I knew it was coming. I think I knew it for weeks but I struggled hard to hold onto some glimmer of hope. My body doesn’t lie and I knew it. Yes, every pregnancy is different. Yes, women have been known to have no nausea, no sore boobs, no gagging reflex at the mere thought of certain foods. Yes, some women have spotting at some point in their first trimester and yes, some women even do it through their whole pregnancies. Darn, I’ve even read stories of women who have just plain bled for weeks at a time and gone on to deliver healthy babies. For every fear that crept into my brain during that anxiety-ridden first trimester of pregnancy I could find a story somewhere in the vast realm of cyber space that would give me hope that my story would have a happy ending. I spent hours looking up each days concern and always found someone who had the same thing and everything turned out just peachy. Someone out there saying that all of those things are nothing to worry about. Their baby turned out just fine and so will mine. My boobs were still kind of sore and I still felt crummy and nauseous a lot of the time, just not as much as I had with previous pregnancies. I couldn’t get enough broccoli and cheese. Milk was my drink of choice. I was obviously a pregnant woman, but it just wasn’t the same as it should have been and I knew it. I just didn’t want to face it. The constant checking of symptoms on the internet was a terrible thing to do to myself. I don’t recommend this search for false hope. It only leaves one more confused and it is a waste of mental energy. The only peace to be found comes with acceptance. I wasn’t able to do that, though, until it was all over. When no longer was it just a fear, but a proven reality. The ultrasound screen doesn’t lie. I may not have trusted that my body was telling the truth, but I couldn’t deny the truth of the actual image of what was going on inside my uterus. Emptiness.
It all started out so lovely. I was absolutely shocked and thrilled when I finally allowed myself to believe the impossible and take a pregnancy test. When it got a second line I just could not believe it! We got pregnant without intervention…wow! A true miracle was occurring and I felt like a very, very blessed woman, indeed. Pregnancy has never been something that has come easy to me so it was absolutely amazing. Everything just seemed so right. Life was turning around for us and this was our sign from above. I spent the next 6 weeks enjoying the idea of a new little baby coming into our crazy household. I am grateful, now, for that time. I wish it could have been longer but those six weeks were a time of feeling so fruitful and fixed and hopeful. It was also a time of great worry and fear but that was a small price to pay for the joy. There is nothing like the feeling of new life growing within you and even though it hurts so bad now I’m thrilled to have had those weeks.
Two days before my first midwife appointment I got the tiniest bit of brown blood on the toilet paper after going to the bathroom. I remember looking over at myself in the bathroom mirror and seeing the most terrified look on my face. I called the midwife. She reassured me that it was very common and, most likely, meant nothing. I wasn’t reassured, though. I spent the next couple of days living in fear and seeing the same thing here and there but never really getting worse and no cramping or anything else to make anyone, other than myself, believe it was anything to be concerned with. I went to my scheduled appointment and again was told that it was normal and nothing to worry about. The midwife tried to hear the heartbeat but couldn’t find it. Again, nothing to worry about since I was still a couple of days shy of 10 weeks and have a tilted uterus so it was not unusual that it couldn’t be found. I knew, though. I knew the real reason it couldn’t be found. I fought so hard to banish the thought! At my request, an ultrasound was scheduled for the next day just to give me some peace even though the midwife still didn’t see a real cause for alarm. That night I felt the most mild cramping sensation. I sometimes wondered if it was just my imagination. Before bed, I went to the bathroom and instead of the tiny brownish blood there was darker maroon colored blood and a bit more of it. I wanted to scream. I was screaming inside with terror but instead of letting it outside, I went to bed. Sleep would end the worry, at least, temporarily. The next morning, I spent the morning OFF of the computer and instead in prayer and reading my Bible. The scripture that I was drawn to was in Psalms. It talked about God being near to the broken hearted. I tried to find another scripture that stood out to me. I didn’t want to accept that this is what the LORD was saying to me but I did feel more confident that I could handle whatever the day held for me and whatever the ultrasound revealed. My cramping sensation was totally gone and the spotting had ended as well. I began to feel hopeful again and began imagining the relief that would wash over me when I saw that little kicking fetus on the ultrasound screen and my husband and I would look at each other and smile and we would drive home feeling like a giant load had been lifted off of our shoulders. After all, the sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. Just the kind of day that would produce good news.
