It’s time to share my story of miscarriage. As of this posting I am still deep in the process. I have yet to complete my miscarriage. This is a long story. It’s a full story. It has a lot of details. I’ve broken it up into parts.
My story begins a week before my baby died. My wonderful husband Dave and I both felt from the beginning that our first baby was a boy and so we gave him the fetal name Azu-zu. We were celebrating our 8th anniversary with our dogs, Satchel and Maji, at the Metolius River near Sisters, Oregon. Like we do every anniversary we rented a place to stay with a full kitchen in a quiet place so the only reason we would have to leave would be to go on a walk. The vacation was perfect. We walked, hung out by the camp fire, watched movies and I slept and ate cheese most of the time.
For the entirety of my pregnancy I was nauseous and unable to eat anything but crackers, bread, cream cheese and yellow cheese. I was tired and generally shocked at my inability to eat. But it all felt reassuring, all my hormones were in full gear, working to make a baby. This was very comforting to me.
The first Tuesday back home, April 6, I started spotting. The blood was dark brown and scant. Though it increased throughout the week, the midwife in me wasn’t concerned but the mother in me wanted it to stop. If I got worried that something was wrong I would just try to eat something from my pre-pregnancy diet and know that I was still very much in the throes of morning sickness. I worried about miscarriage probably as much as any mom and maybe a little more since I had been around it more often as an apprentice. In retrospect, I have marked this day as the day my baby died.
On Friday, April 9, three days into spotting, I had a near anxiety attack because I felt my baby was dead. This followed a morning is agitation where if Dave were home I would have picked a fight with him. I was not right. And this fear was different than my regular concerns about miscarriage. No matter which way I phrased the question, my pendulum told me I wasn’t pregnant with a live baby. I was ready to throw it into the garden I hated that pendulum so much.
This fear sent me to the store to buy a pregnancy test so I could reassure myself that my baby hadn’t died weeks earlier, which was a big fear of mine. The test came back really positive and I was reassured.
On Sunday morning I woke up with a list of foods I wanted to eat. Having not eaten anything substantial in six weeks, this felt like a miracle. I planned breakfast, dinner and a snack. This step back into my pre-pregnancy diet seemed like perfect timing. I was stepping out of the early time frame when miscarriages happen and heading into my second trimester. This felt good.
Dave and I had sex for the first time since the spotting. Pretty quickly I started red bleeding, but wasn’t concerned since that could be common for some women. I went to work and tried to ignore the cramping that was beginning in my uterus. About six hours after we had sex I was definitely cramping and thought that I was just one of those women who can’t have sex in the first trimester. Again, I wasn’t too concerned. I told myself I wasn’t going to have sex for the next eight weeks and everything would be fine. Denial was setting in even before I was consciously aware that I was having a miscarriage.
Dave stopped by work. We ate cheese and crackers. I asked him what he thought and he agreed, I was worried for nothing. We were pregnant and nothing was supposed to go wrong.
The cramping had me doubled over, but since I experience Dysmenorrhea, it was nothing worse than my regular period cramps. The cramping sent me to poop every ten minutes and by this time I was having intense back pain and shooting pain down my hips. Yes, I was really in labor and pretending like everything was okay. After another hour of this I called my friend/midwife Kelly. Her voicemail picked up and since I was trying really hard to believe this wasn’t happening but was in pain and worried, I couldn’t leave a casual message, so I hung up.
I let another hour pass and called my other midwife Laurie. I described my symptoms and she was concerned. But I insisted that I felt my baby’s presence very strongly, felt very pregnant and still has pregnancy symptoms. I needed her to believe that everything was okay.
Dave had an Epsom salt bath waiting for me when I got home from work. The cramps stopped within thirty seconds of getting in the water. See, I told myself, you can’t stop a miscarriage from happening, I’m okay. On the couch I wasn’t able to eat dinner and curled around the hot water bottle asking Dave over and over if he thought our baby was going to be okay. He and I both agreed that everything was fine.
There is a part of my story that is difficult to share that has to do with my husband. Dave is a wonderful, supportive friend and lover. He would do anything for me, but the one thing he is sometimes unable to do is wake up from sleep.
Anyway, after he did his own online research about what could be happening and we both decided that what we worried about wasn’t the real thing and we went to bed together. Dave feel asleep quickly and I laid awake in pain, trying not to move around too much because of my cramping.
I got out of bed to go to the bathroom and passed one of my first clots. It had fetal tissue. It was gray and brown, tiny and sad. I knew that wasn’t a good sign to say the least. I wrapped the only part of our baby I would ever see into toilet paper and saved it in a jar. I stayed in the bathroom downstairs enough to gather myself before I told Dave the sad news.
He was sleeping soundly and I didn’t want to speak out loud the tragedy that was happening inside my body. I writhed in pain for a few more minutes then told him I was having a miscarriage. It was hard to wake him up.
Weeks earlier after I took a pregnancy test early in the morning I whispered in his ear to share the good news and I felt his entire being awaken. The evening of my miscarriage he didn’t move. He was processing through sleep and I was meant to be by myself. I told him I felt so alone and isolated. I told him I needed to leave the bed because I needed to be near a bathroom but also because his sleeping body was killing me with every breath. If that was my option then I needed to be alone. It was like when we would have a fight and go to bed angry; I could just feel every cell of him and it would irritate me. Except on this night it was worse.
He didn’t want me to leave and didn’t understand why I was making that choice. I asked him to please check on me during the night and his response that he held to was, “I’ll check on you when the alarm goes off in the morning.”
