The Loneliest Time in My Life

I’ve decided to write about my miscarriage. I’ve been taking a how to write a memoir class for the past several weeks and this story seems to be the one that most wants to be written about. I don’t know who I’ll sell the story to, but I feel a strong need to write about it and share my experience with others who may have had a similar experience but feel that they are alone in their feelings.

The truth is I hadn’t wanted to get pregnant in the first place and had taken precautions to prevent it. However, accidents do happen and condoms do spill. I got pregnant for my 31st birthday. Happy birthday to me!

I’ll always remember how I found out. It was a month later. For several months, I had been having very bad cramps with my periods — bad enough that I was going home sick once a month. This time, it felt no different, at least for the first few hours. Then the cramps got so bad a double dose of ibuprofen didn’t touch them and I was doubled over in pain. In tears, I made an appointment with my doctor.

The next day at the appointment, she asked me if I could be pregnant. I said no, but she decided to do a test any way.

Well, I was wrong. I was pregnant and it turned out that it was an at-risk pregnancy, too. There was bleeding at the implantation site. (As a side note, I also had a cyst on my ovary. That was most likely the cause of my chronic period-related pain. The pregnancy cured me of it and it hasn’t returned in over seven years.)

I called my boyfriend. I was panicked. I was frightened. And more than anything else I felt like I had let my whole family down. I had heard what they had said about my cousins who had had children before marriage. Being Catholic, that’s kind of a no-no. And here I was, a grown woman facing pregnancy out of wedlock. A part of me thought this was stupidly archaic, but the other part — the little girl — felt like I had screwed up royally.

Flash forward a few weeks. I’m in the midst of wedding plans and morning sickness (which, I might add, lasts all day long!). I got to see my little baby-to-be via ultra sound. It measured at 7-weeks and had a heartbeat. I was in love. There was a beautiful, perfect little life growing in me and I wanted to do everything I could to make things right for it.

At 12 weeks, after my honeymoon, I went in for a check up. The doctor couldn’t hear a heartbeat and sent me to the ultrasound lab. The fetus measured only 8 weeks and was quite dead. I miscarried a few days later.

Lying in the hospital bed, my body wracked with the pain of induced labor to flush out the leftover tissue, I cried because my soul hurt so much. The nurses berated me — the labor pains weren’t that bad. I just couldn’t explain what I was going through.

I had driven to the hospital alone. My husband went to work in his own vehicle. He had wanted me to have an abortion, but although I believe strongly in having that choice available, I couldn’t do that to my child, created out of love.

So here I was, a few hundred miles from my family (they lived in Northern California, I lived in Southern). I was loosing my first child and I was the only one who wanted it. My body felt sick. My heart felt sick. My soul felt sick. It was the worst, most terribly alone time in my life. This blog entry doesn’t — couldn’t possibly — do it justice. But maybe an article, or book, will.