The False Sense of Security

I really need to spend some time and make my blog look better. Some background and graphics... Sorry for not posting this a few months back, I wrote this and never submitted it (I started a new job that has confused my life...)

Having a child really changed my perspective on pregnancy loss. It was always there in the back of my mind - buried somewhere. If anything, it gave me a false sense of security.

Imagine this: You are in the wilderness and incredibly thirsty, thirsty like you've never been in your entire life. You have travelled a very long, dry, costly road and you have lost yourself along the way. Things have happened that have altered your perception of reality. You finally make it to some water and you drink it all. You are feeling pretty content and on top of the world. The journey you had, all but forgotten. Then you realize, damn't, you drank all the water and you have to do that exact same journey all over again.

I definitely took pregnancy loss for granted after we had our son Graham. I had pushed all the lost pregnancies to the back corner of my mind and focused on my new born son. A lot of things happened that caused me to not think about the losses we had. A few things were the sleep deprivation, working sleep deprived, sleep deprivation, remembering to eat, learning how to be a parent...zzz.

Speaking of learning to be a parent, to this day, I'm still amazed they let someone like me walk out of the hospital with the baby. I know there are people out there who were grossly under qualified compared to me yet they have kids and they turn out ok. It's still very exciting, and terrifying, when I think back to when we walked out of that hospital with Graham.

We didn't "try" for kids for a while. At least not in the way we were "trying" before. Well, yes, we still had sex (and it was even better than before!!!!!), but what I mean by not "trying" was we didn't chart, didn't try and time things, and didn't discuss the losses.

So when we my wife said she was pregnant again, I brushed the pregnancy loss part aside. We already had 1 and the universe was not going to do this to me again.

My wife went back to the routine with the Regional Fertility Clinic (the one in the Calgary Foothills Professional building). Call in to let them know you're pregnant, book an internal ultrasound, go for blood tests every other day, receive no phone call from them unless they think you should not be optimistic. To this day, I'm certain if we had said, "we want to consider IVF..." they would've climbed mountains to help us and provide support for us with our recurrent pregnancy loss. What support could they have provided us? I don' t know, I'm not the experts at this - they are and I wish I was given some options beyond IVF and plugging away. I felt as if I was just merely a number there (and I probably was) and an inconvenience to them. Visits were always so short and we were pushed thru like the next person in line at McDonalds. At least at McDonalds they ask if you would like fries.

A mere 3 weeks after my wife told me she was pregnant, we had lost another pregnancy (our 6th pregnancy, and 5th loss I believe). The feelings of despair, sadness and especially guilt (since it was me putting my wife thru this) was mixed in with the happiness and joy of having a son. I was a mess, a failure, and I still had no idea how to make things right. How could I have been so stupid and naive enough to let me slip into such a false sense of security that we could never go thru this again? I KNEW better. I'm an adult, and a parent - yet I somehow managed to not only hide those thoughts, when they did come up I convinced myself that it would not happen again. We have to deal with recurrent pregnancy loss, and it's my fault. Curses. I wish I had this blog at that time to fall back onto.

As a husband when your wife is sad, you want to make things right. However when it's your fault, what do you do? She wanted to have more kids (with me hopefully?), it was hurting her both emotionally and physically. In some ways even today as I write this, I still feel lost, confused and helpless. Support for this? Forget it. It's like you're on your own here until you snap (or deal with it by writing a blog)!

My son was too small at the time to knowingly hug his mom and tell her he loves her. I said to myself that when he got older, I will make sure he "randomly" gave her hugs and told her he loves her. So now (if she read this), she knows why I ask him to do it seemingly "randomly".

What did I do to cope? I gave my baby son lots of hugs, kisses, and told him I love him. It didn't make anything better, but it reminded me how lucky I really was. I know some of you out there who read this do not have that baby yet. As you have read my journey thus far, you all know that I realize how lucky I really am.

Trials and tribulations of discussing RPL with my Asian mom

Disclaimer: I wrote this really fast. I'll try and find any spelling or grammar errors later.

I recently read the 'Tiger Mom' article about the asian way of raising children. It was an interesting read because quite frankly, I lived that to some degree going up and how difficult it was to tell my parents about our losses, and our problem.

A little background on my asian upbringing: I'm actually a former refugee and immigrant to Canada. In fact, my parents were one of the boat people who fled Vietnam in 1980 and I was born in a UN refugee camp. No joke! For the first 4 years of my life in Canada I actually had no country I was a citizen of!

