It was a boy . . .

I’m writing this post to help me work through my grief and some parts of it may be considered graphic by some people. Please read with care. Also, it is long.
Short version is we lost the baby. Long version is below.

Tuesday night I started having some light bleeding. Nothing that would send me to the emergency room, but needed to keep an eye on it. Wednesday, the bleeding continued through the day, but still not heavy. I called my OB after hours to ask if I should be concerned. I was told if I was still bleeding in the morning to come in for an appointment. Thursday, I went in for an exam by my OB and he couldn’t hear the heartbeat on the fetal monitor so he ordered an ultrasound. Yesterday afternoon at the ultrasound, we found out the the baby had probably died 3 to 4 weeks ago. This lines up with when my nausea went away, so we’re going to say death date was July 27th.

I was already mostly prepared for something to be wrong with the baby since I’ve miscarried before, just not this far along. This baby was a little different than my others since we had seen the baby in an earlier ultrasound (my others aborted before we had that appointment) and it seemed to be coming along well. Nate also thought that the baby would still be alive, but we might be having complications. The ultrasound tech was upset and tried to be consoling. I knew before she told me because the baby was ‘lying’ down at the bottom of my womb and not moving. Hannah and Ben were there, Hannah got to see the picture. Ben was busy with his game and probably wouldn’t understand anyway. I told Hannah that the baby’s heart wasn’t beating and she wanted to know what that meant. So I told her that meant that the baby had died. She seems to understand what that means. She has asked some good questions in the last day and some of them we just have to tell her we don’t know.

The plan after the ultrasound was to go back to see my OB to discuss our options going forward. I was told that once they know the baby has died, they usually only let you wait a couple weeks for your body to miscarry naturally and if not, they will schedule a D&C (basically a surgical abortion) because of the risk of infection. I didn’t really want to have the surgery unless it was necessary.

I didn’t get a chance to have the discussion of our options. Last night around 1:00 AM, my water broke. I remember being totally disgusted with previous pregnancies when this event occurred and I knew immediately what had happened. Pretty quickly afterward, the bleeding became heavier and I was having mild cramping/contractions. I called the doctor on call to see what they wanted me to do. She gave me the option of staying home if I wanted since the baby was less than 12 weeks of age. If after the delivery of the placenta, the bleeding didn’t start to slow down, then I should go to the emergency room. I sat in a warm bath for awhile until I got grossed out by the amount of blood. Right after I was trying to switch to new water around 2:30, I passed the baby and some of the placenta. It was raining last night and I could hear the drops on the roof, so I imagined God was crying with me as I mourned. He did look mostly like this image out of my pregnancy book. He was about 3 inches long. I don’t think his umbilical cord was proportional, so he was probably not getting enough blood. At this point, I was hoping I was done, got cleaned up as best I could, and waited to see if the bleeding would slow. Nate and I said our goodbyes and he cleaned up the mess. I was tired and tried to lie down, hoping that would help my body slow down.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t done yet and continued with the heavy bleeding. Around 4, I passed some more tissue, but I also got very faint and had to lie down on the floor. At this point, I told Nate I needed to go to the hospital. He mobilized, got the kids in the van, packed some drinks for me. Moving myself to the van was a chore, I was pretty dizzy and might have blacked out for a short time. I pulled a robe on, but wasn’t thinking very clearly and ended up in the van with just my robe, a pad thing to sit on, and underwear. Nate looked and me and went back in the house to get me some shoes and change of clothes for later.

We got to the ER around 4:30 and, amazingly, it was not busy. We got admitted, they took vitals, and tried to decide if I should stay in the ER intake room or move to a bed upstairs. I told Nate he should take the kids back home. I was thinking that they would just monitor me and see what my body was doing, give me fluids, maybe some pain meds. However, the bleeding continued, and the doctor who examined me couldn’t see what was going on because of too much blood and he said that usually means that I hadn’t passed all the tissue yet and needed to do the D&C. At this point, they had me stop drinking and eating in case I did go into surgery. They checked to see if I might need a blood transfusion, but I didn’t at the time. Though they were still concerned about my dizziness. I also asked for some pain meds since all we had had at home was aspirin. They gave me some morphine and also some medicine to try to slow down the bleeding as well as a bag of fluids.

They contacted my OB doctor on call who I had spoken with earlier and she came in to see what was going on around 5:45. They didn’t seem to have the right attachments for the bed that she was looking for so she just propped me up on a bedpan (turned over) and did an exam. She removed all of the remaining tissue that she could get to and we made a big bloody mess of the room. I think my nurse was surprised by the amount of tissue that the doctor pulled out.

After that uncomfortable experience, all we needed to do was have an ultrasound to make sure there wasn’t anything still left in my uterus. The ultrasound seemed to take forever, I’m sure they were just trying to be very thorough. After that, while we were waiting on someone to review the results, I was able to get a short nap in. I was also able to stand up and go to the bathroom without getting dizzy and my blood flow started to slow. The ultrasound results showed just some blood left over and that was ok with my doctor, so I was discharged around 9:00 this morning. They also gave me an antibiotic to make sure I don’t develop an infection.

The only photo I’ve got (and I’m sure the only one anyone might want to see) is my wristbands. I told the lady who put on the 4th one that my daughter was going to be jealous that I had so many bracelets. Sure enough, the first thing she did after she gave me a hug was to point out and play with my bands.

Nate stayed home this morning so I could get some sleep (and he took a nap too). I did a couple two hour chunks. He also spent some time talking to Hannah and explaining that the baby was no longer in my tummy. We had some fun discussions about what heaven might be like and also about getting older. She wanted to make sure that even when she got ‘old’ like me, she would still be my daughter. This afternoon, Nate went to work for a little while and out shopping and to pick up my meds. I’ve been a little bit dizzy every now and then. Starting to feel more normal, but will be taking it easy for a couple weeks.

Good news is I didn’t have to have the surgery and I had a little bit of advance warning that I might be miscarrying and wasn’t as crazy stressed out when it started as I might have been if I had been caught unaware. We got to say goodbye to our son and are at peace with trusting my body to know that something was wrong and God is in charge. It was also good timing since I don’t have volleyball on Fridays and I’ll have the weekend to recover before our next practice. 🙂

Moral of the story is . . . give your kids a hug and a kiss and tell them you love them and what a miracle and blessing they are!