Stages Of Depregnanting

Tags

D&C, dark humor, miscarriage, missed miscarriage, silent miscarriage, stages of grief

(Warning: Morbid humour and dark imagery ahead)

So, you may want to ask me, Carol, what’s it like having a dead baby inside you?

It’s a little weird, folks, it’s a little weird.

I’ve never had a standard miscarriage, which I am sure is much more traumatic in many ways.

Our baby loss has come gradually.

On the one hand, I hate having it be drawn out.  Our dreams and plans for Christmas have already been dashed, but I can’t put it behind me and move on, because that actual loss of the baby hasn’t happened yet.

On the other hand, it’s helping me draw out the denial stage of grief, which is my favourite stage.

Nor have I been following the stages in a classical manner. This seems to be my progression thus far:

1. Grief

The moment the radiologist left the room, I starting sobbing.

That night, I clutched the little Christmas footie pyjamas I had bought for 0-3 month size and wept into them. PH ended up slipping it from my hands when he came to bed and found me clutching it, and discreetly put it away.

2. That River in Egypt

We left Owl with our neighbours for the first hour and a half after we got the news, while we digested it, and cried, and called people. Then, when we went to go get him, I almost talked to them about “when I am on mat leave” before remembering that I won’t be going on mat leave this year.

I went out and bought myself icewine, because if I was going to be sad, I might as well be sad with wine. If I liked raw fish or blue cheese I probably would have picked those up, too.

But it took some mental strength to actually DRINK it. I still felt pregnant (because I WAS still pregnant. With a dead baby) and it took some fortitude to actually take a sip because a part of me was still screaming “No, it could hurt the baby!”

Then, when I went back to work, we had a patient with fleas. I went to grab the siphotrol to spray the hell out of that exam room afterwards, and for a moment I was like “I’ll have to ask someone to do this for me,” before I remembered and grimly surrounded myself with toxic fumes.

It’s just hard for part of me not to hope that twenty minutes of minute examination by trained professionals may have missed the fact that my baby really IS alive after all.

I don’t think this denial is all that unusual, because the woman at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre said that we can request to repeat the ultrasound before going through with the D&C. I guess a lot of women ask “can you please double-check?” in the hopes that their baby might have risen from the dead.

I would take a zombie baby. I’d lovingly spoon-feed it brains and keep it out of the sun and name it Igor if it would just grow and be born.

3. Morbid Curiosity

There are two reasons why PH and I are going for a D&C tomorrow, rather than wait for me to miscarry naturally or take a suppository to try and help it along.

First, a D&C seems like a faster step towards getting it all over with. This lost pregnancy has derailed our plans significantly, and now the earliest we could humanly produce a sibling for Owl is like, March of next year.

Second, we had no idea what to do if I miscarried at home and actually found the embryo. We were both agreed on the fact that we didn’t want to flush it down the toilet like a dead goldfish (even though we know that after the D&C it’ll just get chucked in a bag of biowaste and incinerated).

But, since the D&C isn’t until Tuesday at the earliest, there is the chance that I could miscarry before then (although unlikely, since as we already know, my body takes a lot of coaxing to go into labour).

So then we had to talk about what to do.

PH rejected my suggestion of getting a jar of formalin from work and preserving it (perhaps to donate to a high school or something – we wouldn’t keep it. Uck).

Neither of us wanted to bury it in our backyard because our backyard is on a crumbling retaining wall and will probably have to be ripped up some time in the near future.

Nor did we like the idea (which we found on Google) of putting it in a nice pot and planting a pretty tree or shrub over it. Because we can’t keep plants alive, and then what do you do with a dead plant in your dead baby pot? I wouldn’t want to dig that up to replant something new, would you?

(Then again, maybe all our plants have been lacking in the past has been a couple ounces of human flesh…)

We eventually agreed on burying it under the kitchen window. IF it came out at home, IF we saw it, and IF it was in a remotely entire state.

But the whole thing freaks me out because I AM AFRAID OF DEAD BODIES and now I have one inside me.

Now, mind you, dead babies aren’t really scary, but the radiologist did say that it “looked a little unusual” and was “a little cystic” so I take that to mean that it’s a warped and monstrous thing with, like, two heads or something.

Oh, and according to the lady at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre, my baby died at 8 wks 4 days, so probably about a week or so ago (it’s hard to know since the whole reason I went in was because we weren’t sure if I was 9, 10, or 11 weeks pregnant at the time, so it may have died three days before the ultrasound, a week and a half before the ultrasound, or two and a half weeks before the ultrasound…).

So is it, just, like decomposing in there? Because as bonded as I was to the idea of my sweet little Christmas newborn, having a tiny little rotting mutant inside me doesn’t make me feel good at all.

So I may have started Googling aborted embryos at approximately 8 weeks gestation, just so I could get an idea of what I had going on in there.

Some of them were cute. Others were not so cute, usually the ones who had “already probably been dead for a couple of days”. Hell, mine has been dead for a week or more.

I really hope it stays in, because if it comes out I know I’ll examine it in minute detail and that might scar me for life but I wouldn’t be able to help myself.

5. False Acceptance

I think this is just another kind of denial, just a little deeper-down. You see, there are times when I think that I have accepted it. I haven’t cried about it in a couple of days, and I can drink wine or take Tylenol 3 (which I have been taking to help me sleep because f*** health, that’s why) without mentally wincing. Instead of forgetting that I am not having a baby, I am starting to forget that I was having a baby (if that makes sense).

