Miscarriage

Today my topic is a little bit dark and melancholy.  I feel like it needs to be a more widespread topic because it happens more often than not. I will warn that there might be TMI( too much information) for some people so please don’t continue if you don’t want to hear the details of what happened.

On July 9th, I found out I was pregnant.  I would have been 5 weeks at that point.  This was super exciting news since we had just started trying to have children.  We decided to wait to tell the world until the 2nd trimester, but we did tell our close family.  Everyone was so excited and happy to hear it as they have asked us a million times when we were going to have kids.  My side of the family was especially happy since this year has been super hard with the loss of my Uncle and it gave us all something to look forward to.  I scheduled my first appointment and we looked forward to what the future held.

My first appointment came around and they had scheduled it very early. From what I read they normally only have you come in at about 8 weeks or later, but they scheduled mine at 7 weeks.  I was obviously not far enough along to do a sonogram, but they took all my vitals, I peed in a cup and we answered the doctor’s questions about our families medical histories.  It all felt very rushed.  They didn’t even confirm we were pregnant.  They pushed us out the door, wrote me a prescription for a prenatal vitamin (I was already taking a different one my normal OB told me to take), handed me blood work to go get done,  gave us the paperwork of what everything would cost in the end and asked us to figure out where we wanted to deliver.  It was all very confusing as to why we even went in that early, but we just went along with it.

I decided not to take the prescription she gave me as I read that many women get sick taking it and the one I was already taking didn’t make me sick.  It had all the same things in it, just not as large of amounts as the prescription one had.  I figured lots of women don’t even take prenatals while pregnant, so even if I took the ones I liked I was ahead of the game.  The next day I went and had my blood work done.   I actually found out I was B+ blood type, so that’s good to know.

A couple weeks went by and we all started daydreaming about what it would be like.  My due date would have been March 12, 2019.  I even researched cloth diapers in this time and decided that was the way we were going to go when the time came.  You might think I am crazy for that, but it saves a lot of money!   I ordered the baby its first piece of clothing, a little dinosaur onesie so it could wear it to the renaissance fair.  It would be our baby dragon.  I started making sure I was eating healthier, that I had healthy snacks to promote good growth for the baby, that I wasn’t eating or drinking anything that I wasn’t supposed to and that I was keeping hydrated.  I was going to bed earlier to get enough sleep.  I did all I could to ensure the baby was getting what it needed.

Saturday August 4th we woke up and we got in the shower.  We were messing around a bit and in the process I had four blood clots come out.  This really freaked me out.  I was told that intercourse was perfectly fine during pregnancy and it even said that it was fine in the paperwork they gave me.  The paper work said nothing about cramping or bleeding after intercourse.  I read up on it online and some women have bleeding as wells as cramps after intercourse.   All it said  was that it was normal but to call your doctor just to make sure. I tried to tell myself it was normal and to not freak out.  It was scary though.  I had to wait till Monday to call and make an appointment.  That weekend I was just a ball of nerves and emotion.  I didn’t even go to church that Sunday.  I couldn’t handle being out around anyone.  On Sunday I had brown mucus coming out of me.  That next Monday morning I called and made an appointment for the next day to go in and check to make sure everything was ok.

Tuesday August 7th we arrived at the doctors office right as they opened.  Barely anyone was in the waiting room.  They took us back for our sonogram.  They couldn’t see it by going over my stomach so they had to go in vaginally.  The lady took a bunch of pictures, told us to wait in the waiting room and she had to write her report.  Next they called me back again and took my blood pressure and weight.  They they put us in a room and said a doctor would see me shortly.  It wasn’t my doctor as she was not in the office yet.

The lady comes in the room and asks if we were the first sonogram of the morning and we said yes.  She then asks me if the first date of my last period was correct.  I replied yes again.  She then proceed to tell me that my baby was only measuring at 7 weeks and that day I should have been at 9 weeks.  She also said there was no heartbeat.  She told me that 50% of first time pregnancies fail and not to be discouraged because most of them come back in two months pregnant again.  She told me my body didn’t know what was going on and probably was fighting against the amount of the growing cells going on down there.  She said they saw a new egg ready to drop down and it would all be ok.  She was very kind, told me to be emotional if I wanted to, to be angry.  She gave me a hug.  I told her I was sorry she had to tell us this information and I was sure it was hard for her too.  She then told me my body in the next week should proceed to get rid of my baby.  If it didn’t, I would need to schedule a D&C.  That’s where they knock you out and go in and clean out your uterus because your body doesn’t realize it needs to get rid of the baby.

After the doctor told us the bad news, we walked out to the counter to give the paperwork to the front desk.  The girl running that area asked when our follow up appointment was.  She didn’t know I had lost my baby.  She thought everything was normal.  Another girl behind the counter figured out what was going on and told the first girl I would call them back in a week.

As we left the building I was holding back tears.  I didn’t even cry when the lady told me.  I was in shock.  Taylor and I walked out to our cars.  He had to go get dental work done and I was going to go into work.  He told me everything was going to be ok and held me tight and we went our separate ways.  All I could think about was how are we going to tell everyone that we lost it and how sad it was going to make them.  I kicked myself for telling anyone before we knew for sure that it was a viable pregnancy.  Thankfully, everyone was super supportive and gave us lots of love.  It didn’t turn out as hard as I thought it would be.