I had the traditional "You will do this because we said so, and we don't have to explain anything to you" kind of parenting. When I didn't listen or did stupid things, I was sometimes spanked, hard. There were incidents that I shall not mention beyond today, more than eyebrows would be raised if someone discussed it. Those of you who know who Russell Peters is will know the phrase, "Somebody gonna get a hurt real bad..." as funny as it is when he says it, there's nothing funny when it's your own dad. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I didn't provoke it. I once turned on the sprinkler while my dad was painting the house. Ooops.

There were also things I recall like... coming home with 80+% on my report card and my dad (and to a degree, my mom) upset that I didn't get 100%. Boys always want to impress their dad and I was no exception. Even today at the age of 30, I still find myself from time to time doing things thinking he'd be proud of me. I'm getting a bit off topic... I tend to do that.

So what does this have to do with recurring pregnancy loss? Well, I remember telling my mom when we lost our first baby. At that point, we had no idea that we had a genetic translocation mumbo jumbo problem. I told my mom that it was unfortunately quite normal to lose a pregnancy here and there.

For those of you that know my mom, this will not surprise you. She said it was because April was doing things 'wrong'. Some of the things I recall were: too much walking, our home had too many stairs and the "extra" exertion from the stairs was to blame, and eating the wrong things. She reinforced herself by saying "yup" at the end of her suggestions. She also at one point suggested April do nothing but lay in bed for a month. "yup".

Asian parents like my mom and dad 'teach' their kids by telling them what to do and expecting their kids to just do it because mom and dad "said so". That's the expectation, and that's how they were raised. You will often find asian parents (especially immigrant generation) doing things this way and getting frustrated when their kids don't "listen".

They also expect the oldest sibling to "teach" the younger siblings in a similar way. I'm the oldest of 4, and I often get the, "Your sister isn't listening to what we tell her to do. You tell her to do it". Of course, this doesn't work cause I was raised in Canada so my replies generally are "I'm not the parent, you are".

So now that you know the background, you can kind of see where this is going. When I told my mom about our RPL the responses could be preceived as borderline insensitive. I didn't tell April most of them cause quite frankly, it would not have contributed to her healing in any way shape or form.

I tried to explain it to her from how I thought April felt - it feels like we lost our baby (and we did). Her response was basically telling me that I was foolish for thinking about it like that and I was wrong because at that early stage, you can't consider the fetus a baby yet. Technically in a clinical and emperical way she was right. However 'telling' someone how to deal with their emotions is like yelling at the rain. No one will listen to the yelling.

I also explained that it's much more emotionally traumatic for her because she has the physical symptoms and hormones which make her 100x more emotional.

My mom's response: "Tell her....." argh. Mom. I tuned her out.

That's the Asian immigrant parent way of helping their kids and their kid's problems. Telling them what to do. I love my mom and dad, but they are not who I turn to if I have any issues like this. Especially anything that brings up a lot of emotion for me. I can't blame them either, it's how they were raised and that's all they know. Many first generation immigrant parents are probably the same way too. You can't change them, so you deal with it the only way you can : by not including them in when you have certain problems.

So who did I (personally) turn to for all the losses we have if it isn't my wife? Good question. When I find out one of these days, i'll let you ladies and gents know.

Child Birth: All hail the supriority of women (Part 2)

More on the miracle (and horror) of childbirth...

The movies lied. Babies do not come out clean, labour is not 2-3 pushes, and all people involved do not spend the entire time smiling.

One of my best buddies told me to stay by the head. Do not look. It never looks the same again after you watch your child come out. April also told me to stand by her head. So I did as I was told... "yes dear" and stood by her head. I should note, I had gone down to the cafeteria at some point and got myself a cup of coffee. Hey, I was up as long as she was, I was tired too! Just not as tired as she was.

To go back to the indian nurse we had in the room, this was by far the best person at the hospital during the whole ordeal. She was a former mid-wife for 20+ years in India, so she knew exactly what she was supposed to do. Our east Indian nurse was amazing. I clearly didn't pay close enough attention during the pre-natal classse and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. The indian nurse had been a midwife in India for 20 years, so she was a pro and knew exactly how to massage April's back to help with the contractions.

Then she went on her 30 minute break and we end up with another nurse. The new nurse decided that April needed an IV because she wasn't getting enough fluid (fair enough). So she went to put the needle in her right arm ... and proceeded to put it right thru her vein. Stupid newb. So she does it again on the other arm and snaps the needle. Stupid nurse! I said 'How long have you been doing this for?' and she decided to try one more time. She gets the needle in and puts the tape on. She then goes to put the IV in and part of it pops out. April then starts shooting blood from her arm 6ft across the room while going thru a contraction. She's screaming and im trying to tell her not to look. It didn't work, she was freaking out. Stupid nurse.

