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- (mis)Adventures in Reproduction: Diagnosing Bad Luck
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- (mis)Adventures in Reproduction: An Update
- Expecting Great Things: A Toast to the End of 2010
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- 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 ‘miscarriage’
Questions After Miscarriage: When do we try again?
It was a long cold winter and everyone must have been baby-dancing at the same time because there are pregnant women everywhere! And Facebook posts and e-mails announcing pregnancies. And baby showers (I personally witnessed three in the past week). It’s an epidemic.
There are reminders everywhere of what we’ve lost. The reality of miscarriage is that even after the physical process ends, the emotional recovery goes on. Every time I see a pregnant woman, or hear a commercial on the radio for daycare, or read an e-mail from a friend announcing her pregnancy, I’m sad. I think, “That should be me.”
I’ve erased what milestones I had marked in pencil on my calendars and scratched through the ones in pen. Remarkably, the dates are still in my head. I wish my brain were like a VCR tape so I could take a gigantic magnet to my head and erase my memory from the past couple of months.
My mom suggested I set new milestones even if they’re just daily or weekly ones like one week without crying or two weeks without bleeding. In case you’re curious, I’ve only ever made it to three days without crying. Happily though, I’ve graduated to panty-liners instead of pads so I think I’m on my way to reaching at least one milestone.
Then there are the milestones set by my doctor: “We always recommend you have three normal cycles before trying again.” Note she didn’t say three months. It could be four or five or six months before I have three normal cycles.
From chatting with women on pregnancy loss message boards, opinions on when to conceive after a miscarriage are varied and dependent on each woman’s unique loss experience. The reason my doctor recommended waiting three months is to give my body time to reset its hormones and to allow my uterus to fully recover. She said there is a slightly higher risk of a miscarriage because of my last experience and that waiting will give me a better chance of having an uncomplicated pregnancy the next time.
So when should we try again? We’re undecided about whether to take the doctor’s advice or throw caution to the wind and see what happens. It’s an impossible choice really. If we take the doctor’s advice and I have another miscarriage, I’ll think, “We waited and it happened again. What was the point?” And if we don’t wait and have another miscarriage I’ll think, “We should have waited! We ignored the doctor’s advice and look what happened!”
Yes, a truly impossible choice and one I hope I won’t dwell on. I hope that when the time is right, we’ll know in our hearts. That means I’m going to have to turn off my brain and trust my body, trust God, and trust the process. It’s like contemporary philosopher Alexandra Stoddard says, “Slow down; calm down. Don’t worry. Don’t hurry. Trust the process.”
Related Podcasts
It Finally Happened: Misoprostal Induced Miscarriage
Just wanted to give a quick update: The last time I wrote, the first dose of Misoprostal didn’t appear to be working. I took the second dose and my experience with the second dose was more consistent, though not entirely, with what was described by my OB. She said something like “Within four hours, you will start cramping and bleeding. Both these things will get progressively worse and you can expect to expel the contents of the uterus within 24 hours.”
It’s true that within four hours of the second dose, I started cramping and bleeding. In fact, it was within that time that I decided if I am ever blessed to give birth, I WILL be having an epidural. Yes. The cramps were that strong and came in waves…like contractions.
The pain slowly subsided over the course of the night and by the morning, I was feeling a little crampy, but not horrible. I actually felt OK until nearly 48 hours later – that’s when I passed the gestational sac. If you’ve been through this, you know that the moments preceding this one are fairly painful. There I was, hanging out with my husband a wave of cramps washed over me. Then, just like that, it was over. I had read that after you pass the sac, the cramps subside almost immediately and I found that to be true so I thought I was in the clear and I was relieved to be starting my physical recovery.
The next day at work was gloriously busy and I was grateful to be so occupied. Same thing the following day until around 4:30. It was at that time that I had horrific cramps and the sudden urge to use the bathroom. Dizzy and sweating bullets, I struggled to get myself into a stall. Just as I landed on the cold seat a gush of fluid splashed in toilet and I doubled over with a contraction.
I sat there for 25 minutes alternating between long contractions and a few short seconds to catch my breath and prepare for the next one. What a strange time it was. I was in the throes of a miscarriage in a public restroom. Never saw that one coming!
Thankfully, I had my Blackberry and was able to get a hold of my manager (also a trusted friend) and get help. She was able to get me out of the building and off to my mom’s house which is, literally, across the street. From there, my mom who happens to be a nurse, took over caring for me.
After this physical experience, I have a hard time believing there could possibly be more…Of course, that’s what I believed a few days ago so who knows. I will keep you posted.
Life After Miscarriage: Statistics Aren’t Much Comfort Anymore
Eighty-four percent of people love statistics.
