It was a Friday, less than two weeks ago, when we found out that our family member S. had tried to kill herself the night before. I cried, and later we called her. After work I went shopping for something to wear to a wedding that we were going to attend that Sunday (Memorial Day weekend), and every so often it would hit me, and tears would spring up in my eyes. I was scared for her, worried about her, and a little bit angry with her. Mostly I thought about how I loved her. S. does not live nearby, so we haven't seen her yet since the attempt; we weren't there to sit in the hospital where she had spent Thursday night, and we are not close enough to share in the caretaking, to spend the night or fix meals or drop by with presents (or just with our presence). We can't give her a hug or even smile at her, but we have been calling or emailing her every few days since. Still, we are so far away; none of it has seemed real.
We went to the wedding on Sunday. It was the wedding of two of my co-workers. I cried even more than usual, and told Geoff that I blamed my extreme weepiness on being pregnant. Katie danced with us and with the flower girl, for over an hour. I didn't drink any wine, although I did take a sip of champagne. I wore a top that is not actually a maternity blouse, but it's one of those empire waist deals that looks like it could be; I had planned that if anyone from work asked me if I was pregnant, I would tell them the truth. No one asked.
On Tuesday I worked from home and went to the dentist. I had one cavity; the dentist told me I should clear it with my obstetrician before getting the filling, just in case. Special rules apply to pregnant patients. I made an appointment for the following week and told her I would cancel if my OB didn't give her approval.
On Wednesday during the day, one of my good friends told me that one of her good friends, in the first trimester of her pregnancy, had just found out that her growing baby had no heartbeat anymore. B. is also my friend, despite the fact that we have only emailed a few times and met in person once. I care about B. I grieved for her. "I hope I didn't spook you," my friend said. "No, it's ok," I said. "It doesn't make me any more or less worried for myself." I knew - you always know - that some pregnancies are not successful. That's just the way it is.
On Wednesday, when I was back at the office, Geoff told me that our friend L., from church, who has already survived breast cancer twice, had found a suspicious patch of skin on her breast and that she had had it biopsied. She expected to get the results on Friday. Geoff has been giving L. voice lessons on Wednesday evenings, and he said that when he saw her that night, he didn't know what to say. He told me that he had decided that he would just hug her for as long as she would hug back. He said she hugged him for a long time.
Even before Geoff told me about L., I was already thinking that maybe my usual optimism has got it wrong. Most of the time, when I am waxing poetic, I tend to talk about the beauty of the world, the miracle of birth, the joy of life. And when I talk about the good stuff, maybe sometimes I pretend that the bad stuff doesn't exist, or that it doesn't matter, or that, at the very least, it pales in comparison to the good parts of life.
But that Wednesday, I was thinking that that's wrong. That day I was thinking that the real miracle is not that there is so much beauty in the world, or that the world is such a wonderful place. I was thinking, instead, that the real miracle is, that despite all of the agony and suffering and despair and pain we experience and put ourselves through, we still manage to recognize and experience and create beauty and joy as often as we do.
The next day was Thursday. I drove to work because I had to leave early for a 2:30 routine appointment with my obstetrician. I should have been almost 12 weeks pregnant. Somewhere around noon, I went to the bathroom, found blood in my underwear, and started to panic. I did not eat lunch. I did not eat again at all that day until 7:00 pm, on my way home from the hospital, when everything was different.
By 7:30 Thursday night, I was at home, living with the knowledge that I wasn't really pregnant anymore and that it was entirely likely that nothing had actually changed in the past week or two. Most likely, I had attended the wedding the weekend before, and the dentist appointment two days before, with nothing living in my uterus. Most likely, this pregnancy had ended at least a couple of weeks before.
When the fetus dies but does not immediately miscarry, they call it a missed miscarriage. I've learned that in my various pregnancy books, which I've been scouring lately, filling my mind with words about miscarriage and grief and loss. In all of those books (I must have ten of them), there is not much about miscarriage. This makes sense, I guess. After all, they are pregnancy books, and a miscarriage ends a pregnancy. Nothing else to see here. Please move along. Still, I find myself wanting to read more, wishing words about miscarriage were as easy to find as words about pregnancy. (Last Wednesday, almost a week after, I found myself overcome with rage, and I took the Fit Pregnancy magazine that Geoff had picked up for me at the grocery store in April, and I threw it across the room, and then I picked it up and ripped it apart, page by page, and then I picked up the pages and ripped them in half. I left them strewn across the kitchen floor. My impotent act of anger.) Yesterday in the grocery store I glanced toward the aisle of books and magazines and fleetingly wondered if there would be anything there about miscarriage. I tried to imagine what I might find. Modern Miscarriage? Mrs. Miscarriage? I couldn't think of anything clever, although just the idea of it struck me as darkly funny.
