Reluctantly Gaining Expertise on Dealing with Miscarriage

On November 20, 2021, I married my wife. She is simply the best. What has followed has been the best year of my life. We have settled into married life with our two dogs, gotten situated in our beautiful new home, rescued stray dogs and cats, made new friends, tried new restaurants, watched a little too much reality TV, gained weight together drinking too much wine and eating too much ice cream, and then lost weight together skipping carbs and working out. Unfortunately, the happiest decision of this year, has also lead to the most difficult times. We decided that as soon as we got married, we wanted to start trying to have a family. Today we are just under 3 weeks from our first anniversary, and we have had at least 4 miscarriages (We think there was a 5th, but we never had a positive pregnancy test for the last one). We remain optimistic and are privileged to be able to work with a fertility doctor to navigate this, but we have no idea how long our struggles will continue. Thus, during this time, I’ve become a reluctant expert on going through miscarriages. I thought I would share a bit about the experience.

Back in early Spring, I took the dogs for a walk. I knew that Camilla was going to be taking a pregnancy test, but I missed the text when she sent me a picture of the lines. She was about to throw away the test, when she noticed the second line. It was faint enough that she first thought it was just her eyes playing tricks on her, but as the minutes passed, it became clear that we had a faint second line. My wife was pregnant. I found out when I walked in the front door with our two dogs. Camilla looked at me with eyes full of tears. I asked if she was OK and she started walking at me nodding. They were happy tears. That is how I found out. I had a brief moment where I thought “Oh shit. This is really happening!” But I snapped out of that and decided it was time to celebrate. I cancelled my morning meetings, and went out to breakfast with Camilla. We talked about how excited we were, whether we were hoping for a boy or a girl, who could be the God-Parents, and (of course) started brainstorming names. For the next week, every moment was a celebration, and I struggled to focus on anything other than babies. I downloaded audiobooks about pregnancy, and started on a to-do list thinking, “I have nine months to finish every project that I’ve wanted to do….” Then it ended as quickly as it started.

A coworker had tickets to see a musical at the Tobin Center and he couldn’t use them so he offered two seats to Camilla and I. We were excited to go and thought it was a perfect way to celebrate. After the show, we were walking back to my car, and she started to clutch my arm tighter than usual. At first I thought she was being affectionate, but I looked down and saw a serious look on her face. She said she thought she was bleeding. We got into the car and she reached under her dress to check, her hand came out with too much blood. We consoled each other saying that maybe everything is ok and finding articles saying that moderate bleeding at the beginning of pregnancy can be normal, but we already knew it was bad news, and when the bleeding got worse instead of better, we were certain. Physically, this miscarriage manifested like a really heavy period, but it left Camilla and I with emotional whiplash. We were so happy and excited and lost that feeling so rapidly that we felt totally empty. My head was swimming with non-sensical thoughts. I found myself sad and confused. I knew I was allowed to feel however I felt, but I found myself wondering how I was “supposed” to feel. Was it ok for me to be this sad? Was I acting entitled for being sad that we had a setback trying to start a family? Next came letting everyone know what had happened.

I don’t hold a grudge against anyone for saying the wrong thing… It is difficult to know how to handle a loved one telling you they just had a miscarriage. That being said, I definitely learned many of the wrong things to say. I’ll start with the right thing to say. If you find yourself in this situation in the future, just tell the couple that you love them, are sorry that they are having to deal with this, and that you are there if they need anything. Please, do not tell them to look on the bright side. Do not diminish the experience because they lost the pregnancy early on. Don’t even talk about how common it is. I didn’t give a single fuck how many other couples had been through this when it was happening to my wife and I. Every time somebody said one of these things, even though they (mostly) meant well, part of me wanted to lash out. Thankfully, I was too emotionally exhausted to react to anything in the moment. Then after a week or two, a switch flipped.

Suddenly, I was able to say all the wrong things to myself and it no longer made me angry. I was relieved that we learned we could get pregnant. I felt comforted knowing this is common and we know people who have been through the same thing (even if they had never told us before). I even was able to distinguish that loosing the pregnancy early felt more like the loss of a pregnancy than the loss of a baby. We skipped the next cycle and then tried again. Unfortunately, history repeated itself. It felt like deja vu with friends and family and doctors all saying the same right things and the same wrong things. I was more braced for this one emotionally, so I didn’t have the same initial reaction, but this was more anxiety inducing for me. I knew that while miscarriage is relatively common, it is also rare enough that having back to back idiosyncratic miscarriages is relatively rare. This meant that the odds that we were going to have a chronic problem suddenly increased. Camilla and I did a wonderful job taking care of each other, but now I had a big stress that I was afraid to share with my wife. She was still upbeat and optimistic, and I didn’t want to change that, so I leaned on a few friends. I would call them on my way to and from work and talk about how I was concerned that this was going to keep happening.

