Flashes of our vacation

It's been a roller-coaster. Everyone reading this has already read the Girl's blog so they know what happened to her pregnancy. The last two days have had lows and, surprisingly, some good highs. One develops a morbid sense of humor on a day like yesterday and we both laughed when the Girl pointed out the fact that the remains of our would-be baby ended up in a trashcan outside Duluth Running Company.

I'm far from an obstetrician and the times I have dealt with pregnant ladies in the ER, I try to get them out to a "higher level of care" as soon as I can, ie. as far away from me as possible. My skills go as far as to do an exam to see if the cervix is open and the lab can check to see if there is amniotic fluid in the discharge, meaning that the water has broken. So I have never, not even as a student, seen a spontaneous abortion in progress. The Girl, as it turned out, had been carrying a non-vital embryo for weeks, although the pregnancy hormones were still quite elevated and she certainly had a lot of symptoms of pregnancy. I can't claim to understand this, actually, but that's the working diagnosis.

So she actually had to deliver this little 4mm sac, in a way. With back cramps and everything, she passed several clots over the day, each of which was inspected by us both. Sometimes knowing a little is worse than knowing nothing, as when we looked at a hard little seed, that had the shape and feeling of a scaled-down grain of rice. Could this be it? If so, it blew off the Girl's finger and now rests near Big Manitou Falls south of Superior, WI. But her cramps continued, and as I was looking at my fat, hairy legs in a pair of Sugoi running shorts in Duluth Running Co, the Girl passed the above-mentioned clot. In Danish, she briefly let me know what was going on and we went outside to play embryo pathologists. The ultrasonographer had told us that the actual remnants of the embryo, and who knows if there was ever a viable embryo per se, would be 1mm in size. We found nothing and dumped the clot in a trashcan. Miraculously, and this is the part of the story I have working up to, the Girl felt completely normal. No backpain, no cramping. Within the hour, her little potbelly disappeared and we even think her face changed a little from some swelling disappearing.

Okay, so we dealt with it through a very mechanistic lens. We already have the Lorax so we know we can make normal babies. This one just wasn't going to happen.

But out vacation has been other things than losing babies.

I taught my son, Andreas, how to ride a bike. After two frustrating hours of me trying every trick I could think of, he suddenly got it. Now, we have cruised around Riverside Park in La Crosse so many times that he knows every landmark there and comments on them. I run behind him with a broomstick stuck attached behind his seat. I save his life every quarter mile or so, but the saves are becoming less frequent and less impressive. It's our thing now; he even talks to me on the phone up here in Duluth, which he never did before. I can't wait to take him out again on friday, when we get back to La Crosse.

I ran a 5K race in 16:32 on a super hot night. The winner, Sammy Korir, ran more than two minutes faster... Still, I was happy with my time. A group of fast people showed up and I was actually in 6th place for most of the race. Did get into fourth with a half mile to go and was closing in on the Duluth Running Co guy in third. Didn't quite get up to him but the dead embryo in his trashcan should teach him a lesson.