I had a miscarriage

I’ve been putting off this blog post.

I’ve written about my miscarriage a handful of times on my Instagram but it feels different to write it all out in one spot. It feels final in some way.

But here we go….

My husband and I weren’t trying to get pregnant so the second tiny pink line that popped up one morning in September was a definite surprise. I was incredibly joyful and my husband a little scared. We decided to keep it under wraps until the holidays and we would tell just our families at those celebrations. And then we went on a trip to Utah, one of our favorite places.

We stayed with our friends and our one-year-old got to live with dogs for a week. He was in heaven. I had all the symptoms that I’d had with my first pregnancy, nausea, headaches, soreness and fatigue. But something about the pregnancy felt different and my husband told me he thought the baby was a little girl. He’s unusually intuitive about that sort of thing.

Things changed in October, when I started to spot.

I remember spotting once or twice with my first pregnancy but they were one-offs and very minimal. This was… different. It started on a Saturday and was brighter than I liked. The spotting stopped for a couple days and then the next Saturday, was bright red. And too much. I tried to be hopeful but I knew something was wrong.

I’ve read all the posts about pregnancy bleeding and I knew what it meant. I clung onto hope and then we went to the doctor’s. We had to drive forty-five minutes to the closest office that had an open appointment. My husband left work early and we were carted into the dark little ultrasound room. I knew it as soon as the tech got quiet and the fuzzy image didn’t look like it should. I was supposed to be ten weeks pregnant, but that wasn’t what it showed.

After the quick ultrasound, we were shown to a room where we tried to keep our toddler out of every drawer for about a half and hour. I knew what they were going to say and I just wanted them to come in already. I wanted them to tell me, to make it real, even though I wanted to be wrong. The midwife came in and said that while we had to wait for someone else to review the ultrasound, it looked like I had a “non viable pregnancy”. Even now, the words make my skin crawl.

Tears fell into my stupid mask and the midwife asked, “How are you?”

What a strange thing to ask. I’ve since learned that people don’t know what to say when something terrible happens like this. My husband answered for me and I’m glad he did. I wasn’t sure how to answer that besides the obvious.

Heartbroken.

Angry.

Dying inside.

We waited longer and longer for them to confirm. It was awful, the waiting in this tiny room with our bored toddler and realizing what it meant. Want to know the kicker? The thing that I would lie in bed and think about for months to come? They were able to determine based on the ultrasound when our baby stopped growing and it happened on our trip to Utah. I think about that all the time. While we were vacationing and having fun with our friends, the baby that we were so secretly happy about died.

And for a little over a month after my baby had already died, I continued to talk to her. To tell her older brother about her and think about what our life would be like after she joined us earth-side. Even as I write this, it makes my heart ache. I had a missed miscarriage. It took my body almost a month to catch up to what happened.

Miscarriage sucks.