Thirteen Weeks

I don't know how much more of this I can take. I mean, really. I don't even want to write anything else - let alone put it somewhere for other people to read - because I'm depressing myself.

I was feeling lovely and peaceful and philosophical, and then yesterday hit, and now today, when I would have been 13 weeks pregnant and my baby would have been the size of a medium shrimp. Instead, I'm still wearing my pajamas, practically neglecting my sweet (alive and well!) little boy, passing clots that look like leeches.

I remain fascinated by my own body insides. I have always been body-curious - a pimple-squeezer, a tissue-examiner, a toilet-paper-checker. (In fact, if I weren't so drawn towards my own fluids, I wouldn't have known I was bleeding for several days. I could have miscarried quietly at home, without my traumatic Emergency Room visit. Last night in one of those morbid conversations I'm always roping unsuspecting Rob into, I explained that if I get pregnant again and this happens again, I am staying the fuck at home. If I go back to the ER, it will be because the bathroom looks Hitchcockian and I'm scraping myself up off the floor to dial 911. Dramatic? Yes. But my mother recently went to the ER in an ambulance, and they were lovely to her. I was treated like nothing because I was walking and talking normally, and, medically, my situation was merely unfortunate.) I keep wondering what it looks like inside my (broken)heart-shaped uterus right now. As much as the blood saddens me, it's also fascinating. What will it look like today? What might this be?

I'm also mildly annoyed at the encouragements to think about the "baby." When I (thought I) was pregnant, I tried talking to the baby - "Hi, in there! Hi, sweetie! It's Mommy..." - and it felt so forced and fake. I didn't think of Westley in "baby" terms until he started kicking me, and even then, I often forgot that there was a tiny human inside me. I realized years too late that it would have helped me to be reminded during labor, "You're having a baby. This is your body helping the baby to be born. Soon, there's going to be a baby!"

I suspect I may be atypical in this regard, but it is oddly comforting to me to think of my miscarriage in terms of "not baby." As much as it makes me feel stupid and unobservant - shouldn't I have known that I was pregnant with nothing? - my blighted ovum was a huge relief. I can't imagine the state I'd be in now if I'd seen the thing I feared most, a dead baby, in the ultrasound image. No heart is immensely preferable to a stopped heart.

Perhaps I'm in denial. (It's a stage of grief, after all.) Maybe all this there was no baby, there was never any baby stuff is protective. Looking at that blood and tissue as simply blood and tissue frees me from a sadness that I imagine could destroy me. Or at least put me on the fast track to alcoholism. But if I really think about it, plumbing my psychological insides, I realize that I truly don't believe in this baby. That perhaps I never really did.

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Half-empty, Half-full

This morning, Westley asked, "Mommy, is there another baby growing inside you?"

"No, honey. Not yet."

His little face melted into a frown, and he started to cry. I tired to get him to tell me what was upsetting him, but he didn't want to - or couldn't - talk about it. It didn't matter. I knew. The adults who had been joyful and busy and liberally peppering their speech with the word "baby" are suddenly quiet and sad.

Today was the first day in several that I've felt really weighed down by sadness. My bleeding has slowed to almost nothing, and I had the strange realization while in the bathroom that I'm actually sad not to be passing clots anymore. Feeling those large pieces of uterine insides stretch my cervix open before slithering down and out was disturbing, and somehow, I miss it. The process of "emptying" is coming to a close.

At the same time that I feel not-quite-empty, I'm struck that I can feel so full of love for Westley. It's practically a physical sensation, a fullness behind my breastbone that feels like anxiety and heartbreak...in a good way.

Westley has curative properties. He's getting a too tall to cuddle easily in a chair with me, but we still manage, and it's magical to hold him. He's so strong and grown-up seeming - in a T-shirt and jeans, he looks like a miniature Rob - but his silky hair, delicate skin, and sweet smell all remind me that he's still very new. It wasn't that long ago that he was the baby growing inside me.

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Loss for Words

I think every woman who's had a miscarriage must hate the word. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive (you'll forgive me for that, right?), but miscarriage sounds judgmental. It's that prefix. Mis- means "wrongly" or "incorrectly." Which just makes me think I did something wrong, because I was the one carrying. If only I'd held onto that baby correctly!

