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- (mis)Adventures in Reproduction: Diagnosing Bad Luck
- Simon Says “Let’s Stop Climate Change”
- (mis)Adventures in Reproduction: An Update
- Expecting Great Things: A Toast to the End of 2010
- Holiday Gifts for the TTC Gal in Your Life
- Holiday Musings from an Infertile
- Life After Miscarriage: How does this story end?
- Life After Miscarriage: Who is that in the mirror?
- Life After Miscarriage: The Place Where Pain & Grief Meet Closure
- Life After Miscarriage: Recovering from Surgery and More
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Posts Tagged ‘life after miscarriage’
Life After Miscarriage: Reminders In The Mail
Some how, some way, Target found out I was pregnant. And so did Gerber Life, and American Baby Magazine, and Similac. Unfortunately, none of them got the memo that I’m not longer pregnant. My trip to the mailbox has become a daily reminder of that I should be getting ready to have a baby, not going to wine tastings and participating in adventure sports (I went whitewater kayaking a few weeks ago).
I got a huge ‘Celebrate Baby’ Target catalog today with a coupon that says “Free $20 gift card.” All I have to do is take the coupon and a printout of my registry to Guest Service at any Target store and they will give me a $20 gift card. Amazing! Oh what to do, what to do. Am I really going to pass up a $20 gift card when all I have to do is register for baby stuff?
This makes me wonder about registries. Could I start a baby registry and register for things that aren’t baby-related? What are the registry restrictions? I think at this point, I would register for the box of wine and a 500-count bottle of ibuprofen to get me through picking up the mail for the next several months. Then again, I could use the $20 gift card to buy a couple cheapie home pregnancy tests for future use.
What I really want to know is how do I get more of these catalogs with gift card offers on the back? I could create several registries under pseudonyms and rack up well over $100 in gift cards. This would take a little more work though. I’d probably have to monitor the customer service counter at Target for a few weeks to make sure I wasn’t always hitting the same guest services employee. More than one registry when I am so obviously not pregnant would probably raise a few eyebrows.
The Gerber Life Insurance Company offer isn’t nearly as much fun. The only thing I would actually get from participating in this offer is a Certificate of Welcome. I actually have to fill out an application for my child though I don’t actually have to send any money now. There are big bold letters telling me “Send No Money!” My conscious won’t allow me to make up a name and date of birth, though it would be fun to write a prankster name like Carrie Oekey (karaoke).
Now American Baby magazine is actually very informative. I just read an article titled, “What No One Will Tell You About Being a Mom (But We Will!)” (June 2010) It scared the crap out of me. Heck, it actually made me a little happy I’m not pregnant. The article featured topics that start with “Why didn’t anyone tell me…” and end with “deafening howls can come out of such a tiny creature?” And “that no one mothers the mommy?” Or my personal favorite, “that discomfort does not end with childbirth?” Now this is the type of thing I don’t mind getting in the mail.
Hopefully you all understand that I’ve developed quite a snarky sense of humor from this experience. Oh wait. I had that before this experience. Anyway…I suppose it’s a real sign of healing that rather than crying when I see the Target Baby catalog, my first thought is how to go about sticking it to Target and getting that $20 gift card!
Life After Miscarriage: Lessons Learned
I’ve been feeling much better lately. Really, I have.
I’ve been thinking about what I learned from this whole experience and I’ve come up with a few things:
Grief is like a tsunami. It comes suddenly and in huge waves. It completely drowns the heart and mind and then it recedes, slowly. Eventually, things get back to normal but it takes time and you can’t rush it. And that takes me to my next learn.
Time really does heal. Yeah. It’s cliché and I wouldn’t have believed you two months ago if you would have said I would feel like myself in just eight short weeks. But I do. I think the catch here is that you have to be willing to heal and, for me that meant finding out that you have to…
Trust the process. I’m still working on this one. Pregnancy is a forty-week process. Miscarriage is a process. The monthly menstrual cycle is a process. Grief is a process. Healing is a process. I’ve learned I can’t rush any of it. I’ve tried and it just leads to more anxiety. Anxiety leads to suffering and here’s what I’ve learned about suffering…
Suffering is a choice. After this experience, I can distinguish between grief and suffering. Grief is what you feel when you lose something that meant a lot. Suffering is becoming a prisoner to grief. I can grieve my loss but I will not suffer from it or because of it because I deserve more.
If a woman in my life ever experiences a miscarriage, these are the things I would tell her. She wouldn’t believe me, of course, because it’s not something you can believe until you go through the process yourself. But I would tell her anyway because when you go through a miscarriage, you want to know that it will get better even when you simply can’t imagine anything but the pain of the loss.
