I have lost something that I will never know or fully understand.
I’ve loved this photo for a long time, and have always wondered about the right moment to share it. It was taken quite a while ago, before I knew it would feel meaningful in this unexpected way. I guess today was the right day. This post is not going to be light, or easy, or especially beautiful. If you’re not in a place where you are ready for my story of pregnancy loss, it’s totally ok for you not to read on.
We’ve been on a fertility journey for four long, uncertain years. Our initial visits with our reproductive endocrinologist started in November of 2019. In May of 2020, we were told that they couldn’t give us a definitive answer of what was happening, why we weren’t able to get pregnant. The wait for a publicly-funded round of IVF was going to be at least a year long; we eagerly signed up, knowing we’d be knocking on the doors of 40 by the time our turn came, if it came.
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As if by magic, the pandemic conspired on our behalf, and our turn for a miracle came in November of 2020.
Nobody tells you that a child isn’t what you hope for first. Nobody sits you down to tell you that hope comes in small bursts, like ripples that build into a wave. First, there’s hoping for eggs. You hope, through rounds of needles and injections and hormones that run wild through your body, that you get enough, that you will have even a single egg. You hope that the eggs are good quality; you hope that they fertilize; you hope that the fertilized eggs grow; you hope that they reach Day 5; you hope that they look healthy; you hope that the embryo transfer is successful; you hope that your embryo finds a spot they like; you hope they settle in. You have a mind-numbing wait to reach two weeks, and then you hope for a first positive blood test result. And then you hope for a second positive result to follow the first. Every trip to the bathroom, you hope to see nothing. You hope: never red. You hope that you reach Week 7, for the first ultrasound that you hope will show you a heartbeat, and then you hope you reach Week 12, so you can see that same little heart beating, and a tiny being that’s starting to look, finally, like that child you’ve been hoping for all along.
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Our hope and joy ran out at 11.5 weeks. Our strange little blob, which looked like a crunchy little Cheeto with a slow and steady throbbing heartbeat on the ultrasound screen at Week 7, came much too early into the world, having lived inside my body for only 62 days. I don’t know what people’s experiences of miscarriage are like, so I don’t know what is normal, and what’s not. I describe my experience in case it’s what you went through. I don’t want you to feel alone.
I think knew something was wrong when I spotted brown blood, on a Thursday, and nothing particularly important had happened that day. I hadn’t had a physical exam and my husband and I hadn’t had sex in the few days prior. It was a boring midweek day. The day that I’d always affectionately called Little Friday, and I was making plans for the weekend. Spotting continued on Friday, turning to a scary brown smear. But still, no bright red and no cramps, so we kept our panic in check.
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Saturday night, I passed a large clot, and what I knew in my heart not to be blood. Tissue, and too much to be good when I knew I didn’t have much inside me. A late evening, white-knuckled drive to the midwives’ clinic followed. I lay on the examination bed as the midwife moved the wand over my belly, hearing a crackling whistling emptiness as the Doppler listened but only picked up the sound of a vast wilderness. It was one of the loneliest moments of my life, and it was the moment that my hopes died. Our midwife gently told us that she thought I was miscarrying, or had already experienced a miscarriage. Cramping would probably follow, and ideally I would pass everything quickly so that I was out of danger of an infection. We went home, my back beginning to ache, and I tossed and turned all night as cramping started to grip my abdomen.
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Sunday morning, there was no spotting, but I still felt awful. And then, in the afternoon, the cramps became something else that I’d never experienced before. I went through three hours of active labour. I had sore, cramp-like contractions that lasted thirty seconds, every four minutes. These got stronger, and closer together, and the pain intensified.
“Go to the emergency room if the pain becomes unbearable” — but what was unbearable? Was this unbearable? Then, it became 45 seconds of incredible wrenching pain, and three minutes of tense relief.
“Go to the emergency room if the pain becomes unbearable” — this was unbearable, but what would happen when I went to the ER? Was this the end? How would I get to the car when the pain lasted almost a minute with barely two minutes in between? Would I have to go in and face this alone?
At the end, the hardest 20 minutes of my life: I had excruciating, all-encompassing knots of pain that grabbed my entire lower abdomen for a minute, barely ebbing for a minute before rolling into another painful wave. I made involuntary noises, I vomited from how much it hurt, and finally I knew that the moment had come that I was bringing into the world a little being that wasn’t ready to live.
I ran to the bathroom and I cried out an apology, my voice saying words that I didn’t know I would say until I heard them. Sorry that our hope wasn’t enough, that we didn’t have enough time, and that they wouldn’t make it. I called my fetus Baby, delivering our little Cheeto being, still whole and enveloped in its gestational sac. And then my body, knowing what had happened, immediately calmed, and the pain subsided. My husband and I held each other and wept, our tears running together on our faces.
It doesn’t feel fair to end a story like this, because the ending is potential and anticipation crumbling into nothingness. There have been so many things that have been said, as we lie in bed staring into the dark, thrashing around under blankets trying to find a restful moment. One of the hardest parts is sharing the pain of never knowing this little being and the good that they would bring to the world. I didn’t feel them become a part of me, didn’t feel any movements that connected me to a whole other life dancing to its own song. We have lived with the hope of meeting them long before we had one brief, grainy ultrasound window onto their peaceful repose, and now the wait extends past us anew, turning a corner where we cannot see what lies beyond.
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There is a photo from our embryo transfer that lives on our fridge, a tiny glowing white air pocket signaling a shy hope that we would meet this little person someday. And yet, in the midst of all this scrutiny and medical surveillance, our little one came to us clothed in white light, and left us wrapped in its membranous shroud. A mystery to contemplate until the very end.
