It is done

Today is the day many of us pause and remember our babies who grew wings and went to heaven. Today is also when I went to the OB in hopes of the miscarriage induction drug (forgive me for not remembering the name). I had grown weary of the waiting and feared that I would be bleeding all over in a hotel room as we moved. The nurse whisked me into an exam room and asked the usual questions. She assumed that I had been spotting since 4 October when the HB was no longer present. I had to correct her and say 3 September is when the spotting started. She looked shocked and went to hunt down my OB.

Unfortunately, he was not in but another was willing to see me and wanted labs drawn and a u/s as well. Hcg checks are not fun, especially when you know it is to see the numbers drop and when the tech uses your difficult arm and wiggles the needle around. The tech finally listened to me when my right arm would just not give her a single drop of blood. Oddly enough, once my left arm was poked, the hole in my right arm started going too.

I had to re-check in at OB after the lab and was taken into yet another exam room. The nurse-midwife explained again the desire for a u/s and Hcg check…that if everything was clear and my numbers were dropping there would be no need for the drug. She went on the hunt for the u/s machine at that point. Soon after, she came back with the portable u/s and we saw absolutely nothing in my uterus. Just over a week and a half ago there was a baby there, two week before that, a heartbeat. It hit me like a ton of bricks for a second, then I felt relief.

By the time I got dressed again and the midwife returned with my Hcg numbers…4. My body had passed the baby and I had no idea it had already happened. She spoke with a doctor too and said that I was good, to wait two cycles and try again. Then she gave me a huge hug and told me that I was in her prayers. She told me to take the time I needed to compose myself. I couldn’t bear another second in a room plastered with images of developing babies, photos of infants, and a chart on cervical dilation. I bolted out of there.

Yes, I do feel at peace that this journey is over. I am glad that the physical pain should be gone. Emotionally, it will always be there…nothing fully heals you when you lose a child. It saddens me a little that I never saw my baby after it passed. Maybe it was just God taking extra good care of me, knowing the past few weeks had been rough enough. When we are ready, we will try to get pregnant. This one was an oops, but still very loved and adored.

Tonight I light my candle in memory of all angel babies, not just my own.

God Bless.

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Contractions, why can’t you let me sleep?!

Normally I would still be sleeping at 5:30am. Instead I am curled up in a ball on our couch typing this on my iPad. I would take an Ibuprofen right now, but I want food in my stomach before I take it and I really do not want to eat while my insides are feeling stabbed at in every direction.

Yes, my husband and I are both frustrated this isn’t progressing. We so badly want things “back to normal”. I know he hates to see me in pain too. He blurrily saw me hold onto my lower abdomen this morning and asked if I was alright, “kinda” was my response. With gentle prodding, I elaborated a bit more and told him there was no way I could sleep with this level of pain. That is when I tiptoed out to the living room.

Rewinding a tad, this week has been full of crap getting flung at us. We thought we found a house last weekend. The lease got emailed to us and I read all 10 pages of it and then the packets of info on asbestos and lead. This quaint home was built in the 1950s, high chance of both those horrible things being in the home. The law here says the landlord has to disclose if there is lead and asbestos in the property…the lease simply said, “unknown”. What a cop out. I emailed him after my husband looked it over and saw no military clause. I asked to see a full report on the asbestos, an inspection and assessment on the lead in the home and in the water pipes, and asked for a military clause. He replied back that he wasn’t going to do the testing, sorry it didn’t work out, and that he was mailing our deposit back. Square one again and that means we wasted money to drove there, stay in a craptacular hotel, and eat out when we could have just spent the weekend home.

What is the risk with asbestos? Well, we dreamed of adding shelves to the storage room. That would allow lead and asbestos dust to fly through the house. We already have one child who has respiratory issues when the wind blows around here. I do not want to see all of us like that. What about lead? That handy info packer taught me it could cause I fertility in my husband and I, we still want a girl thank you very much! Should I manage to get pregnant there, it will cause neurological damage to the fetus, generally ending the pregnancy in miscarriage (totally do not want that again!). Then with our living children it can cause ADD, loss of intelligence, and so on. Now do you see why we don’t want to take that risk? FYI, houses built after 1978 have to be lead and asbestos free.