After a time we got to the point where the pain was too much for April. She demanded an epideral. Unfortunately, she was transitioning (the "hole" stretches from 8cm to 10cm) and at that point it's too late for an epideral.

The weirdest moment was when she started pushing. I guess her water had not completely broken, so her first push there was *POP*. You know, the sound of an overfilled waterballoon popping sound. Unlike a water balloon where the water just kind of spreads everywhere, April shot water 20ft across the room. Phew. Good thing I had heeded her advice and *STAYED BY THE HEAD*.

Now the reason I mentioned coffee earlier was because at one point of me standing by her head, she screamed at me to stop breathing on her. Coffee breath made her angry. Incredible Hulk angry. It did however seem to get her to push harder though!

After much screaming, pain, pushing, screaming, did I mention screaming? Graham was born on July 31st, 2008. 6 lb 13oz, 22" long. He coughed, and opened his eyes on his own right away. They put a clamp on his cord and gave me scissors to cut it. I completely forgot that i'm supposed to wait until it stops pulsing so I ended up spraying my pants with blood. Great.

[edit]I should note my mother in law at this moment said, "it's a boy! I KNEW IT!!!!!!"

By the way, I've learned that child birth in movies is a load of crap. It's not 2-3 pushes and the baby comes out, and it's certainly not clean like they make it look like in the movies. It is yucky, messy, and takes FOREVER.

At this point, I was so proud. Not only because I was now a parent of a miracle child, but also because I didn't look. They moved him to the heat lamp where they did the vitamin K + the goo they put in his eyes. I went over there with him and held his hand for the first time.

It was the most amazing feeling ever. It's easily one of the most amazing moments in my life. Then I turned to smile at my wife.... just as they were removing the placenta.

I had looked. I almost puked. :(

Ladies, you are the superior sex after being involved with childbirth.

However, our miracle child was born:

Childbirth: All hail the superiority of women (Part 1)

I'll put this out there first for the ladies: You are the superior sex. Sorry guys, we don't have to grow a human and then endure pushing that human thru a 10cm hole for hours.

I'll try and keep this a bit shorter - I kind of feel like im a hypocrite for having a blog about pregnancy loss and then talking about child birth.

My wife's labour started on a Monday night. We went to the hospital only to be told to go home. To cut thru the tedious part - we made 4 other trips like this. The Foothills Hospital isn't exactly the nicest place to go when you're not actually dialated 4cm or your water broke. They just send you away to labour somewhere else. Actually, now that I think about it, our health system here in Alberta leaves a lot to be desired. They pump you thru there like it's drive-thru child delivery.


So we went for walks in our neighborhood to help speed up the labour, she drank this Lebanese chai tea that helped her labour move along, and no, we didn't 'do it' to help things go along faster. It's just weird and awkward. Put a basketball between you and your significant other, yeah, it's awkward !

Over 40 hours later, my wife goes into active labour. Go figure, when we had true-blue labour (2 days after she started labour) where you have to stay at the hospital, it was 1:30am. So not only were we both exhausted, we wouldn't be sleeping thru the night either. At the hospital, it was quite a different experience than I thought. I figured we'd be put into our own delivery room right away with a nurse. Nope. We were put into labour and delivery triage with a bunch of other women who were not quite ready for a delivery room, but too far along to be sent home. I had a few memorable incidents from the labour and delivery triage at the Foothills:


1) Someone backing into my truck at 2am (I could see it from the window in the room, but couldnt do anything about it)
2) Some girl in another bed was screaming "I can't take this, i've been in labour for 2 hrs". I thought April was going to tell her off cause April was over 40 hrs at that point
3) Getting into fights with the other husband/boyfriends there. First, it was over popsicles. April wanted one cause they stocked a public fridge with them. I picked thru and took all the non-deformed ones for April. Second, we hogged the only shower for about an hour. Someone was banging on the door, I said i'm here to look after my wife and not yours and promptly shut the door. I didn't hear a thing from him after that.

We were moved into our own room at 7AM. We were assigned this east indian nurse with a thick accent my mom in law couldnt understand. My first thought was, "oh great. I'll have to translate now". My second thought was "peanuts" [ see earlier blog post for this :) ]


The doctor who came in and checked up on us was interesting. Rainbow print bandana and pink crocs! There was an anesthesiologist who was offering drugs like it was going out of style; he gave her phentynol (spelling probably is wrong). Everytime she had a contraction he was like, "oh sounds like she needs more!". I eventually got sick of him and got rid of him by saing, "what are you paid per dosage or something?".


