You know that look people give you when you tell them bad news? You know, that head-tilt to the right, they pull their brows together and push out their bottom lip? The look people give you when you break up with your boyfriend, or didn’t get accepted into the college you wanted. It’s the look you get when someone learns you lost a baby. The look people give you when they don’t know what to say.
When you tell someone you’ve lost a baby, they have no clue what to say. Nine times out of ten, they’ll give you the “look”, and utter an “I’m so sorry.” Only the bold ask questions.
“Do they know why?”
“What was wrong with it/you?”
“Are you going to try again?”
When my husband and I first got married, we knew from the beginning we wanted to have a family. We wanted two beautiful children, a house, and a pack of dogs. We wanted a life full of warmth and love. Most of all we looked forward to the pitter patter of little feet and paws throughout our home. We didn’t want to grow our family immediately. We wanted to wait a few years and enjoy our young marriage before taking on such an enormous responsibility.
Two months after the wedding, a missed birth control pill, and another month later, I dropped my husband off for his National Guard drill weekend. I went to work and I spent the entire day with an unfamiliar, intense, and soul-crushing case of heartburn. I tried milk, Tums, bananas, everything I could get my hands on while working. After my shift, I drove to the store and walked straight to the Zantac. I picked up a box and for some reason, something to my right caught my eye and I looked up to see a wall of pregnancy tests. I shook the thought from my mind and turned toward the checkout line. I don’t remember why but something in me willed me to turn around and grab a test. I plucked two different brands off the shelf, just to be sure, dashed to the checkout line, and hesitantly bought the tests. I drove home, took the Zantac, and went straight to bed.
I woke up the next morning on September 11, 2015. The grocery bag with the two boxes of tests daunting me from my nightstand. Still in bed, I tore into one of the boxes and read the directions. I finally drug myself from my bed and took the test. Three minutes is all it takes to find out the results. A little pink line to determine the rest of my life. My responsibilities and priorities would be different all because of a little pink line. I was scared and only dared to peek at the test when my phone timer went off at three minutes exactly. I flipped the test over so I could see the result window.
I was amazed at how much I wasn’t freaking out. I was actually...happy, excited even. I picked up the test and took it over to my bedroom so I could see the result window in better light. It was undeniable. I was pregnant. I was going to have another human being made up of half me, half my husband. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how amazing that would be. I wanted to call my husband immediately and tell him, but I didn’t. I wanted to surprise him when I went back to Fort Bragg to pick him up from drill. The waiting was the worst part, I had this enormous secret I couldn’t tell anyone. I slipped up and told my sister the next day, but swore her to secrecy.
The time to pick my husband up finally came and I arrived equipped with a gift bag containing a cute onesie and a card announcing that he was going to be a daddy. I was lucky enough to be able to catch his reaction.
As the weeks went by, we told our families. Everyone was thrilled for us. Not a single person breathed a word of how quickly we became pregnant. Only words of absolute love and warm congratulations. So what if it was a bit early? I was going to fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a mother. I was over the moon with excitement. I was once told by someone who had already had a baby to take a photo of myself the moment I found out I was pregnant so I could see what my body looked like before the baby, I thought that was a great idea, so as soon as I broke the news to my husband, he snapped this sleepy photo of me minutes after I woke up from a nap. (Shh, that isn't underwear...okay yes it is, sorry.)
I experienced all the symptoms that accompany early pregnancy. I was exhausted all the time and took frequent naps, had more soul-crushing heartburn, and even the simplest of activities would often leave me out of breath. I grew to have extreme aversions to Taco Bell and craved chicken noodle soup all the time. At one point, I bought 18 cans of homestyle chicken noodle. I was desperate and it seemed to be the only thing that didn’t make me gag.
