by Band Back Together | Sep 13, 2010 | Baby Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Livng Through A Miscarriage, Loss, Miscarriage, Neural Tube Defects, Pregnancy |
Our timing was so perfect. We tried casually to conceive for a couple months, then got pregnant the first month I charted my temperatures. Our baby would be born in May, a month I thought was perfect to have a baby. I’d be off all summer on maternity leave, and I’d still be thirty–a milestone that felt like a relief after our decision to start a family seemed to come not a moment too soon. I had almost made it to the end of the first trimester when I started spotting. We went in for an ultrasound and the baby measured 9 weeks, when I knew for sure I should have been closer to 10 weeks… but there was a heartbeat! We had some sweet relief for a week, in which I felt comfortable telling a few more people at work–because the chance of losing your baby after you’ve seen or heard the heartbeat goes down dramatically. But then my hormone levels seemed to be falling after another blood draw. Dr. Google told us that it was normal for HCG levels to fall later in the first trimester, so we tried not to go wild with worry over a weekend spent waiting for Monday’s ultrasound.
Our baby had grown and developed more in the week since we had last seen it, and there was still a heartbeat. The ultrasound tech spent a long time looking at the baby, doing things we didn’t really understand like examining the blood flow. She gave us a couple pictures and said “good luck with everything.” We went back into the waiting room for the midwife on call to let us know the results. They handed me the phone across the front desk and she started by telling me that yes, there was a heartbeat and that was a good sign, but… BUT. The nuchal fold looked thickened, which was a sign of a chromosomal abnormality. We would need further tests and they would help me get the screening scheduled. She was going to come in to talk to us more. I looked across the room at Jed in utter terror. He rushed over to me and I couldn’t believe I was getting this news over the phone in the middle of the waiting room. I started crying instantly and they ushered us into an empty exam room.
We held each other, crying and afraid, until the midwife came in to expand on the bad news. What the tech saw in the ultrasound didn’t look good–the thick nuchal fold and an omphalocele, I would probably miscarry. In the meantime we would go to a big nearby hospital for a better ultrasound. Either way, we would probably “have some decisions to make.”
That was a Monday. The next ultrasound was on Friday. Neither of us went to work that week. We stayed in, crying, devastated. I needed help getting out of bed every morning because the sadness was paralyzing. We distracted ourselves by painting the kitchen and baking zucchini bread. Our 4th anniversary was on Thursday. I was 11 weeks pregnant with a dying baby.
Friday arrived and we trekked through the hospital to Maternal and Fetal Medicine and one of the top ultrasound doctors in the country. The room had a second ultrasound screen on the wall facing the exam chair, so the mamas can have good views of their babies. I couldn’t decide how much I wanted to look. My husband wanted to punch the resident who hovered around, looking at the screen with barely veiled repulsion. I didn’t notice; I was busy trying to survive. After a really long exam, we sat in a meeting room with the doctor and a couple nurses, where the doctor explained that our baby had edema–cystic hygroma–all over its body, to a level that indicated a chromosomal abnormality so severe the baby wouldn’t survive. There was no way to predict how long I would stay pregnant. I could miscarry that day, or I could go to term and deliver a baby with a certain death sentence.
Termination for medical reasons was suddenly an option they would help me look into.
We went home in shock. It was impossible to comprehend the gravity of this most horrible thing that had ever happened to us. We made the heartbreaking choice to terminate our much-wanted pregnancy and scheduled the appointment. There were only a couple places in our area where I could get an elective termination, despite it being for a pregnancy with no chance of a positive outcome. My midwife wanted to help me but there was nothing they could do in their office.
While we waited for that awful date to arrive we both went back to work. I was like a ghost. People were sad for me and each hug made me cry. I also kept catching myself in “preparing for parenthood” mode—bookmarking an article about librarianship and parenthood, making note of the book about treating common childhood illnesses at home, realizing my new shirt would also make a good maternity shirt. Telling a coworker about how we thought we might dress up our 5-month-old as an acorn for Halloween next year. Falling silent and trying not to start sobbing. I realized my life wasn’t in that place anymore, but my heart hadn’t caught up. I hadn’t yet fallen out of the habit of preparing for baby.
