Hope After Miscarriage

I’m not sure if I’m ready to recount any drama that includes specifics from beginning to end. I’ll see where I end up though. My thoughts are just fuzzy enough to keep me from being articulate, but just lucid enough to clarify God’s hand in the details. We spent most of December in survival mode. I managed to crank out some decorated birthday cookies for a friend and I even made some dips for Christmas gatherings. This was the extent of what might be considered superfluous productivity during the Christmas season. I embraced the holly jolly as much as I could, but I was almost always queasy and instead of craving cookies, I wanted only peppermints. Everything else I did in December was more or less necessary. Exercise was lost altogether except for a few walks. I gained 4 pounds. No matter how much or how little I eat in the first trimester, I gain weight and I rarely exercise. So it goes. 

Most mornings I woke up nauseated and would spend the first couple of hours of the day letting my children curl up next to me with a movie while I waited for the feeling to pass. This pregnancy had me running to the toilet just enough to produce suspicions that this baby would be a boy. My firstborn is a boy and he sent me to the ER at 10 weeks pregnant. But my second born is a girl and she just made me sick--the regular sick that doesn’t require Zofran and doesn’t dehydrate you. With each child, I have used a cute pregnancy journal called the Belly Book. The third child got a book as well and I had already started writing in it. I tend to take one of two polar approaches: I look ahead in life or I live completely in the moment. With pregnancy, I look ahead a lot. So it was with my Belly Book. I flipped a couple of pages to week 9 even though I wasn’t quite there yet. I knew I could either write, “Hear the heartbeat” or “Supposed to hear the heartbeat” or something like that. I was careful with my wording, not wanting to be presumptuous and not taking any life for granted. I was holding the future loosely as I’m sure most women try to do when they’re in the first trimester. But could I really? No matter how I tried, I was already attached. I couldn’t see a face, I didn’t have a name, the room wasn’t ready, and I hadn’t even told everyone the news yet. But my body had already made things clear (and almost belligerently so some days). Someone was occupying my belly, rocking my world, drawing me toward feelings of anticipation, prodding my imagination into the month of July even though the tree was still up and the Christmas presents were wrapped.

And then that day came. December 27th. J got up early to head to the doctor for a flu test. The test was positive. C woke up groggy and flushed. Fever confirmed. I had two sick boys and one happy girl. So on that note, my happy girl and I headed to my doctor appointment. I didn’t panic when she couldn’t detect the heartbeat. After all, I went through this same thing with A and once they did an ultrasound, all was well. I knew the story could end the same way with this baby. But deep down I knew it might not. When she told me I’d have to come back in a couple of hours for the ultrasound, I tried to practice patience. Real patience. The kind you have in your heart. The kind that keeps your heart from racing. The kind that keeps you from "answering" a matter before hearing it out. I ran an errand. I swung by my house. I headed back to the doctor. Patience is hard for me and so is walking by faith. And of course, faith and fear are incompatible. Worrisome and fearful people tend also to be people of little faith. They like to see what’s ahead before they walk toward it. They like calculating. So here I was with patience and faith being only available in a supernatural supply. If God is for us, who can be against us? Apparently not even ourselves. God gave me patience that day and he continued to give it to me when I had none left. He heard each plea when I cried, “Lord, help my unbelief.”

I headed back to the doctor and waited just a moment before it was my turn. Had this been my first pregnancy I might not have known. I might have waited on a cue before I summed up this loss. But because this should have been my 3rd nine week baby to see via ultrasound, I knew right away. Now when you look to your right at an ultrasound that you know is not good and then you look to your left at the face of your two year old, you find immediate warmth around you in the midst of nothing but heartache. She knew something was wrong. I watched her lip quiver as soon as my tears began to flow. She was just old enough that I didn’t have to explain anything, but just young enough to sense my hurt.

The waiting was not over. So far I had only spoken with the ultrasound tech. My doctor was delivering a baby during all of this so I had to wait in her office to discuss the next step. So I waited. And I waited. And waited. My husband was unreachable thanks to his phenergan-induced sleep. Poor guy had been up sick all night and then couldn’t even keep his Tamiflu down. So they knocked him out with Phenergan. And if you’ve ever taken phenergan, you know what it does, especially if you’re already running on empty. I texted my friend, my sister, and my mom and that’s as far as I could go. I didn’t want to repeat the words again. I needed more time before I re-told anyone else. My mom texted back, “I’m coming to sit with A.” Now, if I’ve learned anything, it’s that people really swoop in at a time like this. You feel the rescuing hand of the Lord in every “cup of cold water in Jesus name” and every act of service that comes your way. It’s humbling and I mean that sincerely. So within minutes, my parents were there to sit with A so I could finish up with the doctor. A had been a perfect angel all day, but was getting restless since it was well past nap time. Now here’s one more way that God is in the details. Baby girl had a diaper situation just as Gannie came to my rescue. It’s the little things.