While I’m sad I had to learn these lessons in this way, I’m grateful that I’ve been able to come away with something and I’m proud to say that I survived.
Life After Miscarriage: Eight Weeks Not Pregnant
Early June will mark 8 weeks since my miscarriage. Eight weeks was how long my baby lived inside of me. In eight weeks, nearly all the organs in my baby’s body had started forming. Its eye lids were sealing shut. It had hands and arms, and legs. It had a beating heart. And then, it was gone.
So here I am, 8 weeks not-pregnant. It’s almost like a dream; something that I’m sure and certain seemed so real but there’s nothing that exists to prove it to me. I would question whether it all happened, but the empty place in my heart tells me it did.
My best friend is well into the second trimester of her pregnancy. She is exactly where I would have been. She sent me a message the other day after hearing her baby’s heartbeat for the first time. When I opened the message I simultaneously had two reactions. The first was one of excitement for her; her first true sign that life exists inside. The other reaction was one of sheer shock.
Since the miscarriage, it hadn’t occurred to me that pregnancy ends in anything other than a miscarriage and here, in my life, written in a text message on my phone, was an example of how it does.
That was a confronting moment and I spent a few seconds whimpering and trying to stop my face from contorting into the expression that ends with tears and gasping.
I couldn’t do it. I cried on my husband’s shoulder, soaking it with tears and begged him to help me understand why. “Why not us? Why not our baby’s heartbeat? Why did this happen?”
He didn’t have an answer. No one does and believe me I’ve asked: doctors, nurses, friends, and yes, God. The same thing I hear over, and over, and over again is “Everything happens for a reason.”
OK. I can buy it. I get it. It makes sense. But what’s the reason it happened to us? Answer me that and should I be fortunate enough to have a successful pregnancy, I’ll name my firstborn after you.
Choices After a Miscarriage: D&C or Misoprostol?
It’s amazing how time flies when you’re not pregnant. The nine weeks I was pregnant passed with painstaking slowness; life after a miscarriage during the past two weeks, on the other hand, went by in a blur. I’ve been so busy with trying to stay busy, trying not to think, trying to move on with my life. There’s been one thing holding me back: my inability to naturally miscarry.
I had an appointment with the doctor a few days ago. She confirmed the missed miscarriage and offered me the option to continue to wait, to take a dose of Misoprostol, a drug to induce contractions, or to schedule a dilation and curettage procedure, (or D&C). Because I’ve been waiting for two weeks, I opted for the Misoprostol.
Deciding to take this drug was not an easy thing to do and so I planned nearly every detail of how I was going to handle the experience.
My husband and I would take the dog to my parents’ house. On the way home, we would pick up the prescription for Misoprostal and the one for Vicodin. Then, we would go to one of our favorite restaurants, a wine and tapas bar. After dinner, we would go home and watch some TV and at bedtime, I would swallow the pills and wake up the next morning in the throws of a miscarriage.
Everything went according to plan…until morning…Dinner was wonderful. I ate a trifecta of foods that are off limits during pregnancy: soft imported cheese, fresh salami, and wine. We topped off the meal with some crème brule and then headed home to watch the latest episode of Lost.
By 11:30 I could hardly keep my eyes open so I went upstairs and opened the brown pharmacy bottle. Three pills. I held them in my hand and couldn’t believe how hard it was to put them in my mouth. After several minutes of hesitation, I tossed them back and crawled into bed.
At 2:30 a.m., I was still awake, my heart racing with nerves and my mind with thoughts about when it was going to start and how much it would hurt. I decided to head off the pain with some nighttime pain reliever.
I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and didn’t feel anything. I went to the bathroom and noted some light spotting but nothing like what the doctor described. Throughout the day, I continued to lightly spot but had no cramps or heavy bleeding. At 2:30 p.m. I called the doctor and described what had happened so far. The doctor prescribed a second dose of the medication and told me to call in 48 hours if there is no change. If that’s the case, I will have to schedule a D&C.
I don’t know how long this is going to drag on and what I want more than anything in the whole wide world is closure to this chapter so we can start a new one. My husband says every now and then he slips into this space where he wonders how our life would be different this very moment if none of this happened. I can’t help but wonder the same thing. What would the pregnant us be doing? Would we be looking at nursery furniture? Counting down the days until we spilled the beans? Going out to eat and sighing because the wine list looks so good, but beaming because I’d rather be pregnant than drink wine?
Realistically, the pregnant me wouldn’t be doing anything drastically different than the not-pregnant me but that doesn’t stop us from wondering and wishing things were different.
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