We did try looking again but most rentals want $1,000+ and refuse to take in cats. We have had our loveable fluff balls for almost 9 nears, like hell are we going to give them up. The idea of buying is floating around our heads because we would be able to have our cats that way. Oh, some of you may be thinking why not live on base. 1. Houses built in the 1950s, same stinking risk as the house we wanted. 2. 958 sq ft!!! 3. They want all our BAH for that itty bitty house. 4. 2BR 1bath. To put this in perspective, the house we rent now is about 1,100 sq ft and fits us comfortably, though we did have to build a shed out back to store more of our stuff.

Last night we decided to eat out even though I was ok to cook. I got the enchilada rojas plate and was eager to chow down on it. When it finally came out, I took a bite and it was cold. Not room temp cold, but cold! I touched the beans and rice, same thing. The waiter took it back and I took our youngest to the bathroom. Once we came back, my “new” plate was there. Hubby took our oldest at that point. I carefully looked at the plate, my refried beans were crusty. That does not happen with freshly made, that happens when they microwave it!!! Then I looked to the left at the enchiladas, same ones with the single bite taken out of one of them. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and took one more bite, cold! I pushed the plate away, appetite gone. Yes, it was taken off our check and I will be happy to never return again.

Both boys are coughing again, just like last weekend. Can we please be healthy?!

To look up, I am happy to have my family, that we roll with the punches life throws at us. Hooah for resiliency training! It would be nice for something positive to happen though and for stress to melt away. Maybe some Hail Marys will help me out.

God Bless

***EDIT*** I did do the bath trick again and the contractions tamed down. However, soon as I stood up to shower, they spiked back up again. Contractions have been hitting me for almost 3.5 hours now and Ibuprofen isn’t doing much if anything at all. A good friend did some research and I am going to take 1 vitamin C each hour for six hours (max to take in a day is 6,000mg and I have 1,000mg tablets) to help stimulate the process further. It really won’t hurt anything and I have tried consuming vast amounts of cinnamon too with no real luck. If I can avoid going to the OB or hospital I will be a happy lady.

*EDIT 2* Further research told me that you should avoid Vitamin C with bioflavonoids like rosé hips to speed up miscarriage. It stalls it instead. I really cannot say if it helped me or not because the next day I still had contractions, though not as strong. Then I found out Hcg was at 4 and my uterus was empty. I have no idea when the baby passed, I did not pass any tissue, just very small clots (smaller than half the size of a pea) here and there. Nor have I had any heavy bleeding. The contractions seemed to only be in the morning and that was when most of my spotting would occur.

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Perhaps there is progress

Fair warning, nothing about this is covered up. I am being transparent in hopes that other women can know what to expect and their men can understand what their women are going through.

Perhaps there really is progress. Yesterday I felt cervical pressure on and off through the day. I thought I might be feeling it in my head and asked on the BabyCenter (BBC) board and called my mother about it. Mom confirmed that it is usual to feel a little bit of annoying pressure there and the one responder to my post on BBC confirmed the same thing. It was reassuring to know since I haven’t read about anyone else feeling that. A few weeks ago I had a nurse practitioner say I couldn’t feel my cervix opening for a miscarriage that it doesn’t happen. This was back when my second Hcg check dropped from the first one. As a studier of anatomy, I knew she had to be full of crap but we are supposed to trust our medical professionals, right? Well, sometimes. When you have a gut instinct, follow it, don’t ignore it and push it aside. Who knows their body better, the person living in it their whole life or a person who has studied the exterior of your body for all of five minutes?

Headaches came back yesterday in the morning too. I rarely get them and headaches/migraines generally hit me when my hormones are out of whack (three days post birth with my two sons). Last night around 8:45pm I felt nauseous, I hadn’t felt that in about a week so it caught me off guard. I figured that maybe it was another sign that things are in motion. It also left me feeling very tired. I held out until 9pm and managed to fall asleep to ignore the nausea.

This morning showed me more evidence that I could be having the miscarriage this weekend. At about 3:30am I woke up from contractions. They weren’t terribly painful, but strong enough to make me breathe through. Plus I bled a little through the night and usually the nights bring a “calm” to all this. Even as I write this, I get the occasional contraction. At first they were a few minutes apart and would last about 30 seconds.