OK. I made that one up; it’s just that this whole pregnancy and miscarriage thing has a lot of statistics associated with it. For example, Pea in the Podcast recently posted “The latest stats show over 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriages in the first trimester.”
If this is true then as a newly pregnant woman you quickly do the math and figure, “Whew. That means that more than 75% of pregnancies go beyond the first trimester.”
Or you might think, as I did, “OK – 100 women in a room and only 25, if not fewer, of them will have a miscarriage. Chances are, it’s not going to be me.” And then it is.
It happened to me and I can’t get past that. It happened to me. I am one of those 25 unfortunate women. How can that be? That’s what I spend my free time thinking about and ironically enough, it leads me to wonder what my odds are of this happening again.
My doctor tried to reassure me that a very large percent of women who miscarry with their first pregnancy go on to have a normal pregnancy and healthy baby in their next pregnancy. “Odds are…” she said. Yes. And the odds that I would miscarry were so low.
But it happened. And it happened to me.
So what’s a girl to believe? I can’t answer that question but I do know, as author Elizabeth McCracken writes in her book An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination, “Once you’re on the losing side of great odds, you’ll never feel comforted by statistics again.” That’s something I believe.
Related Podcasts:
Life After a Miscarriage: Finding Clarity On A Leather Couch
My favorite time of day is the five seconds between when I wake up and when my brain becomes aware of reality. If I’m lucky, I’ll make it to ten seconds before the haze of what the day will hold lifts and I’m wide awake with the choice to lay in bed and stare at the ceiling, or get up, pull myself together and get on with the day.
It’s been just a few days since we found out that the baby had no heartbeat; three days to be exact. When I asked my husband how long he thought it would take for us to start to feel better he said, “Well, I use the rule of 1 day for every month you were involved.” According to his theory, we’d feel better today.
I guess I feel better than I have for the past two days. Using tears as a marker, I cried only once today and it wasn’t a heaving, sobbing, snot running out of my nose cry. It was a much more subtle misty-eyed cry, a cry of acceptance that life goes on and so we must as well.
I decided to take advantage of my employer’s participation in a program that provides psychological counseling free of charge up to six times a year. I called to make the appointment and it was the first time I used the word ‘miscarriage’ in reference to myself. It was painful to say and even more painful to try to explain that I hadn’t yet had a miscarriage but was going to in the near future. “No, I’m not worried it’s going to happen. It IS going to happen.” Sigh.
Sitting on the psychologist’s couch I had two realizations: One–I am in the wrong profession. This woman sat with me for an hour as I iterated my innermost feelings, frustrations, and fears. She asked about four questions in the course of an hour and I talked. Two–Going to a psychologist is highly underrated. I said things to her that I had been thinking but unable to articulate to anyone because I thought they would sound ridiculous. She never commented or judged. She simply asked questions that led me down a path where I was finally able to admit to myself that my feelings are mostly ones of frustration.
When I commit to something, I’m in 100 percent. And so it was with this pregnancy. From the moment we made the decision to start a family to the weeks and days I waited to take a pregnancy test, to the first, and second, and third positive, I was fully committed and invested in the idea of being pregnant and having a baby. And then from the first appointment with the OB coordinator to the moment I started spotting, to the first time we saw the baby on ultrasound, I was obsessed with sustaining the pregnancy and convinced that statistically-speaking, IT wouldn’t happen to me.
In my head, I had already made the transition from yuppie to mommy and was committed to what that future held. I had already started divesting myself from work and being more committed to my home life – a real change from being an over-achieving work-a-holic. Most importantly, I had made peace with those two things and was excited about starting a new chapter of my life.
Now that there is no pregnancy, what I can’t get my mind around is that I have nothing I am 100 percent committed to and invested in. I had all my eggs in one basket and the basket is gone, at least that’s the way I feel.
I have a follow-up appointment with psychologist on April 16. That would have been the end of my first trimester. I know that sometime between now and then I will naturally, or with the help of medication, miscarry. What I’m hoping is that by the time these two things happen, I can find something else to be committed to, even if it’s committing to simply relaxing and being kind to myself.
Related Podcasts:
The End of This Road: Dealing With Miscarriage
It’s funny how you can look back on situations and realize that all along something was just not right. Inisde, I think I knew that this pregnancy would not make it out of the first trimester and I think that’s why I had so much anxiety about it. Of course, I was praying that I was just paranoid and nuerotic and that everything would be fine. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. I had my follow-up ultrasound today and no heartbeat could be detected.
As I sit and write this, it hardly seems like I’m writing about myself, but rather, a woman whose experiences I’ve objectively observed and reported on for the past 8 weeks. “The woman, 29, got off the examination table as emotionless as she got on. She slowly dressed and waited to feel something, sadness, emptiness, remorse; instead, she felt nothing.”
