THIS POST CONTAINS MINOR GRAPHIC DETAIL OF MISCARRIAGE// Written in 2011
There are a lot of questions that run through your mind once you realize your pregnancy is in danger.
But, the one question I’m sure every single girl asks is “Why?” The question “why” is a broad one that encompasses the many, many different variations. Sometimes it’s “Why me?”, or “Why now?” Sometimes it’s the harsh question of “Why her and not me?” Guiliana Ransic, the E! anchor who struggled with fertility, once said “Our whole lives we try not to get pregnant, then when we want to get pregnant it won’t happen.” But if we walk around our whole lives asking questions like “Why won’t it happen?”, what good does it do us? Are we any more pregnant than before? Does it help our chances with fertility? Does it unclog our phillopian tubes or create our follicles to grow? Obviously those are silly questions and, of course, the answer is no.
So, my “why” question to you is why do we torture ourselves with analyzing? Why question the why? I believe it’s to find an answer, to find a reason for the issue, right? A solution to the problem. A glimmer of hope. There is only one thing that will give us the hope we need, the hope that will snuff out all of our worries and fears. The hope is that somehow there is a plan, a storyline, a happy ending. But in the meantime as we watch the pages unfold, we need to find a way to get through the pain of now and turn that pain into positivity that can be productive to ourselves and others.
When I started this up and down roller coaster of OB/GYN appointments, I began to wonder why this was happening to me. I had never known anyone else in my family to have fertility problems ( My 87 year old grandmother just recently admitted to me that she had 8 d&c’s and my other grandmother had a miscarriage as well) and to be honest, I didn’t even think it was a possibility at all. I was too busy worrying whether or not we had enough money saved up, if we were stable enough in our relationship and if we were ready to take on such a massive responsibility of a new life. I was actually most concerned with my social life! Would I ever be able to go out again? To the movies, dinner, on a spontaneous road trip? Not that I ever went on a spontaneous road trip but if I had a kid then I’d never be able to. So, when things started to be abnormal with my ultrasounds I really didn’t know how to handle the situation. I was, for lack of a better word, in denial.
On October 22, 2010 I had a positive pregnancy test. I sat there staring at it for a while, just staring at the two pink lines in total shock. I didn’t know what to think. I threw it away and thought about not even telling James. In the end, I scrounged at the bottom of my garbage can and dug it out. I laid it on the kitchen table and waited for him to get home. He didn’t believe it either. I looked at him and could tell he wanted more evidence. I told him to go buy a ClearBlue test if he wanted to see it in writing for himself. He went out and bought it just to be absolutely sure. Three tests later we gave each other a hug, too scared to go crazy with joy. Especially James. I called the doctor right away to make an appointment. The nurse said it would put me at 5 1/2 weeks (from Sept 18), they would see me at 6 1/2. We had to wait a whole week. The suspense was unbearable.
November 4, James and I went into the doctor and were shuffled into the exam room for an internal ultrasound, where the OB/GYN used what looked like a large, thick wand to perform the procedure. The grey and black image appeared with a large empty hole. Nothing was there. James and I looked nervously at each other. What did this mean? The doctor said it was possible that it was too early to detect. They put me at somewhere around 3 weeks. The doctor ordered a blood test to check my HCG levels (Human chorionic gonadotropin) in 48 hours as well as had the nurse draw my blood as a baseline before I left the office. James tried to distract me as the nurse jammed the needle in my vein and told me to hold my hand in a fist. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt from having blood drawn. I was almost in tears. I had large bruises up my arm for over two weeks.
The nurse called a few days later with the results of my blood work. My HCG levels had gone from 13000 to 17000 in 48 hours, not even close to doubling. I had a feeling that hope was lost. I prayed that God would give me the strength to not be upset but I started to feel a wave of depression pass over me. It was like fighting against a strong current. All I wanted to do was lay on the couch and sleep. I was already starting to have undeniable symptoms of pregnancy as well. I was so tired I felt like I could pass out at 3:00pm every day on the dot, many times I would sleep for two hours on the couch. My breasts were growing and becoming tender. My appetite had grown yet I was constantly nauseous. Almost every smell made me gag. I’d cry over a commercial or when saying something nice to someone (I usually could control it but now it was so overwhelming and strong there was no controlling it). At this point, the news was difficult to keep to myself.
