How to Survive a Miscarriage

Miscarriage of justice by Lina Scarfi

First off, who do I think I am, attempting to write a miscarriage survival guide?  The jury is still out on whether or not I sufficiently survived my own, how can I counsel anybody else on hers?

Well, maybe I can't. But I'll try, because if my words bring solace, a smile, or at least a moment's distraction to someone else who's going through it, then maybe I'll feel slightly less broken and empty.

An UnMothers Day Story Starring Various Turkeys.

Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother's Day

Based on the comments I received on yesterday's post, and the fact that somebody out there in internetland found it by googling "fuck mother's day infertility," it seems I'm not alone in feeling sad and inadequate on this day that celebrates the very thing that I want so desperately but am consistently denied.

What Fresh Hell is This?

Oh hi, I'm back.

I stopped writing because for a long time I had no news to report.  Then, when I did have news to report, quite good news in fact, the very best news that an infertile bird can hope to get....well, I was afraid to write about it because I didn't want to jinx it and I didn't want to tell the internet that I was pregnant until I was sure it was going to stick, because I didn't want to liveblog my miscarriage, if that's what was going to happen.

It seems my instincts were sound.

All Summer in a Day

Infertility stole my summer.  Which sucks, because it's my favorite season.  I love sunshine.  I'm convinced that I have chlorophyll in my blood because I crave sunlight like a plant and without it I shrivel and wilt.  I love the heat, and even love the humidity that smacks you wetly in the face the second you step outside this time of year.  I love the beach.  LoveloveLOVE the beach.  I can spend hours walking up and down the shore, looking for shells and thinking about everything and nothing at all.  I'm so grateful to live near the coast.  I spend long lazy summers with salt on my skin and sand between my toes.

Except this year.  Summer is almost over and I missed it.  I feel like the girl from my favorite Ray Bradbury story who was trapped in a closet during the only day in seven years when the rain stopped and the sun shone on her planet.

This isn't Me

If you're just getting to know me here, you might think I've always been like this: indignant and self-pitying, angry at the world.  Some of you might think, "she's never going to attract a baby into her life with an attitude like THAT."  Some might even think that I'm such a hateful person, I don't deserve a baby.

Well, I haven't always been like this.  I struggled, but through three and a half years of failed fertility treatments I remained largely hopeful for myself and generous towards others.  I tried to be the kind of person that deserved a baby.  I believed in positive thinking and karma and that whatever you put out into the universe returns to you.  I recited affirmations as I walked on the beach and visualized holding my baby in my arms.  I offered my experience, support and encouragement to other infertile women in an online forum.  I donated money to every charity that asked, especially anything having to do with children.  Gave double to the Children's Miracle Network because hey, it has both Children AND Miracle in the name, and that might bring double good luck.   You never know.

As the failures piled up, I faced each disappointment with my head held high and a fierce determination to try again.  I believed things happened for a reason.  I believed things would work out.  I looked for the bright side.  Because that's the kind of person I am.  Or was.

The Pinball Machine of Grief

I've been reading up on grief lately.  I knew there were five stages, and had always thought that you passed through them sequentially, like a train moving from station to station in a linear fashion.  All aboard!  Now leaving Anger, next stop: Bargaining.  (I'd like a ticket on the express train to Acceptance, please?)

Turns out it's not that simple.  Grief isn't like a train, it's more like a pinball machine.  You bounce around from one stage to another with very little control over the situation.  Sure, you can take your best shot and aim for the targets of stoicism and equanimity, but more often than not you end up getting thrown all over the place, knocked back and forth between rage, despair and denial.  You can slam those flippers and nudge the table all you want, that little silver ball has a mind of its own and you're just along for the ride. And grief lasts a lot longer than you expect it to:  just when you think your time is up and the game is over and you can walk away from the machine, you score a replay and start all over again.