I have done some reading up on the meds used to induce miscarriages and I am on the fence about it. However, reading those experiences helped me feel more prepared for the natural method.

How can you prepare for a natural miscarriage? Here is a list of what I have done and what I have read up on:

• Have some pain meds handy and take them when the pain is still dull. If you wait until they get stronger, you may feel the worst of it before the meds kick in.
• Place a towel under your sheets (I folded mine in thirds the long way for an extra buffer), have one to sit on wherever you may be in your home or car.
• By all means, do not force yourself into jeans or anything else uncomfortable. Wear those PJs, preferably a pair you really don’t care about so when they get ruined, you won’t mind nearly as much.
• Try to relax. Easier said than done when you are going through this, but it will help your body open up.
• I have read about heating pads and how valuable they are for the contractions. Our kitty, Hunter, decided to lay on my tummy today, right where the contractions were hitting and it felt nice. Yes, our 15 pound kitty felt perfect right there (he’s super squishy and warm), it helped the pain melt away. I do plan on using the jasmine rice bags my mom made years ago for me should the Ibuprofen stop being effective.
• When you feel the contractions get stronger, decide how you want to labor. Yes, this is labor don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I really want to be in the tub full of warm water. It sounds more peaceful and less stressful than sitting on the toilet (those are the only two methods I have learned. If anyone else has gone through or heard of others, speak up please!). Plus I like the idea that I won’t have to go “fishing” in the toilet afterwards. Everything will be clean in the tub.

If you have any other ways to prep for a natural miscarriage, please share. I am here to help inform. Hearing from others and reaching out is helping me cope. It is comforting to know that I am helping others as I go through this.

God Bless.

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Reflections on Miscarriage

Today I find myself reflecting back quite a bit. Slightly more than six years ago is when I had my first miscarriage. It shook my husband and I to the core. We planned that baby and wanted one so badly to have it taken away from us almost as soon as we found out I was pregnant. Our due date was April 1, 2007. I allowed myself to get depressed. I gained weight, I just didn’t care anymore. Three months after the D&C, we tried to get pregnant again and we did. The result was the birth of our oldest son. We were so happy to finally have a baby in our arms. Yet, whenever that due date of our first baby goes by, I get into a mini-funk but I snap out of it because we do have two wonderful children.

Now, as we wait for this miscarriage to actually happen I am determined to not get depressed or gain weight. With this pregnancy I gained about 3 pounds and found myself wearing a size up from before I got pregnant. The day before my last ultrasound I actually caved and bought maternity jeans and a maternity tank top because nothing was fitting right anymore and I needed something to wear for a Welcome Home party for our Battalion that week. There were some other tops I longed for but something held me back.

The next day at the ultrasound I felt guilty for buying those clothes. I wore them to the party that night. I tried to slap a smile on my face around all those people. It was really hard. At entrance to the party, those of us drinking were given green bracelets to wear. I took one and my husband grabbed me a beer. It felt odd walking around knowing many others thought I was still pregnant with a live child and here I was chugging back a Corona with a wedge of lime stuffed inside. Eventually, my husband was the one that started explaining what was going on and I was choking back tears. There were a few times I let them fall and quickly wiped them away. We were there to have fun and cheer on our troops for coming home safely after all. It wasn’t supposed to be a sad night. There was dinner there and I ate maybe half the food. Nausea hit me. I still had pregnancy symptoms. It left me frustrated and awfully sad. I requested that we leave early. I just couldn’t be around everyone while I felt sick. At that point I just wanted to be home and curled up in my husband’s arms. We said our good-byes and even that hurt because word had spread at that point or I had to explain why we were leaving early.

That night, I logged into Facebook and let everyone know what was going on. Please know that earlier that day we called immediate family and let them know. I figured sharing the news in that format would keep me from having to re-tell what was going on. There was an out pouring of support and I am so grateful for amazing friends and family.

