The One That Might be too Sad to Read

Or, The Big Announcement That Never Happened

I'm sorry, this one's gonna be a downer, but I'm going ahead and writing it for three reasons:

1.  I promised you a big announcement, and I'm not going to just leave you hanging.
2.  It will probably be therapeutic for me to write about it.
3.  I'm shocked at how many women have experienced this, and how little anyone talks about it, and even the lack of information out there on the subject.  So I felt maybe I should share, and help somebody somewhere someday.

The big announcement was supposed to be that I was pregnant.  Except that now I'm not anymore.  Let's start at the beginning, just so you know the whole story.

About six weeks ago I realized that my period was going on two weeks late.  I just turned 40, and I'd never been pregnant.  I honestly thought I just couldn't get pregnant.  I've had a lot of "female troubles" in my lifetime including horrible bad cramps every month, cysts on my ovaries I'd been hospitalized for, and ultimately surgery for fibroids about five years ago.  R and I stopped using birth control following that surgery.  I felt that the pill may have contributed to the fibroids (though all my doctors denied this possibility), and I'd been on it so many years, I just wanted that stuff out of my body.

So, all this combined, the many years with no birth control (and no pregnancy), the history of problems, I was sure I just couldn't get pregnant.  And honestly, I was okay with that.  I've never been a "biological clock is ticking" kind of gal.  I love kids, obviously from my chosen profession.  And I am happy to have kids in my life, both personally, and the kiddos I see professionally.  But maybe two years ago I just accepted that "Mommy" was never a word anyone was gonna call me (except maybe dogs, but they don't speak English).

When my period was so late, I seriously thought I must be starting menopause.  I started asking my mother all about her experiences, when it started, symptoms she had, etc...  And she asked me a time or two, "Do you think you might be pregnant?"  And I kept assuring her I most certainly was not.  Finally she pushed me a bit more and said I should just take the test, and then I'd know.  I think even she was more concerned that something was seriously wrong, rather than truly thinking I was having a baby.  I mean, it honestly seemed more logical to me that I had a horrible tumor than that I might be pregnant.

You can imagine my complete shock when I peed on that stick, two weeks after my missed period, and it actually said positive.  Even after the doctor confirmed it the next day, I was still disbelieving.  R was quite calm, and quite happy.  I just felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.  Every morning for about two weeks, I woke up and wondered if it was all a dream.  Until I walked into the kitchen and saw the prenatal vitamins on the counter.

Anyway, I didn't tell a lot of people right away.  I think this is pretty common, to wait until the first trimester has passed, but given my age, I really just didn't want to make a lot of waves until we knew for sure everything was okay.  I didn't tell my dad until last weekend, and I told my boss on Wednesday last week.  At that point I was  almost11 weeks along, and it seemed more real.  And it was reaching the point where work plans were being made for spring and summer, when I planned to be out on maternity leave.  I felt like I had to tell her.

After knowing about the pregnancy for several weeks, of course I had started to become attached.  I'd started to make plans.  I'd started pondering names, mentally decorating a nursery, looking at baby stuff every time I'd go shopping.  I had a feeling it was a girl, from day one.  I had dreams about baby girls, and I always referred to the baby as "she" or "her" without even thinking.

Then, driving home from a work trip on Thursday, I started spotting a little.  I wasn't terribly concerned.  I mean, I've read a lot of stuff since finding out I was pregnant.  A lot of women spot, and it's usually okay.  I'd had a tiring and stressful couple of days, and I figured that was all it was.  But I still called my doctor's office when I got home.  The on-call doctor said he didn't think it was serious, and that I should just rest for the evening, and call first thing in the morning for an appointment.

I woke up that morning, which was Friday, and I'd been bleeding a lot more.  So when I called to make the appointment, the nurse said, "Honey, you need to go to the emergency room."

And then I went insane.  I started crying.  I called R at work and told him to come home NOW.  But somehow I still felt like it would all be okay.

We went to the ER, and told the nurse and doctor the whole spiel.  The doctor pulled in a little ultrasound machine, and he said he wasn't a radiologist, but he couldn't see anything in there.  They took some blood, and they sent me down to see the "real" ultrasound technician for a "real" ultrasound.  They aren't supposed to tell you anything.  That's not their job.  But we could see the screen, and we didn't see a baby.  She finally showed us one picture and said that in this image, it looked to her like the embryo was about 6 weeks old.  I was supposed to be 11 weeks pregnant.  She asked how sure I was of my due date.  I was sure.  We knew this wasn't good.

They wheeled me back into my room.  And then we waited.  And we cried, and we held each other.  And then we calmed down and turned on The Young and the Restless, and life felt normal for an hour.

The doctor finally came back in and explained everything to us.  He said it was a weird situation.  Which sounded about right for something in my life.  It looked to the radiologist like the embryos stopped developing at 6 weeks. Yes, I meant that to be plural.  I had been carrying twins.  My dad is a twin.  And the few people we'd told about the pregnancy teased us about twins running in families and "skipping a generation."  But it was all in jest.  When we found out we'd lost not one baby, but two, we started sobbing all over again.

