I love to rank things. Movies, baseball players, grandma style pizza slices. Blame it on Nick Hornby or Bill Simmons or some other middle-aged white guy, idk. Anyway, we mostly do it for fun stuff. Time to do it for very bad stuff too!
The Top 7 Worst Days of the Worst Week of My Life:
7. Saturday, March 14th: Honestly, not that bad of a day!
6. Sunday, March 15th: This one ends okay, but otherwise, it’s where I finally came to terms with the fact that I won’t be seeing any of my friends for weeks.
5. Friday, March 13th: I pride myself, for better or worse, on being a pretty evenly keeled person. But on this night, I start to spiral. “Hey, this coronavirus thing, it’s bad!” I start thinking to myself. I smoke weed, and believe it or not, it doesn’t help! I doesn’t feel good, not a good night.
4. Monday, March 16th: I find out I didn’t get into grad school. Honestly, all things considered, not the biggest deal! Would I have even gone, had I gotten in? Will grad school even exist in September? Also, work is bad!
3. Thursday, March 12th: My mom’s 70th birthday. Coronavirus suspends everything. The trip my wife and I have the next day: canceled. Work: suspended indefinitely. I’m asked to continue working, even though the future is unknown, to help set-up classes online (I work for a comedy school and theatre in New York; yes it’s the one you’re thinking of). A coworker behaves inappropriately all day. Not a good day!
2. Tuesday, March 17th: After a long 4 days of not knowing the status of anything, I’m laid off from my job. I’m given no severance, save forty hours of unused PTO. Our health insurance was through my job, so we lose that too. I cry, hard, for the first time in years.
1. Wednesday, March 11th: The day. The day you have been waiting to read about. “I love to read about other people’s miseries,” you say to yourself, a miserable person in your own right. My wife has a miscarriage.
It’s hard, as a man, to write about this. Okay, yes, that’s stupid, it’s probably harder as a woman. But I guess, at least, if you’re a woman, and you have a miscarriage, and you want to write about it, you can! It’s your body! With me, it’s like, I dunno, does anyone really care what I have to say about a miscarriage? Do I even have anything to say about it? It was terrible to receive the news that it would happen, and then even worse when it happened. It was sad.
This was our second miscarriage (yes, suddenly and without warning, you’re now reading something that will be exclusively about this, sorry?). The first one was a blighted ovum, which I think is what happens when a sac forms in the uterus, and while the woman is technically pregnant, no embryo forms inside the sac. This first time, we weren’t even trying to get pregnant, counted ourselves lucky that it happened so easily, and then used “well, we weren’t trying” as a way to mask our INCREDIBLE SADNESS when we found out the pregnancy wasn’t viable.
With this, the second pregnancy, we were trying a little more consciously. But wow, my wife got pregnant quickly again! Wow, I’m a real man! And hey, there’s an embryo in that sac, and hey, that embryo has a heartbeat. But wait, the embryo is a little smaller than we’d expect at this stage. But also, that’s okay, we adjust the conception date all the time. And two weeks later, no, the embryo is still the same size, and no, there isn’t a heartbeat anymore, and yes, The Sad Thing has happened.
The thing about a couple trying to have a baby is that it’s weird. There is truly so much stuff I just did not know. For instance, we knew for weeks that my wife was pregnant, but it was too early to have any sort of appointment, so we just sat on that info. And, especially if you’ve previously had a non-viable pregnancy, that is stressful! You don’t know if everything is good, or bad, or unknown.
Also, wow, there are a lot of different kinds of miscarriages. Who knew? Probably a lot of people, but not me. I just kind of assumed that you were pregnant, and then sometimes you were no longer pregnant. Turns out, it’s much more complicated than that.
Most of my friends who have kids had a miscarriage. Doctors tell you it’s very common, happens to about 20% of pregnancies, maybe more since it can often happen before there’s even an appointment to confirm the pregnancy. Could be 30%, 40%. Up to 100%. It’s certainly between 0%-100%. Has to be.
A second miscarriage though? I don’t know. Could truly mean nothing. But we don’t talk about this, like, at all. It’s an incredibly common thing that happens all the time and we just don’t talk about it. In fact, they tell you NOT to tell people you’re pregnant, so that if The Sad Thing happens, you don’t have to tell them that. I would like it to be okay to tell people whom I love that it happened. So I did. If you go through this, and you want to talk to friends but you’re worried about how they’ll react, please try to put that aside and tell them. This has been the worst week, but the support I’ve received from friends has been invaluable.
And now, with all the other shit that’s happened, as weird as it is to say this, maybe it’s okay that it went this way. I’d rather my wife be pregnant. I’d also rather I had a job, and health insurance, and friends over, and not this overwhelming sense of “everything is not the same.” But in a vacuum, if you were to tell me, “you’re going to lose your job, and insurance, and we’ll be on the edge of a global depression. Would you like your wife to be pregnant or not pregnant?” man, I dunno.
And that’s maybe why I shouldn’t be writing about it.
beardzoid 