Miscarriage story

Here's the story that compelled me to start this blog. Not for you, dear reader, but for me. I know I am not a unique snowflake but even so have to get it out somehow.

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I got pregnant in early January, 2004. I miscarried on Monday, March 8, 2004.

We hadn't told anyone we were even trying. I'd given up the pill a year before I was due to finish grad school, ever careful nothing happened before we were ready.

We were planning to visit E's parents in a week or two and tell them the good news.

The night before, E and I went to dinner at Boston Market, purveyor of guilt-inducing, fast comfort food. I ordered a huge turkey sandwich that I couldn't finish. I read Wired magazine and learned all about Google. We came home, watched a video, and I flipped through a pregnancy book for the very first time.

Up until that very day I'd been too superstitious to allow myself to feel pregnant. I'd been to the doctor for my first prenatal exam and met the ob/gyn in charge. She'd said everything was going fine.

Before bed that Sunday night, I felt wrong. My belly was tight and cramped. The nurse on call put us through to the doctor on duty. It wasn't my doctor, but another on the "team." He told me to put my feet up and relax. We went to bed as usual.

I woke up at 2am. E was fast asleep.

I'd been spotting over the last few weeks (perfectly normal, according to the doctor) but it had gotten heavier in the night. I got up and tried to go to the bathroom. Frankly, it felt as if I needed to fart. I strained and forced some stuff out of my bowels, but it didn't help. I sat there breathing hard and suddenly felt something slide down my vagina. I looked into the toilet and saw a golf-ball sized clot with a pinkish-white stripe floating above the bed of shit I'd just left.

I knew what it was, but I got a flashlight and looked at it more closely. I wondered if I should pick it up and save it. The prospect of presenting the 10-week-old "products of conception" to my doctor in an old salsa jar full of toilet water and feces was just not a path I was going to take.

So I flushed it. I washed my face and woke up E. We again called the doctor, who told us to go to urgent care in the morning. E sat on the edge of the tub and held my hands as I bled some more. When it slowed, we went back to bed. He fell asleep almost immediately, as if he'd just shut down. I envied him.

In the morning we called in sick and went to urgent care. When I told them I was pregnant but had been bleeding and cramping all night, their faces blanched and they rushed me to an exam room.

"The doctor sent you here?" everyone asked. The consensus seemed to be that I should have gone to the emergency room. Even the free magnetic "when to call urgent care" reference card said so.

We waited for them to prep the ultrasound room, which wasn't intended to handle women in my situation. The tech looked around my uterus with the wand for a while, silently.

We waited for the results. And waited. For nearly two hours. Got all caught up on news of Martha Stewart's prison sentence from the waiting room TVs.

E finally asked reception what was going on.

They had forgotten us.

A doctor soon appeared and sat us down in an exam room. She told us nothing was left of my pregnancy, that I'd had a clean miscarriage in the night. E, hearing what we already knew, started to cry. The doctor asked with kind and furrowed brow if we had anyone we could talk to. I told her we hadn't told anyone we were trying, that we were about to tell E's parents we were pregnant. Then I started to cry. She asked if we wanted to be alone for a bit. When we said yes, she fairly flew from the room.

When we regained our composure, we went back out and got the doctor. She advised us to take the rest of the day off and monitor my temperature for fever.

We went home and lay on top of the covers of our bed in the bright, cold spring sunlight and cried and cried. I wanted to fall back to sleep, but couldn't. So I stationed myself on the couch and E went to buy a thermometer (we didn't have one at all) and some mint tea. We spent the day quietly, watching some movies, reading a little.

It was back to work for us both on Tuesday. On Thursday I gave a group presentation about search engines to one of my classes. One of my group members was home sick with a really bad cold, guys, and was really really sorry she couldn't do her part of the presentation, and wondered if I could cover for her. I did. Things were back to normal but would not be quite the same.