*Side note pertaining to previous post

I've had a lot of people on and off of the comments (as in via Facebook message or email when not in the comments) inquire about the legal side of my miscarriage and whether or not my parents were notified. The answer is not simple, but here it is:

The legal age of consent in Colorado is seventeen. Weird, I know. Anyway, to answer the questions about whether my parents were informed about the situation when I went into the ER, they were not.  Seeing as I wasn't victimized by rape or incest in order to become pregnant in the first place, the ER staff was not legally bound to tell my parents that I had miscarried, so they didn't.

My mother and sister weren't even there, it was just my dad sitting in the waiting room, and he was told nothing by the ER staff all night, leaving the amount of information that I could share with him about my ordeal completely up to my discretion.

I told him the half-truth, essentially trimming the information down to the barest, most technical explanation that I could. I said that my uterus had been spasming and convulsing, trying to flush out its inner lining, and had ended up over-compensating, resulting in a lot of blood loss. I left out the fact that a fetus had been flushed out in this process, but I feel that my explanation not only satisfied his worried parental curiosity, but sufficiently justified my going into the emergency room as opposed to simply waiting to go into urgent care the next morning.

I lucked out in every way possible on this one. Not only has my pregnancy been eliminated without my having to spend $400 to have a doctor carve the fetus out of my body or deal with the emotional baggage of having killed a little being that could have developed a soul and a life one day, but, due to Colorado's pedo-friendly age of consent laws, my parents have remained absolutely unaware of the entire shebang and will now never have to trouble themselves with the knowledge that I became pregnant at seventeen.

I am honestly a little flabbergasted that everything worked out so well, I mean, despite the whole painful/bloody fetal self-destructo bit. I had already scraped together about $300 towards getting the abortion, and had begun preparing the "Hey, so I'm kind of pregnant, please sign this form so that I can not be pregnant anymore" speech for my parents. Announcing my pregnancy on this blog was kind of the last step in my accepting the situation.

The fact that I miscarried only days after announcing and discussing it on here strikes me as God's way of saying that he reads my blog. I hate to sound cheesy and overzealous, but I honestly don't know who else to thank for my miscarriage. God, you really did me a solid on this one, and I definitely owe you.

I'm going to take the next few weeks to rebuild my karma levels, because I feel as though I cashed in on a few favors with the universe.

On that note, I would like to apologize for talking of nothing but my pregnancy for the past few posts. I had known since about week three, and it was eating me up on the inside not to be able to talk about it, so this blog was basically my only coping mechanism. Anyway, now that it's all done and over with, I'm probably not going to mention it again at all, ever. At least, mentions will now be sparing, seeing as I'd just like to forget about the last seven weeks of my life.

Normal blogging will resume with my next post, I promise! Thank you for reading, supporting, and tolerating me during this whole thing.


Julia