Even now, as I write up what’s going on with this miscarriage, I have a ton of support. Not meaning to through my site stats at you all, but in less than 24 hours this blog has had roughly 140 hits. No doubt it has grown even more by the time I have posted this. That means 140 people are aware what miscarriage is like. One hundred forty people have a story to relate to. That’s a big deal to me. Yes, there are some people who commented that I do not know who they are, but they got the information they needed. I hope to continue to do so.

Also, if any of my readers are male and have dealt with a pregnancy loss in some way, please let me know. It was hard digging around finding a woman’s perspective; I can only imagine men trying to dig around the net and falling short. If you’d like to share your perspective, drop me a comment with your email address and I will contact you and we can do an interview. It’d be nice to have more than one male perspective because everyone deals with this differently. Each miscarriage within a couple is different too. My husband and I have dealt with this one in different ways than the first one.

Again, thank you for reading and please come back. If you’ve lost a baby, I am sorry and am sending prayers up daily for healing for all of us who have lost a child.

God Bless.

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Miscarriage Part 2

I realize now that I left some things out in my original post about miscarriage. First off, know that it is nothing that you did or didn’t do, there was something on a cellular level that was wrong with the baby.

For instance, our first miscarriage, we knew nothing was wrong at first. It wasn’t until we saw the ultrasound of our oldest that we knew what was wrong with the first baby. Quite literally, it was all heart, nothing more.

Right now, this one probably had a heart issue too since the heart rate was always on the low side. I wish I had numbers to give, but I was so numb in grief at my last appointment, I never asked. I just wanted to dash home and be in my husband’s arms.

You will grieve like you lost a child that you had in your arms. This child was inside of you, growing, literally a part of you. It’s ok to feel that way. Allow yourself to grieve and if anyone else tells you otherwise, ignore them because they do not understand and will not until they go through something like this (which I really hope no one ever does, but it is far more common than most people think).

With a natural miscarriage you are left feeling like a ticking time bomb. You know your baby is dead inside of you and sometimes you still have the pregnancy symptoms and definitely still have the pregnancy weight. However, you have no way of knowing when your baby will actually deliver, but you know it will be sometime soon. Right now I am petrified to leave the house in fear that I will lose my baby in a public place. It sucks, there are many things I have been invited to during this week that I have had to turn down because I do not want to be doubled over in pain and bleeding in front of a crowd of people.

This is very much like labor and technically it is labor. Practice meditative breathing, soak in a bath, rub some lavender oil on you to allow your body and mind to relax. Right now I am forever grateful for the prenatal yoga class I took when pregnant with our oldest son. The meditative breathing alone is helping me through the waves of pain that Ibuprofen cannot touch.

If you are told and or want to go through a natural miscarriage instead of a D&C, please ask for pain medication if you don’t want to feel the contractions as hard. I forgot to because I was rather upset. Even ask for them for after a D&C if you go that route. I felt like a carved out jack-o-lantern with my D&C and was curled up in a ball after the anesthesia wore off after the surgery. As a woman who has done natural child birth, the pain after the D&C was far worse than an non-medicated and unassisted child birth.

I also forgot to mention a sweet gesture my OB did during this last appointment. It seemed odd that day that he gave me the ultrasound image of my baby, but now I see why. It allowed me to say good bye to my child and literally see that he or she had shrunken in size since the appointment two weeks prior to that one. Yes, that happens when a baby passes away in the uterus. Perhaps it is nature’s way of making the delivery a little easier.

As of right now, I have finally passed a clot, tiny, but I see it as some sort of progress. I have also decided that if things have not progressed further over the weekend that I will go in and request either a way to speed up the process or to go for a D&C. I really would rather not go through another D&C, but for my health, I may have to. It seems more pertinent to do with the upcoming move. We now have packing dates tentatively scheduled and this month is flying by at a rapid pace.

Thanks to anyone who has taken the time to read this. Writing about it is like therapy for me and I hope to help other women (and men, they grieve too) going through this. If you have lost your baby too, I am so sorry for your loss.

Yes, I do plan on writing more until this process is complete. I have yet to see real time documentation of this. Maybe this post will provide insight to others.

God Bless.

