Miscarriage

A really terrible thing happened to me.

There’s no other way to spin it – you shouldn’t try to spin it any other way.

When your body, against your own will and prayers and screams and pleas, rejects your pregnancy it is terrible.

The story

On March 30, 2022, my pregnancy test result was positive. Mars showed me the two pink lines and I screamed. I had suspected I was pregnant for a week or so when my period was late and my emotions were scattered, but could not believe I was right.

We were casually trying that month, but I didn’t think it could happen that quick. Everyone I had asked said three months was the average. I considered myself average.

Leading up to that pregnancy test I was keeping a journal – trying to track my emotions around the possibility of becoming pregnant and coming face-to-face with my eventual motherhood. I was scared. I didn’t want to mess anything up. Part of me didn’t want to be pregnant yet.

A week later I took another test, just to be certain, and it was positive again. I remember thinking to myself, “I guess that seals the deal.” This was happening.

I was pretty nauseous and tired most days. Some days were better or worse than others, but I took comfort in knowing it was all for something.

Week Six we told our parents and siblings. Mars and I were so excited to share this news, bring his parents their first grandchild, and finally break our secret. It felt so cool to say, “When the baby comes,” or “We’ll have a baby by Christmas!” It all felt like a dream: beautiful and beyond me.

At Week Eight – one week before we left on our road trip – we went to Baby Moon. I looked forward to hearing the heartbeat with Mars as my pregnancy had not yet felt real. This heartbeat would connect me with my baby and wake me up from the dream, making this baby a reality.

I wore a body suit and high-waisted button-fly jeans – that was stupid. I was obviously an ultrasound rookie and I took note that I would wear a more sensible outfit for my next ultrasound.

So, with my bodysuit undone and tucked under my bra, jeans unbuttoned and rolled down, the ultrasound tech squeezed the cold gel on my lower abdomen and squished my tummy around looking for something, anything.

Silence.

Mars sat on a plastic chair at the foot of the bed staring at the screen. I lay on the bed, eyes glued to the black and white lines and shapes.

More silence.

After what may have been 5 minutes of looking, the tech asked me how far along I was.

“8 weeks and 1 day,” I replied. I remember my voice shaking a little.

“Well, mama you might be a little earlier than that,” she explained and pointed out what she assumed to be the yolk sac on the screen. There was an obvious sign of pregnancy, but she suspected I was less than 8 weeks and it was too early to listen to a heartbeat or see anything else.

“We won’t charge you for your visit and you just come back in a couple weeks, okay?”

I was gutted. Mars held me as I sobbed in the elevator, in the parking lot, and in the car.

I felt stupid for thinking I knew how to track my pregnancy and made the appointment too early. I was scared that something was wrong and my worst fears were just confirmed so casually in a strip mall office space. I was so disappointed that Mars didn’t get to hear his first baby’s heartbeat.

Mars comforted me, gave me logical reasons as to why our pregnancy might be earlier than we thought, and tried to give me hope. I had hope.

We left for Mexico on April 29. I had packed so many snacks for the road trip to keep my pregnancy nausea controlled. The three days to Mexico were exciting with new scenery, fast highways, and relatively none of the usual discomfort from my pregnancy.

The week we spent in Mexico – our first vacation together – was relaxing and perfect. I got to reconnect with old friends, Mars got to truly unplug from work and regular life, and we got to experience new things together.

After Mexico, we took one week to drive through the States and see some sights. We stopped in Scottsdale, Sedona, The Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, and Salt Lake City.

Sometime in that week, between Arizona and Utah, my emotions became quite erratic again. I hadn’t experienced this since my first two weeks of pregnancy. I felt like I had lost my spot in the driver’s seat and my hormones were in control. I remember saying to Mars, “What if I am like this the whole pregnancy? What if I am mean and crazy?” I was so scared of driving him away from me and being out of control.

Once again, Mars comforted me and gave me hope that this was just a phase or that I was maybe just tired from the ongoing travel. I had hope.

From Salt Lake City, we had a long day of travel to Bozeman, Montana. Along the way, at some rest stop in Idaho, I started noticing brown discharge. I googled it on the gas station wifi and was told it was normal. I had begun cramping that week – or maybe earlier, I should’ve written this crap down – and I really noticed the cramps again on this long drive. When we got to Bozeman, every hotel was booked. No Airbnbs, we had no supplies to camp out anywhere, and we were hungry. We grabbed a burger and kept driving to Miles City. I had found us a cheap, clean Best Western and I just wanted to lay down.

