Memories (or lack thereof)

TW: Pregnancy Loss (some studies suggest trigger warnings aren’t helpful, but I personally find them helpful so I’ll be trying to remember to use them)

Next week I am starting EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). If you haven’t heard of it, EMDR is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress resulting from trauma. Some studies show that 84%-90% of single-trauma victims no longer have PTSD after only three 90-minute sessions. Those are pretty amazing numbers. And since I’ve already hit my out-of-pocket maximum on my insurance like 20 times over, I figured I’d try anything for free. In my mind, it’s a little like hypnosis and a bit too woowoo for me, but most articles say it’s very different than hypnosis and plus, the research shows it works.

But there’s a catch. EMDR depends on a patient’s memories. The way you reprocess is by evoking vivid visual images related to the memory, and then you think about your negative beliefs about yourself and the related body sensations and emotions, then start to reprogram those beliefs and sensations that are related to the memories. This obviously poses a problem if you have no memories.

In preparation for EMDR, I’ve been trying to remember everything that happened in the months leading up to my hospitalization and loss of our baby, but I have a lot of gaps. First of all, it’s hard for me to pinpoint anything happy. It’s as if my brain remembers how horrific the week in the hospital was, and it has deleted and reconfigured any happy emotions I had at all the entire pregnancy. I’ve been meaningfully trying to remember being happy and excited, but now it’s all tinged with fear and extreme depths of depression.

When we told my parents about the baby, we had created a whole fake story so that we could get their reaction on video. It’s really hard to watch that video now. My mom cried. There were so many happy tears. But I watched that video trying to remember how happy I was and now as I watch, it feels fake. Was I really that happy? It seems like I’m watching someone else have those emotions. On a deep level, did that girl know what would happen? They say hindsight is 20/20, well now it feels like hindsight is just SAD.

Since I haven’t actually started EMDR, I am not sure if we will focus on the whole pregnancy, or only on the hospitalization and loss trauma. But if we focus on the hospitalization, I’m in even worse trouble because I have even fewer memories.

A couple of weeks after I came home from the hospital, I started writing a never-to-be-published blog about my experience and I realized I couldn’t remember a lot. I went through all of my hospital records trying to remember. I had 118 unopened test results in the app. I had pages and pages of doctor notes. From the moment that my OB told me to come into the hospital, my fight-or-flight reaction was triggered. I won’t get into all of the science, but basically when there is trauma, your memories can be affected. Add that to the fact that I was on a magnesium infusion for a week, which causes confusion, and also add the fact that I wasn’t allowed to eat food, and I have major memory gaps. Not to mention the later epidurals and the Ativan. Between the psychological issues and medical interventions, my brain feels like Swiss cheese.

Last week, Chris and I were trying to go through the timeline of what happened at the hospital. There were certain things that I thought happened on Wednesday but he said they happened on Friday. Some of the conversations that happened throughout the first night when we had a revolving door of neonatologists, maternal fetal medicine specialists, residents, doctors, nurses, etc., I don’t remember at all. Even in that moment, I recognized that my memory wasn’t great and I had my sister taking notes on her phone to report to Chris, who was on a last-minute flight back to NYC.

Two weeks ago, I started going through my text messages and phone logs to try and reconstruct what happened. Most of the calls made from my phone in the hospital were made by my sister. I was in no shape to make phone calls, I was mostly sobbing the entire time out of fear and sadness and confusion. My sister called some coworkers to let them know I would be missing meetings and that I wouldn’t be at the strategic planning meeting the next week in Texas. She called Chris and my mom many times, but those calls were mostly made from her own phone.

Then in my call log I saw one call from my best friend that came in at 7:18 pm on my first full day at the hospital. I hadn’t slept the night before because doctors and specialists were in and out of the room every 5 minutes, so I was awake approximately 36 hours by that point. According to my call log, that call lasted 17 minutes and 59 seconds. I have 0 memory of it. None. Not a single memory. I don’t remember it happening. When I saw it, I didn’t even believe it. Even though it was in black and white right there in my palm, I still thought maybe it didn’t happen. I took a screen shot of my call log and I texted my friend. I said, “Can I ask you a really weird question – did I talk to you when I was in the hospital? I’m trying to like put my memories back together and I saw this in my call log and I have literally 0 recollection of this.” She wrote back immediately, “Yes we did talk!”

17 minutes and 59 seconds gone. And the worst part is that I saw that date and I realized it was the last full day that my daughter was alive. And I don’t remember it. Not only are the memories of my pregnancy now completely overshadowed and tinged with sadness, but my final few hours pregnant with our first child are missing from my brain. I’ve been working on giving myself more grace, but it feels unforgivable that I just don’t remember those last few days. What kind of mom forgets the last few hours of their kid’s life? These are thoughts for my therapist. I realize this isn’t necessarily my fault, and that a body’s trauma response is not rational. I realize that this wasn’t a choice. And if I’m completely and totally honest with myself, I’m not even sure I want to remember those days. They were terrible. Every single minute of those days was horrific and if I forgot 17 minutes and 59 seconds of one of them, that could be viewed as a blessing. Some days it seems that way, and some days it feels like a curse, adding insult to injury.

We have so few things to remember our girl by, and the fact that I don’t even have reliable memories feels extra cruel.

p.s. I originally thought I’d talk about physical mementos in this post, but that’s for another blog, if I get to it. I am also trying to give myself grace on these posts. I’m figuring out what I want to share, and what I want to keep for ourselves. There are so few things. And while I think our daughter deserves her own space in the world, I also selfishly want to keep her for ourselves. There isn’t much to go around.

p.p.s. Some of these blog posts won’t have tie-in-a-bow endings. My story isn’t tied in a bow. Not only is it ongoing, but it’s messy. If it feels like a post ends abruptly, it’s probably because I left my computer to crawl into a ball on the couch and cry. This is just real life now.