The doctors wanted to see me again on November 10. James and I went for another internal ultrasound performed by a technician. This time, there was something there. A little fetal pole that looked like the shape of a bean in that big black hole and a tiny flicker of “what could be a heart beat” the technician said. We went in to see the doctor and she said she was much more optimistic, especially since I had all the symptoms- perpetual nausea included. Things looked better and we were due July 5. They still wanted to take my blood to check the HCG levels. I had blood drawn in the office that day and would go to Quest to get it done again in 48 hours. James was so encouraged and praised God every night for our little baby and prayed that the heart would grow strong. I, on the other hand, kept my guard up. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to fight off the strong current that was depression again if my hopes were crushed.
They set us up for an initial OB appointment November 22. We wanted a few extra days of the news sinking in before we announced it to James’s family at Thanksgiving dinner. I had the whole thing planned out. We were going to bring a large bouquet of flowers to dinner. It would have a card attached and inside the card would read, “I am so thankful for you and I can’t want to meet you in July. Love, Your Grandbaby”.
I got another call from the nurse with my new HCG results. This time the levels went from 24,000 to 32,000. The nurse said that even though they did not double, they were still going up and that was a good sign.
On November 22, we went into the doctor at 9:50am. The nurse gave me a lot of papers to sign and a big packet of information telling me how to pre-register at the hospital and then ushered us into the OB’s office to talk with him about our questions/concerns with our first pregnancy. James and I exchanged anxious looks. “Are we going to have an ultrasound? Tell them we want an ultrasound, ” James said to me. I knew exactly what he was thinking. They were getting our hopes up and we didn’t want that happening until we saw proof that was the little heart beat on the black and white screen.
After a short meeting with the doctor, we went into the exam room where we had our third internal sonogram. There was something in my heart that was ready, as ready as I’d ever be, to see the empty black hole. The doctor apologized and we left the packet on the nurse’s desk.
James and I had decided a few months before Christmas that we would spend the holiday up North with my brother. He was the last one of my family living in Pennsylvania so I thought it would be fun for him to have family up there during Christmas. I also thought it was the perfect time to tell my old friends that I was pregnant. I had figured it out and I would be just leaving the first trimester at the end of December. As the story goes, I did not have an opportunity to give my friends any congratulatory news.
On Wednesday, December 22, exactly two months after taking my initial pregnancy test, I began having terrible cramps. I usually don’t have bad cramps during my menstrual cycle so I knew it had to be associated with the miscarriage. I woke up in the middle of the night hugging my stomach and wondering how bad it had to be before I should start worrying. The next day we headed to the airport and the cramps hadn’t stopped. I put a call into the nurse and she prescribed Vicodin. I was just calling to ask her if I could take Advil, so it worried me a little that she prescribed me something so strong. I had my brother pick up the prescription just in case. I am so thankful I did.
On Christmas Eve we went to church. I took half of a Vicodin because I didn’t want to feel loopy for the service. I had to sit through the entire service while people stood around me belting out Christmas carols. Since my view was the backside of everyone, I couldn’t see the words on the screen and therefore discovered how little I actually knew of the Christmas carol lyrics. Once everyone sat down, I linked my arm around my husband’s and squeezed it every time a sharp pain came shooting through me. It seemed to me that it could be a glimpse of what a real contraction may feel like. Every five minutes or so, I’d get a sharp pain in my lower abdomen that made me eyes fill with tears. When service was over and it was time to stand up, I felt a rush and excused myself to the bathroom. In the bathroom, I doubled over in pain as I watched drips of blood fall into the basin. The toilet paper was drenched in blood. I started to worry.