To go back to the doc, interesting thing... she was not supposed to be doing deliveries. We later fond that out. Needless to say, the doctor's name on our son's birth certificate is NOT the one who delivered him. Besides the fact she wasn't supposed to be delivering babies, she was a fantastic doctor/birth coach (sort of).

To be continued; including my wife telling me to 'STAND BY MY HEAD AND DONT LOOK'.

Where have I been for the last year?

I started writing this blog within days after losing our 8th (or 9th) pregnancy. I was writing it because quite frankly, it felt good to talk about it. Dare I say it was almost as good as a cold beer on a hot day.

So I imagine you're wondering what changed. Well as I was reading thru my blog one day it brought back some painful memories and I could not contain myself. I made a knee-jerk decision and went the route of sticking my head in the sand. For a while, pretending that everything was fine was working. Since this blog brought on those feelings, ignoring it seemed logical, Spock logical.

Unfortunately, I still had reality to contend with, and after a few more losses, I realized that once again I was being an idiot (idjit as my wife calls me sometimes) and needed to get back to reality. I *KNOW* I can't run away from it, yet I tried anyway.

So yes! I will be writing again very shortly. I've decided to change a few things - firstly I originally thought remaining nameless would protect me but I realize that's stupid. I am open about this around my friends and family.

So a little about me: my name is Minh Tran. If you're one of those Facebook creepers and if you can find me on Facebook please feel free to friend me (make sure you mention this blog or I won't add you). Warning though: Minh Tran is the Vietnamese equivalent to John Smith. My wife's name is April, and yes, my wife is white (I married the whitest white girl as her mom said once). I may include a few details about my life in future posts, but I think i'm a fairly boring person so I don't see the need to write a bio or anything (yet).

My next post will be about the most horrific (yet very awesome) thing i've ever witnessed in my life: the birth of my son. I sometimes refer to him as our miracle child because that's what it felt like to finally see him come into the world.

RPL - Pregnancy 5 (Continued again!)

Let me clarify first when this happened - we're talking about first half of 2008 right now. My cousin sent me a msg and said 'congrats on the pregnancy!!'. When I asked him what the hell he was talking about, he pointed me to my blog. :)

For a couple that does not suffer from RPL, there seemed to be a lot less pregnancy milestones. Milestones like the 18 week ultrasound to find out the sex, 37 week full term, due date, etc.

For my wife and I, every week was a milestone. Just 1 more week - every week. Some of the milestones I can remember:
- 7 week (as far as we had made it before)
- First ultrasound where we could see a heartbeat
- When we were transfered from the RFP to a OB/GYN
- When we actually heard the heartbeat
- When I was supposedly able to hear the heartbeat with a stethoscope (I failed horribly at this)
- 18 week ultrasound
- viability for premature babies at 50%, 60%, 70% etc.
- Full term
- Delivery date

At first I was reading "What to expect when you're expecting". Let me tell you... that was quite possibly one of the most depressing reads of my life. It seems every other page is about all the things that can go wrong and there was quite a bit of emphasis put on the doom and gloom. You're wife is expecting! congrats! by the way here's all the things that can go wrong - oh and here's more things that can go wrong!

After nearly replacing all my hope with fear, I stopped reading it. I switched to 2 other ones: "The mother of all pregnancy guides - Canadian Edition" and "Your pregnancy week by week". I can't recall which of the 2 books it came from, but they were both very informative, positive yet still addressed the concerns without making it sound like the human race was doomed from all the things that could go wrong. I do remember my favorite part of YPWBW was at the start of every week, they had a photo of what your baby was supposed to look like.

I never tried to read more than 1 week ahead - I didn't want to be let down incase something went wrong with our pregnancy again. Every week was something new for me, I was always (and still am) amazed about the 'miracle of life' and how much our baby changed week-to-week.

Husbands do get the sympathy pregnancy symptoms. I gained weight, quite a bit of it (relatively speaking anyway). You ladies want to know why men gain weight? It's because you order food and then you can't eat it because of the smell and we end up eating it for you!

I'm going to jump around a bit here to what's on my mind - prenatal class. We signed up for this class that ran weekly for 5-6 weeks. We live on the northern edge of Calgary so we actually went to the class in Airdrie (a small town, sort of like a suburb on the northern edge of Calgary). They showed us things like labour positions, the different stages of it, crying, how to put on diapers, how to give baths, what breastmilk tastes like, signs of PPD, what can we ask for in the hospital, how long after birth before you can have sex again etc. Yep, I really did say "what breastmilk tastes like". Though they didn't tell us that... in one class the instructor asked what we knew about it and I repeated what my father in law said, "tastes like canteloupe juice" (I did later confirm this "myth").