When we got pregnant for the third time, all of my concerns went out the window. Because of the prior miscarriages, we were brought in for very early ultrasounds and I was excited that we were getting extra attention. When we made it more than a week past the missed period, I thought our troubles were behind us. We even picked out names. At about 7.5 weeks, we were brought in for an ultrasound, and it was the very first time we got to see the beating of what would become the heart. It was no longer a ball of cells. There was our baby! Seeing the little arms and legs is pretty surreal. We had finally gotten it to work. I was sure we were going to have a boy. Intellectually, I knew it was a coin flip… But emotionally, I was sure that psychic energy was communicating the sex of our child to me.

Then, just a few days later, she noticed light bleeding and started to feel cramping. We knew that both of those things could be normal in early pregnancy, but that together they could mean trouble. Camilla called our OBGYN and they rushed us in that day for another ultrasound. To our relief, and the technician’s surprise, everything looked good. The heartbeat was still steady and strong and there was no indication that anything was wrong. She had, in fact, began to miscarry but there was no way to know at that point. They reassured us and told us that the most important factor was that the baby looked fine. We were told that while bleeding and cramping can be normal, it would be worrisome if it persisted or worsened. They instructed us to let them know if it did and to go to the hospital if it worsened to the point that she was “keeled over with pain.”

On July 3rd, it got that bad. We called the on call physician and were told that this didn’t sound good and that we could come into the hospital, but when pressed about what they could do for her, we were told that if we would be more comfortable at home, we should stay home. The cramps got worse. So did the bleeding. The cramps were awful and they were coming in waves. This is when I began to recognize what was happening. Not from academic papers I had read or from my work, but from movies and TV shows… The intense abdominal pain that started at irregular intervals and was gradually getting more frequent and more regular. I was afraid to speak it into existence, but I recognized at this point that my wife was probably in labor. My wife, who was just shy of 9 weeks pregnant, was in labor on our living room couch. I was devastated and I felt totally helpless. I wanted to intervene. I wanted to make her feel better. I wanted to share some of the pain with her, but there was nothing I could do. Then it was over. She would continue to deal with the physical ramifications for another month, but after one especially painful contraction, she felt that she needed to go to the restroom because she knew she was full of blood. That is when the amniotic sac passed and landed on a piece of bloody toilet paper. Camilla, was being so brave. She is normally grossed out by stuff, but she remembered reading that we should collect “it” so that genetic testing can be done to try to understand why the miscarriage happened. Panicking, I grabbed a Tupperware and ran back to the bathroom to pull our dead “baby” out of the toilet. that is an awful feeling that you just can’t forget. Together, we called the on call physician again, and cried with an OB that we had never spoken to before. It was July 4th, so we couldn’t go into their office until the next day.

The next morning, I put our baby in a cooler and went to the OB’s office with Camilla. Since they were squeezing us in we didn’t have an appointment and had to wait much longer than usual. We sat on a couch in the waiting room and Camilla curled up and put her head on my lap. Normally, she she wouldn’t let herself be seen like that, but she was still experiencing pretty severe cramping and neither of us were concerned what anyone else thought while we sat in a room full of pregnant women with a cooler at my feet with a dead fetus in it. We didn’t have any energy for it. When we were called back to the office, I still didn’t know how best to talk about what had happened, partially because I could only think about the cooler sitting in my lap. The only part of the visit that I remember clearly, was when I finally handed over the Tupperware full of fetus. It felt wrong to give it away. As I handed it to the doctor, I almost wondered if I should be getting it back after they were done… I managed to keep those thoughts inside.

The next month was brutal, Camilla’s symptoms and our trips to the OB’s office to deal with the aftermath were constant reminders of our tragedy. Even after that, there were constant reminders. In August, when Camilla would’ve reached the second trimester, friends who had waited to share their news, started announcing pregnancies on social media. Through my envy and sadness, it was hard to get excited for them. Even months later, on a work call, a collaborator mentioned that his wife is due in February. I don’t remember if I managed any response at all, because all of my mental energy was fighting back the awkward response that felt most natural… “That is when our’s was supposed to be due too!” I managed to keep that inside my head too.