I finished with the doctor and I went straight home. The first thing I did was cover my face and fall into J’s arms. Imagine keeping one’s distance from the love of your life at a time when your heart is breaking in half. Even so, I came down with a fever and chills Thursday night, but it never progressed to anything. I don’t know how to even recount what happened between that Thursday and the following Thursday. It was the longest week I’ve ever endured. I continued to feel pregnant, but I knew I was not. I continued to wait for my body to realize that I was not pregnant. I spent Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday with a husband who could barely get out of bed. I continued to keep my distance from my husband, in fact, so as not to be susceptible to the flu. 

Thankfully C spent only one day with a high fever. I woke up in the wee hours on Saturday morning with a pain so intense I told Josh to call 911. But then I reneged and told him to call my doctor. So he did. It turned out to be more like a contraction because it only last 2 or 3 minutes and it was all over. What was that? I still don’t really know. What I thought was the beginning of the end turned out to be just another step of the road to waiting. And more waiting. I could not bring myself to take the medicine they gave me to speed up the process. Everywhere I turned in scripture, all I saw was “Wait.” Wait on the Lord. Wait on the Lord and He will deliver you. Wait. So I did. In the end, I had no peace at all about experiencing the completion of this miscarriage at home. That’s what I thought I wanted, but then I changed. I began to have peace about the D&C. This peace was intensified when I heard the words of the nurse when she called to check on me and said, “Even if you take those meds, you might still need a D&C.”

On Saturday morning, A decided it was a good time to make her mark on this week of unfolding drama. She threw up in her crib. And then in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. And then in the toilet. I guess it was a fluke, because she never got officially sick. She just wanted a piece of the action, apparently. 

Saturday night my grandmother called. She’s 81, mind you. She asks if I would mind if she came to cook lunch and clean my house on Sunday. I don’t argue. But in my heart I’m thinking, “You might be sorry you signed up for this when you see a million Christmas toys that haven’t been put away and a house that has been unmaintained, but very much lived in.” She stayed almost 7 hours. We slept a lot of that time and she just let us “be.” She’s a worker-bee type and I think she sensed we weren’t up for chit chat anyway. She cleaned the ring around my front load washer among other things. I’ve ignored that dirty ring for months.

On Thursday I went for my surgery. They call it surgery, you know. Until I had this experience for myself, I thought surgery to be a rather strong word for a D&C. I thought it was just a procedure. I get it now. I was petrified of the anesthesia, but I praise God for the blessing of anesthesia. I remember nothing. I remember a big circular light with lots of smaller circle shaped lights within it. I remember the doctor saying something. And then I was out. As soon as I woke up from anesthesia, the grief slammed into me like it had been running toward me for awhile and gathering momentum. I wept. The nurse was right there. She held my hand. I asked her where I was. She told me I was in recovery. Not long after that I was moved to another room and reunited with my husband. Whether I’m going through a heartache or just reading a book, I like life better when he’s around.

It is hard to know what to feel after something like this. I’m a justice-oriented, idealist sort of gal. I asked myself if what I’m feeling is what I’m supposed to be feeling. I wasn’t consumed with questions of why, oddly enough. I know the world is fallen and I am not exempt from the consquences. I didn’t want people to talk to me about anything except this loss the first few days. Chit-chat felt like an injustice to the soul that I knew was now in heaven. I felt the need to push pause as much as I could. It felt wrong to do anything but come to a halt in a lot of ways. I wept and cried and ached for a July 30th due date that I knew would come and go without a baby. And then I questioned myself. I told Josh that part of me felt conflicted like I wasn't allowed to feel too hurt. I know people miscarry all the time and that this is very common. Why did it hurt so bad? He said to me, “It happens all the time, but it’s only happened once to you.”  Of course. It hurts because it’s not common to me. And even if it happened 6 more times to me, it would never feel common. 

People want to comfort you by reminding you that you can have more babies. But what they don’t know is that when they say that and everything is still so fresh, it just translates to me as, “But don’t you know you can have more miscarriages? You can lose more babies!” It’s too soon to sing songs to my heavy heart. They don’t sound like songs yet. I have found the best things said to me were the words of scripture. I also found that I wanted to hear from others who had already trod this path. I liked knowing what I might expect. I liked hearing that this heartache was valid. I liked hearing from someone who had been where I am and walked through it and found God faithful. Every text that expressed concern was precious. I loved every message on my phone, even though I knew I was not ready to talk on the phone (too much spontaneity involved). I was so thankful for every meal offered and brought. I loved every email and every attempt to acknowledge this loss as painful and try to comfort us. Every act of service was beautiful and comforting.

What extra miles people have gone for us! God gives us more than we ask for or imagine and he does this sometimes by means of the Body of Christ. My sister put a pot of soup by my back door one day. There are just no words to describe my gratitude for these kindnesses. The loss still hurts and still feels fresh, but the more I claim God’s word and God’s truth and the more I take my thoughts captive, the more I find myself hopeful and the more I find myself walking by faith. The just shall live by faith. And God is faithful when we are faithless. I have claimed Psalm 71:14 above all else which says, “But I will hope continually and will yet praise you more and more.”

Yes. I will.