Late that week I felt like my symptoms were diminishing–my nausea was suddenly totally gone. I made a last-minute appointment with the midwife to check for a heartbeat. If there wasn’t a heartbeat, I wouldn’t have to go for the termination and I could stay in the care of my midwife for whatever happened next. The ultrasound tech–who I now reflexively hated–told me I didn’t have to look at the screen while she checked for, and found, the heartbeat. It felt so cruelly wrong that I had almost been hoping for the opposite. I wanted the suffering to be over, for us and my poor sick baby. The midwife understood my emotional state and emphasized that when abnormalities this severe are found this early, there is no chance of survival.
That weekend we went to have dinner at my parents’ house. We’re close with our families, and in a terrible piece of timing, my parents had been in France this whole time and dealing with our news on their vacation. This also meant seeing my sister-in-law who was also pregnant, with the same due date as mine. You read that right. She’s not the most empathetic person, and this was the first day of the next seven months she spent avoiding us.
The next day we arrived at the family planning clinic at a different big hospital in the area, first thing in the morning. The only other people in the waiting room were a small cluster of people centered on a very sad woman. They were obviously there for the same reasons we were–the pain bubbles around all of us were huge. We got in to see the doctor and asked if we had any options as far as anesthesia, because we had been told that today we’d decide with the doctor whether I’d be put to sleep. This seemed like news to the doctor, who kept talking about how it was less expensive to do it the way they usually did–local anesthesia only, awake the whole time. That was pretty much the last of our concerns, not to mention the fact that amazingly my insurance was going to cover it either way and we ended up paying $47. But we just numbly moved forward. It was happening. She flipped on the ultrasound and we saw our baby for the last time, laying peacefully in my womb, no heartbeat. I suppose we could have walked out right then, but it was over for our baby, and we wanted it all to be over so we could move on with our grief. Three hours later, the baby was no longer a part of me and we were on our way home, empty. The D&C was painful and traumatic. It couldn’t have taken long, but it felt like forever. The physical pain was a distraction, but so inconsequential to this pain I was positive was going to be lifelong.
Our terrible limbo was over, but this was only the beginning of our suffering. I write this now almost a year out from the nightmare, with a baby girl who appears to be healthy kicking in my belly, but the intervening months–and subsequent bonus chemical pregnancy just to show how very cruel life can be–have changed me forever. I will never have the innocence of getting pregnant and assuming I’m going to have a baby. I can still place myself right back in the pain and terror of the slog of grief.
by Band Back Together | Sep 11, 2010 | Baby Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, How To Help A Friend With Infertility, Infertility, Livng Through A Miscarriage, Loss, Miscarriage |
The first miscarriage was the one that destroyed me.
I lost four more babies; suffered a failed adoption; and barely saw my first born before she was yanked from between my legs – limp and drenched in a dark, life-sucking coat of meconium – then rushed to specialists trained to cheat death.
But that first loss, when my body cramped and convulsed and spit out a baby we so desperately wanted, is what shattered my heart. It robbed me of hope and started a years-long spiral into grief, despair and, ultimately, nothingness.
Exhausted by the anguish and terrified of feeling it again, I turned off as one loss became two. I numbed myself as two bled into three, and the doctors called me infertile. I became a shell and didn’t feel the fourth miscarriage or remember the fifth. I disassociated from my body when the doctors told me they intubated our first born and knocked her out after she had an eight-minute seizure. That person, sitting speechless and alone in the hospital room after they rushed our baby to a first-rate NICU at a different hospital in another city? That wasn’t me.
But it was.
I was 30 and married just a few months when I first got pregnant. I didn’t know much about babies, didn’t have friends who had them – or lost them. And I certainly never heard the statistic that as many as 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage.
