I've often thought I should write this down. Not just so I have a record of it, but so that other people might benefit from it. Benefit how, I don't know. ... If you would rather not hear some not-too-pleasant details, then simply don't read this post. It's that easy.
We had told everyone we knew that I was pregnant at just about THE moment I found out. There were a few reasons for this:
1 - We were excited!
2 - Nothing had gone wrong with pregnancy #1. I just assumed that's how pregnancy #2 would go, too.
3- I was sick. A lot. The pregnancy was horrible and I had to go home from work early a lot, etc., etc. It would have been tough to find another reason for that.
In late November I spotted just a touch. It was a one-time incident, but still a little scary. I was almost 8 weeks pregnant, and anything can happen during that time. I had a doctor's appointment about a week later, so we mentioned it to him when we went in (Rob went to almost every single appointment with me, for all 3 pregnancies. What a guy!). He decided to do an ultrasound and the baby was fine. The due date was pushed back a little because the baby was smaller than expected, but there was a heartbeat and movement and all that.
We went to CA for Christmas and sometime on that trip I started feeling much better. I could eat breakfast. I was happier. I wasn't feeling near so sick. I figured I was just starting to feel better as a new phase of pregnancy. I was almost 12 weeks along. I was grateful to be feeling better.
We went in for our 12 week visit when we got back to Utah, New Years Day 2003. The doctor couldn't find the heartbeat. I told him I'd been feeling better lately and he said, "That's not good." We went to do an utrasound again and the baby was gone. Just gone.
I was not sad about this. I think Rob is still bugged that I wasn't in the slightest sad. I was saying things like, "I don't have to be sick any more!", and "I can take Advil any time I want." Rob thought this was very callous of me, and maybe it was. But the pregnancy had been awful, and the baby wasn't a baby to me yet. It was too early-on in the pregnancy still. It was only an agent making me terribly sick. I was happy to have that agent gone. I never did cry. It just wasn't sad to me.
So the doctor said I had 3 options. I hadn't spontaneously miscarried the fetus (80% of miscarriages are spontaneous), and who knew when my body would decide to expel the waste from my body. He said it might take up to a month. I thought that was a LOUSY option. Sit around waiting for my body to throw out a dead fetus? No thank you. Option #2 was to schedule a D&C. Quick operation, but not cheap (not too expensive either, but we were dirt poor). Option #3 was to take a drug that would cause me to miscarry. It was something to treat ulcers or something like that, but a side effect was that it causes miscarriages. Poor women who had to figure that one out initially.
We choose to take the drug. It was inexpensive, and we figured if it didn't work, we could always do a D&C anyways. What would we have lost? A few dollars?
Round 1 of the drug caused uncomfortable cramping, but nothing else happened. I kept waiting for it, but nothing. By the next morning it obviously hadn't worked and we went in to the doctor again. He said we could try Round 2 of the drug or we could schedule that D&C. So Round 2 it was.
Wow. Pain. ... If the miscarriage was any indication of how actual labor would be, no thank you (all 3 of my kids are C-section, and the miscarriage is the only experience I have with anything close to labor).
I think the pain didn't really start until mid-day or so (I think this because I wrote a journal entry on that day. I don't start the entry with the miscarriage news (the first paragraph talks about New Year's Resolutions that I dislike), and I don't give any of the fun details I'm about to share. I wouldn't have written the entry AFTER the events of the day, I would have been too tired). I took the pill in the morning and the whole thing was over by that evening, but the time from mid-day on, ... Wow.
Some of the details of those horrific hours:
I was puking and then dry heaving. I had severe diarreah. I was bleeding so fast that it just wasn't worth it to get off the toilet. I would sit on the toilet and puke into the bath tub. I couldn't find any position that was comfortable. Not standing or sitting or laying down. I tried to take a bath to relax my body. Nope. Nothing. I was absolutely exhausted. My body was drained.
I asked Rob repeatedly to kill me to put me out of my pain. It was so painful. Probably the second most painful experience of my life (second only to trying to brave the pain instead of taking the drugs the day of my first C-section. That was more intense, but lasted less time). I was losing my mind. Mentally I was gone.
