Never Forgotten

I lost the baby.

Jake and I went to our 8 week appointment on February 21st and was told there was no heartbeat. According to the ultrasound tech it didn't look like it was older than 8 weeks 4 days.

Wow. I didn't think I'd cry when I started writing this but it's still so hard. Instead of trying to write an entire post, I figured it would be easier to post an email I sent to a few people a few days after my suction D&C (I had an incomplete miscarriage). I think I have a better time at talking about what has happened post-D&C than anything that happened before it. Thinking about the before still stings.

I said in my first post that I wanted to blog about everything being pregnant so my (hopefully soon to be) kids will know what experiences I went through. This is all part of that. The horrible, horrible (and secretive) downside to it all. So, here goes. The email I wrote February 24th (or sometime around then):

I know this is going to sound absolutly awful, but although I was constantly hoping and wishing the baby was okay and felt better after seeing the baby at our 8 week appointment, there was always a part of me that didn't think our pregnancy would go full term. I think because of that I haven't been as devistated as I imagined I would be. I [still] of go through spurts of being fine and then crying fits. The hardest part is thinking about our last visit and seeing the baby on the monitor and watching and hearing its heart beat. It's hard to think it only lived only five more days. Luckily we can't think of anything we did wrong, so we aren't beating ourselves up with "what if I did this instead of that?" The only thing I'm beating myself up over right now is not really saying goodbye to the baby before the surgery. I think I was so shocked and concerned it was inside me for amost a month not living and then being scared of the surgery that I didn't really think about saying goodbye.

For those of you who don't know, I had to switch doctors. So Monday's vist was my first time at the new doctor's office. Everyone there was nice. They didn't rush us out of the office and I got a hug from the doctor, ultrasound tech and the receptionist. I don't think we would have gotten the same kind of treatment at the old doctor's office. The doctor was already doing surgeries on Monday afternoon, so she fit me in for a suction D&C that evening. I'm glad she was willing to do that. I think the surgery allowed me to move on a little faster and didn't really give me the chance to overly stress out about the surgery itself. I had the option of letting the pregnancy go a little longer to see if the baby would come on its own, but it was far enough along that I knew it was begining to look really human and I didn't want to see it. Plus since it had been inside me for almost a month there was a risk of infection and with the surgery they could send the fetus to a pathology lab to try and determine why I miscarried.

The surgery went well. I was told that the longer the fetus is inside the harder it is to remove everything form the uterus, but the doctor was able to get everything. They had put a catheter in while they did the surgery, so peeing was difficult on Tuesday.  Luckily the pain/burning only lasts about 24 hours, so I didn't dread going as badly yesterday. I'm also not bleeding as much as I thought I would, which is nice.

I'm on an antibiotic and was taking something on Tuesday to help the uterus contract. I wasn't really in pain, but the contraction pill made me super uncomfortable. I am allowed to start driving today, but I'm going to wait until tomorrow to venture out of the house. We have a follow up appointment on March 7 and they should be able to give us the results from the pathology lab. We're keeping our fingers crossed it was just a fluke chromosome issue and the baby was just never going to be able to live longer than it did. We're also hoping that the doctor will give us the green light to start trying again right away ;o)

...More on some of the above another time. It's been a few weeks since I wrote the email and I (obviously) have updates.