We pored over baby name books at the bookstore and delighted my parents with the news. We heard the baby’s heartbeat and marked the due date on the calendar.
Then we saw blood. Just a spot. “It’s common in early pregnancy,” the nurse told us over the phone. “Try not to worry.” So, we didn’t. We believed her. We didn’t know enough not to. Idiots.
Then I bled more and they asked us, ever so calmly, to come in to the office. “Let’s just take a look.”
I sat in the passenger’s seat while Kent drove down the interstate and I tried not to think this was anything more than typical bleeding. Truthfully, though, I feared otherwise. Kent excitedly pulled an ultrasound photo from his suit pocket as we readied for the doctor; he couldn’t wait to compare the growth from the last appointment to now.
Ten years later, I can still see the inside of the car and the exit from the highway as it was that day that changed everything. I see the inside of the doctor’s office and Kent fiddling with the black and white photo.
“Put it away,” I snapped nervously. Sure he was jinxing the luck we needed.
And then, quick and impersonal as a business transaction at the bank, the doctor inserted the ultrasound wand, marked the top and bottom of the little bean with an X and explained that he didn’t see a heartbeat.
“Put your clothes back on and when I come back in we’ll talk,” he said.
We left the office in silence, a short, poorly-written book about miscarriage in our hands and an appointment for a D&C on the books. The tears started in the car and rushed with scary abandon once I crumbled on to the couch at home. I hid my face and howled into a pillow. Angry, terrified, lost.
Kent made phone calls to my family, talked to my boss. He tried to explain what we didn’t understand. How it happened. Why? When.
I agonized over the “when,” made myself sick flipping through the calendar as I tried to imagine what I did the day our baby died. Because, of course, I killed the baby. We went camping a few weekends before: did scrambling over rocks and hiking to exhaustion kill the baby? I spent too many hours at the newsroom: did I drown the baby with the stress of deadlines, interviews, and vapid politicians?
The baby fell out of me in horrifying pools of blood and fluid and mangled clots the night before the doctors planned a sterile procedure on a cold operating table. I was alone in the house, doubled over with cramps when the first gush sent me running to the toilet. Over the course of the night, Kent phoned the doctor several times to ask about the shocking volume of blood spilled in the tub, the toilet, the bed, on the floor.
We left the doctor’s office the next morning in silence. We stopped for bagels – because I was famished after losing so much blood – and ate without a word: chewed food, swallowed milk, stared past each other. Like robots, if robots could eat.
Kent went to work while I called in sick the next few days, stayed home and wept with little reprieve. I listened to angry, pulsing music at deafening volume to drown the mournful wails of my heart. And I wrote a letter to the baby I held in my belly but never felt in my arms.
“Today we were supposed to see you once again, all flickers and squirms and holy, miraculous life,” I wrote. “Instead, we shall say goodbye. We came to church to do it. We had hoped the baptismal waters would rush one Sunday morning in June as the priest held you aloft and the congregation craned to see your pink body and dark hair. God would welcome you then, we thought. We didn’t know He’d want to take you now…
“Now, we entrust you to Him. Though we wanted so desperately to hold you and touch you. Love you. Watch you. Clothe and bathe and feed you. Nibble your feet and tickle your ears. We couldn’t. But we did love you. And we will miss you. You can be sure.”
I signed the letter, then Kent did too and we traveled to church to leave a pink tulip at the base of the baptismal font, a symbolic gesture to signal the start of our healing.
Ten years later, I pulled the letter from the envelope and found a leaf from a Japanese maple and a helicopter seed tucked in with it. Signs of life lost, just like our baby.
I changed, but I am not healed.
by Band Back Together | Sep 7, 2010 | Infertility, Miscarriage |
In the fall of 2003, a couple of months after our first anniversary, my husband, Jordan, and I decided we wanted to try to have a baby. It had been my observation in my 24 years that when a couple made that decision, it was a simple matter of the Mommy discontinuing her pills, throwing away a diaphragm, or no longer getting that shot every three months. In some cases, the choice was taken away by an ineffective birth control method (Hey Baby Sis!) or the sheer stupidity of two teenagers in a back seat.
