so, um…yeh.  the hospital in Halifax sent me home.

i am free, and grateful, and confused, and a little sheepish.  do you think a cervix can have Munchausen’s syndrome? or a split personality?

my doc here sent me because she can only check me manually, and she’s feeling a lot of softening and related shortening so far as she can tell.  a strong cervix should – so rumour has it – feel rather like the tip of a nose, firmish and almost cartilaginous.  mine does not.  or does, and doesn’t, and back and forth…but on Wednesday when i went for my checkup she declared it “mush,” more like an earlobe than a nose tip, lacking any structure.

i can feel the softening, the subtle but sharp twinges that i noticed but assumed were normal before all hell broke loose in my first pregnancy, the same ones that hearkened shortening and hospital bedrest when i carried O, the same ones that i thought i must be fabricating in my own neurotic brain last March when the routine ultrasound revealed my cervix disappearing at the bizarrely early mark of twelve weeks, necessitating cerclage. i feel ‘em.  they’re familiar…they don’t even cause panic.  i just mark them silently, note their frequency and severity.  they are not extreme.  and by Monday, i will have had five checkups in a span of two weeks, so it is not like they are going unmonitored.

but they are being dismissed by one half of my care team, as is the concern of the other half of the cross-provincial partnership.  because of ye olde stitch of steel up there millimetres from my bladder, all this softening doesn’t mean anything.  or so says Halifax.  they don’t even check the softening, so uninterested are they in texture, in whether i resemble a nose or an ear or a green alligator.  they are numbers people.  their magical dildo wand does not lie.

and according to the ultrasound evidence clearly provided by said dildo wand, my cervix was nearly a normal 4 cm long yesterday.

i try to imagine the look that must have crossed my face when this shocking (and fabulous) news was delivered.  i suspect i looked rather like some poor sot who’s just woken from a dream wherein he’d discovered himself onstage, naked, in a play he’d never learned the lines for, as part of an exam he’d never studied for, and unexpectedly eight months pregnant to boot.  the dreaming self feels trapped, helpless, afraid.  the waking man is befuddled and bewildered by the sudden change of states, but damn happy to give his head a shake and return to the status quo of mundane reality.

i am home.  i am relieved, beyond measure, to return to the relatively comfortable status of couch troll. but i am still a bit groggy from the dream, from all the drama.

i see my doc here again Monday.   i don’t know what to expect.  i have tried, so hard, to be patient and passive…to sit tight and trust my caregivers.  but i do not know if i can keep riding this emotional roller coaster of preparing to leave O behind, preparing myself for the terror of another micropreemie, preparing myself to weather the summer in a hospital that – all the other nights spent in there aside – is still and will forever be imprinted on me as the place where my child died.  i don’t know if i can handle this kind of mindfuck every week, not when each time i pack it gets harder, and not when it keeps being a bloody false alarm that one doc rings and the other dismisses.  living on orange alert is a wearying, exhausting thing.  i do not want to keep bouncing like a pingpong ball between dire prognoses and “oh, you’re fine.”  i want to be fine.  i want this baby to be fine.  but i am starting to wonder if perhaps we don’t all have a bad case of teh crazy, instead.

maybe this whole circus is some strange fabrication that my apparently-imaginative cervix has concocted to relieve the boredom of pelvic rest.  maybe my doc here is secretly pulling for some other contestant in the Miss Cervix Universe ’08 pageant and is trying to sabotage me.  maybe i’m dreaming.  these seem like rational explanations, from where i’m sitting lying…just as rational as my cervix gaining a gorgeous three entire centimetres in 24 hours, much as i don’t want to appear ungrateful for the apparent miracle of the latter.  but it’s weird, folks.

in any case, if i am a loon i’m a loon whose carcass is happily back on its own couch, and appreciative – if embarrassed – about all the kind messages of support and love that were utterly unnecessarily sent its way.  except, well, they did make me feel awfully nice.  really, very, awfully, nice.

as you were.  nothing to see here.