(Does the fact that I just compared my grief to a pinball game reveal that my infertility issues may be age-related? )

Also, I had always thought that grief's bargaining stage was just about trying to make a deal with God, which never made much sense to me.  What, do people really try to negotiate having their loved ones brought back to life?  That sort of thing only happens in stories and never ends well.  Have they never read The Monkey's Paw? 

But no.  Bargaining also includes all the what-ifs and if-onlys, the "coulda, woulda, shoulda" thoughts, and the accompanying guilt.  Oh, I know all about that.  If only I had insisted on having those blood tests done a year ago.  What if I hadn't stopped taking progesterone when I did, would the baby still be alive?   My body is defective and this is all my fault.   Right now my pinball is mostly bouncing off the bumpers of hindsight, guilt, fury and blame, and every so often it slinghots straight down the middle, into the pit of depression and hopelessness.

Oh, and I coulda, woulda, shoulda been exactly 12 weeks pregnant today.

The Relentless Self Absorption of the Chronically Infertile

it's what's for dinner

It's all about me.  It's not just the miscarriage.  The waves of anger, loss and despair that currently consume me do leave me even more inclined to turn my gaze inwards, but I've been like this for a while. The past 3+ years of fertility treatments has left me with a bizarre sort of tunnel vision.  In other words, I have my head so far up my uterus I can't see straight.

The quest to conceive has taken over my life.   My infertility has become a filter through which I view the entire world.

My take on current events:   What's wrong with a world where Casey Anthony can have children and I can't?   The fact that she's talking about wanting to get pregnant again, and most likely could get knocked up in a skinny minute if she wanted to, makes me ill.   Why are messed-up women always so fertile?

Future plans:  Sorry, can't commit to anything beyond 2 months from now, because something might be happening that involves my reproductive system, requires frequent trips to offices where people sample my bodily fluids and peer at my lady parts, and causes me to have a refrigerator full of hypodermic drugs.

How was my day?  I saw six women with big pregnant bellies, five with newborns, two sets of toddler twins, and one 4-year-old girl in a rumpled flowered dress running on her tippy-toes in purple shoes and my heart ached every single time.

What's new at work?  I'm so burned out on my job.  But I can't quit because I have all this leave time saved up and I'll need that if ever I get pregnant.  And they're good about letting me have time off when I need it for a doctor's appointment, emergency d&c, or just because I'm crying too hard to get my puffy-faced self into work.  I fantasize about using up all my vacation and sick time after the baby's born and then quitting to be a stay-at-home mom.  Then I realize just how far removed from reality that vision is, get depressed and spend an hour mindlessly surfing the web instead of focusing on work and as a result I'm falling behind on all my projects and kind of stressed out about it but still too paralyzed with grief to comprehend tackling any of said projects, thanks for asking.

Sure is hot, isn't it?  And yet my feet are cold.  I think my lousy circulation means there's not enough blood flow to the uterus.  Maybe that's contributing to my infertility....

How are your friends?  One of them just had a baby.  I'm jealous and bitter.

What are we having for dinner?  Grass-fed beef, organic kale and lentils if I'm gearing up for or in the middle of an IVF cycle, pineapple for dessert if I'm in the two-week-wait post transfer, no peanuts if I'm pregnant, bacon cheeseburger if I'm wallowing in misery and disappointment after a failed cycle.

Someone please bring me a cheeseburger.  And yes I'd like fries with that.

Oh Baby: It's Not You, It's Me

It's all my fault. 

We found out today that there was nothing wrong with our baby.  It was chromosomally normal.  (It is, however, still an "it," since the doctor didn't reveal the gender and we decided we didn't want to ask, because what's the point?)

It's like being in a neverending heavyweight boxing match.  Every time I start to get to my feet, I get knocked on my ass again.  I've been physically and emotionally pummeled beyond recognition.  The doctor had anticipated that the results would show a genetically abnormal embryo, and I was holding on to that hope.  It would mean that the miscarriage was not my fault, that I was capable of getting pregnant, and if we just could just get a healthy embryo then we could have a healthy pregnancy.

