It Happened to Me: After Two Miscarriages, a Nurse Told Me to ‘Get on Birth Control’
I walked out and never went back.
My partner held my hand as I leaned back on the examination table and our doctor used the ultrasound wand. I was 36, married for less than a year, and this was my first pregnancy. We were so, so excited.
We watched the screen — which small speck was our baby? Which gray and white circle? Was that the heartbeat there, swirling in the far corner? I looked at our doctor’s face. She seemed puzzled. There might’ve been sighing. She explained there was an egg sac, but there was no heartbeat. I was supposed to be eight weeks along, but the embryo had stopped growing around six and a half weeks.
“But I didn’t have any bleeding,” I said. “I actually am pregnant, right? You see that I’m pregnant?”
Had I hallucinated a pregnancy?
Then she told us about missed miscarriages (something my online miscarriage calculator failed to mention!). It’s when the baby has died or — more accurately in my case — the embryo has failed to develop, but your body hasn’t emptied out your uterus yet, so the cells are still inside you but will never grow.
I asked a dozen questions, trying to will my way back to hope. Could it have been earlier in the pregnancy than I thought? Would it maybe start developing at some point … like could we just wait and see? Why does no one tell you about missed miscarriages? What kind of fucked up online miscarriage calculator doesn’t mention that there is this other thing, this silent miscarriage, that can sneak up on you and snatch your joy away??
The doctor told me I had two choices. I could wait until my body started bleeding and flushing out the dead embryo, which could happen anywhere, at any moment — a restaurant, a work function, a friend’s wedding, on my mother-in-law’s white sofa. Or I could get it over quickly and have a D&C (dilation & curettage), which meant the doctor would clear out my uterus, and I could start trying to get pregnant again. I chose the second option.
It took a while to accept that it was the end. That we wouldn’t be having a baby in March, that the maternity clothes would stay in a drawer, and there would be no big announcement to our families, no expectant Christmas celebrating with friends. I was relieved we hadn’t shared the news with anyone, because I could process what happened on my own timeline, with my partner. We grieved what could’ve been. Maybe somewhere, in some alternate universe, a version of me was smiling for a maternity shoot, my partner’s hand on my growing belly. Maybe somewhere we were happy.
After I recovered from the miscarriage, we were ready to try again. We told ourselves it was a fluke. Miscarriages were common. I got pregnant, again, immediately. This time I knew about missed miscarriages, but it seemed so unlikely, the cruelest of bad jokes, really, that it would happen a second time. I checked the miscarriage calculator leading up to the appointment.
Chill, I told myself. There’s no reason to think anything is wrong.