When we got to the doctor's office on Thursday, we had to wait twenty or thirty minutes. I didn't tell them anything was wrong, although tears ran quietly down my face every so often. Geoff would start to say something, and I would ask him to be quiet. I couldn't talk about it, not yet. Everything might be fine. And if it wasn't fine, there would be plenty of time for talking and crying. After a little while, they called us back. I peed in a cup. The nurse weighed me (up one pound) and took my blood pressure (slightly higher than they'd like). The nurse left. The doctor got there.
"How are you today?" she asked, and I said "I've had some spotting," and I started to cry. She handed me a Kleenex. I apologized, and she said, "No, I bet you've been holding that in all this time, haven't you? Let's take a look right away. Once we've heard a heartbeat, it's very unusual for this to mean anything serious."
When she wasn't able to find a heartbeat with the Doppler, none of us were really too worried. "We should look with the ultrasound, because it might still be too early to hear it on the Doppler. At this stage, an ultrasound is not any more reassuring, medically speaking, than hearing the heartbeat on the Doppler, but I bet it would be more reassuring to you, especially. I should have thought of that."
This is the part that I keep remembering. I remember my kind doctor's face, leaning toward the screen while she moved the sensor around on my belly. She looked worried, but not too worried. She looked serious. She kept moving her face closer to the screen, then farther back, as she moved the sensor around, picked it up, put it down, pushed it around, tried a new angle, started again. There on the screen, all along, was the baby-shaped blob, quiet and still, with no blinking heart. "I'm not seeing what I want to see," she said. "But I am not sure...". She squinted at the screen instead of looking at me. I took it as a kindness - she wasn't going to lie to me and tell me it was ok; she wasn't going to stop looking until she knew for sure that there was nothing there to see. "I know this must be uncomfortable; I'm sorry," the doctor said, in her quiet, gentle voice, as she moved the sensor again and again, pushing it down into my lower abdomen. She kept squinting and looking and moving the sensor, re-positioning and starting over.
Minutes passed. Geoff moved to my side and grabbed my hand, and we waited. I was not going to say it first. I was not going to jump to any conclusions. I was not going to panic. Finally, she stopped looking. "Let me take some measurements here," she said. "Yeah, I think..." she said, and looked down. "This is measuring at less than 10 weeks. And I can't find a heartbeat," she said. She looked at me and Geoff. "I'm so sorry."
That was when I sucked in my breath sharply (oh, God, my poor little baby), and started to sob, and that was when Geoff leaned in to hug me. The doctor handed me a whole box of Kleenex and looked like she might cry, too. "I'm sorry," she said again. And she hugged me.
The rest of the day was even worse. We had to wait for hours to get a confirming higher level ultrasound, performed by an ultrasound technician. While we waited, nobody talked to us or told us how much longer we might have to wait; nobody said they were sorry for what was happening (had happened); nobody asked me if I was ok or asked if there was anything they could do. My face was blotchy and swollen and red, and for most of the rest of the day I had tears streaming down my face, and yet passersby kept opting to talk to me. "How's it goin'?" they'd say cheerfully. And "Have a nice day!" afterward. The receptionist at the ultrasound/radiology department, after we had checked in there, tilted her head to the side, looked at my bright red face and puffy eyes and said, "Have you been drinking?" She had to repeat herself twice before I figured out that she was asking whether or not my bladder was full enough for them to perform the ultrasound. Then she gave me a styrofoam cup and directed me down the hallway to a water fountain. "Drink at least 4 or 5 cups worth," she said.
The news had felt like a tragedy, but this part felt like torture. We waited for two hours, in front of a television set showing Seinfeld and King of Queens, my head throbbing with the headache I'd given myself by crying so hard, so that somebody could confirm that the fetus in my uterus was dead. In the end, Geoff had to leave before I had the ultrasound, so that he could pick up Katie from daycare. When I did finally get called to have the ultrasound, at around 5:15, the technician led me into the room and gave me a big smile. "I'm Jennifer. So, what brings you here to us today?"
