This post is going to be a departure from the “normal” content (what’s normal anyway?) we have posted, but I wanted to do something a little different. Bear with me – I don’t have a story where I was dangling from a cliff and a robot came to my rescue, or some medical robot saved me in surgery (well maybe the second one happened, I’m actually not sure), but I promise this post is about robots, sort of.
trigger warning: this post will discuss pregnancy and infant loss, and a touch of medical trauma.
In June 2024 I went into the hospital to deliver my second child after a relatively normal pregnancy. During active labor, my uterus ruptured. There were no signs this had happened until it was too late. We lost our son, and I nearly died on an operating table. Thankfully, after 5 hours in the OR, something like 5 blood transfusions, and 7 days in the ICU later, I was discharged to resume life again, down an ovary and a with a clear directive not to get pregnant again.
For those of you reading this with children of your own, you know this is unimaginable and “resuming life” wasn’t going to be easy. I was fortunate to live in a state with paid family medical leave, and to be working for a startup at the time with incredibly understanding leadership, so I had some time to process and recover at home before I returned to work, and to a “normal” routine. When it was time to go back to work, I needed to find a new job (as startups do, mine was acquired, but I didn’t make enough to get to retire). The relationships I had built with my roboticist peers over the years proved crucial here. I was floored by how fast the community rallied around me when I put feelers out about looking for a role, and even more floored by the response when I started talking about what I went through. The robotics community felt like a soft place to land after going through something unimaginable – a tight knit community of tech nerds who showed up with a compassion I didn’t expect. I cried at work a lot in the first few months back, and I always had the space to do that without feeling judged, less than, or like people would think I wasn’t just as capable as I was before. I’m arguably more capable, but that’s different post. I’m not saying I would have died without the support from my work community, but it was appreciated, and went a long way to help me feel like a normal human again.
I’m writing this post now, on this first Monday in October, because October is Pregnancy and Infant loss awareness month. Not everyone is as vocal about their struggles to create a family, but struggling is so, so common. 1 in 4 pregnancies end in loss, and that doesn’t factor in people who struggle to even conceive. IVF is a brutal process (trust me, after 5 failed egg retrieval rounds, I now know this well). Even an early miscarriage comes with postpartum hormones, which is like kicking you when you’re down after losing a baby. The loss impacts partners as well as birthing parents, too. They can feel helpless, on top of the loss of a desperately wanted child. Having a support community around you is crucial, and when that community extends into work, the outcomes are so much more positive.
This month is going to be hard on some people, whether they’ve shared their stories or not. Check on your teammates. Show compassion (you should do this always, not just this month, please). Know what services your company offers for support. And if you don’t work in robotics already, consider it, the people here won’t let you down!
