The Human Experience
The Human Experience artwork that expresses a human experience that I have encounter in my life is birth and death. The reason why I chose two experiences is because I had a miscarriage and I had to go through natural childbirth and in the end, I ended up losing my baby. A friend of mine just found out that the baby she had known about for all of a week or so is not viable. Basically, that means there is no heartbeat, no baby. She should be six weeks pregnant, and the embryo measured at five weeks. That means it stopped growing a week ago.
That brought back memories. My first pregnancy ended almost exactly like my friend's. I began light spotting nine days after I found out I was pregnant, about at the six week mark. An ultrasound revealed an embryo marked at around five weeks with no detectable heartbeat. A follow up ultrasound a week later revealed, basically, nothing. No sac, no detectable embryonic mass, nothing. It was over. Truthfully, it never was. What was even more heartbreaking, for both me and my friend, is that your body still feels pregnant. Breasts are swollen and tender; waistband still tight; still nauseous and retching at smells; still fatigued, tired, and weepy. It seems a cruel trick of nature. It is important to understand that, to you and your partner, you have lost a baby, and it is important to grieve as you would any other loss. Most other early miscarriages are the result of a fetus that is unhealthy and probably will not survive until the end of pregnancy. The age of the mother plays a factor. About half of all pregnancies in women over 40 year’s old end are in miscarriage. Sometimes, you will never know what caused a miscarriage. It's hard for a prospective mother to realize that sometimes things just happen. It is easy to blame yourself, and to feel that you failed in the most important job of all-to protect your child. But the truth is, the fetus would not have survived the pregnancy anyway. And one...