It's Not Just Loss

My family is happy and healthy. We are busy with homeschooling, extra curricular activities, work, birthday parties, holiday dinner planning and just general delightful chaos. It wasn't always this way. When my husband and I decided to build our family, it didn't happen like we thought it would. It was confusing, frustrating and heartbreaking. It was all consuming; It took over my world and it was all I thought about. Although we have never had to endure the unfathomable loss of an infant, we did have to endure unpredictable, on-going issues with my health.

My now 9 year old son was 18 months when we decided to have another baby. He was conceived quite easily, and it didn't take long for us to become pregnant the second time around. I did the usual things that I had done before: made an appointment with the local midwives, stopped drinking alcohol, took my vitamins and went to bed earlier each night.

I noticed my pregnancy symptoms hadn't arrived. No nausea, no sore breasts, no fatigue. It was concerning but I tried to be positive. At 9 weeks I noticed spotting. I saw my midwives but they couldn't find a heartbeat so they ordered an ultrasound. As I lay on the bed in a dim room with an intravaginal ultrasound inside me, the technician didn't turn the screen for me to see the baby like they usually do. She didn't speak, she didn't reassure me. When she was finished with the exam, she said she couldn't disclose any information. She would let the midwives know and they would contact me with the results. I knew, of course. My pregnancy had failed.

I went home and waited for the call. Finally the midwives called later that day and told me that the pregnancy was non-viable. They had found it was a blighted ovum, a type of very early failure, when a fertilized egg never develops into an embryo. Instead of expelling the tissue early on - perhaps disguising it as a menstrual period - the tissue hung on inside my body for weeks. The spotting was indication that my womb was about to give up and let go. I tearfully asked what I was supposed to do next. They softly explained that I now had to wait for the process to start. Needless to say, my husband and I were heartbroken.