I have given birth to five living children, four girls and one boy, but I have been pregnant six times. My third pregnancy was by far the worst one, not least because of how it ended.
After having our oldest two girls, our family moved from California, where we’d been living for the previous four years, to Provo, Utah. My husband Jake and I had met while attending BYU, so in some ways it was a homecoming for us. We’d come back so I could teach at BYU, an effort to transition from a practice-based career to one in academia, which we anticipated would provide more flexibility and a better work/life balance. Jake found a job in Salt Lake, and although the commute was lousy, he enjoyed the work and the salary was good.
Almost immediately after we moved and I started my teaching fellowship, I began feeling as though we should try for another child. Our second was already eighteen months old, and the two-year spacing seemed to work well for our family. Despite these promptings, I delayed, in part because I anxious about my new position and eager to succeed. However, the promptings continued, so in early 2013 we began trying for a third, and by April we learned we were pregnant, due in December.
My parents organize a family reunion for my siblings and I every other year, and in May of 2013 we all traveled to Galveston, Texas, for the reunion. I was horribly sick the entire time. Not just nauseated, but extremely uncomfortable in my gut. I was also irritable and cranky. I remember spending most of the trip in my room or in the bathroom, trying to avoid being around people. Although we hadn’t yet announced the pregnancy, it became clear that I was sick, and all my siblings quickly guessed the reason.
When we returned I had my 10-week doctor’s visit. Although Jake had attended many of my doctor’s appointments with my first pregnancy, by now we were both old hats and he did not attend this one. When the doctor applied the Doppler, we heard the baby’s heartbeat thundering along. The doctor smiled, expressed sympathy at my ongoing sickness, prescribed some medication, and sent me home.
I only took one or two of the anti-nausea pills, but they didn’t seem to help at all, so I stopped taking them. I continued to suffer through some debilitating nausea, feeling like a walking zombie. In June I informed my supervisor about my pregnancy, as I anticipated it would affect my ability to teach the Spring semester. I could also feel my waist thickening, so I assumed it wouldn’t be long before I started to show.
By mid-June I started to feel better, and by June 17th, my 14-week appointment, I was feeling better and even a little enthusiastic about the rest of the pregnancy. I went into my 14-week doctor’s appointment, looking forward to listening to the baby’s heartbeat again and scheduling a time for our big ultrasound, to determine the gender of the baby and see him/her suck on his/her little fingers and toes. Jake and I planned to tell our girls to expect another sibling that evening. I remember wanting to wait until after that appointment, although I didn’t really have a specific reason. After all, we’d already heard the heartbeat.
But when the doctor looked for the baby’s heartbeat at this appointment, it wasn’t there. She’d brought in a nursing student to observe, I remember, and said something about how it could be hard to find sometimes. She put some more gel onto the monitor and ran it over my abdomen again. In fact, she tried for two or three minutes, until a muscle in my abdomen balled up and started to hurt. At that point she gave up and had me sit up.
I knew then, sitting in her office, that the baby was gone, but I didn’t cry at the time. The doctor said something about not proclaiming it a miscarriage just yet – it was possible we were just missing the heartbeat, but she also acknowledged the possibility that I had lost the baby, even without any spotting or cramping. She made an appointment for me at the hospital, and I went directly there. On the way I called Jake and called or texted my Mom. Sitting in the car, waiting for my appointment, I did start to cry.
They got me into the ultrasound quickly, and as soon as the image came up on the screen it was obvious to me that the baby had died. It was small – too small for 14 weeks – but more telling it was absolutely still and the Doppler was absolutely silent. The ultrasound technician was very gentle. He handed me a tissue, which I absent-mindedly used to wipe the gel off my stomach, rather than the tears streaming down my cheeks. He told me he needed to go and review the results with the radiologist, but I already knew the results and he knew that I knew.
He came back a few minutes later and, just as gently, told me what I already knew. The baby was gone. As I bit my lower lip he handed me the whole box of tissues and told me to take whatever time I needed, then left the room.
I started to hyperventilate then, and I couldn’t stop crying. My throat ached with grief. I called Jake to let him know, then texted my Mom, with a request that she tell the members of my extended family who already knew about the pregnancy, and ask them not to call me, because I didn’t want to talk. I felt such a flood of emotions; grief, guilt, disbelief, humiliation, even a little bit of anger. The measurements indicated that the baby must have died shortly after I’d heard its heartbeat at the doctor’s office, meaning that I had continued to experience pregnancy symptoms for four weeks after the baby was gone. I never felt any cramping, never had any bleeding or spotting. My body simply didn’t realize the baby had gone.
I didn’t have the emotional energy to process it at the time, but Jake was also grieving. He headed back from Salt Lake as soon as I called the first time, but it was a 90 minute train ride for him. He spent the time crying behind his sunglasses, thinking how unfair it all was.
