The Low Point

"It may be when we no longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey."

--Wendell Berry

October 31, 2009. My lowest point thus far. When I saw pictures of me tagged on Facebook from that night, I actually thought to myself, "Something HAS to change." I haven't untagged those pictures. I let them sit right there. It's not that I was doing anything embarrassing; it's how I look. Look at me. Drunk, disheveled, blotchy, puffy, downright unhealthy. I don't remember getting into this car. I barely remember these pictures being taken, just sort of a tickle of a memory. I said and did things that were potentially damaging to friendships. Luckily for me, I have amazing, understanding friends that forgive me my transgressions.

In my defense (and this doesn't make my actions right, just a little more understandable), I found my first and favorite cat, Tessa, dead on the side of the road that morning. A complete shock. I'd left to go out of town for the night and a friend accidently let her out when he came to collect something from my house. He didn't even know. She had a tendency to wait by the road for me to come home. I kept her in the house when I was away for this reason. I'm sure that she was waiting for me to come home that night when someone driving too fast or drunk hit her. It was devastating to me. It'd been a rough day, understandably I'd look a little rough.

But, I looked too rough, and it wasn't long after this picture that I found myself one morning, on my floor, crying and crying and crying, for no particular reason. I woke up with this horrible sense of dread; I hated myself; I hated my life; I was lost, so I cried. I finally acknowledged that I was depressed, and on advice from a friend, I called the Mental Health Center here at UF and made an appointment with a therapist. Now, I have to back up and tell you the real story behind my depression. I loved my cat and losing her was hardcore painful, but that's not what sent me into a downward spiral.

In March of 2009, I got pregnant. Not necessarily on purpose, but not completely by accident either. On my 30th birthday, I went off birth control. I wanted to know my cycle without the pill. I'd been on it for 14 years, and if I got pregnant, so be it. 6 months later, bam! Pregnant. Also, not long after I found out I was pregnant, I received another rejection letter from a granting agency. The reviews indicated that my proposal was good, but not good enough. I could make changes and resubmit, but turn around time was 2 weeks, tops. It's weird, though, being pregnant gave me a new focus, a purpose. I was happy, excited, ready to turn that proposal around and make it fundable. The father and his family were also super stoked about the pregnancy. Things were really looking good.

Then, I started to spot, which isn't all that worrying. Many women spot during pregnancy. I was told to take it easy and monitor the situation. The night I started spotting, I had this dream. My paternal grandmother, who'd died a couple years prior, came to me. She was like a second mother to me. A couple weeks before this dream, my actual mother had told me that my grandma said I would never have children. I think she meant that I had other priorities in my life besides children, but that has stuck with me ever since. Anyway, to continue, I told my grandmother, "See, I WILL have children." She just sort of looked at me hollow-eyed and didn't say anything. She doesn't usually talk in the dreams I have about her. The dream ended with me on some random toilet miscarrying the baby. It was horrific. A horrible nightmare. I emailed a friend the next day freaking out. He calmed me as best he could.

Not long after the spotting, I started to have pain on my right side. An uncomfortable gassy feeling that turned into a more acute pain that would come and go and I started to bleed red blood. At this point, I flipped the fuck out. My midwives set up an appointment with their back-up doctor to get an ultrasound. In the meantime, I searched the web for information on bleeding during pregnancy and miscarriages and whatnot. I became convinced that I had a tubal pregnancy. This is really super rare, but based on my pain and what was happening with my body, I went ahead and self-diagnosed. I spent the next couple weeks praying that I was wrong.

The next three weeks were probably the worst three weeks of my life. I sat on my toilet at work watching gobs of blood exit my body. I sat on my toilet at home and watched tissue from my womb drop into the water. I was convinced that I was flushing my baby down the toilet. It's silly cause even if I was was, at this point, it was maybe the size of a bean. I went to the doctor, he told me there wasn't much left in my uterus, he didn't see a fetus and wanted me to get a DNC. We scheduled an emergency room DNC. I was put into a twilight sleep, and when I woke up, the first thing I said to the doctor was, "I think it's a tubal pregnancy." And, he said, "So do I."

Of course, I think y'all figured out that from here the torture didn't stop. You know, it's funny, up until the point I had the DNC, I kept hoping that the doctor would see something in my uterus, like he'd tell me there it is, it's your baby. After the DNC, I knew that was it. No baby, but the baby hormones didn't decrease, they increased. The doc finally identified a developing mass in my right fallopian tube. I was admitted into the hospital and administered a drug to abort the pregnancy. It kills the developmental tissue, an extremely painful process. You can feel the tissue dying in your body. The pain was so bad one day at work that I just closed the door to my office and lay on the floor for a half hour until it subsided. Ibuprofen didn't work, and besides, I wanted to be a part of this pain. I wanted to feel this death.

In the meantime, the father had dropped off the face of the earth. No explanation. He just stopped taking my phone calls. I was later to find out that he was so devastated at the loss of the pregnancy that he couldn't talk to me. He didn't know what to say or how to handle his emotions. He was nasty to his family and spent most of his time hiding in the bush. He handled the situation badly. He left me alone to deal with it. Thank God for my family and friends! They were there for me every step of the way.

After I received the shot, I went in to have blood drawn every few days until my pregnancy hormone levels dropped below a certain point. It took a few weeks, but finally, by July, the nightmare was over. Of course, by this time, I'd missed the deadline to resubmit my proposal. I'd, also, been forced to give up an exploratory research trip to Costa Rica. I'd stopped caring about my degree anyway. I'd had a purpose in life, even if briefly, and it'd been yanked out from under me. Getting my PhD no longer seemed all that important to me, and without direction or purpose, I started spiraling into my depression. Oddly, I never talked with my therapist about the pregnancy. I guess I just wasn't ready. I only saw him a few times, but it was enough. I just needed to admit to myself that I was depressed and start taking steps, even small ones, to remedy the situation.

It's only been in the last few weeks that these issues have started to resurface. At some random moment, when I'm in a great mood, the memory will come back to me and bring tears to my eyes. I don't dwell on it. I just acknowledge that it's painful and that I'm still grieving the loss. I'm not sure when I'll be completely over it. Maybe not till I actually have a healthy pregnancy. Not only was it difficult to let go of that purpose that had so magically entered my life, but I now didn't trust my own body. I'd never even considered that I wouldn't have a healthy pregnancy, and for the first experience to be so traumatizing, well, pregnancy is a scary thing for me now. It still holds a kind of wonderment and beauty, but it's been forever tainted. If I ever do get pregnant again, I will be haunted by the fear that my body could abort the pregnancy at anytime or that it could be another tubal pregnancy.

Ok, now, I'll tie this back to PCP and my reasons for taking on this challenge. This project marks an important transition period where I let go of that old self and grow into a new, more empowered and focused self. I'm still the same Jenny, but it's time for me to grow up, to start taking responsibility for my life and my actions, to make a contribution to this world. Part of that growing up is learning how to treat my body with love, kindness and respect. A healthy body produces a healthy mind which in turn can deal with life challenges in a healthy way. I was dealing with my grief and sadness by latching on to people, looking to them to validate me, drinking too much, smoking too much and basically numbing myself from the emotional pain. I was looking for something outside to make it better, when really I only needed to work on the inside. That's why PCP is much more than a physical project for me; it's allowed me to really take time and focus intensely on myself and what I want my for my life.

And, with those reflections, I leave you with something uplifting. This is especially dedicated to TEAM SEXAAAY as we enter our last week of workouts on PCP. Don't puss out now! Let's make it happen!