I had a miscarriage at 6 weeks in July of 2012. It was the day before my grandpa died and a
few days before we lost our car as well.
Needless to say it was an eventful few days. For the sake of this blog I will only be
telling the things that happened with the miscarriage. I had been having the pains since the
beginning of the pregnancy pretty much.
They gradually got worse and worse.
But being the person that I am, I thought that I just needed to deal
with it. I didn’t have an OBGYN yet and
my insurance was from California and would only cover ER visits in Utah. I didn’t know what to do about it so I just
kept trying to deal with it. Over the next few weeks the pains got worse
and worse. I couldn’t walk or talk or
even move at all through them. They came
and went. They seemed to pass through
me, and I wondered what kidney stones felt like, because it did feel like a
huge rock in my stomach was moving through a tiny tube or something.
The day it was the hardest Andrew and I looked up things about miscarriages
and I got very emotional about it. It
wasn’t till later in the day when I had blood on my underwear that I became
hysterical. We looked up on the internet
about severe lower abdominal pains and it said that if it was accompanied by
blood then it was most likely a miscarriage.
Right when I saw those words, I broke.
I cried and cried and sobbed and we didn’t even know yet that it was for
sure. I was almost inconsolable. Andrew held me in his arms and he seemed
confused and concerned. He was
calculating the situation and trying to figure out what would be best to do. I had been in touch with my mom constantly when we first started seeing the signs. She helped us decide that we did need to go to the emergency room. We went right then, even
though it was barely any blood. We were
there for four hours. I had an
ultrasound in a dark, dark room at 2:30 am. Andrew had to sit far away from me as I laid
there on this gurney staring up at the ceiling.
It was there where they saw the flicker of light- and they said it was
the heartbeat! We saw it fluttering and
we were so relieved. They said things
looked okay and that the blood could be a few different things. On that day our baby looked safe and I
thought I had overreacted. They told me
to ‘take it easy.’ The pain persisted
when we got home, but since the doctors had said everything was fine I took
that as a confirmation that, yes, I just needed to bear through it, it wasn’t
just me being stubborn anymore.
My sister Julia and her husband Lester came to stay the night the
next day on there way through town. The
pain was still there, getting worse every time and I was still bleeding. We
ate dinner but while we played games afterwards I couldn’t handle the pain
anymore and I noticed that I was bleeding more than a normal period for
me. I told them to continue playing and
went into the room and called the Kaiser advice nurse. While I was in there on hold I was so
confused. We saw the heartbeat the day
before. If our baby was healthy why was
this happening? At this point I still
didn’t think it could really be a miscarriage.
The nurse on the phone said that it sounded like I was miscarriage-ing
and she told me what to look for. She told
me what it would look like if I ‘passed tissue,’ she said it would look like uncooked
hamburger for lack of a better description. She said that it would now just be a waiting
game and that I should go into the emergency room again if I could not stand
the pain. But I wanted to endure
it. I don’t know why, maybe it was
psychological. Maybe I believed that if
I could get through it the baby would be able to also. If I could take this pain then the baby would
be okay. That night I couldn’t even sleep
through the pain. I tried lamaze
breathing and I tried groaning through it.
The next day my sister and her husband had to get on the road
again. We called my other sister,
Mariah, and asked her to come help us with housework and meals, so Andrew could
go back to work. Andrew insisted that I
stay in the bed. He set me up with
pillows and snacks, books, movies, journals and a computer. My sister came that evening, Thursday, with
plans to stay through the whole weekend.
She and Andrew went to the library to get me some movies to watch on
Saturday. While they were gone I already
was having a hard time taking it easy.
Surprisingly the pain had gone away almost completely so I was up doing
a few things that were not too strenuous.
It was then that I felt a different kind of pain all of sudden. It felt like a snap inside me. A horribly painful twinge. It happened a few more times, but I tried again
to just bear through it. I was actually
feeling pretty good emotionally. I
wasn’t crying. I went to the bathroom
and was not thinking about it until I was finishing. And then I saw it. I had the ‘tissue’ on the toilet paper in my
hand.
I know that this may not be normal to write about every detail of
this kind of an experience. But I’ve
decided that personally I want to remember the details. Because now that this experience is truly a
part of me, who I am, I feel like I need to be able to look back at it…all of
it if I ever am going to heal from it. I
know myself. And I know that I don’t
want to forget any part of my experience with this baby.
When Mariah and Andrew came home from the library they found me in
the bed sobbing once again. I told them
what had happened and we got in the car and went back to the ER. I could barely talk to the check-in nurse
about why I was there, what my emergency was.
