Warning: This post is very long. I considered breaking it up into smaller posts, but it really is a singular piece and I would feel that I am doing myself and my story an injustice by making it bite-sized just for the sake of convenience. This is sensitive subject matter for me and I tried not to hold much back while writing it. I hope that it is appreciated, and I hope that it inspires more women and men to speak up about their own experiences.I had five ultrasounds in January, and not a single one of them showed any signs of life.
The first one was the worst, because I had actually expected to see something there. I'd counted down the days and hours and finally minutes until the moment that I would see my little August's heartbeat...and that moment never came. When the first images were brought up on the screen, my doctor exclaimed cheerily, “There's the baby!” I grinned, my husband grinned, and my heart was as light as it's ever been.
And then my doctor went silent. It was the loudest and most hideous silence of my life, and it was only the first of many.
I went home that night thinking that I would be able to just jump back into life. I actually planned to return to work the next day. But it didn't happen. I didn't sleep that night at all. I stayed up watching the first season of Heroes, and at 6am I decided to leave a message for my boss letting her know that I wouldn't be coming in.
That turned out to be a mistake. In my shocked and sleepless stupor, I accidentally called her
house instead of the office. I explained to her that I hadn't slept in almost 24 hours, that my baby was dead, that I wouldn't be in, and I just started sobbing. I humiliated myself over the phone with her and I didn't have the good sense to just shut up. She was sympathetic, of course, and obviously very uncomfortable, and after we hung up I couldn't stop feeling like a failure to her and myself.
I had my second and third ultrasounds two days after the first, one transvaginal and one standard. The tech was silent when it became apparent that there was no viable pregnancy. And then, when I thought that it was finally over, she explained that the doctor had to double check before I could go. So I had my fourth ultrasound (another transvaginal) just ten minutes later. And again there was that silence as she stared at the screen, looking for any sign of...anything.
I elected to have the D&C rather than to wait for my body to miscarry naturally. I wanted it over with. I wanted it out of my body. It was dead and I wanted it gone. I couldn't stand the thought of bleeding and crying in my parents' bathroom (my husband and I were staying there temporarily due to badly-needed renovations in our own home) for God knows how many days or weeks it would take to happen naturally. I was furious with myself, I was furious with my life, and I was furious with my ridiculous fucking failure of a body.
I didn't have my surgery until five days after that first ultrasound. That day is really what this post is about. That is when I consider my miscarriage to have occurred, even though the baby was already 7 days dead by then. I haven't really talked about that day much in detail to anyone, because it really was the worst day of my life and I can't express how vulnerable it makes me feel to type it up for everyone to read. But I am sharing it because I think that it needs to be talked about; not just my miscarriage, but miscarriage in general.
I did not sleep the night before my surgery. I stayed up, watching TV or browsing the Internet, and I listened to Caleb Kane's
“In Your Own Way” on my iPod over and over. I cried even though I felt rather numb, and it was only in the wee hours of the morning that I realized that I was
terrified of what was about to happen to me. I wrote to
my best friend but I don't remember what I said, and even right now I'm a little scared to look up that email. I don't really want to revisit that mindset.
I was supposed to be at the hospital at 6am. I had talked my husband out of coming with me (which was no easy feat) because...I guess I was trying to be brave. I was trying to prove that I had not been destroyed by my loss. I fooled myself into thinking that I didn't need him, and it was a dumb mistake, because I would come to find out that I really, really did. So my husband stayed at home, and my mother drove me to the hospital. She stayed with me in the waiting room while I listened to Kane's song on repeat.
I kept having to repeat why I was there to various nurses and receptionists and the anesthesiologist and to the other patients in the prep room who saw me crying, and I kept having say “I'm getting a D&C” over and over and over again. I had to say, “I miscarried” over and over and over again to all of these strangers. They sent my mother back to the prep room with me and she sat next to me and cried with me.
They put something in my IV that made me a little fuzzy as they wheeled me back to the operating room, separating me from my mom. There were all these people in scrubs and coats and they were very busy, it seemed. I felt like a tiny little girl, like a failure, and I couldn't stop crying. And then I realized that my surgeon was my OB/GYN, and I had somehow managed to forget that she was 7 months pregnant. Her large belly mocked me. It all seemed so unfair.