But I don’t think the acceptance real.

For one thing, the whole thing has been very cerebral. I haven’t actually miscarried. I have changed from thinking of the contents of my uterus as  an alive and twitching future child into thinking of it as dead mutant tissue, but nothing has physically changed.

I think that having it physically ripped out of me on Tuesday is going to be a shock.

F*** Cheery Ultrasound Techs

Tags

first trimester, missed miscarriage, pregnancy, ultrasounds

I went in for a dating ultrasound yesterday because, without boring you with tmi details, we weren’t entirely sure when I conceived.

The ultrasound technician was a chirpy young thing who addressed me as “mom”. As always, she made PH wait outside while she did the scan. As she ran the probe over my belly, she asked me why I was there.

“Hmm, I do think your dates are a little off, it seems pretty small,” she said. “Have you ever had a vaginal ultrasound?”

“No.”

“Well, you did a great job of filling your bladder but I’m going to ask you to go empty it, because I need it completely empty for the vaginal scan. Just let me take what measurements I can here, and then I’ll ask you to run to the bathroom,” she said cheerily.

She clicked away while she asked me questions – date of my last period, how sure I was about that, etc.

Then the questions began to get weird.

“And you had a positive pregnancy test?”

“…Yes…”

“And what was that? Urine?”

“Yes, a stick at home. I took it the same day my period didn’t arrive and it went positive right away…”

“And have you had any cramping?”

“…A tiny bit, a few weeks ago, but no spotting.”

“Okay, Mom, you can go empty your bladder, and then we’ll do the vaginal scan,” she said cheerfully.

So I went pee. But on my way back, I sought out Perfect Husband in the waiting room and told him that I was scared, because she was asking weird questions.

“Am I allowed in NOW?” he asked, squeezing my hand.

“Nope.”

So I went back in, and she had me take my pants off and stick a wand up my hoo-ha.

“Now, this won’t hurt you or the baby,” she assured me.

She spent  good ten minutes wiggling the wand around and clicking measurements on the screen, which was pointed away from me. I love how they hide the results of your own frigging scan from you. It’s my body isn’t it?

When she was done she told me that I could clean up and get dressed, and she would go and fetch “Dad”.

She ushered him into the room a moment later, and told us that she would be right back.

It’s at that point that you start trying to talk yourself out of paranoia.

After all, we had had a scare about the baby in our last pregnancy. Having read Marley and Me makes you more aware of what can go wrong in a seemingly healthy pregnancy.

But on the other hand, why did she ask if I had had a positive pregnancy test? She was clearly measuring SOMETHING on the screen, so there must be something in there. What a weird question.

“If there is something wrong, I would hope they wouldn’t just put us in here and leave us hanging with no warning,” PH said. “If she was that cheerful at me and there is something wrong…”

“She probably isn’t allowed to tell us anything. She probably has to hunt down some doctor to say “yep, that’s a dead baby,”” I said.

But we were still dealing in hypotheticals. I have anxiety. I live in these hypothetical scenarios where terrible things happen.

I’m not used to them actually happening.

So when she returned, still chirpy, with a radiologist in a white coat, my heart sank but I still didn’t really believe he was going to tell us terrible news.

He would tell us the baby might have Down Syndrome. He was going to say that the baby was due on Christmas Day instead of the 4th. He was going to tell us it was quadruplets. He wasn’t going to tell us that…

“So, I’ve reviewed the scans and unfortunately, the embryo is not living,” he said calmly and briskly.

“Oh.” I said in a small voice.

We proceeded to nod calmly while he told us that these things happen, that it probably happened a while ago, and it is usually due to a chromosomal abnormality. The embryo looked a little malformed, a bit unusual, so that was probably why…

“In what way?” I asked.

“Sorry?”

“What’s different about it? It’s okay, I understand the big words.”

He looked uncertain. “There’s not really much to tell you, it’s very small, only about the size of a peanut. There just seems to be some cystic processes going on. Anyway, I’ve called your midwife, but unfortunately I had to leave a message…”

His cell phone rang. “Ah, that’s probably here now. I’ll be back in a moment.”

And he left.

PH held out his arms to me, and I began to cry.

The radiologist came in a few minutes later and we sat up and wiped our eyes and nodded some more as he told us that the midwife was making up a referral to BC Women’s hospital where we could go to discuss our options, which would likely involve either taking drugs to miscarry at home or having a D&C. He said she was going to call me. He told us to take our time and to leave when we were ready. He said he was sorry for our loss.

We dried our eyes and left immediately. The midwife called and told me that it was called a missed miscarriage, that the people at the Women’s hospital would go over the options in detail, that she had sent a referral and we would probably hear back from them the next day. She told me that it wasn’t my fault. PH squeezed my hand as if to say “LISTEN TO HER”.

We had to pick up Owl from daycare right away. We took him right to our friends and neighbours’ house and asked them to take him for an hour. Then we went inside, and cried, and made phone calls.

My Christmas Baby is gone, but my body still thinks it’s pregnant. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been going through nausea and exhaustion to build a placenta for a lump of tissue that isn’t going to use it.

It’s hard to accept that no one will ever wear the little newborn sized Baby’s First Christmas outfit that I picked up at a swap meet a few weeks ago.

It’s worse to think that I can’t even get pregnant again until I get the remains removed, because my body doesn’t want to let go.

I can’t blame it though.

We’re having some trouble letting go as it is.