For similar reasons, I cannot bring myself to say, "I lost the baby." Really? You lost the baby? How shitty of a mother do you have to be to lose a baby - especially one still inside your own body?

Which leaves us with, "The baby died." Ouch. I still believe that this was the best thing to tell Westley. But the phrase just plain hurts to say. Or think. (I soften the blow inside my head by telling myself that the baby just changed her mind about being born.) Besides, it throws off my accuracy meter. The ultrasound showed an empty gestational sac - a blighted ovum, more judgmental-sounding language.

(If I hadn't been consumed by feeling so, well, empty, I would've asked for a picture from the ultrasound. I wish I had one now.)

No fetal pole equals no baby. Was I ever even really pregnant? Does any of this language even really apply to me?

* * *

So many women have shared their stories with me. Some in great detail, some with a simple, "That happened to me, too." The nurse who filled in while the nurse assigned to my ER room went to lunch mentioned that she miscarried her first baby at 16 weeks - and while she was recovering, a visiting friend brought over a huge stack of baby clothes.

Suddenly it seems like if you have female parts and it's not you, it's the woman right next to you. "It's very, very common," my midwife said at our follow-up appointment yesterday. "But no one talks about it."

Miscarriage falls firmly in that "don't want to talk about it" space. Or, if you're a chronic oversharer like I am willing to talk about it, it seems too harsh to bring up:

"Hey, how're you doing?"

"Oh, not so good. I had a miscarriage on Sunday."

Whoa. Maybe not. But how are we supposed to not not talk about it, then? I wish I knew.

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Thank You

I'm feeling overwhelmed by all the love that has been pouring in over the last 24 hours. Thank you for your unbelievable kindness here and elsewhere. I feel the weight of your messages like arms around me, I really do. I'm so grateful, and I wish I could send each of you a handwritten thank-you note and a batch of cookies.

Today has been a day of comfort food, baths, and heating pads. I think I've only burst into tears four times. I keep losing track of time and my appetite, but right this minute, I feel surprisingly okay. My body seems to be doing exactly what it needs to do. I'm exceedingly thankful for that.

The ER doctor prescribed misoprostol to help me expel the "product" (thank you, sir, and your unfortunate medical terminology for ruining future trips to the salon). I politely declined it. He asked me, ever so sweetly, to please at least take the prescription home so I could fill it later if I changed my mind. I agreed, but noticed immediately that the form that came with my discharge papers also included a prescription for Vicodin. Because, you know, misoprostol can cause "some" cramping.

Yeah. None for me, thanks.

* * *

At the hospital, I told Westley what happened. I didn't want to use the word "miscarriage," but what I said ended up sounding extremely harsh: "Westley, we have some bad news. The baby died. The baby inside Mommy wasn't growing right, and it's not going to grow any more."

His eyes filled with tears, and he said, "I think it will! It will grow more!"

"I wish that too, honey, but it won't." And I did the thing I'd stopped myself from doing for hours: dissolved into sobs in front of my child.

My beautiful, sweet, helpful, healthy child. Who was so, so good the entire day and never had a meltdown even once. Not even a little. My dear, good boy who saved his sobs and screams until we were safely home, on our couch, relaying the day's events to my parents. After dinner, after cookies and ice cream, Westley exploded bigger than I've ever seen. He wailed and thrashed. He roared.

He looked and sounded exactly how I felt.

* * *

I'm surprised at how peaceful I feel, so soon. It's incredible the difference being in my own home surrounded by kind words and thoughts makes. Rob has been incredible. He seems sad, but surprisingly normal. I told him I don't understand his "man emotions."

We're surviving on convenience food, gurney humor - there was a running joke last night after Westley went to bed about smoking while jumping on a trampoline, possibly at a "crack bounce house" - and knowledge that we've been through shit before, together.

There ain't no hill or mountain we can't climb.

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Fade Away

I hate everything about this post.

Yesterday around lunchtime, I went to the bathroom and noticed some reddish streaking on the toilet paper, and a tiny blood clot about the size of a mustard seed. Rob and Westley were out running errands, and the house suddenly seemed uncomfortably quiet.

I paged my midwife, and stood in the silence. Then I set the timer on the microwave for 20 minutes. (If you don't get a call in 20 minutes, you're supposed to page again.)