But not being ABLE to get pregnant? That thought never occurred to me. I mean, how hard could it be?
As it turns out, it can be very difficult. I think most people know that a certain hormonal cycle needs to take place for reproduction to be possible. When I came off my birth control, that cycle didn’t come back like it was supposed to, so off to the doctor I went.
My OB/GYN didn’t seem too concerned, just gave me progesterone to kick-start the cycle, then Clomid to stimulate ovulation. I know now that jumping the gun like that with no further investigation was a mistake. Hindsight and all that.
By this point, I of course had been online learning as much as I could about trying to conceive, or TTC as any of you message board veterans know it. I ended up with so much more knowledge about the reproductive process than I ever wanted. So I knew that I was extremely lucky to get pregnant on my very first round of Clomid.
Jordan and I were over the moon at the sight of that plus sign. We called our families and friends to share the good news.
Because I had used Clomid, my OB wanted me to have an early ultrasound so I went in at eight weeks pregnant. He mentioned that the baby was measuring on the small side and the heart rate was slower than it should be so he wanted me to come back in two weeks.
I tried not to worry. I just chalked it up to maybe being a few days off on calculating the gestational age. At ten weeks, I went back, this time with my husband.
“What’s conspicuous in its absence is the heartbeat.”
That’s what the doctor said to me as I was trying to register what I was (not) seeing on the screen. I’m sure you can guess how devastated we were. I hope you can because I can not come up with any words to describe it. If it helps you understand, know that now, six years later, I am trying to keep the tears from hitting the keyboard as I type.
After I was dressed again, the doctor gave me some options in his very calm, clinical voice. He told me he was on call through the next day so I could have a D&C done then, I could wait until he was on call again the next week, or I could wait and see if I miscarried on my own.
The thought of walking around for any amount of time knowing that my baby was gone was more than I could handle. So we scheduled the D&C for the next day, Thursday, April 22, 2004.
There’s not a lot of actual events from that day that I remember. All I remember are emotions. I don’t recall the ride to the hospital or the OB talking to me beforehand. I know that there was an emergency C-section taking place in the operating room I was supposed to go to, so they left me laying on a bed outside of the room for what seemed like hours.
All I could think was “Why can’t they go ahead and knock me out so I don’t have to sit here and think about what’s about to happen?” They finally came and got me. I was still awake when they strapped my arms down on each side and did all the prep work. When I woke up in recovery, I was already sobbing.
At least one of the nurses hugged me and tried to cheer me up the best she could. I honestly don’t remember anything after that. I don’t remember going home, talking to anyone, or even seeing Jordan, even though he drove me there and back.
As is usually the case, my doctor told us to wait a few months before trying again. So we did. The second round of Clomid also resulted in pregnancy. I got a positive test on a Monday. That Saturday, July 24, 2004, I woke up cramping and bleeding. I knew exactly what was going on so we headed to the ER. Obviously, at just five weeks, there was nothing they could do besides make sure it wasn’t ectopic or otherwise complicated.
The next week I went back to see my OB/GYN. At this point, he referred me to a Reproductive Endocrinologist (RE). The new doctor finally diagnosed me with PCOS, put me on some new meds, and performed a hysteroscopy to remove some polyps in my uterus. After all of that, he prescribed another round of Clomid. Again, I got pregnant right away. Remember the date of my second miscarriage? Well, on Sunday, July 24, 2005, Jordan and I brought home not one, but TWO beautiful, perfect, two-day-old baby girls.
I know that our journey to parenthood was not as dramatic or as lengthy as some. I’m thankful we didn’t have to do more, such as IVF, IUI, etc. But, just as in every life issue, knowing that someone out there has it worse than you doesn’t lessen your pain. There are women out there who have had 7 or more miscarriages. That fact certainly doesn’t stop the pain that is still inside me, even after so many years.
A mother is a mother whether her children are here on earth or waiting for her on the other side.