But no.  Something is wrong with me and we don't know what and that something killed my baby. 

I'm so frustrated I could scream.   My self-loathing knows no bounds.   My other-loathing is fairly boundless, too.  I'm angry at God, every pregnant woman on the planet, and especially my doctor.  Today he ordered a series of blood tests that I've been requesting for over a year.  Every other time I asked about them he said it was a waste of time and money.  Now, however, he thinks they are indicated.  If one of them turns out to be positive, and I have a clotting or other immunology issue that could have been addressed before now, possibly preventing this miscarriage from occurring....well, wouldn't that be just my luck?

I've filled in my infertility bingo card.  I've gotten one or more items in every column:  failed IUIs, failed IVFs, fibroids, chemical pregnancy, and now miscarriage/loss and likely immunological issues.  Bingo!  Did I win a baby yet?   No?   Fuck.  I'm so tempted to quit the game, just walk away from it all.  But by now I've invested so much (time, energy, money, emotions) that I really have to see it through to the bitter end.

Although, if I become any more bitter, I'm going to turn into a horseradish. 

Don't Tell Me

In two hours, Mr Wren and I will go to the fertility clinic for yet another WTF meeting.  It will be the 8th time that we have dragged our defeated selves through those doors to sit in Dr S's back office and discuss why our expensive, invasive, complicated fertility treatment didn't work as anticipated.  Science has failed us and we've failed it.

This will be the first time, though, that we have to discuss a might-have-been.  After 8 different procedures, I only got pregnant this once.   This was my first miscarriage.  I had the d&c so baby could be tested for chromosomal abnormalities, because I want to understand why it happened.   If there was something wrong with baby, then there was nothing I could have done to save it.  But if that turns out not to be the case, and baby was normal, then, well, it's pretty much my fault, right?  For some reason my body rejected baby.  Or baby rejected me. 

Baby stopped growing the same day I stopped taking the additional hormones, the estrogen and progesterone I had been taking 3 times a day to help me stay pregnant.  Did the hormones sustain an ultimately unviable pregnancy longer than nature intended, or did my little one just need more time and help than we gave it before it started producing those hormones on its own?   Would staying on the meds for another two weeks have kept baby alive?  Some fertility patients take progesterone through the entire first trimester (or so people on the internet tell me.)  I stopped at nine weeks.

I'll find out the answers soon enough.  I'll probably even find out what gender baby was so I can start using the appropriate pronoun when I talk about it.

But here's the thing:  I don't want to know.   

Well, that's not entirely true.  I want to know.  I always want to know.  I've been hungry for information since I was a little kid - I was that annoying little kid who was always asking WHY?   I need the world to make sense.  I need to understand.  

But I don't know if I can handle it.  I'm beyond humiliated to return to that clinic, where just 3 weeks ago everyone was cheering and hugging me, all so excited that I was graduating to the OB and telling me to bring my baby back to visit them.  I know they'll all be giving me the sad eyes today and that makes me cringe.  But I can feign stoicism for long enough to get through the awkward encounters with the receptionist and lab techs.  The thought, however, of sitting in that back office and finding out what went wrong - or possibly finding out that WE DON'T KNOW for certain what went wrong which in its way is even worse - either way, having to discuss how my baby lived and died, the entire arc of its too-short existence, well that just makes me want to put my head in the sand and blow off the appointment entirely.

I Hate Your Baby

and I hate this baby too

I hate your baby.   I hate your precious little birth announcements and the hospital room photos of you nuzzling your newborn.  I hate his squishy little cheeks and her sweetly pursed lips and that downy fuzz of hair.  I hate all his adorable monkey pajamas and all her darling pink blankies.  Keep that thing away from me because I hate the way the top of its tiny little head smells.

I hate you for conceiving your baby the old-fashioned way, the fun way, and that the only shots you took were possibly tequila.  I hate that your pregnancy was unplanned.  I hate that you were confident enough in your ability to carry to term that you put your 8-week ultrasound pictures on Facebook.  I hate that you posted status updates from the delivery room.

