2010 in Review: The Year of the Baby

Leslie’s Patients for a Moment prompt for the last edition of the year is a good one: recap the year in posts, or pick a favorite post from the past year.

Indulge me while I do a little of both.

Clearly if you read this blog regularly you know 2010 was the year of the baby here on A Chronic Dose. After talking a lot about chronic illness, pregnancy, and parenting over the past few years, I kicked off 2010 all riled up about the insensitive attitudes and assumptions people have about adoption and parenting with chronic illness. Reading it over, I still get a little red in the face and animated, and hope to continue those kinds of conversations in the near future.

It was a long, stressful, and secretive winter and spring, but the post I am most proud of on this blog and probably more proud of than anything else I’ve written is when I finished the rest of the story of children and chronic illness in April, the backstory that I’d largely kept off the blog for much of our four-year journey towards being parents. I’ve never drafted and re-drafted a piece more, and even though it is a bit longer than normal I think everything is relevant. It represented everything that is part of a journey like this: hope, sadness, forgiveness, frustration, and most of all, thankfully, joy.

Wow, a lot has changed since I “came out” with that post, when I was 16 weeks pregnant and still holding my breath a little bit. When I talked about a high-risk pregnancy by trimester I had no idea I’d go on bed rest shortly after, that my loved one would suffer a catastrophic medical problem, that I’d be in and out of the hospital quite so many times, that I would go into pre-term labor and hold my breath yet again at 28, 32, and 34 weeks.

I’d rather skip ahead to my favorite post of the year, when I could type the words here at last and finally, we exhaled and focused instead on falling in love with our little girl.

Since then we’ve adjusted to being parents and juggling illness and work, and can’t wait to spend out first holiday season with our daughter.

So much has changed in twelve months. I am excited to leave at least some of the medical complexity and anxiety of 2010 behind us and focus on living our new life. 2010 gave us the most amazing, incredible experience so despite the ups and downs, that’s the note on which I am happy to end the year.