Saturday, November 27, 2010

When it is your blog, you can exclude any and all references to my uterus...or just make them shorter

I have decided that I am going to write a little more specifically about my miscarriage.  I am a little self-conscious about it because, well, as it turns out there are not many people who hold an intense interest in my reproductive discharge.  Go figure.  Oh well. anyone who is grossed out by this kind of stuff can skip this entry.
Here's the thing though: I didn't really know what to expect when it came to my miscarriage.  Obviously every case is different so my doctors kept describing it in very vague "you-will-experience some-discomfort" terms, so outside of what I had seen in movies, I had no idea what was going to happen.  From what I could gather, a miscarriage involved blood-soaked sheets, quiet and quick gasps of air, followed by a montage of me and my husband talking to doctors and embracing gingerly.   That whole event would last about two minutes.  If it was a particularly dramatic miscarriage, I expected that I would become delusional and never really recover.
Once again, life failed to live us to my Hollywood expectations.  As far as I can tell, my miscarriage started the moment I conceived; spotting upon conception.  I had spotting- daily bleeding but not enough to fill a pad- for two weeks.  It was when I started filling a pad that I started to get nervous.
Wait, no, that's not true.  I was nervous immediately upon learning I was pregnant, because, as previously mentioned, that whole area is generally regarded as an unfit environment.  Once I started filling a pad, I knew something was wrong.  This was no longer a "well, I am always anxious about everything" scenario, but a "we have to do something NOW" scenario.
We got the first appointment at my doctor's office that morning, and test confirmed that I was pregnant: I had an HcG level (the pregnancy hormone) of 120.  However, my progesterone levels (levels that sustain pregnancy) were at 3: during first trimester there should be a minimum of 10.  Such a low progesterone level indicated that I would probably miscarry.  The deciding factor would be the rate and direction that my HcG levels changed.  They were suppose to double every week.  If they decreased, I was miscarrying.  If not, there was an option to treat with pregnancy injections.  I would need to wait a week to see how my hormones shifted.  Doctors told me that I should go home and try to relax because stress could increase the likelihood of miscarriage.  Nothing like knowing your unborn child's life is on the line to help a girl decompress.
But then, the next day she was fine, right?
I got the news that I would miscarry at work.  Thank God because it left me no choice but to keep it together. Still, I had no idea what to expect, and again as previously mentioned, I had no idea what I was looking for.  There were times when I would feel really bad cramping, think to my self "this is it", and then just pass a really big fart and be all better.  I bled for a month, sleeping on towels because I was afraid I would ruin our bran-new sheets.  I was massively depressed.  It wasn't the broken hearted, "I am an empty shell without my beloved child" unhappiness that I had seen on movies.  I was only pregnant a few weeks.  No, this was the despondent, lonely, disassociated, broken-hormone stuff that comes with clinical depression.  It sucked.   Finally, I woke up one night with bad cramps: not like, labor cramps, but just period style bad cramps.  By morning I had heavy black, mucus-y discharge.  It was like a bad heavy period, but was mostly over within a day, followed by a few days of light bleeding afterwords.  Shortly thereafter my mood improved, and my poor sweet husband stopped asking "is there anything I can do?" every hour or so.
Now, we are just about ready to try again, which is scary, but you know, kind of the way it works.  Hopefully things will work out better this time.

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