I hate the way you brought that baby into work and paraded it around like you just won the Stanley Cup.

I hate that you're taking your new baby home from the hospital at exactly the moment I'm leaving after my D&C.  I hate that your husband is bursting with pride and mine is sagging with grief.  I hate that your arms are full and my womb is empty.

I Don't Want to Talk About It



 I watched exactly 5 minutes of the film Jennifer's Body and
what I saw was this scene, where she projectile vomits a river of tar.

I don't want to talk about it.

If you knew me, that statement would give you an idea of just how bad things are.  I've seen my share of  traumas over the years and through it all: tragic haircuts, crushing heartbreaks, financial devastation, personal loss... I've never not wanted to talk about it.  I've never not NEEDED to talk about it.  It's what I do. It's how I get through and make sense of things.  I love a good story.  I love an audience.  I have almost no boundaries and usually tell people way more than they want to know in my desperate need to understand and be understood.

This is different. 

This, I can't talk about.  It's just too much.  I can't let out the pain, frustration, misery and heartache that is welling up inside me. If I did, I picture it like a scene from a horror movie, gallons of toxic black goo exploding out of me:  oily and malevolent, taking on a life of its own and consuming everything in its path.  No-one wants to see that. 

But I can't keep it bottled up inside, either.  I'm not a good bottler.  Can't keep all this pent up sludge hidden away in the dark corners of my soul.   Like a bad batch of homebrew fermenting unattended in the basement, the pressure can only build up for so long before things start exploding.  And no-one wants to see that, either.

So here I am, finally making good on my threat to start a blog.  I don't know what to expect.   I don't know who, if anyone, will read this and that may be beside the point:  I have to let it out somewhere.  Hopefully I will, overall, keep the toxic spewing to a minimum.  But I make no promises.  At least not while I'm dealing with THIS.....

What is THIS?  Oh, I don't want to talk about it.
............................................................................................

But I have to.  It happened and I have to find a way to deal with it.  I was pregnant and then I wasn't.  Life goes on.  Just....not for my baby.

We made it to 9 weeks.  Almost 1/4 of the way there. We beat amazing odds to get that far - the fertility doctor had predicted imminent early miscarriage just a few days after declaring me pregnant. But our little one was a fighter and held on long enough to develop arms and legs, fingers and toes, eyelids and ear canals, and a strong, steady heartbeat.  A heartbeat that we saw on the ultrasound when baby was the size of a grain of rice, then a kidney bean, then a raspberry, then a grape.

As it developed from grain to legume to fruit, the doctor called it our "miracle baby" and marveled at its on-target growth and perfect heartbeat and increased our odds of success from minuscule to hopeful. 

Until last Tuesday.   It was our first visit to the OB after successfully and triumphantly "graduating" from the fertility clinic the week before.  I was nine and a half weeks along, and baby should have been the size of a stuffed green olive.  But I had a bad feeling.  I had woken up in the middle of the night, rolled over onto my stomach and realized that, for the first time in over a month, that maneuver hadn't sent lightning bolts of pain shooting through my chest.

Three hours of obsessive Googling and breast-poking later, I was only slightly mollified.  Lots of people on the internet say that pregnancy symptoms decline at around 9-10 weeks and it's nothing to worry about.  But still, my boobs felt completely different.  Like a switch had been flipped and all the electricity that had been pulsing through them was completely turned off.

So I was worried about my little cocktail garnish, and prepared for the worst.  At least, I thought I was.

As it turns out, nothing can prepare you for having your ultrasound projected on a giant screen overhead and seeing, larger than life, your perfectly formed almost-baby, which actually LOOKS like a baby and not an amorphous blob for the first time ever, lying there motionless.  A still, silent, solid space where only 6 days earlier you had seen a pulsing beam of light and life beating inside its tiny chest.  A lifeless olive sunk to the bottom of the martini glass.

I can't get that image out of my mind and I DON'T want to talk about it.