PREGNANCY

The experience
I was in the grocery store when I noticed it. Not a gush or even a trickle; just a subtle damp feeling. I was sure it was nothing, but I figured I should check it out just the same. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I told my husband, Michael. “I’ll meet you in the frozen food.”

But when I got inside the stall, a bright red splotch made it clear that this was not nothing. I was stunned. After two uneventful pregnancies and two healthy kids, I had never really considered the possibility of having a miscarriage. And yet, here I was with red underwear, 11 weeks into my third pregnancy.

I caught up with Michael and told him calmly — maybe too calmly — that I was spotting. “It’s no big deal,” I said, “there’s hardly anything there. Let’s finish up here and then go home and call the midwives.” Clearly my reflex was to under-react, but his was quite the opposite. “Oh my God, we have to go to the hospital. Oh my God, let’s go.” He wanted to abandon 40 minutes of shopping and run; I wanted to get our chicken and go to the checkout.

As a compromise we cut our shopping short but paid for the contents of our cart before paging our midwife from the parking lot. There had been no increase in bleeding and there were no cramps, but I still stood with my legs pressed together in an irrational attempt to prevent a torrent of biology from spilling out of me. Outwardly I scorned Michael’s panic, but my teeth chattered and I shook a little. My body did not feel like my own; I had no idea what to expect.

At least not physically. Sure I had read articles about miscarriage, and had known women who had been through it, but the experience had always been framed in emotional terms. The disappointment and heartbreak, the invisible yet very real sense of loss, these were the feelings I had heard about. And yes, over the weeks that followed, shades of these emotions — and many others — washed over me. But initially what I felt was sheer terror. What was happening to me?

A couple of days and half-a-dozen telephone consultations with our midwife later, I was still spotting only lightly. We booked an ultrasound and learned that I was not carrying a live embryo. Afterward, Michael and I stumbled home. I put the phone in his hand before crawling into bed. “Call them all and tell them we were wrong,” I whispered. I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone thinking for even a moment longer that we were going to be having a baby. In addition to the sorrow and a strange kind of shame, I felt that I didn’t understand what was going on inside my own body. Had I had a miscarriage or hadn’t I? What was left inside me?

Only after another talk with our midwife did I realize that miscarriage is a process that can take place over a number of days, and that mine was in the early stages. I would know that my uterus was emptying itself when there was an increase in cramping and bleeding. If that didn’t happen on its own, my midwife said, I would need to go to the hospital for a D & C because my cervix was partially open and there was a risk of infection. She consulted with other midwives in her practice as well as an obstetrician and concluded that we could safely wait two more days.

The two days came and went and still I had nothing more than a little spotting. It was time to take action, but I knew I did not want a D & C. “Isn’t there another way?” I asked. My midwife said that, in fact, there was and she told me about other clients in the practice who had safely avoided a D & C with treatment from a naturopathic doctor.

Next Page: Alternatives to D & C

Originally published in Today's Parent Pregnancy & Birth, Autumn 2002