October 15th is apparently Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. I never really had any reason to commemorate the occasion before, but recently my wife and I went through a miscarriage. Now of course I can’t begin to understand her perspective of it, but I want to try to tell my side. All too often men don’t like to talk about these kinds of things, but it’s important for all of us to express emotions in difficult times.
My wife had been taking birth control when we got pregnant so it was a little. . . unexpected, from the beginning, but we got used to the idea of having another baby on the way. We were even planning for it, looking at houses to buy with room for our growing family. Talking about how the kids would share a room for a while. Mulling over names.
Our one and a half year old was running around the house bouncing off of walls by himself, and it sounded nice that they’d be close enough in age to be real friends and keep each other company. We hoped it was a girl, you know, to even it out, but ultimately any parent just wants their baby to be healthy. Unfortunately, we didn’t get either.
What happened?
It was early in the pregnancy. Eleven weeks. We hadn’t heard a heartbeat or seen an image of it. I say “it” because we never knew the sex. We actually don’t even know if there was ever really a baby. It seems like it was what they call a blighted ovum, which is when an egg gets fertilized and implants but never develops into an embryo for any number of reasons. About half of miscarriages are the result of some kind of blighted ovum. They’ll induce some of the early signs of pregnancy, including a positive pregnancy test, but it’s really hard to diagnose a blighted ovum before at least nine weeks of pregnancy.
So at about week 10.5, my wife started bleeding. That was on a Wednesday. She called me to the bathroom, shaking as she showed me the blood on the toilet paper, thick and dark red. It was only a little bit, but we called the doctor. His wife/secretary said to just take it easy and come for our scheduled appointment on Friday morning, or go to the ER if my wife had any sharp pains or excessive bleeding.
The next few days we read and heard all kinds of stories from people who’d experienced bleeding during their pregnancies and went on to have healthy children. We were still hopeful, but cautiously.
That day at the doctor I waited outside. We were in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic so a lot of hospitals were only letting the person being treated in. Our son and I went to a park so that he could run around a little bit.
When I picked up my wife, she couldn’t tell me anything. She said the doctor didn’t even touch her, and he said there was nothing he could do for her. We needed to go get an ultrasound to see what was going on. He wrote us an order for a specific place, but they said the earliest available appointment was the next Tuesday. We tried going to the place where we’d done our ultrasounds for our first child, but they told us they couldn’t see us without an order specifically for them from our doctor.
This was frustrating, to say the least.
Meanwhile, the bleeding didn’t stop. In fact, it got worse. Little did we know that we were still in the early stages of the process. She continued to bleed throughout the weekend and on Monday we decided to go to the ER. They did an ultrasound and saw that there was no baby. She had a sack but no sign of a fetus.
My wife walked back to the car looking defeated. We had been making plans for when the baby got here. The baby wasn’t the only reason but it was part of the reason we had decided to stay in Las Vegas and buy a house. We thought we needed more space, and we didn’t want to move across the country and look for houses in an unfamiliar place in the middle of a pregnancy and a pandemic.
Point being, we’d made plans to include this baby and now it just wasn’t coming. It was… upsetting…disappointing.
The day of
The bulk of the physical miscarriage took place the next day. A Tuesday. The day we were supposed to get an ultrasound. My wife called them in the morning to cancel our appointment. Soon after she started experiencing severe cramps, but neither of us was really expecting what came next.
That afternoon the real miscarriage began. It started with what can only be described as contractions. All I can say is that I’m glad it wasn’t me. As much sympathy or empathy as I could have for my wife in those moments, it’s not something I’d ever want to experience.
She moaned in the bathroom, wailing, and expelling massive blood clots. Grief is an odd thing. She collected and examined the clots, looking for signs of the life that never was. I can’t blame her. I don’t know what I would have done in her shoes, but I looked with her. We poked through all the fleshy pieces of blood that came out of her. It was an intense experience, to say the least.
At the end of that day, after the largest piece had been delivered, she got a second wind. Probably a shot of pure adrenaline pumping through her veins, but I made her rest and take it easy. She was drained, and I could see it on her face, even if she didn’t know it at the moment.
The long road to recovery
But that wasn’t the end of it. And this is the part that I really want to tell you about because we could hardly find any information on it. She went on to bleed for almost another three months. In the first few days, we were really worried. It didn’t seem like she could go on like that for very long, and it didn’t show any signs of letting up. Occasional clots would plop out of her. It’s not flattering and I’m sorry, but it’s what happened.
We kept calling and going to the doctor, but he said there wasn’t much he could do. We just had to ride it out, so we did. For another three months. Constantly worried that something wasn’t right.
But eventually, it stopped. We bought our house, with room to grow. We settled in and stayed distracted. We got back to normal, well, as normal as 2020 could be, and life went on without a new baby.
There’s something to be said for lost love. Maybe we never saw a face, but it changed our lives all the same, and for that, we are forever grateful.