After checking in, we ran up the open-air stairs to our room in the pouring rain. I had to go pee so bad. On Thursday, May 12, in that Best Western War Bonnet Inn room bathroom on South Haynes Avenue, in Miles City, Montana I began to bleed. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

“Okay, don’t freak out, but I am bleeding a little,” was all I could get out before breaking down. Mars called my mom. She had never had a miscarriage before. She didn’t know what was normal or wrong.

I called my sister who had one miscarriage, she thought this could be normal. She knew of a few girls who bled a lot through their whole pregnancies and had perfectly healthy labours and babies.

I kept slowly spotting, sharply cramping, and crying all night as Mars held me.

The next morning I felt okay and the spotting had slowed. My first prenatal appointment was scheduled for May 25, but I hoped to call into the office on Monday morning and maybe see my doctor sooner.

We made it to Fargo the next day. I kept spotting and cramping. I just wanted to have one last, peaceful night of vacation with Mars before we came home. While I felt tense and afraid, I had hope.

We got home on May 14, unpacked, cuddled our cat, and I accidentally won some tickets to a Manitoba Moose hockey game for Sunday, May 15. What a nice end to our vacation!

We stopped in for brunch with Mars’ parents before we left for the city on Sunday morning. I was having cramps, but I thought that maybe I had just eaten too much, too fast. I had done this a few times throughout my pregnancy: get too excited about being able to eat without nausea and overdo it.

We were at the door, putting on our shoes, when I felt a heavy gush of something in my pants. I went to the bathroom and my underwear was soaked with blood. I pulled my pants back up and stood awkwardly, anxiously, at the door as we said our goodbyes.

“I think we need to go to the hospital,” I said to Mars as we climbed into the car. I could feel the blood coming out of me, throbbing and gushing, with my raised heart rate.

I screamed and cried all the way to Steinbach. “Please God don’t take my baby.”

The emergency room on a Sunday afternoon is surprisingly full. At the registration desk, they asked me my pain level on a scale of one to 10. My cramps were like the worst period I ever had so I said, “Six,” through my tears sitting in a wheelchair because I was afraid if I stood up, my baby would fall out of me.

They asked how far along I was, how many pregnancies I ever thought I had, and how long this had been going on. Every time I said that this was my first pregnancy, I wanted to scream. This was not how your first pregnancy should go – it wasn’t fair.

They wheeled me to a private room, put my favourite jeans and underwear in a bag – “I will never wear those again,” I thought – and gave they me pads bigger than my arm to put in their weird mesh underwear. The nurse asked me to try and go to the bathroom soon and leave my pad for them to weigh afterwards so they could gauge how much blood I was losing.

When I sat on the toilet, I could feel something coming out of me. Instinctively, I put my hand in between my legs to stop it. “No, no, no, no..” I kept crying as I couldn’t tighten my vaginal wall enough to keep it inside.

I heard a splash in the toilet water. Mars and I looked at each other. He went to get the nurse and they peeled me off of the toilet seat together, not letting me look back to see what I had left behind.

The nurse, behind a closed door, examined it and informed us it was just a big blood clot. I don’t remember what I felt hearing that information, but I know it was not relief.

Mars held my hand as I lay in pain, not wanting to take any medication, and cried as I lost hope.

They wheeled me out, alone, to get an ultrasound. I was too full of blood for the tech to conduct a external(?) ultrasound and needed to do a vaginal ultrasound. I laid there, crying, as she silently search for any signs of pregnancy, of life.

She left me alone to get up from the bed and put my diaper back on. More blood clots fell out onto the hospital floor before I could put on the pad. Blood ran down my leg, I had some on my hands, and there was a pool of blood where I had been laying on the bed.

As I rolled back to my room, I prayed that God would give us a miracle, give us some hope.

The doctor asked if he could give me a vaginal exam. I agreed and they rolled us to a new room. Mars, holding my hand, had to witness the stirrups, the speculum, and all the usual things used in gynecology while the doctor poked around inside of me, pulling out blood and tissue from my cervix.

After cleaning me up, Mars rolled me back to our first room.

I lay in that room, with Mars by my side, for over two hours waiting for the ultrasound results. Maybe they forgot about me, maybe they didn’t want to see this bloody, snotty, mess of a young woman and kill their sunny Sunday afternoon vibe. The doctor and nurse finally came back – after Mars asked the desk where they had gone – and told us that the ultrasound results were, “Inconclusive.” No further information was provided.

