It’s weird for me to be writing on this topic because it feels like just yesterday I was scouring the internet to find something similar to read while I was experiencing my miscarriages. I desperately needed to read and connect with other women’s stories to make my experience feel less lonely, but I struggled to find anything that helped me deal with the heartbreak of miscarriage. That’s why I decided to share what I went through with you – hoping that if you need this that it helps, even if it
Pregnancy #1
My first pregnancy was healthy. My husband and I stopped birth control with the thought that it would take a year to get pregnant, but we ended up pregnant before I even got a period. It was relatively uneventful, and I felt good for the pregnancy. I remember the excitement I felt when I got the positive stick and then feeling that same level of excitement for every appointment after that. I had zero worries about complications because I didn’t even know bad things could happen, nor had I heard of anyone else experiencing it.
Pregnancy #2
We started trying again after my daughter’s first birthday. We expected it to be as easy as the first time, but it took 8 months to get a positive pregnancy test. It was a faint line, but my friends told me that it still counts. I made a doctor appointment, but my OB was no longer there so I was assigned a new one. I went in for a blood test to ease my mind over the faint test and my HCG level came back low – like less than 34 low. I remember the frustration waiting for the result. My doctor office wasn’t calling me with the result. I waited nearly 3 days to hear from them, even after putting in a call to the nurse line and receptionist. They ordered another blood test and it wasn’t doubling. Nobody explained much to me about what that even meant, so I took to Google and read all kinds of bad things on websites and forums. I can’t tell you if I was more upset that it was happening or that I wasn’t getting any support from a doctor. I ended up going to the Emergency Room because I started bleeding. I was 4 weeks at that point. It wasn’t super heavy and barely even got on a pad, but I had blood every time I wiped. I didn’t have cramps either. I know this is TMI, but I wanted the gory details when I was trying to find other peoples’ stories, so I’m going to share it all in case you’re like me and want that, too. Since everything I read said only heavy bleeding and cramps meant miscarriage, I had a hope that I wasn’t miscarrying. I also read horror stories about ER doctors being terrible to people going through this. I was lucky enough to have an amazing ER doctor that I felt more supported by than my own OB at the time. They did all the tests and concluded that I had a threatened miscarriage/abortion. I don’t know about you, but that’s such a shitty term.
Threatened Miscarriage
They sent me home and instructed me to take it easy and follow up with my OB to do more blood work, so we could “wait and see.” Since this was a Friday, I didn’t talk to my OB till Monday and again, it took lots of phone calls before I even got ahold of a real person. They wouldn’t allow me to talk to a doctor on the phone since I didn’t have an appointment. More blood work happened over the next week and my HCG went down to 0. I bled from Friday to Tuesday and then it was done. It was never enough to fill a pad. I never had cramps or pain. By the following Friday they concluded I had officially miscarried. They told me we could start trying as soon as I got my next period for dating purposes.
OB Follow-Up
I went in to my originally scheduled 6-week new baby appointment and used it to talk to the OB about why the miscarriage could have happened. I shared that I had concerns of hormonal imbalances (important info I forgot to share – I went through postpartum depression after my daughter and was on an off antidepressants for a few months and also went on and off the birth control pill) and asked if they could look into that so we could rule it out. I was essentially told no, but she said they would check my progesterone the next time I got pregnant. I also asked about infertility. I was so worried because it took 10 months to get pregnant and I didn’t want to wait that long. She told me that I would not be able to have additional testing for infertility until I went a year without getting pregnant, and said that even though I miscarried, she was still happy that I was able to get pregnant. In hindsight, I know it’s a good sign, but in the moment, it felt like a slap in the face that she said she was happy I got pregnant.
Pregnancy #3
Fast forward a few months. I miscarried in August and found out I was pregnant again in November. The pee stick was uber dark this time, but I didn’t feel a lot of excitement. I called the OB (I got assigned to a new one) and she ordered the blood work. I was 3+ weeks and my HCG came back at 9,900! My progesterone was 2.1, which was below the “normal range” they provided me with. My best friend, Google, taught me that this was a very concerning set of numbers according to my dating. I called the nurse line to explain my concerns and speak with a doctor before my 6-week appointment, I was told they would call me back when they had the time to talk. It took 2 days to hear back and the doctor told me it’s not a big deal and I don’t need to worry about it. I felt so unsupported and unheard. I knew in my gut something was off, but I wasn’t feeling pain or bleeding so I was trying to be excited. I called a new office in a different city to get a new provider.
E.R. Visit
Five minutes after getting off the phone scheduling an appointment with a new provider later that week, I had to pull over in my car because I was having such bad cramps. I knew something was wrong and called my husband crying. I asked him to leave work and meet me at the E.R. They did another blood draw and my HCG only went up to 9,990 (only +90 from two days before when it should have doubled), so they knew something was wrong. They should be able to see a gestational sac and even a yolk sac/fetal pole with levels that high, but when they did the ultrasounds they couldn’t see anything.