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Miscarriage, no sugar coating here

Miscarriage is not something new to me. However, dealing with it the natural way is new to me and I found the internet lacking in information. There are very few personal accounts of miscarriage and then there are the dry and uninformative medical sites with some information. My first miscarriage was roughly six years ago with my first pregnancy ending at 8 weeks. We were stationed in Germany at the time and my OB performed a D&C the very next day. That was hell. I cannot tell you how many times I asked to see my baby and was denied every time. Not only was my womb empty after the procedure, but my heart felt empty too. I had ZERO closure. Every part of me hurt, mind, body, and soul. To top it off, my Mutterpass (a German “passport” for pregnant women that holds info from all of their appointments) had “spontaneous abortion” scrawled across it. That hurt me deeply to read such an insensitive medical term on my perminant medical record.

Fast forward a bit and now I have two sweet boys and have dealt with a deployment too. Not long after my husband returned we found out we were pregnant with number four. After the first week, we dealt with road blocks, spotting started at 5 weeks and the Telenurse had me believe I was having an ectopic pregnancy. To the ER we went and everything was fine aside from the gestational sac being small. After that my Hcg levels were being monitored every two days. Yes, I felt like a pin cushion and my left arm started developing a hard spot. My levels kept dropping and I was told in a very poor manner by a nurse practitioner that I was miscarrying and that I was still young and could try again later. NO, never ever say that to a grieving woman. Screw that, nothing replaces the child you are losing right then and there. That night I had cramping so I took some Aleve and downed a glass of wine thinking I was losing my baby.

Another Hcg check later (to make sure they were still dropping) and my levels went up. They wanted to be sure I wasn’t having an ectopic (hadn’t we ruled that out already?!) A twin was suspected…that I had lost that one in the previous week as a vanishing twin and that the other was holding on. I was asked to come into the OB office again for an ultrasound. Lo and behold, a precious heart beat was found. New hope, but I was still spotting but the cramping wags gone. The gestational sac was still small and I was told the heartbeat was week. At this point I was six weeks along, when the heartbeat just starts. Based on research, the heartbeat is usually low at that point. I came in again a week later and the heartbeat was slightly stronger and the baby grew, sac was still small. Still, I had hope. Intercessions to St. Gianna and St. Gerard kept going up. Prayers increased to God too and not just by me, but by many people. I felt those prayers and found comfort in them.

A week ago I had another follow up ultra sound and within moments I sensed something was wrong. My OB who had been great and very informative was suddenly silent with a dismal look upon his face, the screen out of my line of sight. When he finally saw all he needed to, he turned the screen towards me and said, “I am so sorry, I have looked everywhere and I see not even a flicker of a heart beat.” All I could do was nod, knowing from the start this was a possibility. He then told me what I would be emotionally going through and the insensitivity of others (to ignore it). His wife had gone through this four times, that is why he is so compassionate, he’s had to grieve all those times too. Next he said that he’d prefer me to go through this naturally since the baby was only measuring 6 weeks 5 days at that point and I was 9 weeks 3 days at that point. I agreed to it having gone through a D&C before. He said there is also a drug that speeds things along but he did’t want to put me through it. Apparently it makes the “cramps” (bull honkey, it is labor pains) more difficult to manage. I was fine with not doing that too.

As I write this, I have more labor pains that Ibuprofen isn’t even putting a dent in. They come in waves just like real labor, every few minutes and last a minute or more. Right now I can breathe through them or even pack up some of our house through them. Yes, as we go through losing yet another child, we are gearing up for another move. It’s the perfect distraction as we wait for the miscarriage to finally do its thing. The waiting around for it to happen is like torture (going through all the physical pain without the prize at the end), but if my attention can be focused elsewhere, I am fine. I like that I can get the closure of seeing my baby at the end. Also, to anyone reading this and going through a miscarriage, a great deal of churches will bury your miscarried baby for free. Just call around and ask. I need to get to that this week. My OB wants me to send my baby to pathology, no point in it since by the time I drive 45 minutes over there, the “sample” will be ruined. Plus, I’d rather not have a lab of scientists poke and prod at my child. I’d rather my child get respect and dignity with a burial.

I do plan on doing a follow up post as I continue to go through this. Sure I have the phsyical pain, but I still have nothing more than spotting. That is starting to concern me and I just might have to go to the OB on Monday to figure out what to do next.

God Bless!

 

 

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