Hello and welcome back to Tales from the Pit. I'm your intrepid pittsman, Mr. Michael Swame,

and this is your combination trigger warning and introduction. If you've been listening to the show

lately, you're probably aware that I'm expecting my first child, a boy, in at least biologically

born a boy, ha ha, in January, mid-January,

and in honor of that occasion, I've been covering childhood and child rearing specifically

from the parental vantage point at various stages.

I thought that arc would end with our previous episode, actually two episodes ago at this

point, in it with my friends Brandon and Lisa talking about the chaos of raising a toddler

and a relatively newborn at the same time.

However, then friend of the show John Leo, whose voice you may remember from

our frame rate episode on Army of Darkness, he also hosts his own pod, I'm glad you exist,

reached out with the unfortunate news that he and his wife Annie had just suffered a miscarriage

and thought that, hey, the pit might be a good place

to unpack some of that, at least as much as is, you know, comfortable for public consumption,

in the hopes that it might be a light in the darkness to people going through the same or similar

experiences and just help normalize conversing about miscarriage

specifically, but of course all of life's darkest moments, because talking about it helps,

such is the presupposition of this series. So tremendous appreciation, especially to Annie,

for being so open and forthcoming about a dark experience that

many, many, many human beings go through more than we like to discuss or admit, unless you're

looking at a chart of statistics, and then you probably already knew that.

Before we dive into the conversation, which I really enjoyed, I'm going to

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