanted to write a quick post today (Haha, who am I kidding: as if ANY of my posts are ever ‘quick’!) because, as I mentioned on Instagram earlier this week, it’s kind of hard as a blogger to know how to segue gracefully from miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy and health anxiety to, ‘Hey, lookit my new shoes: so sparkly!’

I mean, I could do it exactly like that, and just accept that I’d look like a bit of an ass, but to quote Taylor Swift (Which I do more often than I probably should…), I might be OK, but I’m not fine at all… and I don’t want the sudden switch in topic to imply otherwise. I, do, however, want to get back to writing about the kind of things I usually write about here: so the fashion, the beauty, the sparkly shoes, and all of those other things that don’t generally have to come with trigger warnings attached to them.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop talking about all of the other stuff that’s been going on lately, because now that the Chamber of Secrets has been opened, so to speak, I feel even more convinced that these things have to be talked about, and if I have to volunteer as tribute, then so be it. I will try to stop mixing my literary references now: sorry about that.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that, on the day my miscarriage was confirmed, I came home from the hospital, took a blank notebook from my special ‘notebook’ drawer (Yes, I have a drawer full of blank notebooks. They bring me peace.), and started writing about my experience. I had some kind of half-baked idea at the time that one day I would publish these writings as an ebook or something (Because there HAS to be a market for a book called ‘Hysterical Ramblings of a Very Hormonal Hypochondriac’, right? HAS to be.), and that this book would have a happy ending, which would both comfort and encourage people who were going through the same thing.

Well, as you know, it didn’t work out like that, unfortunately. I did keep writing, though – every day, in fact. Then every other day. After a while, I realised I hadn’t written anything in that notebook for a while, purely because I hadn’t needed to. I won’t say I was fine… but I was OK. I felt like myself again, for the first time in weeks, and the reason I felt like myself was because I had been acting like myself. I don’t mean I’d been denying my feelings, or lying about them, or anything like that. I just mean that I’d been getting up every morning, putting on makeup, getting dressed (I really wasn’t joking when I said there are certain members of hospital staff who have never seen me in makeup, or wearing anything other than clothes I can also sleep in…), and going about my day.

Doing these things doesn’t make everything magically better, of course, but they DO help: or they helped me, anyway. Even just opening up my WordPress dashboard, scrolling through my favourite retail sites, and writing posts about shoes and clothes, and other things that don’t really matter, helped give me back a sense of normality, and right now, normality is what I most crave. There was a day a couple of weeks ago when Terry and I stopped in at Starbucks after yet another hospital appointment (This was before I knew my pregnancy was ectopic and had simply been told that it was failing, and I should expect another miscarriage…), and we sat there for a while, watching the word go by. I remember watching people rushing around doing their Christmas shopping, and going about their business, and thinking that I would give anything – anything at all – to be one of them. To be worrying about what to buy everyone for Christmas, and what my next blog post should be about, rather than waiting for the hospital to call with what I knew would be bad news.

Normality. It’s utterly wonderful, and very much under-rated, don’t you think? So, over the next few days, I’m going to be doing my best to get back some sense of normality. Obviously I’m still dealing with a lot of very difficult stuff (I’m writing this on Monday evening, knowing that I have another hospital visit on Tuesday afternoon: it should just be a routine blood test, but you never really know what these tests will show, and already The Fear is starting to build), and I’m not going to just ignore that, or pretend it’s not happening, but I will be starting to return to regular programming, as opposed to the ‘all misery/all the time’ stuff that’s made up this week’s content.

I realise that the sudden changes in subject might seem a little odd and jarring at times, but, well, that’s life, really, isn’t it? And all we can do is get on with the show…

[Read all of my posts on ectopic pregnancy]