Recently a friend of ours gifted me a book about miscarriage from a Christian lens. (For anyone interested it’s called Grace Like Scarlett: Grieving with Hope after Miscarriage and Loss by Adriel Booker.) I’ve only read the first section, but it’s already an intense read. The raw details of her miscarriages and emotions so closely echo mine. At the end of the first section there was a reflection prompt that encouraged me to write down my story from start to finish without including any “lessons”. I’ve written about bits and pieces of what happened, and shared with people in person, but I haven’t written it all down until this point. This is the full story.
We were away on a road trip with Heech’s siblings. I had been fighting off some bad gas pain for the last week or so, as well as loss of appetite, but otherwise I was feeling fine. We enjoyed some golf for a couple of days and then drove to our second location. Upon arrival I quickly went to the bathroom to relieve myself after the long ride. As I sat on the toilet I looked down and noticed that there was a little bit of spotting on my underwear. Trying not to draw too much attention, I asked Heech to come upstairs to the bathroom. I didn’t understand what was going on. That day my body had felt the most normal it had felt in about a month. Looking back, maybe that was the first sign that something wasn’t quite right. I called my doctor to ask what I should do. They told me that if there was no cramping or heavy bleeding then I could wait to come in to the clinic until my scheduled appointment the following week. With that little comfort in mind, I tried to be as normal as possible for the rest of the evening.
The following morning I began to feel some mild cramping, but I was only spotting still. I asked Heech if we could go home early to see the doctor. Thankfully they were able to squeeze me in to an earlier appointment the next day. As the day passed by, I was beginning to bleed a little bit more and my cramps were more frequent when I wasn’t lying down. Everyone wanted to go to the beach and I didn’t want to ruin the entire mood so I went along. I lay on a beach towel staring at the sky and quietly cried tears into my mask. The day was absolutely beautiful, but it was tainted with worry. While I lay on the beach my baby was dying or dead inside of me. That thought tightens my throat with tears I don’t have left to cry. Every time I went to the bathroom, I hoped that there would be less blood. Instead I saw pink toilet water.
The drive home the next day felt endless as I continued to cramp on and off. I was so afraid of what the doctor was going to say and I lashed out at Heech as he asked about my condition. Holding all of my fears in while we were around family so that they wouldn’t worry (especially if this wasn’t a miscarriage) was lonely and scary. When I saw the doctor she said that everything was probably fine, although she didn’t think my baby was as close to 9 weeks as I had thought. In the office I was relieved to hear that she thought everything would be okay. The next day, though, I was crying in the shower wondering if things were really alright or if my baby wasn’t growing. I was still cramping on and off and I couldn’t get it out of my head that this wasn’t normal.
The next day, a Sunday, I was still bleeding. We went to church and I cried as I listened to the sermon on hope. I felt convicted about my hopelessness and my anxiety. Why didn’t I trust God more with this process? After lunch, however, I started feeling intense lower back pain. I lay on the couch and tried to shift positions, thinking that maybe it was another case of painful gas. No matter what I did the pain wasn’t ebbing. I found myself digging my nails into my hands to deal with the discomfort. I tried to lie in bed, but I couldn’t lie down either. Soon I was hunched over the bed, groaning. I told Heech that I would try to sit on the toilet and see if I could pass gas. I tried to text friends who had been pregnant to ask if this amount of blood was normal, but at a certain point I couldn’t even answer texts any longer because I was in so much discomfort. I was sitting in a cold sweat, hands shaking, holding my head in my hands. I checked the time and realized that it had been a full hour. Feeling like I couldn’t take much more of this, the thought crossed my mind to lean back. (This next bit hurts me the most and it’s taking me a little bit to get it out… Alright…) I leaned back and I tensed my muscles, and I felt tissue pass through me. I looked into the toilet and saw a large mass of tissue; I knew then that I had just miscarried. The pain immediately ceased and I gingerly pushed the tissue to the side of the toilet bowl. I had just read online that you should save the tissue so the doctors can examine it.
I cleaned myself up and waited for Heech to get back from walking our dog, Bella. The immediate feeling I had was relief because I wasn’t hunched over on a toilet anymore, cramping and struggling. But as soon as I told Heech that I had miscarried I couldn’t help the sobs that came out. Everything that I had feared had happened. Heech did what I couldn’t and took the baby out of the toilet. We saved our baby in a plastic bag until I could bring them to my appointment the next day. Can you imagine putting your baby in a plastic bag? Because I can’t. I still can’t. But we did. I saw a post on Instagram the other day comparing the size of the embryo to different Halloween candies depending on how far along you are. They said at 7 weeks the baby is the size of a piece of candy corn. All I could think about was “In that sac of tissue sitting in a Ziplock bag…was there a little baby the size of a piece of candy corn?” When I think of what my baby looks like all I can see is bloody tissue. My poor baby.
When I went to see my doctor she removed some residual tissue that was hanging from my cervix. I hadn’t expected her to do anything like that and I was already in a very fragile state. The idea that she was removing more of the baby from inside me caused me to cry quiet tears as she worked. Everything about the week after the miscarriage was awful. All of the doctors visits and repeating that I had miscarried and having to be poked and prodded was stressful. I have another post about that and other posts about processing through everything. I suppose I’ll end it here. This is just about everything I felt and thought and saw. Not everyone’s miscarriage is the same or affects them the same way. I just hope that for other mothers of babies in Heaven there will be peace and joy despite this pit that we’ve fallen in.
Drops of Jules 