Four minutes later my phone rang. My midwife prescribed "pelvic rest" - no sex, no orgasm, no jogging. Not that I've jogged recently. Or had sex, for that matter.

I sat all day, drinking water, occasionally getting up to pee, checking the toilet paper. Always some pink or brown streaking there on the white. Sometimes a tiny bit. Sometimes a tiny bit more. By 9:00 PM, I was still spotting, and starting to feel uncomfortable. Rob dialed the pager number for me.

* * *

By 1:15 PM, the ER observation room across from mine had been cleared twice. I'd been sitting cross-legged on my narrow bed, watching through the window for three hours. It would be at least another hour before I got the ultrasound I'd come for.

We met our midwife, Bev, at the clinic this morning to check things out and listen for heart tones. I brought her a little Ziploc bag full of my red-streaked toilet paper. Her brow furrowed when I handed it to her, and even before I climbed up on the table, I was pretty sure she wouldn't be able to hear anything on the Doppler.

Nothing came up but the whoosh of my own insides. It was time to seek out an ultrasound (and on Sunday morning, that that meant going to the Emergency Room). Bev said, "Prepare yourself." That babies at 12 weeks move around a lot, that Dopplers aren't perfect, but . . . "prepare yourself." I don't know how one prepares oneself for an ultrasound showing no life - except to expect it. I didn't want to expect anything negative; I wanted to be calm happy and hopeful.

The longer I sat on that ER bed, the less hopeful I felt.

Rob and Westley had gone out for lunch. The room was cold, dim, and so, so quiet. Tomb-like. The TV had no remote. I was glad to have my journal:

There's a mirror across from the bed, so I can see myself out of the corner of my eye. Or else I can look up and see how miserable I look.

* * *

A young man with an armful of tribal tattoos wheeled me into Radiology, a ghost town of a department on Sunday afternoon, and parked me in a room with an ultrasound machine.

Phillips, I noticed immediately. Not Siemens. (I used to work in technical publishing. I've seen the manual for several Siemens ultrasound machines in more than a dozen languages.)

"Hello?" my chauffeur-nurse called out, and his voice echoed.

"Hi," a female voice came back from around a doorjamb.

I was glad the tech was a woman, even though when she came into the room she looked half my age and was chewing bubblegum. Over my shoulder, the nurse disappeared quietly. The ultrasound tech, Becky, said almost nothing once I was on the table. She'd angled the monitor away from me, but I could still see most of it. And I knew what I was looking at, and what it meant.

The outer-space landscape of my uterus with a curved black hole on one side, a few inches long on the monitor. Not a flicker of movement.

There was nothing, Becky explained later, when the ultrasound goo was wiped away. No crown-to-rump to measure, no heart to be beating. (Though she didn't say it like that.) Essentially, I had a tiny empty sac with no sign of a fetus.

* * *

Becky wheeled me out into the silent hall. She took two blankets out of the warmer, and draped one over my legs. The other she wrapped tightly around my shoulders, mummifying me.

"Someone will be by in a minute to take you back to Emergency." And she left.

I sat in my wheelchair, wrapped in my warm blanket cocoon, unable to lift a hand to my face. I started to cry. The occasional doctor or nurse walked by, completely oblivious to the wheelchair. I felt invisible, like a piece of paper someone had thrown away.

I sat alone - staring at the framed pink patchwork quilt, about the size of a baby blanket, that hung on the opposite wall - for five or ten minutes.

My chauffeur-nurse appeared from around a corner I didn't know was there.

"I'll take you back to Emergency."

I nodded, and burst into tears. I was getting good at crying in front of strangers.

"What happened?" he asked.

I thought about what to say. All I could manage was, "Bad news."

"I'm sorry," he said, sounding not particularly committed to his sympathy. Then, a second later: "Something about a pregnancy?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry."

Rob and Westley were waiting for me in my ER room. They didn't let us go home for another hour and a half.

* * *

Rob drove home. The three of us were almost silent. I felt numb, and my head was very quiet inside, except when it drifted into singing the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter." (Why that song? I wondered. I can't remember the last time I listened to it.) The view as we crossed Lake Washington was a heartbreaking kind of beautiful.

* * *

The closer it gets to completely dark outside, the more I seem to bleed.

It's the first day of Spring. The symbolism is all wrong.

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