I started having extreme pain on one side of my body. My blood pressure kept tanking from the moment of intake and then every few minutes once I was in a room. I almost passed out every time and from what my husband describes, I just looked gray. I had a full bladder from all the fluids they were pumping in me, but I wasn’t able to pee. I was full of morphine for the extreme pain. They thought it was ectopic but couldn’t see a thing on the ultrasounds. They considered kidney stones, but ultrasound showed nothing for that either.
I was so out of it, but I remember the rush of doctors and nurses in and out of my room and the whispers while they stood outside my door exchanging notes. My husband overheard the doctor tell another that they needed to get me to the operating room as soon as possible. Within minutes, a surgeon came in and told me that I would die if she didn’t operate right now. My abdomen was filling with blood and they couldn’t confirm what was wrong, but they strongly suspected ruptured ectopic.
Abdominal Ectopic
The surgery took three times as long as normal because they found the baby attached to an abdominal cavity between my colon and vagina. Somehow, this child fell out of my tubes/uterus and implanted itself in my abdomen. Ectopic (or tubal) pregnancies occur in 1% of pregnancies from what I’m told, but an abdominal ectopic occurs in 1% of the 1% of ectopic. Pretty crazy and pretty rare. It had ruptured and that’s what caused the bleeding. The good news was she was able to check all my lady parts and they looked perfect. She only needed to do the surgery laparoscopically, so I just have three tiny scars and the recovery was not bad. I was couch-ridden for a couple days, then sore for about a week. I still took it easy and refrained from exercised for the recommended 6 weeks, but I felt like myself after about a week and a half. We were instructed to wait to get pregnant again until we tracked my HCG levels down to 0.
Pregnancy #4
I went on a 3-week trip over Christmas and before I left my HCG was down to 50. I didn’t get any blood drawn during the 3-weeks and I even got my first period since the surgery. I assumed this meant I was at 0 so my husband and I did the deed in January without protection. We found out we were pregnant 2 weeks later and I called my doctor. It was super stressful because she explained that you can still get a period even if you aren’t down to 0 and they were very concerned that I had old tissue that implanted again and my body could be faking a new pregnancy. I did a few blood draws that were the appropriate levels for my timing and were doubling every 2 days. Good news. Then I had a 5-week ultrasound to check where the gestational sac was. It was in the uterus. Good. Then I had to wait a grueling 3 weeks for another ultrasound to see if we had a heartbeat. We did. Good. It was such a waiting game.
Worries
Peeing on a stick will probably never be exciting for me again. Now that I know all the things that can go wrong, I think I’ll always have an anxiety attached to the “what-if” things. My heart actually pounded visibly, and I was sweating so much during the two ultrasounds I had, so scared that we wouldn’t see a baby or a heartbeat. There was zero excitement over these appointments, just worry. I have been praying that I still get to be excited for this baby and feel what I felt for my first. I’m happy to share that after the last ultrasound, it feels like I can breathe again. I know things can still go wrong, but to see my baby’s heartbeat brought so much peace. We are celebrating and dreaming of what he/she will be like, thinking of names and already talking about ideas for the nursery.
Relating
I know going through a miscarriage is hard. Until you’ve been through it, you will never truly understand what it feels like. I had so many well-wishers say things like “your time will come” or “at least it happened early on” and it made me so angry. (an article on what to say and what not to say) I was hurt and felt like they didn’t care. I felt attached to my two babies, even though they left me so early and some comments made me feel stupid for getting attached. I know that my time will come, but that felt like it took away from the sadness I felt in the moment, almost making it feel invalid in a way. I know that nobody intended pain when they made these comments, and I’m not bitter about them now, but I share this because if you know someone miscarrying, please don’t say things like this. All I needed to hear was that I was cared for and loved and that my babies were loved. If you want to help someone through a miscarriage, send a meal or a coffee. Come clean their house while they recovery from surgery. Even be open to talking about the baby if that’s what mom wants to do. Just don’t point out a “silver lining” of it.
Hope
And sadly, I know miscarriage can take away from the beautiful, amazing parts of a good, healthy pregnancy. I want to leave you with this. There will be hope again. There will be joy. While I truly pray that it comes in the form of a healthy pregnancy, the honest truth is that it might not. You may need to find another way to grow your family and it will be okay if that’s what you need to do. You just need to allow yourself to feel that whenever that feels appropriate to you. For me it was once I saw a heartbeat. For some, it might be making it to 12 weeks. For others it might be something else not even pregnancy related. But I want to challenge you not to rob yourself the joy of dreaming of your little one’s life before they come into the world. And if it happens again, at least that little one felt your love and joy before they left this world.
- The Heartbreak of Miscarriage - April 4, 2019
