The Joanna pattern

My mother and the ladies at her work used to have a large knitting circle.  They ran out of babies to knit for locally (my children are very well stocked in knitted items) and my mother got everyone to start knitting for the Wellington NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) and Wellington Hospital Trust.  The pattern and drive to help the hospital came from loss: the hospital is where Joanna was born and died and the work gave Mum a practical way to 'give back' to the hospital.

One thing she did was create the pattern below.  It makes a small blanket: about the size of bassinette or to cover an infant in a baby car seat.  You can easily make two or four and join together if you would like a large blanket.  I still use the single blanket on my daughter's bed.  It goes across the top of her other blankets - more for decoration than anything else.  It is the absolute perfect size for a prem/ sick baby.  If you want a cot blanket or pram blanket then I suggest making it wider or knitting two and joining them together in panels.

The Joanna pattern

Cast on 80 stitches in double knit.

Knit four rows
K5P2(K8P2 x7) P2K5
K7(P8K2 x7) K7
Repeat the above two rows five times.  Then start over from the beginning.

Make it as long as you want it!

Anniversaries

There are two grief days that I set aside each year for formal grieving.  These are the day that Joanna died, and the day that she was due. 

This year has been the first official date to pass without tears, and without the horrible nervous butterflies in my stomach.  It was actually a really nice family day, with little time to dwell.  I'm glad that the day was nice, and I guess that I realised that a time would come when the grief would not be as acute.  Like most things to do with grief I wasn't quite expecting that it would be now.  That being said, it was Joanna's due date.  Her birth/death date is much more complex:  high emotion, terrible illness and the isolation of the experience.  I was alone.

Last Friday I had to return to the location of Joanna's birth/death: the Emergency Department.  I was too distracted on this trip by my very sore daughter to dwell on the location.  I was very annoyed with the triage process - it took an hour just to get triaged in some new 'efficient' process.  It may be more efficient, but I suspect that the triage nurse just has a higher workload than before - she was run off her feet.  I was really annoyed with the delay for triage and sent a rude text about it to my husband as part of my updates.  It wasn't until I saw the triage nurse's name while we were waiting for the X-Ray that I realised it was the same nurse that had looked after me that horrid evening Joanna was born.

I'd sent a card at the time, but resolved to thank her in person if I saw her during our stay.  She popped by and I went to thank her.  She remembered the night, and the room that I was in straight away - and the tears started - for both of us.  Grief can feel like a solitary experience sometimes, it hadn't explicitly occurred to me how much impact that night could have had on the staff who cared for us.  I had exceptional care that night, particularly after the hemorrhage when I was very ill and a number of doctors and nurses appeared instantly and almost with being requested to assist with the birth and getting a lot of fluid/ gel into me.  I remember being really sad when my ED nurse handed me over - but then welcomed as I was transferred to the ward on the service I worked in daily.  I had the best of nursing care - both the caring aspect, as well as the technical.

Of course, when you have sick children you don't have a lot of time for grieving over your lost ones: I wiped away the tears and turned back to my daughter.  Although in a fair bit of pain she could see that I was upset.  I explained that the nurse took care of me one time when I was really sick, and remembering that sickness made me sad.  My daughter gave me one of her bravery stickers she had received from her X-Ray.  She is awesome.  And just like that, another unexpected grieving moment passed.  Always just sitting under the surface, quick to rise.  But this time the knowledge that Joanna's very short life had a great impact on those providing us with care has provided a kind of comfort. So few people know of Joanna, or her few moments of life.  Knowing her birth left an impact feels like her wee footprint on Earth is a little bigger.

Grief and grieving.

Since the majority of people who read this blog are friends you will know that in 2009 I was pregnant, sick, got some kind of bug and horribly and suddenly miscarried our daughter Joanna in ED.  The reason is unknown, even the obstetrican was surprised. My daughter was alive, swimming around and my cervix was tightly closed ten minutes before I miscarried.  The randomness and unfairness of it all is still breathtaking.  It remains the worst experience of my life, and I'm sure in many ways defines the person I am now, although I cannot point to a specific example.  Over the next year it took a lot of effort to get my notes, Joanna's postmortem report, deal with two more 'chemical' miscarriages, commence blood tests and appointments for recurrent miscarriage clinic and then end up pregnant the month we were not trying.  That baby is currently asleep upstairs.

The grief was phenomonal.  It is hard to explain how all encompassing it was.  I look back at my writing at that time and I am very lost and very, very angry.  I found it so much easier to explain how I felt in writing than out loud.  I spent a lot of time in an online forum for mums who had experienced pregnancy loss.  I imagine that all kinds of grief have their own special nature, and I think there is a certain kind of guilt that comes with pregnancy loss.  After all, you spend most of pregnancy doing everything you can to protect the baby from harm, and then something goes wrong and your body doesn't do its job anymore.  In my case, I lost a lot of blood, ended up with retained products and so also required antibiotics and an operation to resolve the physical effects of the miscarriage.  So at a time when I was overcome with grief, I was also very physically unwell.

It took a long time to accomodate the grief within me.  It didn't wear off, and I didn't 'get over it.'  Basically, I accomodated the grief in my life, and it no longer felt as acute.  A day or two could go by when I wouldn't think of Joanna.  The grief would just tick along with me, with days like her due date or birth/death date allowing that grief to dominate my thoughts.  This year I found the birth/death date surprisingly difficult to deal with.  I was not looking forward to the day, and it was a day that just had to be endured.  There were a few tears and a bit of anger, and then some of the tension dissipated.  I felt fragile and shaky, but once the day passed I felt better.  The grief retreated back to being a part of me, rather than all of me.

Last week that grief was unleashed, in its full, horrid acuity.  A google search of my name led to Joanna's cremation record posted on an online tribute site that I had not set up.  Enquires to the crematorium determined that this site 'Heaven address' had used a spider bot (computer programme) to take cremation details from the searchable cremation database and create automatic profiles on their website.  During the same conversation I learnt that the hospital had informed the crematorium that we didn't want Joanna's ashes, so they had scattered them somewhere at the cemetary.  This was incorrect, we had desperatly wanted Joanna's ashes, but were informed that due to her gestational age it was unlikely that there would be ashes.

I dealt with the online 'tribute site' - they wont be doing that again.  Dealing with the hospital is a little trickier, but I'll get round to it. But what was just really hard to deal with was the wall of grief that slammed into me.  I stopped.  I couldn't do anything.  I had to withdraw from a course that I'd really been looking forward to:  I just couldn't do the pre-course work.  To have to relive all that grief seemed really unfair. One person told me 'that it has been two years, it is time to move on.'  Well, that is the problem with grief, or maybe miscarriage.  There is always one person missing from our family, no matter how many more children we have.  Would I be told to move on if it had been an adult who had died? Grief isn't finite, I don't think it has an endpoint.  It just hums along in the background, unleashing itself periodically.