My doctor called shortly after I got home from the hospital. She was absolutely perfect in how she handled it. Like the ultrasound technician, she was gentle, but also practical. She observed that in the absence of any cramping or spotting, we could wait for my body to figure out the pregnancy had been lost, but she recommended having a D&C instead.
We scheduled the D&C for Wednesday, June 19th, the soonest they could get me in. Knowing the baby was dead, I was impatient to be done with the pregnancy. I resented all those weeks of being sick, especially the time I spent feeling sick even after the baby had already died. I punished myself for delaying the pregnancy at all, realizing that my two-year spacing for my children was now impossible. I questioned whether taking those anti-nausea pills had been the cause of the miscarriage. (They hadn’t, but with my later pregnancies I would never even consider taking medication.) Mostly, I mourned.
On Wednesday, Jake and I went to the clinic for the procedure in fairly good spirits. In retrospect, it felt a lot like gallows humor – just a method of coping. I was worried that I would be sick after the general anesthesia, as I had been with a knee surgery years before. We waited impatiently for the doctor, and were advised that he had been called away just as I was brought into the holding room, so that he could deliver two (live) babies; one vaginally and one via c-section. I had to wait an additional two hours after that. I remember being keenly aware that those other women were going to deliver live babies, but I was going to have a dead baby cut out of me. It was hard to not feel resentful.
They finally wheeled me back into the room. As I shifted over from the gurney to the surgical bed, I started to cry again. I remember clearly one of the nurses looking sympathetically into my face, and then picking up my hand and holding it. It was one of the most human moments of my life, one that I will never forget. She held my hand and patted it as the anesthesiologist put the medication in my IV. I fell asleep. When I woke up after the surgery, I was still crying, but the nurse was gone. I felt so sad. I asked the attending nurses walking in and out of the recovery room if someone would hold my hand, but I think they assumed I was still under the influence of the knockout drugs, and instead they wheeled me back to Jake. He took me home.
Throughout the entire process, I was so grateful for the gentleness and the kindness of all the medical personnel. Everyone accepted that I was sad and let me be sad. No one suggested I shouldn’t be sad because I had other daughters, or because the baby was so small. Everyone just let me cry when I needed to and told me they were sorry, without trying to make me feel better.
A few weeks later I threw my back out leaning over to pick up something in the closet. My doctor prescribed some physical therapy. I was in pain and very irritable. The physical therapist was kind and cheerful, despite my grumpiness. I complained about hurting myself doing something simple like bending over. I think she asked if I’d had a baby recently, and I told her I’d had a miscarriage. She said, “Well, that’s the problem! Your body is still recovering.” I teared up as I thought, “Great. One more way I can be hurt by this thing.” I looked up and saw, to my astonishment, that my cheerful therapist’s eyes were also filled with tears. She picked up my hands, looking deeply into my eyes, and told me she’d also had a miscarriage, years ago, and she could remember feeling the way I was feeling. She hugged me and expressed her sympathy. I was shocked. I was overcome with her gracious empathy. It was such an expression of kindness and understanding to someone she had only just met – someone who was grumpy and in pain and making no secret of it.
A few days later I dragged myself to my supervisor’s office and told him, “Well, there’s no good way to say this, but I lost the baby.” I started crying, again, and felt ashamed for it. But he immediately stood up, wrapped me in a hug, and sighed, “We also lost a baby. I understand.” He then told me the story of his first son, who had been born alive but died after only a few months from a horrible genetic disease. I was stunned. I suddenly felt grateful for the fact that I’d only carried my dead baby for four months. I’d never seen his or her face. I’d never given him or her a name. I couldn’t imagine losing a child I had once held and loved.
A few months after that, my younger sister, who had gotten pregnant about when I miscarried, also had a missed miscarriage, which she learned about at her 20-week appointment. She was induced and gave birth to the stillborn baby a few days later. That was the first time I felt grateful for my experience, because I knew what she was going through, and she knew that I knew. We had always been close, but this experience only brought us closer.
When we both had little girls the next year, in 2014, it made the experience all the sweeter. We were also able to empathize with the fear we felt during those “rainbow” pregnancies. My wonderful doctor let me come in whenever I wanted for a quick Doppler check. My sister bought her own Doppler machine to use whenever she felt nervous. I felt less resentful of those periods of morning sickness, and grateful for every kick and wiggle I felt during my subsequent pregnancies.
By far my biggest takeaway from the experience was the importance and meaning and power of empathy. I still get sad when I think about my lost baby, just as I get sad when I hear the stories of other women who have lost children. But I remember how I felt when I saw my therapist’s eyes fill with tears and when the nurse held my hand. My goal is to be that person for someone else. The reality of all life, but especially of pregnancies and births, is that there will be challenges and setbacks and loss and grief. These experiences are difficult, but they are also necessary for our growth and development. The beauty of these experiences is that it enables those who have gone through them to be guides, cheerleaders, and companions to others. I am grateful for the blessing of empathy that came from my loss, and for the love I felt from strangers who gave me their empathy during my loss.