I know that when I fell asleep, I was still crying. And that I woke up sobbing. It's a strange sensation, to wake up already crying. I'd never felt it before and I haven't felt it since.
That was one of my lowest moments, when I really lost all sense of reason, all sense of who I was and what I knew about the world. When I woke up, I immediately asked my doctor, “Was it a boy or a girl?” I knew damned well that it was too early to see that, but I asked it anyway, without even thinking. I hadn't even known that the question was in my mind until it escaped my tongue. I've never felt so stupid or so weak in my life.
When I woke up, I was a creature of pure agony. There was no room for anything else. It was over. My August was dead and gone.
They rolled me into recovery, where I sobbed and hyperventilated and basically had an anxiety attack for half an hour, while a nurse stood by looking annoyed. She said that she couldn't take my IV out until my heart rate was low enough, and since I was freaking out, it stayed too high. She wasn't very sympathetic, but I doubt she even knew why I was there. I never told her. Or maybe she did know and she didn't care. I don't know.
Eventually I calmed down, and my husband showed up and my mom went home. I was weak from crying. He brought me a teddy bear, and I held onto it while he held onto me.
I went to the bathroom, and when I peed there was blood in the toilet. I had not seen my own blood in two months, and I could not help but stare. I wasn't supposed to see my blood again until August when the baby was born...and yet here it was. No baby. Just blood. It dripped onto the bathroom floor as I washed my hands at the sink. I couldn't stop it. I didn't have my clothes on, just the hospital gown, and there was no stopping it. I had no control over anything, not even my own body. Especially not my own body. I reported the mess and the nurses were nice enough about it.
My doctor had ordered me to abstain from sex for two weeks after the procedure, or else I was risking a serious infection. I was bitter about that. I needed the comfort of my husband more than anything else at that time, and she told me that I could not have it. We didn't follow her orders. We made love every night for six nights starting the day after my procedure, and it was the one thing that I did
right throughout the entire ordeal. I needed him. And he was worth the risk.
I went on short-term medical leave from work. I could have had three weeks to myself, but I felt like I was letting my boss down by tending to my own petty emotional needs, so I only took one. That was yet another mistake in a long line of mistakes.
Two days after my surgery, I came down with a bad fever. My doctor told me to go to the emergency room as soon as possible, and I ended up spending six hours in the hospital getting blood drawn, having yet another ultrasound done, getting my temperature taken, and ultimately being told that I had the extraordinary bad luck of catching a random virus right after surgery, but that there was no sign of infection.
At one point I spent fifteen agonizing minutes being pushed back to my room from ultrasound by a nurse (who was hugely pregnant) and her colleague, who spent the entire time discussing how much the nurse had not ever wanted to be pregnant. To say that it was difficult hearing how much someone else didn't want their pregnancy just days after I'd lost my own is an understatement.
So in my experience, ultrasounds are awful ordeals. They make you hold your pee, then poke around inside you, push on your full bladder, stare at the screen, and tell you that there is nothing inside of you to love anymore. There are pictures of babies on the wall to remind you of what you don't have. There are posters reminding you of the importance of folic acid to your developing child - fat lot of good that does now. There are other women there, and they
are pregnant. They do have something to love inside of them.
They will be mothers. Not you. You don't belong here anymore.
It's upsetting to write about this. It's upsetting to think about. But no one ever talks about miscarriage, and that only hurts women who have miscarried, because it means that many people don't understand it at all. It's too often thought to be this rare affliction that only happens to women who weren't careful enough with their pregnancies; and that could not be further from the truth. A lot of people don't consider it a real loss. And they say a lot of stupid and hurtful things because they don't know what else to say. You can always try again, it's not too late, you're young, you have plenty of time to start a family, it wasn't mean to be, at least it happened early, blah blah blah. You wouldn't say that to someone whose brother just died, would you? Women who have miscarried a beloved pregnancy have lost part of their
FAMILY. That needs to be understood.
Too often it seems that women are expected to get over it, because a pregnancy is often considered to be renewable. Replaceable. Forgettable. And maybe it is for some women, but it isn't for me, and I know a lot of women who also will never forget their losses. And they should not ever be expected to, either.