Then it got weird.  The doctor said that it looked, from the ultrasound, like one of the babies was definitely "on it's way out" but that the other one was still in place.  There was no visible heartbeat in either, so that wasn't a good sign.  BUT, on the off chance that maybe I was way off on my due dates, there was a very slim possibility that one was still okay.  Plus, my hCG level wasn't anywhere expected.  He said in a normal, eleven week pregnancy, especially one with twins, it should have been well over 100,000.  In someone who was miscarrying, it should be closer to 1,000.  Mine was over 9,000.  Which wouldn't be so far off for a six week pregnancy with one baby.

So, at that point they were treating the situation as though I'd been carrying twins and was miscarrying one.  Though they kept saying the chance was very slim, like 5%, that there was still one viable embryo, since the heartbeat wasn't detectable.  My instructions were to wait 48 hours, then return for another blood test.  If the hCG level had roughly doubled at that point, we'd know I was still pregnant.  If it had gone down considerably, we'd know I had miscarried.

But that just made the whole thing more impossible to deal with, you know?  I mean they had to send me home not really knowing whether I was still pregnant or not.  And honestly, at that point, I wanted nothing more than a big glass of wine and an Ativan, with the promise of an Ambien to follow.  And I still had to treat my body as though it were pregnant, just in case.  Yet we knew, either way, we'd had twins, and at least one of them was gone.  Which was horrible.

You can imagine how much sleep I got that night.

Well, the morning got worse.  Because, up until that point, I'd been bleeding minimally and feeling like I had mild menstrual cramps.  I woke up Saturday morning feeling like something was ripping out my insides.  I took some Tylenol, because that's all I was allowed to take, and then I promptly started throwing up.  I kept lying on the bed moaning, then running to the bathroom.  I was sweating profusely, then I was freezing.  R didn't know what to do with me.  He asked repeatedly if I wanted to go to the ER again, and I kept saying no.

Until I couldn't take it any longer, and I told him yes, ER, NOW.  At that point I felt like I would pay any amount of money and endure any kind of poking and prodding just to make the pain stop.  I think I have a pretty high pain tolerance, and this was like nothing I've ever felt before.

Thankfully the ER wasn't busy, and they didn't do too much poking and prodding before they gave me Morphine and something for the nausea, and then I felt like a whole new woman.

I was hoping they might go ahead and do that blood test that day, since I was there.  I mean, it seems logical to me that if they expected a significant change in 48 hours, there would be some amount of change in 24?  I guess I just don't understand, because they kept telling me it didn't work that way, and no, they wouldn't do it that day.

They did another pelvic exam on me.  And let me tell you, if you think those things aren't fun on a normal day, they seriously aren't fun when you're already in pain, and upset, and bleeding.  And it's not your normal doctor.

Then they sent me home with prescriptions for Vicodin and some nausea thing.  The meds made me pretty sleepy, and I spent the rest of the day on the couch watching stupid TV shows and dozing off and on.  I wasn't very upset yesterday, partly because I was so happy to not be doubled over in pain anymore, and partly because the drugs just had me in a stupor, I'm sure.

Then today I went to get the blood drawn for the second hCG test.  I asked the woman who did it whether they would tell me the number.  I mean, I had the number from Friday, so if they would just give me the number, I would know my answer.  Of course, they are supposed to send results to your doctor, they aren't allowed to diagnose, blah blah blah.  Thank God the nurse who had helped me that first day in the ER was there, and she pulled me aside, gave me her phone number, and told me to call her in about two hours.  She said, "I will tell you the number.  I can't say any more than that, but I'll tell you the number if you call and ask for me."  I'm sure she'd get in trouble for that, but whatever.  I'm eternally grateful to her.

Anyway, we went home from the hospital for the third time in three days, and we watched the clock for two hours to pass.  But honestly, I already knew the answer.  Already my breasts had gone way down in size, and they no longer hurt.  My tummy pooch was smaller than it had been.  I wasn't peeing as often as I had been for the past two months.  I just didn't feel pregnant anymore.

When we called, the nice woman told me the number was 1400.  So, much lower than 9,000.

It was done for sure.  No more two babies.  No more one baby.  Just me and R and Daisy and Rudy and Beavis.

Which is how my life had been for five years.  Which was how I assumed my life would be for years to come.  And I had been fine with that.  Really.

Now I just feel like life has played some kind of cruel joke on me.  Why put me through something like this?!  Why throw my life into complete turmoil, then lead me to ultimately accept and even embrace the idea of being a mother, only to rip it away from me?

If the babies had stopped developing at six weeks, that means I spent five weeks thinking I was pregnant when I really wasn't.  Or it had no chance of lasting anyway.  And the cruelest thing is that at my first OB appointment, she had said I was about 8 weeks along.  I'd taken the pregnancy tests two weeks prior to that.  So the truth of the matter is, I didn't even know I was pregnant, until really, I wasn't anymore.  And life just let me spend five weeks thinking, planning, starting to love this little baby.  It seems so unfair.

Anyway, if you've read this far, thanks for sticking with me.  If you've ever had this experience yourself, oh my god, I'm so sorry.  I feel like I've been a horribly inadequate friend for not saying more, doing more, understanding more when people I know experienced a miscarriage.  I just didn't know what it was really like.

One of my dearest friends (you know who you are) has experienced this more than once, and when we left the hospital that first day, all I wanted to do was go see her.  I knew she'd "get it."  I knew she'd understand.  And while I'm so sorry she had to go through that pain, I'm so grateful that I have her in my life right now.

It's really cliche to say there's a reason for everything, but I do believe that's true.  Hopefully someday soon I'll know the reason for all of this.