At the beginning of this year I saw that perfect little PLUS sign confirming I was pregnant.
In fact, I saw four of them, because I’m kind of obsessive, so I had to be sure. Every day I devoured articles, books and blogs while sipping my caffeine free drinks and every night my husband laid his hands on my belly and prayed for our growing child before we went to bed. According to calculations, we would welcome a child into our family in September. It still amazes me to this day how quickly hope can spring up from the reality of a dream coming to life.
I was going to be a mama.
After several weeks of waiting patiently to be “far enough” along, my husband and I went to my first prenatal appointment. Just a few months prior we celebrated our one year anniversary, and writing my last name, James, on the new patient paperwork still felt new. We sat excitedly as the doctor began the ultrasound and then I watched as his face gradually changed. As he pushed the monitor away, I will never forget the words that fell out of his mouth next. “Well, let me tell you what I see. What I do see is a perfectly in tact gestational sac. But what I don’t see is a fetus.”
My heart went numb. Wait, what?
In my mind, there were only two scenarios that could have happened. Either I wasn’t as far along as I thought and the baby would be healthy but hard to see or the screen would show a tiny pea-sized shape and I’d hear a heartbeat. I didn’t know I was supposed to prepare for another scenario. Staring at the screen I was determined to see something the doctor didn’t, to prove him wrong. But all I saw was a perfectly round, large, empty circle. The inside was completely dark.
He dove right into the details without skipping a beat. It was a 50/50 chance that I had experienced a missed abortion and I was in the process of miscarrying. Or, as he shared with less enthusiasm, I could still be pregnant. I had two choices, to “wait and see” or begin a series of blood tests. I chose to wait. And pray to God for peace.
I hurried home and searched my pregnancy books and online for something to confirm, one way or the other. On one hand I had many symptoms of a miscarriage in progress, but other articles said these could also happen when experiencing a “normal” pregnancy. A phone call to a close friend who is also an OBGYN confirmed the same. I would just have to wait.
I hated the words missed abortion as a part of my diagnosis. The doctor used it flippantly like I should know what it was. Other terms that I quickly became familiar with were missed miscarriage and blighted ovum. In this case, the egg and sperm meet, but immediately when it’s time for one part to develop into a baby and the other into the gestational sac, the sac develops but the baby does not. It is “missed” because your body doesn’t recognize this at first and continues develop hormones as if everything was normal. Still, this hadn’t been confirmed for me, so I was asked to wait another week and come back to see if the baby had developed.
The week in between my prenatal appointments was one of the longest of my life. Every waking moment was spent darting from one possibility to the other. I swayed between feeling hopeful to feeling depressed. In some moments I would try to envision the baby growing inside of me. I would lie awake at night and picture rocking a newborn boy, looking at him thinking, they thought you weren’t there, but I still had hope and look at you now! Other times I could almost feel my hope slipping as the pregnancy symptoms began to diminish. I hated sitting at dinner parties as people asked when were we going to have children. They had no clue, so I couldn’t blame them, but the question would buckle me as I smiled back blankly. It was a terrible mind game and my only respite was when I would pray.
Little by little these moments of prayer turned into my constant inner dialogue. And with this I began to feel a kind of peace and comfort I had not experienced before. Hymns would come to mind at night, particularly, It Is Well With My Soul. And I clung to this song to drown out the voices of fear. Little by little it began to work.
The second appointment confirmed it was a blighted ovum. The gestational sac was completely in tact, measuring about 9 weeks, but had stopped growing, with no sign of a baby. I felt like I was having an out of body experience. Here I was just getting to used to the idea of being pregnant and now I wasn’t. It felt so unfair. To top it all off, no one knew. I didn’t even get to tell people (outside of my immediate family) I was pregnant in the first place. All of those ideas I collected on “how to tell people you’re pregnant” or gender reveal parties seemed foolish now. I had all the right books, the cravings, the hope, the soreness, the tiredness and I would have nothing to show for it. To my surprise I learned that this happens in 1 of 3 miscarriages and that most women who experience a blighted ovum go on to have healthy pregnancies. Sometimes, as in my case, it just happens.
So just like that…as quickly as this hope was planted, it was taken away.
The miserable part is that knowing you are having a miscarriage doesn’t mean that it’s over. In some ways it’s just the beginning. Your body still thinks it’s pregnant. And so does your heart. All of the hormones, cravings and symptoms of pregnancy continue to rise until your body figures it out and the hormone levels begin to decrease. Thus began another intense, painful waiting period.
This period of waiting changed my life forever. For me, this process took about two weeks. Each day I would wake up and think, maybe today was the day it was going to happen. Then each night I would pray for it to pass so I could begin to move forward. I felt stuck. It was a strange holding pattern and one that put my faith to the fire. But that’s the thing about fire, it purifies. For the first time my prayers were raw and honest, not careful and calculated. I was deeply wounded, but not broken. And I figured out I was stronger than I thought.
Although the entire process took only a few months, I feel like an eternity has passed since I first saw that PLUS sign appear. In a sense I am still in a holding pattern, waiting to understand why my husband and I experienced this deep loss of hope. Why my body had to go through so much pain and why this happened when it did. But even as I write this, I already know some of the answers to these painful questions. Thankfully, through it all, I can still say, “It is well with my soul.”
If you have experienced a miscarriage or are in the process of miscarrying, feel free to email me at brandee@thechicsite.com.
I am happy to share some of the more personal details if it will help you in any way.