I stared at her. "They think it's dead," I said, and started to cry.
She said almost nothing during the ultrasound itself. Finally, after it was over, and after I waited in vain for a radiologist to come talk to me (the technician could never track one down), she told me to go back to my own doctor's office, across the walkway.
My doctor gave me options. She told me that I could wait for my body to realize that this pregnancy was no longer viable, and to miscarry on its own. "You could wait up to two weeks, if you want to," she said. Or, if I wanted to, I could schedule a D&C right away, or at any time when I felt like I no longer wanted to wait. Or, if I wanted to, I could get a prescription for some pills that would hopefully convince my body to miscarry. She did a pelvic exam and said that my cervix wasn't open yet, but it was "soft." "You don't have to decide now," she said. "You can talk about it with your husband, or with friends, and think about it." She told me she would be gone the following week at a conference, but that she would tell the other two doctors in her practice about me. "I'm sorry I won't be here to help you through this," she said, and I started to cry again (I almost thought I'd cried it all out).
I decided to wait, and then the next morning the doctor called me, on her day off ("that's my three year old son in the background," she said), to see how I was doing, and I decided I didn't want to wait anymore. I didn't want to go on for who knows how long, carrying dead fetal tissue with me wherever I went. I wanted this part to be over with. We scheduled a D&C for Monday at 3:30, the first time that was available. "This is your decision," she said. "And I think it makes perfect sense that you feel the way you do."
In the end, it wasn't exactly my decision. On Friday evening, I started to bleed in earnest. I bled through a few pads, and left my pants off. Then I bled some more, and blood ran down my legs and onto the floor before I could make it the ten feet to the bathroom. I yelled for Geoff, and Katie came, too. Geoff started wiping up the blood. "I want to help," said Katie. "Can I help, Daddy?" And, "Does mommy have diarrhea?" "Something like that," Geoff told her. And he gave her a wipe and let her help a little bit. I smiled at her and talked to her, and she did not seem worried.
I was not far away from this at all; this was taking place right here in my own body. It still did not seem real.
A little while later, I heard Geoff on the phone, calling our friend Rebecca, asking her to come and get Katie, in case we had to go to the emergency room. There were instructions on the sheet of options the doctor had given me. In case of miscarriage, I would need to go directly to the ER if I was soaking more than two pads full of blood per thirty minutes for more than two consecutive hours. We did not go to the ER.
Instead, I ended up removing all of my clothes and sitting in the tub, washing blood down the drain. Over and over, I turned on the water and wiped myself off with a washcloth. Over and over, I had to reach down to the drain to break up blood clots with my hands so that the drain would stay clear. I was emotionally detached from a lot of this, I think because it was so physically draining. Suddenly, I felt panicky and breathless and nauseous and lightheaded and weak (feeling as if, I remember thinking, someone had torn out my internal organs). I suddenly wondered how the hell I would get to the ER if I had to go, because I knew it wouldn't be under my own power. Geoff brought me a bowl and I threw up into it. The next thing I remember is Geoff asking me in a worried voice why I was making the noise I was making, and I realized I didn't know what he was talking about. I also realized that I'd been biting the side of my tongue. I thought that I must have passed out for a few seconds.
A few seconds later, I felt like myself again.
When Rebecca arrived to get Katie, I was doing ok - Katie came to give me a hug and kiss, and didn't ask any questions about why I was naked in the tub. She left happily. I peeked around the shower curtain at Rebecca, and thanked her. "Are you ok?" she asked. I told her I was. I thanked her for taking Katie. "I like your hair," she said; I had colored my hair red earlier that day (I had been waiting until the end of the first trimester to color my hair and my gray roots). "Thank you," I said. I could tell she could have said more, and I could have, too. We were all doing our best to keep it together.
By 9:45 or so, a little less than two hours from the start of the heavy bleeding, it had slowed. I got up out of the tub (I was lightheaded and had to steady myself), made it to the bedroom, put on a nightgown, turned on the tv, and settled under the covers, with a towel underneath me. Geoff went to the store, leaving me with a laptop, a phone, a remote control, Kleenexes, clean underwear, and pads, all within arm's reach. I fell asleep within an hour or so, and slept until 8:30 the next morning. (Within 48 hours, I could wear again the skirts that had just gotten too tight in the waist.)
