The 8-week appointment couldn’t be scheduled at eight weeks because of Thanksgiving. Instead, I was asked to come in the following week, a few days shy of my 35th birthday.
I remembered a friend going to the doctor for a pregnancy confirmation a few months earlier and asked her how long she had to wait. She confirmed that eight weeks was the norm, based on her two pregnancies. “Shouldn’t it be sooner?” I remember thinking. Eight weeks felt like an eternity. In the meantime, I didn’t know what the hell to do; this was my first pregnancy, and I am an only child. She agreed, it really should be sooner, but this was American healthcare.
The positive pregnancy test wasn’t a surprise, but how quickly it happened was. We had just started trying, and I’d had a feeling I’d conceived right away. With a period normally like clockwork, I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t arrive on time. After waiting a few days to be sure, I took a test that, sure enough, came out positive. It was hard not to feel a little bit cocky.
I was met with a mix of excitement and fear–fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of somehow failing. Still, there was exhilaration that mellowed into happiness. From my back of the napkin math, I calculated I would probably be due in July. Once I had a timeline, something solid in mind, it started to feel more real. I couldn’t wait for that 8-week appointment to further solidify things.
What I didn’t anticipate was never making it to that appointment.
It was a Friday morning, and I was driving to work. I started to feel sick as I was merging onto the highway and tried to disregard it. Morning sickness. I’d driven maybe a mile before I could no longer ignore it and promptly exited, pulling off into a suburban neighborhood. The sickness came on suddenly and violently. I remained parked for about ten minutes before texting my colleagues to say I wouldn’t be in and heading back home. It was weird; according to the apps I’d downloaded, it was still a little early for morning sickness.
That night, I started bleeding.
From my research, a little bleeding was normal. Implantation bleeding, it was called. Something in my gut told me it was too late for that, that I was already past that point. Still, I hoped for the best.
The bleeding intensified over the weekend, and I knew something was wrong. Call it a mother’s intuition or maybe just being intimately familiar with my own body, but I knew there was a chance this was where the pregnancy ended.
I called the doctor’s office as soon as they opened Monday morning. When I explained to the assistant that I was bleeding, she didn’t initially seem concerned. However, as I answered more of her questions, her tone changed. She told me to come in that afternoon.
To her credit, the doctor was great. After examining me, she patiently explained that I was in the process of miscarrying and that the blood was effectively a heavy period working to clean everything out. She reassured my husband and me that we didn’t do anything wrong and that this just happens sometimes. Our bodies know best, she said. Mine likely knew something was wrong, or that the DNA didn’t quite zip up correctly, and this was what had to be done. I was fortunate in the sense that my body was handling it on its own, and I didn’t need a D&C.
It’s difficult to mourn someone you never knew. Because the miscarriage happened so early, we didn’t get to the point of an ultrasound. We will never know the sex of our baby or even a firm due date. Instead, we’re left mourning what could have been, the promise of becoming a family of three that was suddenly ripped away.
The official rates of pregnancies ending in miscarriage fall somewhere between ten and twenty percent, but my doctor explained that the real number is likely closer to a quarter. Often, patients miscarry before realizing they’re pregnant and mistake it for a bad period. In today’s post-Roe world, many women likely do not report pregnancy loss for fear of being treated like a criminal.
Miscarriage is far more common than most of us think. Why, then, is there such a stigma around talking about it?
Perhaps talking about it more will make it feel less awkward to bring up when you haven’t even told the people in your life that you were expecting. Perhaps it will better prepare lost mothers to expect some of the same postpartum symptoms that women experience after giving birth to a live baby. Perhaps it will sting less when you find yourself suddenly available to make plans during the month in which you would have given birth.
Pregnancy loss has been the loneliest thing I have ever experienced. I would now be in my second trimester, and it’s impossible to stop marking the months on a timeline that never fully materialized. Every pregnancy or birth announcement feels like a punch in the gut, something for which I can’t stop feeling immense guilt. I want to be happy for my loved ones, and I am–but I can’t help feeling left out. Some of the first people I told of the loss were my colleagues. That week, one of them let me hold her snuggly one-year-old. It was simultaneously one of the most cathartic and heartbreaking things I’ve ever done.
The worst part is feeling like my grief is forgotten. Many people write off early pregnancy loss as not being that big of a deal; at least you can get pregnant, they’ll say. At least you weren’t farther along–as if you don’t feel connected to your pregnancy until you’re past the first trimester. Just try again–as if children are interchangeable as if I’m not terrified this will happen again. As if I don’t constantly wonder if maybe, just maybe, I did something wrong. Others will shy away from talking about it because it’s hard. Others will simply forget.
Several weeks after the loss, the day after I turned 35–another perpetual source of anxiety over whether I simply waited too long to have kids–I got a tattoo in memory of my angel baby. It helps to feel like he or she is always near my heart. It didn’t necessarily give me closure, but it helped me feel more grounded in an odd way like there was a physical representation of the missing child.
I don’t know that I’ll ever be “over” this. I might be okay one day, but I won’t be whole. I’m sure we will try again at some point, even if we never feel fully ready, but a new baby will not fully fill the void. In the meantime, talking about it helps. If only our world let us do more of that.
Photo by Alex Boyd on Unsplash
Gretchen Corsillo
Gretchen Corsillo is a librarian and writer from the greater NYC area. She holds a B.A. in Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing from Ramapo College and a Masters in Library & Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Gretchen is the author of a bimonthly column for Public Libraries Magazine, and her work has also appeared in Salon and the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Blog. She is currently working on a novel. Learn more about her at gretchenkaser.com.
