The M Word

I had an ultrasound today.  There is no heartbeat.  The fetus stopped developing a couple of weeks ago.  I had a miscarriage.  On Friday I'll have a D&C.  I'll write more about that later.

It's ok.  I mean, it's horrible, but I'll be ok.  This is nothing like losing a 24 week pregnancy.  When that happened, I really resented people who equated my experience with a miscarriage, but I wasn't sure if my feelings were just, because I had never experienced a miscarriage.  Well, I was right.  This is hard, but I don't feel like I've lost a baby.  We didn't know the sex yet, we had never heard the heartbeat or seen the baby on ultrasound, and we hadn't bought anything for the baby.  My belly hadn't grown.  I hadn't felt the baby move.  We hadn't bonded with it.  We don't have a huge context to disintegrate.  We just have to start over.

I do have one similar feeling:  the feeling that I have lost time.  When our first child was stillborn, I felt like I had lost a year of my life.  We had spent 4 months getting pregnant, 5+ months being pregnant, and then we had to wait 3 more months before we could try again.  I'm sure I'll be told that we should wait 3 months again, but I might not heed that advice.  I started planning and thinking about it within 10 minutes of finding out, and Adam agrees: We're getting right back on that horse!

I'm also thinking about the things that will be easier.  We have some travel plans that will be much easier now.  Next time, I'll be better prepared with the right drugs for my psoriasis, which has gotten totally out of control since I had to suddenly stop my medication.  Well, that's about all the positive stuff I can think of right now.  As for the negative, I think the thing that bothers me the most is that when we do have SS, there will be that much more of a gap between our children's ages.  That, and the fact that, the older I get, the less likely we are to successfully have a child at all.  But, at least right now, I'm not feeling as stressed out about that as I was when we first decided to try for another child.  For some reason, I was really afraid that we wouldn't be able to conceive at all.  A miscarriage is almost par for the course at my age, so I don't feel like this doesn't bode well for the future.  We might have another miscarriage, but we're still fertile, and we've had one healthy child, so there is no reason to leap to worries about ultimate failure.

And that is one of the reasons I decided to announce my pregnancy to the whole world immediately.  I knew this could happen, and if it did, I wanted people to know.  I can't tell you how shocked I was after our first, failed pregnancy, to find out how common miscarriages, infertility, stillbirths, and other problems really are.  Once you are a part of "the club," the stories come out of the woodwork.  Miscarriage is common enough that I would call it normal.  If you don't know how common it is and you have one, you will not have the right perspective, and you might become afraid.  It might seem like there is something wrong with you, or that you did something wrong like eating the wrong food or exercising too much.  Many women even feel ashamed, since it is just never, ever talked about (except in those internet chat rooms, and you should not go there--trust me).  I don't want women to have to go through that.  I mean, I hate thinking about all the pity people will feel for me, and even the sympathy.  I hate to cause other people those negative feelings and I hate to be the object of them.  I could have spared all of us that by just keeping my mouth shut.  But now that this has happened, I can confirm what my gut told me in the first place:  We need to stop hiding early pregnancy and miscarriages.  It's one thing to learn the miscarriage rate as an abstraction.  It's another to know that 5 out of your 6 best friends have had miscarriages, fertility problems, or a stillbirth. 

I've only known that I miscarried for about 8 hours now, and I've had to tell 5 people.  Telling people is difficult and painful (although writing this blog post is cathartic).  I understand the desire not to have to go through that.  But I think that telling people is an important part of facing up to what happened.  I can't imagine having been pregnant this whole time, losing the baby, and having the whole thing be invisible to all of my friends and family.  I think it would prolong the pain.  I don't mean that I want to "share" the pain, like spreading it out would lessen it or something.  I just don't like keeping secrets from people who are close to me.  (And once you tell those people, the cat is out of the bag and you might as well tell everyone.)  It's important to note that I absolutely do not think that it is dishonest to keep an early pregnancy a secret--it is nobody's business but the parents' and there are plenty of situations where it is rational to keep it hidden.  What I'm saying is that this default practice of waiting 3 months to announce a pregnancy does not do anybody any good.  Ignorance is not bliss.

I'll write more about this in the days to come, but now I have to go have a good cry.