I intentionally used “it” and “baby” to describe what was going to be our child, because I didn’t know what word to use then, and I still don’t. It was too painful to think about “it” as our “baby”. It was too impersonal/disingenuous to call it anything else. To make it even more difficult to talk about… Roe v Wade was overturned less than 2 weeks before, and I was suddenly very aware that the language that I used to describe a very personal tragedy could suddenly sound like I’m making a political statement. Did referring to losing our “baby” make me sound too pro-life? Did referring to the “fetus” or “fetal tissue” or “it” make me sound like a cold, unfeeling, asshole? My semantic confusion was indicative of much deeper confusion. I didn’t know how I was “supposed to feel”. People at work were having to pick up my slack. I had become a burden. I simultaneously worried that I was being overly dramatic and that I was going to use up the goodwill of my coworkers (“what if this happens again this year? what if it happens more than once more? I need to get back to work.”). I also wondered if we needed to come up with a new boy name, because our first born son had died (when they tested the tissue we brought in, we did find out it was a boy)… Months later, I still don’t know how to feel or what to call our baby/it/our 3rd pregnancy. While it is still not ok, to minimize anyone’s loss when they lose a pregnancy very early (these are often called “chemical pregnancies”), I can confirm that, for me, this felt a lot worse.

I’m very proud of how my wife and I handled things. We talked constantly, held each other, and just sat in the sadness together. I will always be infinitely grateful for my wife’s ability to empathize with me and include me in the loss we were feeling when anyone could’ve understood her not being able to be there for me. We were excellent supports for each other and the loss brought us closer together. That being said, I can easily see how it could’ve just as easily torn us apart. In the aftermath, my wife’s comfort was simultaneously my greatest consolation and my greatest torment. She would go to comfort me, and I would feel my love for my wife bubble up, and it would make me feel the loss that much sharper, because the pregnancy was a manifestation of our love for each other, and our love for each other is why we want a family so badly. I am still sad about the loss. When I think about any of these losses, I still cry. But after about a month, we were able to recalibrate and look forward once again. We got on the calendar to see a fertility specialist that our OB recommended, but while we waited for our first appointment, we had yet another miscarriage. By the fourth, we had each gotten considerably more resilient. We got sad, worked through our sadness and were looking forward again very quickly. Somehow, this was a new source of confusion. I was glad that I wasn’t sad so long, but I also didn’t want to be numb to this sort of loss.

We still don’t know what the problem is. We might never. One way or another, we are going to find a way to grow our family together.

I’ve been wanting to bring back my blog and start sharing thoughts again, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. I wanted to share this story, but I thought it could be too personal/private. A close friend told me that you become a parent the day you decide to start a family, because that is the day that all your decisions become about your future family that is bigger than it is today. I think she was right. As we have gone through this process, we have been very open with our friends and families and coworkers. To each their own…. but I have never been able to comprehend the logic behind not sharing pregnancy news. Whenever anyone asked “what’s going on?” I felt like I was being disingenuous if I didn’t mention the biggest news that I had ever had in my life. Being open about the pregnancies meant that we then had to tell all the same people that knew about the pregnancy that we were no longer pregnant. I know that this is a fear people have. They don’t want to tell anyone about being pregnant, because if it doesn’t go well, they don’t want to have to tell people the bad news. Those conversations weren’t pleasant, but it was more than made up for by the responses that we received. We were surrounded in love and support by our friends and family and coworkers and we were able to share a burden that we couldn’t carry alone. In hindsight, I’m very glad that everyone around us knew what was going on. Now, as I restart my blog to share my thoughts, I feel it would be disingenuous not to tell this story. These are my thoughts. This is what I’ve been thinking about. I hope that no one who reads this has to go through a miscarriage, but even with my minimal readership, I know that someone will. So my message to any of you is this… be kind to yourself and be kind to your partner. It really sucks and I don’t know what makes it better, but in my experience, it does get better. I think that perhaps, passing time makes the memory loom less large, even if it hasn’t lost any potency. If you know someone going through this, it’s really easy to say the wrong thing, but expressing and showing love for someone has never made anything worse, so just give love.

Take care of each other.