Our Miscarriage

Most people don’t usually talk about miscarriage. It’s sad, it’s personal, it’s isolating. Sometimes I don’t want to talk about it. But when we went through it a month ago, I couldn’t think of more than one person my age who had experienced a miscarriage. So this is us, telling our story, so that if you ever go through this you can know you are not alone.


From Chelsea:

(Scroll down to read Josey’s thoughts.)

We found out we were pregnant in late January. I had been tracking my body, and we were not exactly planning to get pregnant. The timing wasn't right - but yet, the timing was perfect. We bought a house, we have teaching jobs in Bozeman, and we've been married for 2 and a half years. We had been fielding questions from friends and strangers like "so, when are you guys going to have kids?"

When the test read positive, we weren’t all tears of excitement, like the movies and commercials make it out to be. We were surprised at first, but as we got used to the idea of having a baby, the excitement grew and grew. The next day at school, I walked around the halls screaming “I’m pregnant! I’m pregnant! I’m pregnant!” inside my head, over and over. (Inside my head, even though I wanted to tell the world.)

We did not wait long to tell our immediate family members, and our closest friends. We were going to be the first children on both sides of the family to produce a grandchild! We were going to move into our new house, and announce our addition to the family, all in one go.

My symptoms got stronger- no morning sickness, but extreme fatigue, random emotional outbursts and, erm, sore body parts. I scoured the internet for every little thing- could I eat this, could I do that? I downloaded a really neat app that gave me articles to read every day and tracked his/her growth. Baby Q was so teeny, he/she looked like a little hippo, according to the app. I fell asleep every night to the little image of Baby Q on my screen.

Then came week 7, and I wasn’t quite as tired. I wasn’t nauseated, in fact I felt pretty good. I was beginning to think my pregnancy would be on the easier side. After all, my mom never vomited when she was pregnant. The longer we knew about it, the more excited we became, and I just wanted to tell the world that we were having a baby! Waiting 12 weeks to announce seemed like an eternity.

I won’t go into all of the details, but one night I started to get concerned that something might be wrong. I was spotting, which is unusual for me, but not all that unusual for pregnant women. I turned to the Internet, and reassured Josey that while it could mark the beginning of a miscarriage, it probably didn’t.

After all, the first page of comments on the discussion board said that their babies turned out fine.

Josey went to sleep that night and I kept reading. I got to page two of the comments and started to panic. “My miscarriage started that way,” or “the doctor told me it was okay, but then two days later it wasn’t.”

I went to school on Monday with the worst feeling in my gut. I had a Monday of all Mondays, with discipline issues in the classroom, and at lunch I spilled my entire bowl of hot soup on the carpet in the teacher workroom. By the end of the day, I knew I needed to do something. I called my doctor, who suggested I come in for blood work that day, since I was concerned.

Josey came with me, and they drew blood for labs. That night, I got a call back from the nurse with not so great news. My hormone levels were at a concerning level. (Too low.) She wanted me to come in for an ultrasound the next day. It could all be okay, or it could all not be okay, we weren’t sure.

I cancelled all of my plans for that night, and Josey and I cried in fear that we would lose the tiny baby in my tummy that very few people knew about.

The next day, Josey had an all day band event out of town for his teaching job. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I taught in the morning, and then drove myself to the hospital for the ultrasound.

I cried in the waiting room, I cried in the bathroom, I cried as the ultrasound tech asked me if there was anyone who could be with me. (I know if I had asked, there would have been an army of people who would have gone with me, but at the time I felt like it was the only option.)

As the tech started her work, I told her “there is nothing in there, I know there is not.” But as she started the ultrasound, she said “I don’t know why you were so worried! There it is!”

Baby Q was so tiny!

And there it was! I laughed with relief through my tears as she took measurements, tracked the heartbeat, and took pictures of our little hippo/gummy bear.

We discussed due dates, and she explained that I was probably only at 6.5 weeks, which might explain the low hormone levels. I believed her then, because I wanted to believe that everything was fine. I was able to text Josey and my family and let them know that we weren’t out of the woods, but the chances were better that we wouldn’t lose it.

The trouble was, I knew I was at almost 8 weeks. I had written it down. And as I laid on the couch watching the Olympics, I felt the little cramps I had been experiencing get stronger and stronger. I called the doctor who prescribed me something to try to help, but I didn’t realize that was a last ditch effort to stop something that nature wanted to have happen.

