UPDATED! With PHOTOS! After Jane's Quick Intro Last Week, You Asked For More Details About The Xanax And The Miscarriages. So Here Is A Bonus Version Of That Story.

Here’s an expanded version of Friday’s post, after much cajoling from Corynne, who also shares some xoJane memories.

Happy Monday, Jane Pratt lovers

I don’t write these introductory notes often (this is my first and possibly last intro, we’ll see!) but I wanted to let you all know why we’re sending this piece out. Again.

When I met Jane in person for the first time, it was when I interviewed to be her Managing Editor at xoJane in 2012. I was a huge Jane the person / Jane the magazine fan (still am, obvs!), and one of the things that excited me most about working with her was getting to know her personally. And I felt like our little group there (Emily, Cat, Madeline, Olivia, Julie, Eric) were all close and got to know each other so well. (Our editorial meetings were basically group therapy.)

As her ME, I was more responsible for the organization and monetization aspects of xoJane, as well as some less-than-fun HR-related duties. But now, for the first time, I’m working with Jane in a capacity where she edits my writing and helps guide the narrative (the hands-on, old-school magazine writing mentors I never had, being a tabloid girl,) and I love it. [And you’re EXCELLENT at it! -Jane]

Still, I feel like it's something so special when I get to read her writing.

So when she wrote this short —but very personal— introduction to Aubree’s post (check that out here if you didn’t read it Friday), I was moved. (Literally to tears.) There are details and stories I have never heard, and as a fan first, I wanted this to be its own stand-alone story. (Guys, there’s a Tavi apology in here, that I really don’t think enough of you actually saw.)

Then some of you wrote in with questions wanting to talk more about certain aspects of her [hastily written, sorry! -Jane] intro, like her history with miscarriages. So, she agreed to re-run it (the beauty of the internet!) and even allowed me to edit out a couple of words so it could stand on its own.

Jane, being Jane, wants you all to have new things all the time, so she added some photos from her journals from that time that were not in the first post. And some more details. And is already insisting that we will have new new new content up ASAP. Thank you, Jane, for sharing it all. I hope you, her readers, agree with this approach. And I hope we can give her the love and thanks that she always asks for when we tell our stories. -Corynne

Me pregnant (obviously) standing in my backyard. It’s a photo of a Polaroid, thus the quality factor, but we can pretend it’s a mood.

By Jane Pratt

First things first, I am really excited for you to see the first installment of Aubree’s beautiful rehab diaries that will be appearing here regularly. Her story was the impetus for my original intro and included my own related story that Corynne suggested (strongly - those Managing Editor types are persuasive!) that I share again with you here. I added a little more to it too, just to make it somewhat more worthwhile. Let’s meet in the comments to talk and heal from all of our related and unrelated experiences, ok? XO Jane

I was pregnant with twins conceived through in vitro and about four months into the pregnancy, I started having extreme bouts of anxiety and panic attacks of a different type than I had ever had before. They came on much more suddenly and I felt them all throughout my body instead of mainly in my head and my heart, where I had felt them before. They would wake me up. I remember one night in particular when I got up from bed after a few hours of sleep and felt such a surge of physical panic that I walked as fast as I could move toward my window - thinking movement and maybe going out of it would help this feeling go away, considering going up to the roof for more of an effect… and banged hard right into the radiator in front of it. Really hard. Which shocked me enough that I didn’t do anything more destructive.

The twins early on in their bunkbeds. I’ve kept this ultrasound image in a baby book ever since it was taken in 2005.

These went on. I went to a psychologist recommended by my OB/GYN. She gave me something to help ease the panic a little bit while I was pregnant, but I honestly can’t remember what the medication or supplement was. I don’t think she could have given me prescription anxiety medicine at that point in my pregnancy (second trimester), but part of me thinks it was Ativan and that I was supposed to take it only when needed. (And now based on the comments from you highly intelligent readers, I understand that it likely was Ativan that she gave me to take as needed. And I did, as conservatively as I could stand, as I recall.)

In any case, I miscarried those beautiful twins later into the second trimester when I developed pancreatitis (the doctors thought as a complication of the double pregnancy and the in vitro - I will go more into their theory when I write this Whole Other Story).

I delivered them in the same room at Mt Sinai Hospital where I had given birth to my incredible 22-year-old-now daughter Charlotte two years before, with the same OB, whose face looked almost as horrified the whole time as I felt. The complete opposite of her hugely smiling eyes during Charlotte’s beautiful birth. (During the process of pushing to deliver the twins - who could not have survived at that point - I made the mistake of looking down and seeing one of them, the girl’s head I am pretty sure, and I really - for me - wish I hadn’t. But that was a long tangent, and I will as promised twice here already tell you that entire story whenever you want to hear it or ask me about it.)

After that, and deciding what to do with the babies’ bodies (part of that Other Whole Story I will tell you later so that I stay somewhat on track here), I had to be hospitalized for a few weeks to recover. I got blood transfusions, and loved getting to feel as solid as the person who had donated the blood must have felt all the time. (I also came to believe that you take on the emotions of the person whose blood it was, which was FASCINATING - to me anyway.)

It was uncertain based on my elevated enzymes whether I would live, but you know me, of course I did - I wasn’t worried about that. And the flowers in the hospital were so beautiful, I wish I could have received them at home spread out on a monthly basis rather than all at once in that kind of yucky hospital room. But that’s life.

The other reason this period in the hospital was so hard was the same thing that led to all those gorgeous bouquets of flowers: My publicist called me the day after the miscarriage to tell me that the NY Post and People Magazine and maybe a dozen other press outlets were going to write about my miscarriage. I begged her to beg them not to - I felt such guilt about what had happened (AGAIN, more on that later, I swear, but I don’t think that reaction is uncommon from what I have heard since from other women who have been through miscarriages too).

But she said to me, “It’s news.” And they wrote what they wrote, while I hid in my hospital room with a black mouth because all I had been allowed to ingest at that point had been ice but the doctors had upgraded it to include the Rocket Ship red-white-and-blue popsicles they were selling downstairs in Central Park. We all know those color combinations turn your tongue black and little Charlotte and my mom were bringing these up to me regularly, as a ritual for them that I think felt productive.