I was told I had most likely experienced a miscarriage today and that if I did not naturally “expel the remaining products of conception,” then I would need to book a D&C, but that would be arranged with my doctor next Wednesday.

Yes, the doctor I was supposed to see for my first prenatal appointment, was now becoming an appointment to confirm my pregnancy had self-terminated.

The nurse instructed me to take Advil, Tylenol, and not to use too many heat pads to manage the physical pain. She stood there, silently in the doorway, as Mars held me and I cried. “I’ve gone through this too,” she said.
“It doesn’t ever leave you, but it gets easier.”

We went home, and both sets of our parents came to the house. I was so ashamed. I felt I had ruined this exciting, perfect, happy time in everyone’s life. The nurses, doctors, techs, Mars, my mother-in-law, my mom, my sister, everybody told me it wasn’t my fault.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“It was out of your control.”

But you see, that was the source of my anger and pain: I couldn’t stop it. The control over my own body was ripped away from me and I couldn’t save this life I had been entrusted to grow inside of me.

I have an Rh-negative blood type and needed to go back to the hospital Monday night for a WinRho shot. We were told this should be a 20-minute ordeal, but instead sat in the waiting room for over four hours. My cramps were sharp and aggressive, almost like lashings, as if my body was trying to punish itself for failing to protect my baby. I cried and screamed through my pain, without inhibition, in that ER waiting room. I didn’t care who knew.

Throughout the rest of this week, my parents would drive me to Dynacare, I would have my blood taken, and then the QuickCare Clinic would call me that afternoon to let me know my results. They were testing my pregnancy hormone, hCG, to track its decline and further confirm that my pregnancy was over.

I had already been poked so much at the hospital that my arm’s veins weren’t usable at Dynacare and they needed to extract my blood out of my hand’s veins. I cried at my first blood test because I was so emotionally exhausted and I was not used to having a needle in my hand – go figure. The tech told me not to cry, that everything would be okay. If only that were true.

My hCG levels were steadily dropping, not in large increments but still dropping. The nurse on the phone told me I had definitely lost this pregnancy. “One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, if not more,” she said.
“Unfortunately, you’re part of that statistic.” I’m just a statistic.

But I knew that. Every morning, since I had seen those two white lines, I woke up feeling pregnant. On Wednesday, May 18, I woke up feeling normal – not pregnant. I couldn’t tell if my brain was trying to brace myself for the inevitable, or whether my body innately knew it was no longer a home for our future child, but I woke up feeling no longer pregnant.

I was feeling physically alright on Friday morning. The usual muscular, uterine cramps had subsided and I felt more like myself. My parents went back home, per my request, and I had my first afternoon to myself in weeks. I cleaned the house, did laundry, cried, ate, and lay in bed.

Sometime after lunch, I noticed a sharp pain, inside of me, below my belly button. It felt familiar but I could not place it and was not concerned. I took Tylenol and picked up Mars from work to run some errands in town. Our friends were throwing a birthday party for their son the next day and I was determined to go, bring a gift, and live normally – even just for an afternoon.

When we came home, I began to wrap the birthday gift. The sharp pain returned and I finally recognized it. It was my cervix. I remembered the same pain when my IUD had been implanted and I grew concerned.

Mars brought me heating pads, gave me a warm shower, gave me more Tylenol, but nothing dulled the pain. It grew all evening. I couldn’t lay still, no position gave me relief from the pain.

Around 11 o’clock I felt an urgency to go to the bathroom, to push something out of me. For over an hour, Mars sat on the edge of the bathtub, holding my hands as I sat on the toilet and shrieked in pain. All week I had been bleeding or spotting, but the clots had returned tonight. I began reaching inside of myself, trying to get them out, but nothing worked. I have never experienced any pain like this.

I tried to call my mom, for prayer, for comfort, but instead, I just continued to wail. I remember Mars taking the phone and saying that he was going back to the hospital.

It was like a sick deja vu: the wheelchair, the people, the registration desk, the questions.

“What is your pain level?”

“10!”

“How many pregnancies have you had before?”

“This is her first.”

“How far along are you?”

“Maybe between eight or 10 weeks. We were here on Sunday, isn’t that on her chart?”

This time they wheeled me to the closest room, where I continued to cry and howl in pain. They examined me and confirmed I did not have an infection from any remaining “products of conception”. This was a relief, but why was I experiencing more pain than I had all week?

The resident and nurse convinced me to get a morphine IV – talk about relief.

As the drugs slowly took effect I remember saying to Mars, “I just want this to be over. I don’t want to be in pain anymore.”