To be straight forward, the pregnancy book my wife got from the health region already had all the information in it. The class simply just repeats what's in the book. So why would you go? The social interaction with the other people in your class. For us, I believe only 1 of our friends had kids so it was hard to find anyone you could relate to.

The pregnancy was pretty much textbook (from a husband's perspective) up until the labour. Despite the pregnancy going so well, I could not help but remember the other 4 we had lost.

Sorry if this seems a bit disjointed I'm writing this on my lunch break. My lunch hour is up - so I will write more later.

RPL - Pregnancy 5 (Continued)

I apologize about how dry my post was this morning. I had done it when I woke up - no coffee or anything. I'm perfectly fine with out coffee, usually it's the people around me who suffer tho :)

.... to continue on (see - told you I'd write more today!):

We booked in for an emergency ultrasound. This one however was at the RFP - normally ultrasounds are handled over at EFW instead. The ultrasound was an internal ultrasound.

I was very apprehensive about this one - the heartbeat had given me so much hope. Normally with most ultrasounds, you get 1 tech. For an internal, there was a male doctor performing it. I can understand having a female nurse there - a guy using an internal ultrasound wand has just got to be watched... however there were a total of 3 people. 1 doctor, 2 nurses. The extra person in the room just made me apprehensive. Why where there extra people there if not incase something was wrong?

It's really hard not to think about the worst. You just can't help it. Quietly, I was praying that everything was going to be ok.

I'm not a very religious person - I was raised Buddhist but I had gone to a church too. Yes yes, I know, if you're Christian, you can't be anything else. I am who I am - I was raised with both faiths (granted I am not practicing either). Since the start of this pregnancy, I prayed before I went to bed for the health and safety of my wife and unborn baby - both as a christian and as a buddhist (with insense and all). Really, even if you don't believe, there are moments in everyone's life where a little faith, a little hope and asking for help from whatever is out there is all you got. It's all you have to comfort you.

The ultrasound was very quick. Doctors always say spotting is normal in the first trimester. However for us, it's never been normal. This time, the spotting was unexplained - however we still had a baby! For me this ultrasound ... was amazing. It was the first image of our baby that resembled a baby (I don't count a blinking dot a picture of a baby). It was an amazing picture! The definition was unbelievable - you could clearly see toes!

Not to quote a cliche, but it was "like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders". My heart had stopped racing, I took a deep breath and let out what was the most relieved sigh I had ever let out. Our baby was still with us. I can truly say this was one of those moments where I could have tears of joy - but I didn't. Gotta save that for an even happier occasion!

They printed the picture for us. To this day it sits in our home - front and centre on the bookcase. It sits in a frame with this writen under it: "Love at first sight".

This was the best and what I would say the only good experience I had at the RFP.

RPL - Pregnancy 5

It's been over a month since I continued on with our saga... my wife has harassed me to post something. Even going so far as to show the posts a mom on her wedding forum made asking me to not leave everyone hanging!!

I do owe an apology if I've left anyone hanging..

So my wife left a pregnancy test on the desk infront of me. It was positive. Again, with guarded hope... I quietly cheered. We marked the pregnancy test with the date and kept it. Every other day, she would do another pregnancy test and they were progressively getting darker! We marked these ones as well with dates and to this day still have them. Now that I think about it, it's kind of sick to keep around - these things got pee'd on.

Over the next few weeks, my wife would go and get Beta HCG tests and for once, things were looking good with a pregnancy! HCG levels were doubling as they should - my wife was still on the penis supositories. We had an ultrasound at 5 weeks, 6 days - believe me, I had to ask my wife this. I can barely remember birthdays...

The ultrasound was to look for a heartbeat. As a guy, I had no idea what to look for. The monitor looked like static. My wife said she immediately saw the hearbeat. I'll be honest, I had to wait for the ultrasound tech to point out the blinking dot to me. Apparently that is a heartbeat!!!

For us to have made it this far was incredible - up until now, we had never seen a heartbeat. Again, we kept it quiet and to ourselves for the most part. Only a few people knew - not my parents, not my in laws, siblings, etc. It's hard to be so excited and yet not talk about it. Everytime someone asked if we were pregnant, I would nearly explode from trying to keep the news to myself!

Then a telltale day... my wife started spotting at 9-10 weeks.

... to be continued later today. I have to go make breakfast and then pickup a backyard playground for a friend.