I don’t know what to feel. Aren’t there stages of grief? I think denial is near the top. I’m not going to lie, the thought has crossed my mind that the ultrasound was wrong, that my uterus is tilted, that the detector that picks up sound is broken. I know in my heart none of that is true. And I know that I have at least several more stages of grief to go through.
I cried in my mom’s arms (my husband is in California on a business trip), more out of a sense of “Now what?” than anything else. The doctor who spoke with me today said it could take up to three or four weeks to have this miscarriage naturally. She explained how it would happen and physically, what I would feel. She said that if it doesn’t happen soon enough for me, I can take a pill to induce it. I find this option slightly strange, almost wrong but it’s not one I’m ruling out because if there is one thing that’s worse than finding out your baby doesn’t have a heartbeat, it’s waiting weeks for the miscarriage to happen naturally.
I want to thank everyone for following my journal. And I want to thank you for all the kind comments and prayers you have sent my way. They meant more to me than you can know. I don’t know what the future holds for me, but as one reader put it, hopefully this will be a blip on the radar to motherhood.
Related Podcasts:
Worry with a capital W…
It started as a normal workday except that I wasn’t drinking my usual cup of coffee. I decided to give up caffeine. That’s what makes this story all the more ironic. I just finished chatting with a colleague when I realized I was about to pee my pants. I hightailed it to the bathroom, dropped the drawers and that’s when I saw it: unmistakable brown discharge. I sat there for a minute staring, filing through my mental cabinet of stored information: discharge, miscarriage, symptoms, signs, blood, brown, red, pink, gray, clotting, tissue, cramping, early, common, warning, doctor.
In my head, I knew I had to call my doctor but not before I called my mom, a nurse, and my best friend who I knew would let me sob over the phone before directing me to think like a reasonable, rational woman and call the OB.
When I finally did call the OB, I was met with the annoying automated menu of choices. “To schedule or cancel an appointment, press one. To speak with a doctor or a nurse or for prescription refills, press two. If this is an emergency, go to the emergency room.” I pressed the correct number to get to my doctor and was greeted by a message saying “the doctor and her staff are not in the office today. Press one to leave a message for the on-call doctor.”
So I pressed one and left this quivering message with my name and birthday and a description of what had just happened.
It took 20 very long minutes to get a phone call back but I was scheduled in for an ultrasound within the next two hours. I immediately called my husband who left work to meet me at the doctor’s office.
While we sat in the office waiting, I looked around at the other women, all obviously pregnant and I wondered if this was the end of our road. I looked at my husband and said, “You know what’s going to happen, right? They’re going to do an ultrasound and we need to be prepared to not see a heartbeat.”
By the time we were called back, I was numb. I undressed from the waist down and the technician came in and turned off the lights and went to work.
Within seconds, we were able to hear a beautiful heartbeat – about 152 beats per minute. My husband, squeezing my hand, leaned over and kissed me as I choked back tears. “A heartbeat. That’s good, right?” The technician confirmed it was very good and went back to work gathering measurements and not saying anything else.
After what was probably only 10 minutes or so, she said something about everything looking good and no obvious cause for bleeding BUT…
At this point, I held my breath and waited to hear the bad news. She went on to explain that the yolk sac (what is that anyway?), looked bigger than it should at this stage and, that according to my last period, I should be 8 weeks and 3 days but the embryo was measuring at 7 weeks and 3 days. “No big deal,” she said. “You probably just ovulated late and that’s why the date is off. I’m sure the doctor will want you to come in next week for an ultrasound. Let me go show her these images and I’ll be back.” The technician’s last words before confirming that the doctor did want me back in a week were, “I’ve seen this go both ways. Fifty percent of the time it results in a normal pregnancy and the other fifty it ends in miscarriage.”
And that’s what we were left with. My yolk sac is bigger than is should be and the baby is smaller than expected and my chances of miscarriage are at fifty percent.
I’m sure you can guess how the rest of the day went. I never went back to work. I went home and changed into pajamas and crawled in bed with my laptop. My internet search for enlarged yolk sac returned results like “embryonic demise” and “probable miscarriage.” I sobbed and slept, sobbed and sobbed some more. My husband held me and tried to comfort me, though I’m sure he was feeling as much grief. My mom came over just to sit with me and together, we tried to make sense of what we’ll never be able to make sense of.
The only thing I know for sure right now is that our baby has a heartbeat and that has to count for something. I pray that Monday’s appointment will bring good news and I’ll laugh with my husband and say, “All that worry for nothing.” Until then, we wait with a capital W.
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