Mixed emotions: Women may find themselves dealing with grief and joy simultaneously when a successful pregnancy follows a miscarriage. (Image by Corbis)
A blood clot no bigger than a pea permanently changed my life. I was six, maybe seven, weeks pregnant and, by all accounts, the perfect candidate for an uncomplicated pregnancy. I was 24 years old, an avid exerciser at a healthy weight. No woman in my family had ever lost a baby.
But when I saw that speck of blood — a bright red alarm against the white of my toilet paper — I knew I was losing our first child.
I’d always assumed that a miscarriage happened in one agonizing day. But it turned out to be a much more grueling process — nearly two weeks of bleeding, cramping, and crying, made worse by people’s attempts to ease my unique heartache with universal platitudes.
“You know, this just means the pregnancy wasn’t viable.”
“Don’t worry, this isn’t the end of the line for you — a lot of women miscarry.”
“It just wasn’t meant to be.”
I had to have bloodwork done weekly to track the decline of my pregnancy hormones. And each time I was handed the piece of paper with my results, I was confronted with the callous medical term for miscarriage — spontaneous abortion — screaming at me in bold, black type. I wanted to protest: This wasn’t my choice; this isn’t an end result I decided upon.
The truth is, the pregnancy had been unplanned—it happened just a few months after my husband and I got married. But it was a happy, welcome surprise. After the miscarriage, however, I slowly began shutting myself off to the idea of having children. My fear that a future pregnancy would end in another loss was too intense, especially after my obstetrician spotted a uterine septum, a wedge of tissue that partly divides my uterus, during a follow-up ultrasound.
“You should have surgery before you try to get pregnant again,” my doctor cautioned me. Even though the uterine defect wasn’t necessarily the cause of my loss, it seemed increasingly clear, at least to me, that my miscarriage wasn’t due to a problem not with the fetus but with my body — a body that might insist on betraying me.
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But then, almost a year later to the day, I got pregnant again. I had been married for more than a year, I’d started a lower-stress job, and the raw pain of my loss had settled to a dull ache. All the pieces were in place; the timing was right. Yet my excitement was matched, if not exceeded, by my anxiety. Every day felt like a blessing, but every trip to the bathroom (and when you’re pregnant, there are a lot of them) felt like a threat.
When my pregnancy symptoms randomly waned — my breasts weren’t as sore, I didn’t feel crippled by nausea — I couldn’t be thankful for the respite from the normal discomforts of the first trimester. I could only be terrified. I often woke up in the morning with a sudden, irrational belief that I was no longer pregnant, a fear that no amount of soothing words could calm.
Doctor’s appointments became my lifeline — a chance to hear my child’s heartbeat and know that I had one more day with her, at least. I stopped exercising out of a fear that I might somehow jostle the baby, even though my doctors reassured me that physical activity was perfectly safe. At nearly seven months pregnant, just writing this piece feels like tempting fate.
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