Finally, the time came to leave for the back-up doctor’s office. We got in the van and began the 35 minute drive to get there. The beautiful morning had turned to gray skies. It was getting darker and darker. As if the clouds were in synch with my body, I began cramping and as the skies looked dimmer my cramps got harder. I pointed out to my husband that it was getting darker and that it looked like it did the last time we went to get an ultrasound and found out our last pregnancy had ended as well. He reminded me of how the day we got married it was dark and gray until we started saying our vows and at that moment the sky cleared and the sun shone down on us. It made me smile. I didn’t tell him about the cramps that were becoming quite painful. Partly because I didn’t want him to worry and partly because I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Saying it out loud made it real. We arrived at the office and we went inside. I really had to pee, so I went straight to the bathroom. This is where God’s mercy really became apparent to me in this whole story. He let me know beforehand what was happening so that I didn’t have to find out on the screen. As soon as I sat on the toilet a gush of bright red blood came out. I knew it was the end. I went back out to the waiting room and told my husband. We both wanted to cry but knew that we couldn’t. The tech came out and called us back to the room. She was happy and chipper and I had to tell her what happened so she didn’t say something dumb. It gave her the heads-up to turn the screen around when she began the ultrasound, too, so that we didn’t have to actually witness the sight with our own eyes. At that point, it was not a surprise. The baby had not developed beyond around 6 weeks and I was continuing to bleed through the whole thing. We were sent over the midwife’s office where we were given our options…blah…blah…blah. I just wanted to get out of there. We went home and waited for the phone call with our D&C schedule. It was not needed.
I started having “contractions” a few hours later while we stopped in Wal-mart to get some pads for me. I was in so much pain that I could barely walk and the whole trip in there is a total blur. We thought we were just going to pick up pads but then realized that there were several things we needed to get, especially if I was going to have surgery in the morning. I remember walking through the toy aisles with my 2 year old daughter. My husband had gone to another part of the store and I was left there without him. I was in so much pain that I was doubling over. I was a bit embarrassed wondering what others must think of me because there was no way to completely hide the pain that I was in. I felt gushes coming out of me and hoped that the blood wasn’t going to run down my legs. When my husband returned I told him that I thought we may need to get his parents to come over and sit with the kids so we could go to the ER. He asked if it was that bad and I said yes. We drove home and the cramping was easing a bit. I wondered if I was over-reacting and decided to put a call into the midwife to see if I should go to the ER. She told me what I was experiencing was to be expected and that I didn’t need to go unless the bleeding was filling a pad in an hour. My pad was completely full when I got home from Wal-mart and even had a small round clear gelatinous blob on it that I wondered if it was the gestational sac. I just kept looking at it when I found it and finally, reluctantly, decided to throw it away. Since I had the pad on for longer than an hour, though, I wasn’t sure how quickly it had filled and I decided to wait. I got up to go to the bathroom and when I began to sit down on the toilet the blood just began coming hard. In fact, I bled all over the back of my panties because I couldn’t get them down in time to let the toilet catch it all. I even had to slightly push to pass all of the clots that were coming out. Had I been wearing a pad at that time, it would have filled in 1 minute! I felt a bit of panic that I was bleeding so hard, but within a few minutes the cramps were easing up and I decided once again that sleep would be the best medicine if I could manage it. My husband and I went to bed. The cramps were getting noticeably less and less and eventually I was able to drift off to sleep. I actually slept pretty well considering what was going on and when I woke up I felt much better with hardly any cramping. I knew that I had survived the hardest part, at least, physically. Unfortunately, the physical part was the easy part.
The pain in my heart is severe, but I do feel that God is near to me and I do have peace that there is a bigger picture here and a reason that all things happen, good and bad. I feel strong on one hand but very weak on the other. I cry easily. I can smile and convince others that I am fine. I lose my temper easily. I tell everyone that I’m okay. I get irritated over the most ridiculous things. I wonder if I will ever feel normal again. I want to be happy. I want to move on and forget all the pain. I don’t want to move on because I’m afraid that I’ll forget. I worry that God thinks I’m a bad mom. I know that’s not true. I feel like it’s my fault that the baby died. I know that it couldn’t have been avoided. I live in a constant teeter-totter of emotions. Full of negativity but striving hard to contradict it to keep myself from spiraling into a deeper depression. I’ve been there and I don’t want to go there again. I just want to be alone, but that is impossible. I know, though, that I will get through this. I will survive. I always do.
I miss you, baby.