And that was it. I was left alone by a man who has never left me alone before. I was suffering through the longest night of my life, pleading for my baby’s survival, confused, more scared than I’ve ever been and in pain. And as much as I now understand what was going on for Dave during that night, I’m still sad as I remember those feelings of being the only woman in the world who was crying with her left cheek on the bathroom floor as her baby bled out of her vagina.
I contemplated calling my midwife friend Kelly. I thought about it for some time until the clocked said 11:40 and I knew it was too late. Though she is a midwife, I was still in denial that I was in serious need and I felt I was probably calling because of my hurt by Dave and not the miscarriage. I considered calling my friend Sarah who had an abortion over the summer and would understand the pain of the cramping and bleeding and the sorrow. I didn’t know anyone else to call.
I turned the white holiday lights on in my office and layed down on the futon. The same futon where I took my morning naps after breakfast because the nausea from pregnancy was too great to allow me to do anything else. I laid there feeling alone and scared and needing Maji, our Mystery Hound, who has a track record of providing wonderful physical comfort.
I called her in my head and by the fifth whisper she came downstairs. Jumping in bed, she licked my face then curled to fall asleep right where I wanted her to. At this point I was getting up to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes. As a cramp would diminish enough for me to walk, I would sit up and Maji would raise her head, without her normal bitter beagle face that she wears at night She watched me as I crawled over her and then fall back asleep. In the bathroom I would watch the toilet water become red and sob more.
Sobbing isn’t the right word to describe the way my fears poured out. Convulsive gasps and blubbering come close, but they aren’t powerful enough. It was the type of raw emotion that grips your body and squeezes tight, where every last breath is shaken out of you and the world demands that you provide one more gasp of air before it lets you go and crumbles you off the toilet to the floor. That is what I felt like that night.
I talked out loud the whole night asking this not be true. I prayed to my dead grandmother asking her to please make the cramps stop. Sometime after one in the morning I got up to puke and I knew I would catch a break. For the next ninety minutes I was able to doze, relax and not think about what was going on.
When I awoke from that sweet reprise I convinced myself that I was passing an unknown twin and that I still had a viable baby inside me that I could carry to full term. After all, I had yet to soak a pad in 12 hours and my clots were not matching a 10 week baby. I prayed that this was the truth of my situation.
After 4 am I heard Dave and Satchel, our Ridgeback, come downstairs. I yelled at Dave about how angry I was that he left me alone all night. He defended himself saying that he had a lot of work to get done today and that he’s trying to balance everything. I told him he doesn’t understand and that I wanted him out of the room. Nothing I could say would convince him of how horrible his decision was. The dogs left the room, scared.
He refused to leave. He got into bed. He watched me in my most private misery and he finally understood. He didn’t understand. He didn’t know it was such a physical process. He just didn’t know. He was sorry.
My uterus relaxed when he was with me and my cramps were less severe. I cried, this time to someone other than myself, about the unfairness and pain and wretchedness of this. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me. I had been so sick during pregnancy. That meant everything was working. I’m a lucky person, these things aren’t supposed to happen to me. THIS WASN’T MY STORY.
At 7 am I called my midwife friend Kelly and told her I was having a miscarriage. It was nice to talk to someone who understood truly what this meant. We decided that an ultrasound would be a good idea since I had a confusing symptom picture with my lack of bleeding and heavy cramps that weren’t producing clots.
I encouraged Dave to go to his meeting in the morning because my cramps basically stopped and nothing more was happening. He didn’t want to go and I felt bad for his grief at missing being with me through the night. I felt that a distraction would be good for him. While he was gone I laid in bed with Satchel and Maji and fell asleep for an hour.
We got into see Dr. Ed, a naturopathic midwife, at 1 pm. Because I wasn’t going in to a large imaging center, Dr. Ed would tell me what was going on rather than me have to wait until they send the report to my midwives. The stress of preparing to leave for the appointment caused my uterus to contract hard. I was bending over the kitchen table and carrying a plastic bag to vomit in. Dave was providing counter pressure on my lower back and nothing was helping. I was so scared and out of my body. Even Dave couldn’t reach me where I had gone.
The original plan was for us to drive separately to the office because Dave had a workshop to teach at 1:30. He arranged a substitute to be there to tend to class before he got there. Seeing the amount of pain I was in Dave said he was going to call some friends to see if they could meet me there. He suggested another friend named Kelly, but she was too sick to come and then he was going to call Robin, but the idea of a man being with me during this time made me tell him no. I called midwife Kelly and she agreed to meet me after the ultrasound and take me home.
I had to lay in the back seat of the car because of the pain and I was trying to not puke because of the nauseousness. Dave didn’t print the directions to the clinic and we got lost and were late. Dave apologized and was beating himself up and feeling bad. The cramps lessened as I filled out the paperwork.
Dr. Ed asked, “Is there anything significant about this pregnancy I should know about?” I was in shock that the front desk did not convey that I was there because I was having a miscarriage. I was so angry. “I’m having a miscarriage” was all I could say.
The ultrasound showed a baby that died at 9 weeks and a uterus that stopped growing then as well. Everything was in chunks and I still had a lot to pass. As soon as I heard the news that there was not a live baby inside me, my cramps stopped. This information was not for me and I refused to participate in this reality.
My cramps did not pick back up. My body still believed in this pregnancy. That was, as of this posting, five weeks ago. My baby has been dead for six weeks. I’m allowing my body to let this pregnancy go naturally and part 2 of the story continues with that painful and enlightening process.
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