I finally looked at Rob and told him I couldn't do it any more. He gave me a Priesthood blessing and it said that I would be able to pass the stuff quickly, or we would know quickly that I needed to go to the hospital. Pretty soon after that my body was hurting so badly and I felt so weak that we decided that I needed to go into the hospital. Rob called the doctor and told him to meet us there (the doctor gave Rob a condescending tone and told him, "I told you it'd be painful."). C was already at the house to help with Miciah, so he stayed with her while we went (C is the only person except Rob who saw me like that. C saw more than he ever wanted to, but he was SO supportive). On the way to the hospital I was starting to space it. I was getting loopy, things seemed far away. Rob kept telling me how pale I looked. By the time I got to the hospital I was very very weak. I laid down on the hospital bed and I think I fainted--I don't remember quite a bit of what happened at the hospital. They got an IV in me pretty quickly, I know that.
Then I was in the pre-operating room. I remember the doctors there to do the surgery. My doctor looked at me and said he was going to give me a drug to let me take a nap. I almost cried when I heard the word nap. I was so exhausted. I thanked him for letting me sleep--I hadn't been able to sleep through all the pain of the day, and I hadn't slept well the night before. If I could have forced my body to sleep through all that, ... So when my doctor said I could take a np, I wanted to get up and kiss him. I didn't fight the drug that knocked me out (normally I probably would have, or at least I would have needed to force myself to relax). It seemed like paradise to go to sleep.
I woke up in the recovery room with Rob by my side. Rob asked how I was feeling. I smiled and told him I felt GREAT. SO MUCH better. I can not even describe how much better I felt. It was like being half-dead, and READY to be the other half, too, and then suddenly you're re-born and perfect. It was near-miraculous.
Rob told me that I had almost passed the remains of the fetus on my own. The surgery took a matter of minutes because my body had almost done all the work already. But I am SO GRATEFUL that we went into the hospital. Not so that they could let me sleep. :) Not so they could do the surgery, even. But because I was so dehydrated and sick that I think had we stayed home, I would have quickly become a medical emergency. That IV saved me from getting any worse. I am grateful to have not found out how much worse I would have become.
This is the only experience in my life that I remember being so listless. The pain at first was excruciating and I wanted to die. But then, as I got more and more dehydrated and exhausted, things just drew quiet. The pain was still there, but everything was dull and grey. It would have been peaceful to just let this life go.
I took the next day to recover. It was really the only day I needed to fully rest. My boss at work was really great. C (who worked at Nu Skin Enterprises with me) explained my circumstances so I didn't have to make that phone call, and my boss said I could take as much time as I needed. This was super great of him and I took something like 5 work days off. However, turns out that NSE changed their sick days policy mid-January and made it effective Jan. 1st. That's the first day I found out about the miscarriage. Before that, sick days in a row could all be counted as 1 sick day. After Jan. 1st, though, that was only with a doctor's note. Which I could have gotten, no problem, HAD I KNOWN! ... My immediate supervisor told me it was cool, things could slide later if they needed to.
I could have gone back to my doctor and asked for a note for those days, I guess. But he and I soon were not on good terms over a billing issue (that I don't need to discuss here). ... I suppose what bugged me most about work being dumb about the time off thing is that the boss (whom I adored then and adore still) said he would "take care of it" and to "take as much time as I needed." While that sounds very understanding and nice, to not follow through and leave me without sick days for the rest of the year? Not cool. (This was a non-issue later, since we went to OH for the summer, so I stopped working there in late April or early May.)
And that's my miscarriage story.
Oh. Here's why you don't tell people that you're pregnant when you're only 4 weeks along: If you miscarry, people will be asking you for up to a YEAR about the pregnancy and the baby. We decided a good rule, from then on, was to announce the pregnancy to the same people that you wouldn't mind announcing the miscarriage to. I didn't mind telling people about the miscarriage, really, but it was so akward for THEM that it was painful for me to talk about. I didn't want to have to go through it all again with each new person.
(written 25 July 2008)
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