As I stood in Safeway to pick up the prescription, I was doubled over in pain, and I knew it was gone. I tearfully paid for the meds and uttered “but I don’t need them anymore anyways” and called my doctor from the car. He told me what I could expect, and that this happens to 1 in 3 pregnancies.

I got home and cried as my body decided it didn’t want to be pregnant anymore. I know this isn’t exactly how it works, or the most sensitive way to say it, but it was how I felt. My body betrayed me. It gave us a baby we had been waiting for the “right time” to have, and it took it away from us. Pregnancies end for many reasons, but we will never really know why this one did.

When Josey got back from his trip, I had to tell him the news. The last he heard was that everything was okay, so this was a huge and terrible blow. I couldn’t tell him sooner, as he was responsible for a class of middle schoolers on a bus. We held each other, and took turns crying. He was so ready to be a dad, he was ready to be a dad the day we got married.

He asked “are you sure it’s gone?” It was so hard, because yes, it was. And so was all of our anticipation, our excitement, our plans for him or her.

I don’t write our story this way for sympathy, or for attention. I write it because it helps me to process my emotions, and because I want couples, young and old, to know that someone else is going through this too.

We lost the baby on February 13th, and had a pretty rotten Valentine’s day, and a rough couple of weeks. We are scared that something might go wrong when we decide to try again, and we both feel like we have a hole in our heart. I found it hard on Valentine’s day, with all of the hearts, and all I could think about was my baby’s heartbeat on the ultrasound just a day before, and now no more.

Since our loss, I have spoken with many women who had one or more miscarriages. I was at about 8 weeks, some women were much further along than that when they lost theirs. Some had stillbirths, and some had pregnancies where they worried the whole time the baby wouldn’t make it to term. We didn’t have that worry, but we will have it the next time. I am so sorry for all of you women (and significant others) who have gone through this pain. It is so difficult to explain the feeling of losing something you just barely had an idea of, but it’s real, and it hurts.

Talking to people about it really helped us, and we know it was not our fault. Time does help to heal wounds, and although I was sad and angry that this happened to us, I know that it really did happen for a reason. A reason only God knows.

When our hearts are ready, we will try again.


From Josey:

I have never felt so empty. Although I knew Chelsea was pregnant, it didn’t really set in for me. I didn’t feel any of the physical changes, and it wasn’t until we started talking about the possibility of something going wrong that I realized how much I wanted to bring Baby Q into a loving home, to have a real baby to play with rather than Arrow and Panther, to decorate a room, and go to garage sales looking for great toy tractors. The day of the blood tests, all I felt was dread. Going out of town the next day with a bunch of crazy middle school students certainly did not put me at ease at all either.

When Chelsea told me that we had lost the baby, I felt like everything had emptied out of me. I know I must have asked too many times if she was sure it was gone. I wanted to hold on to the hope that there had been some sort of misunderstanding. It didn’t feel right; everything happened way too fast. There’s no way that I could have gone from being worried about Baby Q, to seeing a picture of the ultrasound, to being told there was nothing there anymore all in a single day.

One of my good friends who had experienced miscarriages with his wife when they were around our age told me that the worst part is losing the potential for who that baby was going to be. Another friend told us God takes the little ones home right away.

I have no idea why Baby Q didn’t make it, and I’ve been told it was likely some sort of defect preventing the baby from growing to term, but for those 8 weeks, I loved Baby Q, and still do. A few days later, I couldn’t sleep because I just kept thinking about what it will be like to someday meet Baby Q in heaven. I kept thinking about all the life experiences this soul never got to experience, yet was loved from day one.

For me it was really hard to know that Baby Q was gone; again I didn’t have any physical effects, and was just left with an empty feeling inside. I’ve really only ever felt this way 3 times in my life: the day I found out my grandpa had passed away after just talking to him on the phone, the day I told my students in Hinsdale that I would be moving at the end of the year, and by far the hardest, the day I found out that Chelsea and I had lost our first baby.

Afterwards, it was really hard for me to talk to the few people who knew we were pregnant. Obviously this was something we were excited about and I didn’t know how to bring up that we lost the baby.

I dreaded Valentines Day because I was afraid to get a card from our families mentioning the baby we just found out didn’t make it. I felt so alone and empty, and I’m so thankful for the friends and families that just talked with us. I didn’t know this was so common, but now we hear about more and more people that have had a similar experience. I just wish more people could know they’re not alone, because a statistic about the frequency of miscarriage did nothing to make me feel better.

I hope, if you’ve read this far, that you’ll say a quick prayer for Chelsea and me and for Baby Q, who I know is looking down on us from heaven.

Love,

Chelsea & Josey