We took a seat in the waiting area all of us together. While Andrew and I sat next to each other he
expressed his emotions about it. It was
his turn after all he had done to comfort me. I tried to be there for him for a
change.
I had a second ultrasound and a vaginal one as well while Mariah
waited in the lobby. This time in the
same dark room as before Andrew asked for, almost demanded, a chair so he could
sit right close to me holding my hand during it. Awhile later when we were back in the normal
hospital room the doctor came in and said that they had found nothing. For a split second I thought he was saying
that they had found nothing wrong with the baby and I felt such a wave of
relief and amazement. The whole time I
did not believe that it could really be a miscarriage. Then all at once I realized what he was
saying as he kept talking. When he said
they had found nothing he meant that everything had passed and my uterus was
completely clean. Tears instantly filled
my eyes but didn’t spill out. The doctor
expressed his sympathy told us briefly about his personal experience with
miscarriages in his life. His words were
helpful and kind, but I had no idea how I felt.
It was like I was numb. Andrew
and I were pretty quiet as we packed up and were discharged, both tired and
hungry because we hadn’t eaten. We got Mariah out of the lobby where she had been sadly waiting by
herself. She didn’t know what the
outcome was. And we didn’t tell her
until in the parking lot she asked. As
we walked out of the air-conditioned building into the heat I felt it. The weight of it all. The extreme sadness I was feeling. I remember to answer her question I just
said, ‘it’s over’ as we walked towards the car and that’s when the emotions
began to spill. Because it was just
over. Everything was over. The trauma of being in the ER was over. And the pregnancy was over. It was just over. It was the relief of finally knowing and not
having to wonder and worry. But it was
first and foremost the devastation of the plain fact that this little life was
just gone. Our baby was just not coming
anymore.
Thinking about how quickly everything went with the baby made me
feel so incomplete. I felt like it all
went so fast. One minute I had a baby in
me. The next minute I didn’t. I remember how excruciating the physical pain
was but I don’t remember WHEN it happened.
Because we’ll never know exactly when it happened. One day we saw the heart beat of our baby. Two days later there was no sign that I had
ever even been pregnant. Overall it was
a very, very hard thing for me to accept and understand. Even now, a year and a half later sitting
here with my 3 month old daughter in my lap, I still don’t fully understand why
it had to happen the way it did. There
are a lot of different interpretations and I believe someday we may know
why. I have faith in God’s plan and I
have no doubt that He takes care of it all.
I think most people who knew about the miscarriage at the time just had
no idea what to say to us. Some people would tell us about others who
have gone through worse things. Others would awkwardly say, "Do you
um...want a hug?" Some people told us not to worry because we will
have other kids and have a big family someday. I know people didn't really
mean it when they said 'don't worry about it,' but to me those words made it
sound like it was something that didn't last long enough to be important. I saw a quote soon afterwards that summed up
how I was feeling: “A baby fills a place in your heart you never knew was
empty.” Well we knew it was empty now
and we could feel the hole. During the
miscarriage we started filling that empty space, and afterwards we could feel
the emptiness even more.
After it all happened I went through a period of time where I was very
bitter about it. I was seeing so many
other girls announcing their pregnancies and I felt like it was so unfair. I was driving myself crazy. I feel like the hardest thing about it was how
confused I felt. Sometimes I just wanted
to hit something. Other times I just
wanted to sleep forever to get away from it all. I wrote in my journal a lot. I actually started typing my journal because
I felt like my hand couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the emotions
that poured out. Writing was very
therapeutic for me and it’s something I would suggest to you if you’ve gone
through one and don’t know what to do with your feelings. I look back now and am actually surprised at
how angry some of my entries were. Sometimes
I get pretty emotional all over again when I read them. But I’m glad I did it because I know it
helped me heal from the experience little by little. I felt so much love and support from my parents, siblings, in-laws, friends, and other family. It meant so much to me.
I believe that there is a purpose for these trials we go through and that
this experience was not lost on us or on God.
I know that people have gone through so much worse. But it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t hard for
us. He knows that it was hard and He
will never discount this tragedy. God’s
love is so much more than ours, so who would understand it better? No one understands it better than He. He will make the sadness we feel and the
growing we do from this experience count towards our salvation. It is not lost. It is not in vain. I’ve found that time really does make all the difference when it comes to healing. And our life now is living proof that there is
hope for the future even after such a hard experience. It was a part of life that we grew and learned so much from and will always remember. But that's just it- it was a part of life. Just one part. And I know there are a lot of good things to come.
Ask me any questions about my
experience. I would love to answer them.
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