My first pregnancy ended in what’s called a “missed miscarriage” - a miscarriage where the baby stops developing, but your body doesn’t realize they have passed for many more weeks. This means you continue to have pregnancy symptoms, and your uterus continues to grow. I had my first inkling that something could be wrong with that pregnancy when, at 10 weeks along, I went in for my first appointment with my homebirth midwife. At that stage you can usually hear the heartbeat with a Doppler ultrasound device, but we couldn’t find one. Maybe it was too early, we decided. We’d try again at the next visit.
That afternoon I went home to notice I was spotting light brown blood, and also noticed that I didn’t have the breast tenderness I once had. I called my midwife and I decided to go in for an ultrasound. “I’m sorry, this isn’t a good pregnancy,” was all the doctor who performed my scan had to say.
I cried. I blamed myself. I cried some more. I went to my OB to decide what to do next. Should I let my body miscarry on its own? Should I take medication? Should I schedule a D&C (dilation and curettage - a surgery to remove the “products of conception”, as they call them)? I decided that I wanted this process to move along so I could heal and grieve, and so I chose to take Misoprostol at home to bring on labor.
I birthed that little baby, and everything that came with it, into the toilet. There was so much blood. It was painful. It was sad. But I was glad it was over.
My second pregnancy resulted in my first son. My third pregnancy was healthy as well and gave me a second son. But then my fourth pregnancy ended in an early loss (6 weeks), and I was devastated all over again. My fifth pregnancy gave me my third son at the end of 2020.
That was two and a half years ago. At the time when my third son was born, I thought for sure I was done. I was 39, I had three boys, and I was tired. But as my third baby grew, so did my longing to go through pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding just one more time.
In October 2022 I found out I was expecting again and was so excited. It happened right after my first postpartum period, as many of my pregnancies have. Maybe this will be my little girl, I thought. And then, as the doorbell rang and guests arrived for Thanksgiving, I wiped and saw a spot of blood. I hoped everything was okay, but in my heart I knew it wasn’t. Entertaining for a holiday while wondering if I was losing a baby that I hadn’t told anyone about seemed impossible. I went on to lose that baby at 6 weeks, just like the last time.
And then I started to worry. I was almost 42. Was I too old? Would I never get a chance to mother another tiny human? Would my last son be the last child I nursed to sleep at night?
But right before my 42nd birthday I found out I was expecting again. Like every other time I was excited, but held my breath. I told my husband and oldest son, but no one else. I waited until 9 weeks to even contact my midwives, hoping that if I made it that long it meant things would be okay. I had no real reason to suspect that anything wasn’t right, but had this sad feeling inside that I couldn’t explain.
I anxiously awaited my midwife appointment, which I purposefully waited to schedule at almost 11 weeks so we’d have a better chance of hearing the heartbeat. I knew that would allow me to breathe again. My midwife could tell that I was concerned, so we started right away with the Doppler to see what we could hear. But there was nothing, no matter how hard we tried. Was it still too early? Maybe. But maybe my intuition was right. Maybe it was happening again, just like the first time. We tried a portable ultrasound machine. We could see a sac and something inside, but no movement, no heartbeat. My midwife warned me that she wasn’t well-trained in ultrasound, so not to be concerned.
When I went home I wiped and saw the tiniest spot of blood. Was the exact same scenario as my first repeating itself? I cried into a pile of laundry in the bathroom, whispering to myself, “please, not again. Please, not again.” But my cries couldn’t stop what was coming. As the days progressed I bled more. I had an ultrasound a few days later to make sure the miscarriage was moving along well, since I remembered how bloody the first one was at 10 weeks, and we had a vacation to Legoland scheduled the following week. I was worried that I would have to go to the hospital in another state and ruin our trip, so I wanted to make sure that the bleeding would slow down by then. Things seemed to be going well, so I chose to let my body miscarry on its own, without the medication that I had used with my first.
After my ultrasound I went to buy milk with all the kids in the van. I put the milk on the seat next to me, buckled myself in, and felt a gush. I bled through my pants. I had never done that before, not in all the years since I got my period at age 11. I went to the diaper bag, turned the wet bag inside-out and covered it with napkins. I drove home. The kids stayed in the car while I cleaned myself up, and then, like we all do as mothers, I kept on with my day. I had to. With no help, my husband at work, and three little guys to care for, it’s what had to be done.
After that the bleeding slowed, which I was so thankful for. We could go on our trip, and I may even be able to swim with my kids. We drove 3.5 hours, successfully navigated Legoland, visited my in-laws in NYC, and drove 4 hours home. The bleeding was almost gone. I put away everything from our trip, cleaned the whole house, and went to bed around 12am. I was glad to be home.