Less than a month later, on September 30, I was off work and resting on the couch watching some British television series. My husband was working second shift and almost as soon as the sun went down I felt a heavy pressure in my lower abdomen. I went to the restroom to check for blood and there was none so I warmed up a heating pad, prepared a frozen Chinese beef and broccoli dinner and returned to the couch to rest some more. As I was eating, I looked down at the bowl of food and suddenly felt nauseous. I placed the bowl on the end table and laid my head on the back of the couch. I was home alone and I had a weird feeling that something was wrong. I let another hour or two pass before I got up again. I went to use the restroom and looked down to find the slightest bit of bright red blood. I stared for a few more moments and calmly cleaned up. I tried to tell myself everything was fine and maintained my composure. I was in a state of denial. First trimester spotting was normal, it happens in most pregnancies. I told myself nothing was wrong over and over.
I decided to call my mom and let her know so I wasn’t carrying this piece of heavy information alone. She’d know what to do, she’d be able to offer some guidance. She asked if I wanted to go to the hospital to get checked and I said yes. We stopped by my husband’s work and picked him up before going to the emergency room. I was greeted by a nurse who took me to a bed and told me to remove all my clothes and replace them with a paper gown. While at the hospital, I developed a throbbing headache and asked the nurse to give me some Tylenol to ease the pain while I waited for the doctor. The doctor finally came into the room, asked me about my headache, and prescribed me a drug called Reglan and a dose of Benadryl to dilute the painkiller. The doctor said it wouldn’t hurt the baby and I’d feel much better after I got the drug. The doctor left and the nurse came in and popped a vial into my IV. I rested my head on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. My mom turned out the lights and the Benadryl finally kicked in.
I woke to the fluorescent lights flicking on and the doctor’s voice startling me awake. It was two o'clock in the morning, three hours after I initially arrived at the hospital. Before I could even recollect the events leading up to this moment, my feet were in stirrups and the doctor was saying “alright now, Katie. Try and relax.”
A few minutes later, the doctor pulled off his gloves. “Everything looks great!” He said optimistically, “the cervix is closed, bleeding is minimal, but I still want to get an ultrasound just to be on the safe side.”
I wasn’t aware of the raging storm outside so the on-call ultrasound technician got delayed. Three hours after the exam, by bed was rolled to the ultrasound room. The technician barely spoke to me. She began the ultrasound and several minutes in, I smiled at her and asked her if she saw anything. She looked at me, snickered, and returned to the screen. My face fell and I looked to my husband who grabbed my hand and squeezed tight.
At six o’clock in the morning, the doctor came in saying my ultrasound looked great. He said my baby was measuring two weeks smaller than how far along I was, and that there was no detectable heartbeat. He said I must’ve counted my days wrong. I went home thankful that my baby was okay, but confused as to why it was so small. We left at 7 in the morning.
That Monday, I went to my normal OB and they did a pelvic exam and said there was too much bleeding, but they’d run blood work anyway to see where my hormone levels were. Later that day I received a call from the midwife, she said my pregnancy hormone had risen from that night in the hospital and that it was a very promising sign. I was to return to the OB office and have more blood drawn to ensure my levels were still rising in 48 hours.
That night, I experienced the worst cramping I had ever before experienced. I was in fetal-position on the floor while my husband helplessly asked what he could do for me. We decided against returning to the hospital, I didn’t want to waste another eight hours in a freezing emergency room. The next morning, I woke up on October 2, 2015 to find my cramps were gone and relief washed over me. I got up from my bed and felt something I had never felt before. I felt a pressure in my lower abdomen, and then an immediate release of pressure. I went to the bathroom and there was my little embryo. I sat there in the bathroom staring. It didn’t look like a baby, but I knew exactly what it was.
I called my OB and they told me to come in. They asked for my “specimen” and left me and my husband alone in the exam room. The nurse came back and confirmed it was the baby and asked if I wanted it. I said yes. I took it to my parent’s house and buried my baby and planted a flower on top of it. No one knew what to say as my husband packed the soil around the stems of the flower. We stared for a few minutes, and then we left. It was time to continue on with life. My pregnancy was over, time to think of other things.