First I was sad, then emotionless, then scared, then sad. I have been angry, and I have been depressed, and through it all I have been exhausted. I still want another baby, and yet I dread going back to the dark mood that marked so many of the months when we were trying to conceive. I don't have to think about that yet; I am still bleeding. Now is not the time for trying. Now is not a time when there is anything I can do but get through each day the best way I can.
On Monday after the miscarriage, I came back to work. I only had one episode at work - on Tuesday - where I felt a sudden gush of blood and had to go change my underwear (another surreal-sounding but real thing - last week I carried 2 or 3 spare pairs of underwear with me in my purse at all times). I worked the next two days, and then took Friday off. Today, another Monday, I am back. If you asked me today, I would tell you that I am mostly ok. Several days after the miscarriage I felt like maybe I was getting over this too easily - maybe the grief hadn't hit me. And then I realized that, regardless of the fact that I was still coming to work, still talking to co-workers and friends and family, I was also spending a portion of every day crying. Just because I am not constantly inconsolable does not mean I am not grieving.
Yesterday, at the church, one of the women who sings with me made her way to the back of the church where I sat with Katie, so that she could hug me and tell me she was sorry and that she loved me. Later, after the service, another woman came and sat down beside me. She is happy to talk, she said, whenever, if ever, I want to. She had two difficult but successful pregnancies and a miscarriage in between (this woman also survived breast cancer and spent several years of her childhood in a wheelchair). "We don't have to talk about my stories," she said. "But we can talk, if you want."
And then our friend L., the one who has discovered she has breast cancer for the third time, came to see us, and she reached for me, to give me a hug. "I'm very weepy today," she said. "Me, too," I said, and we hugged. "I've been so sad for you," I said. "I am so sorry." "I've been sad for you, too," she said. "I'm so sorry." It is possible there is not much better than a long weepy hug from a two-time breast cancer survivor, who's recently been diagnosed for a third time, to make you feel like a miscarriage is not a tragedy.
I have been thinking that maybe the miracle is not only that we can recognize and appreciate the beauty and joy of life in the midst of all of our pain, but that maybe it is also that we can recognize and share each other's pain. I have had so much support, much of it long distance and virtual. Geoff, suffering from this in his own right, has conceded that he believes that I am suffering more, and he has gone out of his way to help me feel better. I have gotten flowers and and cookies and cards and emails and hugs, from my family and my friends, and I have gotten people calling me brave and strong for no reason that I can see other than that I am able to talk about the fact that I'm in pain, and maybe because I am able to say that I am both ok and not ok, and maybe because I have faith that I will reach a point in time when I'm not in pain from this anymore. It will not always be like this. It will get better. It already is.
In the midst of this, I still notice the sunny skies and the warm days. Even in the waiting room on that Thursday at the hospital, watching Seinfeld, I laughed. I still feel good when my daughter hugs me or smiles at me or tells me a silly story (and I still get irritated when she spits on me or refuses to do what I ask her to), and I can still wholeheartedly engage in conversations about other things and other people. I still believe, without a doubt, that I am lucky, and that my life is a good one. This is how I know that as bad as I feel now, I will be ok.
This baby, had it become a baby, would have most likely been born in December. Because Katie kept asking when she could see the baby, we had told her it would not be for a long time. "Not until almost Christmas," I had told her. "Not until it snows." Katie told me yesterday that when she is a grown up, she will have babies. She told me that she will have a little baby in her belly, and that it will be in there for a long long time before it comes out, but that the baby will come out of her belly someday. When it snows. (That made me cry.)
I don't want to name this child that never was. I don't want to have a memorial service or funeral arrangements, and to tell you the truth, I am glad that I don't know whether it was a boy or a girl. I am glad that if I had to have a miscarriage, that I had it before I had ever felt the baby move inside me. I am glad that Katie is not really old enough to understand that the little baby is dead. I know that after I see the doctor again, and after she gives the okay, that we will try again. I still want another baby. I still believe we could have another baby.
I am going to work, and eating proper meals again. The days feel, mostly, normal.
And still, I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that I am also devastated. I don't know when the day will come when I will not cry over the baby that might have been. I know that day will come. I'm not sure when. But it will come.