The ability to cry

When I'm sad, or when I'm stressed and something gives out,  I cry.  Tears work in different ways for people. Some cry copiously, and feel no better. Others lack the ability to shed tears, and keep hoarding their negative emotions. In my case, crying works in precisely the way evolution probably intended it, as an exquisitely-designed mechanism to physically shed emotion and become free of it.

The most sensitive emotional barometer I possess is how much I've cried in any given situation. I cried copiously after my first loss, for days on end, for long periods of time. My second loss bought about far less frequent tears, I went to the numb and 'I'm ok' bits much more quickly. With this 3rd loss, while I cried infrequently through the pregnancy to expend the stress that was building, and plenty on the day of the loss, but afterwards, my tears just dried up.  They came maybe four times that coming week, in very short (like 1-3 min) durations, and afterwards, not all all. I also felt like life was almost normal, I was not even numb, most of the time, I just felt fine. That was bewildering in itself, I have to say.

There has also been very little grief with the loss of this particular life, and there is a little part of me that feels profoundly guilty about it. I never felt like this pregnancy was real, because my psyche, for whatever reason, solidly blocked it. There was no grief that I could identify over the loss of THIS life, this child. I felt sad that the pregnancy has failed. I cried because I'm so scared about the future, and that things were so hard for me.  But I never cried because this particular life was gone. And to this day, I wonder why it was. The easy and simple answer is, its a coping mechanism that my sub-conscious developed, after the back-to-back whacks of 2 pregnancy losses. But still, I'm not wholly satisfied with that explanation.

I want the results of my karyotyping back for multiple reasons-- one part is, that I want this lost pregnancy to become more real for me. I want to know what I had, so it finally becomes more tangible. Its been 21 days post D&C. When I left the country (17 days post-surgery), the results were not back yet. I called today, the receptionist was distinctly unhelpful. She would not inform me of the availability of results via email, she had no idea when they would become available, and her advice was to keep calling back until a) the results came back and b) a nurse practitioner was available to relay them to me. Yikes. That is a lot of international calls. And honestly, I'm just dying to know.

After talking to that woman, the dam finally cracked. I cried again, and I desperately needed to. Grief or the lack of it non-withstanding, these past few weeks have been enormously stressful. Like an idiot, I scheduled my flight out of the country 2 days after I had finished work. I decided the timing the day of the loss, on a day I should have been making no decisions, on a day that my primary priority was to run home to family. Two weeks after, when I was emotionally back to a completely even keel, when I was stressed and overworked with the burden of wrapping up my handover and packing to leave in a ridiculously short time, I seriously regretted it.  I managed it, finished everything I had to do and I'm back in India, but not without some serious stress and cost to myself. Its been rough. And I finally cried today, because of a rude receptionist. I just pray I get my results soon, and they don't end up tell me that they managed to lose all samples or the lab messed it up or something. Though my badly needed R&R has begun, I'm stretched very thin right now.  C'mon universe, tell me what I had.