The next week was filled with a lot of emotions.  Anytime someone talked to me about it, it made me sad.  Anytime I thought about the way it was all handled made me upset.  Anytime I thought about how there are lots of people who don’t deserve to have children, can’t even take care of them like they should and continue to pop them out at a fast rate made me angry.  I have seen a few of my friends post about their losses on Facebook.  They are all great people who deserve to have children and they had to struggle through this hardship too,  yet the ones who don’t deserve to have kids just keep having perfectly healthy pregnancies.  The week was full of anger, sadness and anxiety.  It was now a waiting game to see what my body was going to do.  I am not going to lie and say I didn’t hold out hope that the doctors were wrong.  Maybe they went off the wrong date and I was just behind.  Maybe we had conceived later then when they calculated.  I had read about a lot of women who had that happen to them.  The doctors calculations were wrong and they go back in to find a healthy baby inside them.  The only thing that got be through that week was the new Hawaii 5-0 tv series.  It took my mind off of everything.  I binged watched through the third season.   I hoped and prayed that the doctors were wrong, but Friday August 10th I started bleeding.

The bleeding was just like a normal period.  There were a few larger clots here and there.  I tried not to look at them hard because I didn’t want to see the sac when it came out.  I had some more blood work done during that weekend and the blood wouldn’t stop after the needle came out.  The women asked if I was pregnant.  I had to tell her I was but I was losing it.  Sunday August 12th I went to bed at my normal time of 10:00 pm.  I woke up at 11:20 pm with the worst cramps I have ever had.  There was nothing I could do.  I just had to lay there in agony as my body started pushing out what was left inside.  I was on the toilet a lot that evening.  The cramps also made my body have to constantly go no. 2.  I was completely miserable.  Taylor being the best husband in the world stayed up with me and did all he could to make me feel better.  I told him I would go downstairs so he could sleep since he had work the next day.  He insisted on staying up with me until I felt better and I could fall back asleep.  He made sure I was drinking enough water, he went downstairs and got me my pregnancy pillow so I could get more comfortable(bought it on Prime day, its awesome even if you aren’t pregnant.), he got me an ibuprofen to help with the pain, he rubbed my back, stroked my face and held my hand tight as the cramps got worse and then finally went away.  He made it as easy for me as he could and I am thankful for that.  There were are lot of tears that evening.  Finally after a few hours the cramps stopped and I fell asleep.  To be honest it was a relief to have it finally happen.  I wished it was a viable pregnancy, but I had a feeling it wasn’t.  The next day I was extremely sore and weak.  I continued to have random cramps throughout the day and had even more tissue come out.

I had a follow up appointment on Tuesday August 14.  While waiting in the waiting room, I saw a couple walk out of their appointment with their sonogram pictures and they were so happy.  I was happy for them, but yet another reminder of how I didn’t get to do that.  They took me back, asked if I had had bleeding and cramping.  They had me do another sonogram to check to see if I passed everything I needed to.  Thankfully they found that I had passed it all and I wouldn’t need to have a D&C.   My blood work showed that I had very low progesterone during my pregnancy which should have alluded that it probably wasn’t going to be viable.  I am not sure why they didn’t call and tell me that when they saw it the first time.  I wish they had called and told me that it was concerning and we needed to check up on it.   I asked if this was an issue that I might have all the time and they told me that they can’t be sure, but the next time I get pregnant they would see me sooner and decide if I needed to take progesterone pills.  At this point I am so tired of this process that I don’t feel like I even want to try again.  I will try again, but it certainly cant and wont be anytime soon.  I feel terrible for the women who have gone through this time after time.  It’s such a drawn out process and it is so exhausting mentally and physically.

I guess the part the sucks the most is knowing you have walked around with a dead baby inside of you for 3 weeks.  That there was nothing we could do.  That there was nothing I did wrong.  It sucks that now the next time I get pregnant I am going to worry the whole time it is happening.  It sucked knowing that I was going to have to bleed and be in pain all while I was losing my baby.  It sucks that I still have to go in for appointments to make sure everything is going the way it should.  It sucks that I have to pay for services even when my baby has died.  It sucks still having pregnancy symptoms because your body doesn’t realize whats happened.   Everything around you is a reminder.  I was setting up registries and looking at baby stuff and now that is all that shows up in my feeds.  I see all the posts of everyone else’s baby news, pictures of babies/kids and it reminds me.  Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to see those posts and would never want people to feel bad about sharing them, they are just a reminder.  It’s just a very painful process from start to finish.  It’s not an over and done thing, it is long, grueling and painful.

Why did I share this with everyone?  It’s not because I needed sympathy or want people to treat me differently.  It’s because it is more widespread than you think and I want to have the information out there for other women to read and know.  I want them to know they are not alone.  That they have joined a large, silent club full of women who have gone through the same pain, agony and anguish they have and are.  It doesn’t matter how far along you are when it happens, it just sucks.  The whole process sucks.  In the end, just know that everything is going to be all right.

If you have gone through this or are going through this, feel free to share your story.  Feel free to get a hold of me.  I am always willing to talk.

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