Miscarriage: My Story (Part 2)

*All excerpts taken from my private, online journal*Flickr user mimbrava

Oct. 16th, 2006, 9:04 pm
“I still have not miscarried yet.”

I left off Part One with a letter to family and friends explaining our wish for a natural miscarriage. I was really hoping to go this route. The other options were not something I wanted. But I was scared and honestly didn’t know a lot about miscarriage. The night before I wrote the above I had been up with excruciating contractions from 12:30pm-6:00am. It was the worst pain I’ve ever been in. They were long (a minute at least), they came quickly, on top of each other (sometimes 15-20 seconds apart). There was no letting up at some points. Five hours of this. Five hours of me begging my husband to somehow make them stop. Five hours of unrelenting agony and the heart weariness of knowing my child was dead and there was no happy ending.

I actually still got up that morning and went to work on an hour’s sleep. God gives you grace and you do things that aren’t natural but make weird sense at the time. They sent me home, of course. They gave me a week of bereavement leave. Wow. I needed it and they knew that. It was a gift.

That night I had more contractions, 3 hours worth but the intensity wasn’t as bad and it was more manageable.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this though. I don’t want to have hours of contractions every night. I still have passed nothing… This just seems cruel of my body to make me go through all this pain and have nothing to show for it.”

On October 17, I made a decision that I wish I had not made. I decided to go to the gynecologist’s office. I wanted the miscarriage to happen. I wanted to know I was making some progress with the contractions. Mostly I wanted to start the healing process and I couldn’t do that until the baby had passed. I think I somehow thought the Dr. was going to be reassuring. I was very wrong about that. Instead of being reassured I was bullied and made to feel incompetent. The Dr. kept calling my contractions “cramps” and said there was no way I could handle a natural miscarriage or a medically induced one. He said it was irresponsible of me to let this go on and that I needed to schedule a D&C right away. He also criticized me for not having a Rhogham shot yet.

I was humiliated, broken and defeated. I sobbed all the way home and laid on the floor at home for awhile wishing I could just die. The very thought of having my child ripped from my body was the ultimate horror. But the Dr. had said my cervix was hard, thick and closed.

“I made the decision to just go ahead and get the D&C…because he scared me and I don’t want to go through this for weeks on end. I am really, really upset about doing it though and really scared. I am having it done tomorrow at 1pm. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“I kept thinking while I was waiting how it wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to have my baby in a birth center with no IV’s and needles and drugs. But here I am, with everything I didn’t want and no baby to come home with.”

But in spite of all of that, I was relieved when it was said and done. I thought we could finally get some closure. I thought the worst was over.

“I felt such a wave of relief that it was finally over.”

I also had another reason to have a sense of relief. It was our prayer that we would be allowed to keep our baby. We had plans to bury it under the tree we were going to plant as a remembrance. We had been told by our Dr. this would not be possible. But that turned out to be untrue.

“They let us take the baby home. I didn’t want to look. I have read enough to know what the procedure does but we did want to have a baby to bury. [My husband] was ready to fight for them to let us keep the baby because our Dr. said there was no way we could. But when the Dr. came in that was going to do the procedure she said that our Dr. had said we wanted to keep the baby and that was no problem and they would give us a container to take home. I could see the relief spread over [my husband’s] face. Keeping the baby was just as important to him as it was to me and that comforted me.”

I wish my story ended here…but it doesn’t. Read Part 3.

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