In the month following the miscarriage, I thought I was handling it really well. I went out for drinks with friends, I quit my job so I could focus on school, my husband and I had decided we wanted to start trying to have a baby soon.
I didn’t feel like myself though. I felt as though I was in slow motion and everyone around me was in fast forward. My life had been turned upside down, but the world just kept turning. I ended up talking to my developmental psychology professor. She was a licensed clinical psychologist so she probably saw this kind of thing all the time. I stopped her after class and told her what I was feeling. She told me I just had a baby, but I didn’t get to take it home. She said I had all the hormone rushes of any other pregnant woman. She said it sounded like I had a form of postpartum depression and PTSD due to the emotional roller coaster associated with being told good news that my baby would probably survive by two doctors, yet my baby still died. She said I probably wouldn’t heal until I actually had a baby to fill that void.
One night, I was driving to my mother’s house when I saw the tiniest puppy dart out in front of my car. I stopped and jumped out of the car, scooped up the scared little puppy and took her to my parent’s house. She was dirty, flea-ridden, and scared. I gave her a bath and my mom gave her some flea medicine she had around the house. She spend the night in my apartment and the next day my husband and I went door-to-door trying to find her home. With no luck, we decided she had been abandoned and that she hadn’t been taken care of in a long time. She was so tiny I could hold her in my hands and she’d sleep on my chest. She grew attached to me, I saved her life, and she never left my side. We named her Peach because she was fuzzy and sweet.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Peach was the medicine I needed. I began to feel like myself again. She brought me healing just as I did for her. In a way, we saved each other. She followed me around no matter where I went, we were inseparable.
It wasn’t until three months later in January that I became pregnant again. My husband and I were elated. Finally, I was able to get the baby I so desperately wanted. Finally I had my chance at motherhood. My husband and I were too excited to keep the news a secret so we announced the pregnancy. We decided that this baby's life was precious no matter how small and we wanted others to share in our joy.
Two weeks after we announced the pregnancy, I began to experience the all too familiar symptoms again. The next day, I lost my second baby.
We went to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to try and get our minds off the miscarriage. In this photo, I am experiencing the painful cramping leading up to the actual embryo loss. I was in the last hours of my pregnancy and plastered on a smile to convince myself I wasn’t sad because I had done this once before, I was sure I could do it again. I was stronger this time, but it still hurt. You never think it'll happen to you twice, there was less than a 2% chance of me having a second consecutive miscarriage. People start to think something is wrong with you. Then they stop talking to you. Those who have kids don't know what to say to you. Those who don't have kids are even more stumped. And you can't blame them, you can't expect anyone your age to have already lost two babies.
It has now been four months since the last miscarriage and I still get exasperated when I see girls announce their second pregnancy before their twentieth birthday, or while they’re still living at their parent’s houses. It’s hard to wrap my mind around why so many unprepared girls get to bring healthy babies into unstable relationships where there will constantly be a war between the mother and her child’s father. Yet, I can’t even bring one healthy baby home yet. I can't help but roll my eyes when happy pregnant women walk into the doctor's office, smiling ear-to-ear down at their bellies while I'm having 14 vials of blood drawn that day to try and find out "what's wrong with me" or to receive an ultrasound to ensure my uterus terminated my pregnancy efficiently. I've never seen my baby's heartbeat on an ultrasound. I've never seen beyond the first trimester, I've never felt tiny kicks from within my belly. And I can't even look at frozen Chinese food anymore. I don’t give up hope, though. I know my time will come. And when that time comes, that baby will be so overwhelmingly loved, because his or her parents will have desperately wanted him/her. Because his or her parents will have had to learn patience beyond their comprehension. I know I will be an amazing mom one day.
To this day Peach still sleeps soundly on my chest, even though she is eight months old and 40 pounds heavier. I love her more and more every day. She is so full of life and joy. My husband is my biggest supporter and we both have grown to love each other more deeply with every challenge and setback we face. Our time will come, but until then, we are creepy annoying dog parents. And that is OK.