The resident suggested another vaginal exam, to help me pass the rest of the tissue that was stuck. Thanks to the morphine, this was more comfortable than the exam at the beginning of the week.

They gave us a room to sleep in for the night. Mars got a big chair to sleep in – the ones they give dads after their child is born. The drugs put me to sleep but I kept waking up, forgetting where I was, and then praying myself to sleep: “Please God, let this be over.”

The next few weeks looked the same as before: wake up no longer pregnant, go get a blood test, cry, eat, not sleep, and repeat.

On May 25, I saw the doctor for what should have been my first prenatal exam. Instead, we talked about what I could expect in the coming weeks and months after this traumatic event.

“Your period may not come back for a month or two.”

“You might not want to have sex for a while.”

“Your hormones will need time to settle back into their original place”

He was kind and understanding, and we said goodbye hoping to meet again under better circumstances.

I continued to bleed for over one month. Heavy bleeding, a constant reminder of what I went through – what I am going through.

The reflection

When we first discovered we were pregnant, I had – what I thought was – this irrational fear of experiencing a miscarriage. I very arrogantly talked myself out of this fear: “You’re young and healthy Lissi. You always worry too much and nothing comes of it, this will be the same.”

I’ve learned that this thing, miscarriage, is beyond control and reason. It is not fair and it can happen to anyone.

As I said in the beginning, it is a terrible thing. Trying to pretend that this has some silver lining, or some lesson to be learned, is hurtful. A terrible, awful, traumatic thing happened to me that was beyond my control and I just cannot pretend to move on like it never happened – no matter how much I wish I could.

Giving in to the grief has felt like weakness to me. Not being able to do the same social engagements because I get tired out easily frustrates me. Not being able to make it through a full day of work because I get so easily distracted or because I’ve bled through my pants (again) makes me feel like a failure. Crying at the thought of future events – Christmas, a friend’s wedding, next summer – at which I thought I would have a baby on my hip drives me mad.

While we are grieving a life lost, it is not necessarily the pregnancy we are grieving. We never knew this life inside of me, its heartbeat, or saw its blurry features on an ultrasound. Instead, Mars and I grieve the life we had imagined for ourselves. We grieve the dreams we whispered to each other in our bed for our future child. We grieve the expectations we were weaving around parenthood.

We grieve, but hope is not lost.

The assumptions

I have come to realize that I had made assumptions about those who experience a miscarriage (or several miscarriages). Sure, we all say online how we need to talk more about it, but nobody actually does in real life.

I looked all over online for people who had similar experiences to mine. I am convinced that every experience is unique and no one will totally know what another has gone through, but being able to share experiences can maybe help us relate to the small details.

For those who have luckily never been marked by a miscarriage, I’ve found that some don’t know how to help, react, or talk about it. You say you will pray, that “I am here if you need anything,” but there is no practical way to show your care.

Firstly, if you are going to try and comfort someone who is hurting and say, “I am here if you need anything,” you need to mean it. if you have a friend, like me, who has lost their baby and is hurting because of it, ask them what is the one thing they need to be done that day. Is it to have someone to talk to? Get their kitchen in order? If you are able, make a meal. Grief is nearly paralyzing – I felt like a zombie early on – and having a meal to make or a chore to do can be overwhelming. Small things like a coffee at the door, a chore done, or flowers are those brief moments of relief someone who is hurting needs.

Also, please don’t assume that I don’t want to see your baby or kids. In fact, I treasure children more now. Sure, I may cry a little bit, but it is tears of thanksgiving. I am so thankful that your baby or kid is here and making you happy and blessing you. I know what I lost and I cannot wait until I can have it again. Your kids can be healing for people like me, please don’t think you are keeping me safe by shielding me from them.

Lastly, and maybe this is just me but, please don’t avoid talking about my miscarriage with me. Trying to pretend it didn’t happen can make someone who had a miscarriage feel like their experience is shameful. It’s isolating to only be able to speak about it to your therapist and partner. If you’re in a true community and relationship with someone who had a miscarriage, ask them about it. Don’t push it, but don’t shy away from it either. Being able to invite people into my pain and have them experience it with me has been hard, but has stretched me in a way I never realized. This type of vulnerability, while forced upon me, has the power to greatly bind people together.

Mars and I have grown so close through this pain and hurt, but I will never wish the unfair, terrible and traumatic experience of a miscarriage on anyone.

We strongly believe it needs to be discussed more openly so the burden can be shared by the community and not just on the weakened shoulders of a single person or couple.