I sat in the back on the car ride home to my brother’s apartment and tried to act naturally while hiding the strain in my voice as another “contraction” happened and what I could feel was blood that I was trying to hold in. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I swiftly wiped them away in the darkness. Once back at the apartment, the pains were so bad that I just sat on the toilet and prayed for it to pass. My mom told me once that bad cramps was your body’s way of dealing with a blood clot and she would push on her stomach to help it come out. So, I pushed a few times on my stomach, starting at the top and pressing down to my lower abdomen like you would a tube of toothpaste. All of the sudden I looked between my legs to see three dark and large balls plop into the basin. The pain was different. I panicked. I came out of the bathroom with my eyes full of tears and with a shaky voice said to James, “Can you please call the on-call physician? I think something bad just happened”.
After discovering that there was, in fact, nothing there on November 22, 2010 the drawn out journey of normalcy began. My body needed to take it’s natural course to flush out what it had already rejected and heal itself. Talk of a D&C was brushed upon. However, the doctor didn’t actually use the term D&C. I had to figure that one out on my own. He just said that there would be procedure done. He didn’t expound on that. I am kind of thankful for that. When my mom or sister or husband, whoever it was that told me about D&C’s, explained what it was I immediately knew it was something I wanted to avoid. I couldn’t bare the thought of getting a procedure done. Just the thought of it made me uneasy and desperately sad. I prayed fervently that my body would work things out itself.
I ended up getting my blood drawn 11 times to check my HCG levels to make sure they were going down. If my HCG levels kept going down on their own it meant that my body was working things out. If my levels stopped lowering that meant that the doctors would step in and do the procedure, aka D&C.
My levels, which I had done every few days or so, slowly began to decline and I mean crawled down. They would go from 55,000 to 45,000 to 37,000 to 32,000 to 27,000. You get the point. The part that depressed me the most was the fact that I was still having all the symptoms of being pregnant though I knew nothing was there. I was constantly tired and nauseous. My breasts had ballooned and were hard and sore. My stomach had began to feel hard and bloated.
The whole nausea thing is kind of funny. You feel so nauseous and sick to your stomach, on the verge of throwing up all day long, that you almost can’t remember a time when you didn’t feel nauseous. Then one day it’s just suddenly gone and you couldn’t remember exactly how it felt and when it just decided to not be there anymore. If I could pinpoint a date in which I finally stopped feeling pregnant, I would say it may have been about the second week in December. I just woke up one day and I wasn’t nauseous anymore. I’d wake up another day having the ability to go through an entire day without having to take a nap. My body started to deflate and I felt like my stomach began showing definition again instead of looking like I swallowed a large balloon. My breasts deflated overnight leaving me with red stretch marks around the entire breast on both sides.
Throughout this entire experience, James and I have been praying for peace and understanding and for God to be glorified in whatever circumstance we are faced with. That’s not to say we aren’t disappointed, we certainly can’t deny that. But what we do know is that God has control over our lives. We don’t have to worry. During this past month, my prayer has constantly been Philippians 4:6-7 (Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; 7 and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.). Throughout this pregnancy, I thought I was praying for answers through this scripture. But I wasn’t. I was praying for peace. God has made us a promise, that He will give us peace that surpasses all understanding. And He has done it.
For one reason or another, we aren’t suppose to be starting a family yet and only God knows why. In James prayer, on our way home from the doctor, he said Luke 12:24 Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? God loves us most out of His entire creation, He is waiting with open arms to mend our broken hearts.
I never knew this statistic before but 10-25% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. When I started having complications, I went on some blogs and found such an overwhelming sense of desperation among women who had gone through a miscarriage. My heart went out to them. I never thought before how often it did occur, and when it did how painful it was to go through. The constant roller coaster of emotions are almost too much to bear. If you’ve gone through a miscarriage or lost someone you love, I now can say that I know how you feel. Helpless, hopeless, and guarded. Please know that God loves you and I love you. Your story is important, and I would love to hear it if you’d like to share. I want to be there for you to listen and encourage you.
Isaiah 41:10 Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.
Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.