At 4am my eyes opened wide from a dead sleep. Something wasn’t right. I went to the bathroom in the darkness, trying not to wake anyone else. I flipped on the bathroom light to find blood dripping down my legs. Blood was pouring out of me. I couldn’t stop it. I was filling a pad in a single minute. I woke my husband to tell him I needed help and to call an ambulance. I had thought this miscarriage was over, but it was actually only beginning.
I was losing more blood than I had ever seen myself lose, even after my full-term births. “Are they here yet?!” I called out to my husband as I attempted to clean myself up. They were on their way. It had only been minutes, but it felt like an eternity. What if I kept bleeding this way? What if it couldn’t be stopped? What if this was the last time I saw my family?
I managed to change into black pants and a black t-shirt, which would make me feel better about being covered in blood. I grabbed my purse and phone and walked into the ambulance. My vitals remained okay as we traveled the 10 minute ride to the hospital, but inside my mind was spinning. The bleeding hadn’t slowed - I could feel it gushing out of me. I was worried about how quickly I would be treated, and even more worried that I would lose consciousness and wake up without a uterus. I’ve heard way too many horror stories to be naive to that possibility.
I was brought to a room quickly, but no one checked my bleeding. They covered me in a blanket and left me there with the curtain closed and no call button. I told them I needed help. The male nurse I was assigned treated me like a burden, and kept repeating that my vitals were all fine. Had he looked under that blanket he might have thought differently. “How long will it be before I see a doctor?” I asked. “I’m literally gushing blood, and probably need medication or a D&C to make it stop.” “He’s very busy. It’s going to be a while,” he replied. “This may not seem like an emergency now, but I’m telling you it will become one,” I said. His response to that was to stab me in the forearm and give me fluids without warning or consent, and then to close the curtain again, leaving me with no way to contact anyone, still bleeding beneath the blanket.
Soon my hands started to go numb. I felt like I was going to throw up. I knew I was about to pass out, and I was scared about what they would do if I was unconscious. “Help!” I cried out. The male nurse returned. “I feel like I’m going to pass out.” “How do you know what it feels like to pass out?” he asked, condescendingly. “Because it’s happened to me before when I’ve reacted to vaccines and medications,” I replied. I knew he wasn’t taking me seriously. “It’s because you’re breathing wrong,” he said, blaming me. “You need to calm yourself down.” “It could also be because of blood loss,” I responded. He left the room. He still hadn’t looked under that blanket.
I started to feel intense cramping, like early labor contractions. This went on for a while. My mouth was dry, so I coughed, and I could feel that a huge clot had come out of me. A new, female nurse came in. She asked how I was feeling and I told her I had been ignored and that I was covered in blood. Finally, someone removed the blanket. She gasped. My clothes were covered. The bed sheets were soaked through. Blood was everywhere.
The nurse called for another female to assist her and, together, they cleaned me up. They removed my pants and underwear, tossing my long-ago soaked pad. They noticed the clot I had felt, which turned out to likely be my baby, and they carefully set it aside in a container. They wiped my back, since blood had pooled all the way up it, changed my sheets, and got me into a diaper. Someone had finally noticed me.
From the time when my baby left my body the bleeding began to slow. I waited hours more to see a doctor, and hours after that for an ultrasound to make sure there was no more tissue to surprise me with more bleeding later. Everything looked okay, and I was cleared to go home. As much as I wanted to take my baby with me to bury in my yard, it was important for me to send him or her off for chromosomal testing. This was my first chance at that, after four losses, and I needed to see if there was a reason why this had happened.
My husband and kids arrived with some clean clothes. I changed, and we swung by the milk store where I had bled through my clothes two weeks before. I was able to go home, rest a bit and shower, but then it was back to reality, where there were other people who depended on me, and there was no one to take my place.
I wondered when I decided to miscarry naturally at 10 weeks gestation if it would be better or worse than taking medication to move things along. Though more predictable, the medicated experience was traumatizing for me, especially as my first pregnancy. I really hoped it would be better to let my body miscarry on its own, and I wanted to give it a chance. My losses at 6 weeks were more like really sad, heavy periods, and I was hoping it would be more like that than like birthing a baby who had passed.
And it really had seemed like things were going well all through our trip, which I’m so thankful for. I could have started bleeding like I did that night while in the car on the way home, or while we were at Legoland, or in my in-laws’ apartment. But I didn’t. I was able to be in my home, near my family, where things were more familiar. My children mostly slept through it, had breakfast like they usually do (except without me), and picked me up a few hours later. They fought in the car like we didn’t skip a beat.
If I had to choose again, I would choose the predictability of medication. Now having the two stories to compare, it would have been so much easier to know for sure everything was over, rather than worrying for 3 weeks and waking up covered in blood.
This experience taught me a lot, but it didn’t dissuade me from wanting to become a mother one last time. I plan to give myself some time to heal and focus on myself, and then try again. I know there is one last little soul in there, it’s just a matter of waiting on their timing.
