First Pregnancy, Miscarriage, 30s

One woman’s first pregnancy ends in a miscarriage. She shares her feelings of inadequacy, anger, jealousy, and what ultimately helped her come to terms with her loss.

Kelly’s Story

I didn’t really want to get pregnant so quickly. My husband, Jay, was SO adamant about starting a family ASAP. I did too, just not with the same urgency. At 33 years old, I’d gotten married in early May, gone on a honeymoon, and started a new business. I wanted a brief pause from this whirlwind. In addition, most of my girlfriends also in their 30s didn’t have kids yet — NYers often arrive late to this parent party. I wasn’t ready to give up my frequent singleton wine-filled dinners. Frankly, I resented the pressure signals he was sending me. But there I was pregnant within two months of getting hitched and wholeheartedly ungrateful for this enormous good fortune.

I told only my mom and my older sister, Phoebe. The latter, unbeknownst to me, then told the planet or at least our shared world. By the time, I reached my hometown of Cleveland for a summer sojourn when I was about 8 weeks pregnant, my secret was out there.

At a get-together with my mom’s best friend, Zara. (essentially my second mom), she touched my barely-there bump and whispered in my ear how happy she was for me. I was so uncomfortable because I wasn’t ready to tell anyone and was exceedingly annoyed with my sister. I wish I’d been able to appreciate that exchange with Zara and not been so full of anger and anxiety. Barely four months later, Zara passed away unexpectedly. Our brief exchange was the only time she and I would share an acknowledgment of my newest journey and she’d seen me off on so many. I still tear up thinking about what a brat I was and how sweet she was.

Before getting pregnant, I had only seen a female GYN recommended by my sister who was no longer an OB-GYN. Phoebe told me that the doctor had lost a patient’s baby in childbirth and once that happens, nobody will ever insure you again to deliver babies. I’ve no idea if this is true or not. But I do remember being surprised that babies still died in childbirth as if we were already in some Star Trek era of medical treatment where nothing bad happens. In this journey of mine, I discovered that in some ways we are, and in some ways, it’s just the same as it ever was. Long story short, I had to find a new doctor.

I chose my sister’s OB-GYN because I’d no idea how to find a good one but when I called his office— merely a month into knowing I was pregnant —he was incredibly booked up so I couldn’t get in to see him until the end of my first trimester. While their office had their own sonograms, I needed the usual 8-week scan to check for a heartbeat. Formalities. They squeezed me in at the hospital where he had privileges near his office for a scan and I went in to hear my first baby’s heartbeat at 10 weeks. I’d calculated an early spring due date, we could go for walks in Madison Square Park near where I lived. I was starting to get excited.

I’d had a sonogram once before in my twenties to check for a leaky heart valve. This felt the same only, oddly I had my husband, Jay, by my side for the first time during a medical procedure. As I lay on the table, jeans wedged down to my hips, shirt pulled up to bare my stomach, the sonographer explained everything she’d do during the sonogram. Most notedly, she said wasn’t allowed to talk during the procedure and that the doctor would come in after her and talk to us. Then she went to work tapping away at her machine. She was all business in complete silence except for the click-clack of the keyboard for what seemed an interminable amount of time before she excused herself to get the doctor. No smile. I thought, “Hunh. I guess these baby technicians are serious”.

After what seemed a few centuries, in swept this middle-aged, slightly built doctor who introduced himself and then recommenced where the dour sonographer had left off click-clacking on the keyboard. No smile. Then he says, “Well, there’s no other way to say it. There’s no heartbeat.”

I remember thinking, “Really? There’s no other way to break that news?” I could think of quite a few off the top of my head. But I get it. Random doctor guy probably delivers this depressing news 10x a day 5 days a week so he’s desensitized to it. It just escapes me why he couldn’t memorize a kinder way of breaking the news and oh I don’t know, repeating it ad nauseam with nobody none the wiser. I’m sure funeral parlor operators do just that. As an introvert, none of these thoughts left my head and I just waited to write an entire book to vent about Dr. Bedside Manner, heretofore, referred to as Dr. BM.

My husband probably asked myriad questions because that’s what my extroverted husband does. I had no questions because my baby was dead. It was all I needed to know. I remember Dr. BM saying that it was a blighted ovum (a what?) probably ended around 5-6 weeks, which seemed crazy that my body hadn’t noticed this since I was now 10 weeks along. Looking back, I see every detail of that morning in a swirling vortex. Jags of crying, despair, worry, stoicism, anger, self-pity. I assume Dr. BM told us to call our actual OB-GYN and so we did.  This was how I first met my OB-GYN, Dr. Noiret, who would take me through all five of my pregnancies.

Unlike Dr. BM, Dr. Noiret was armed with reassurance. He opened the door with great, positive energy yet simultaneously sorrowful. He seemed genuinely upset and did another scan to confirm what the hospital had told us. Confirmed. But, it was reassuring that he wanted to double-check. Then he said, “Well, here is the good news. You GOT pregnant. Half the battle in having a baby is getting pregnant.” It was the first time I had any comfort that day. A moment of respite. Like I’d been drowning and at last, had found something to cling to.

He instructed me to wait a month to try again. He said that sometimes you can get false positives because the pregnancy hormone can linger in your body. I didn’t actually understand his reasoning but I accepted his advice because he’d been so reassuring when I needed it most. Dr. Noiret asked if I wanted to have a D&C, take hormone pills to bring on a period, or let the miscarriage happen naturally. I asked if I went the natural route if I could just start having a miscarriage and bleeding while standing in line at the grocery store and he said, “Yes.” So, I said no thank you to the natural route. Also, I reasoned if my body hadn’t recognized something was wrong in the past 4-5 weeks, when would it?? Having never had surgery before, I decided against a D&C. So pills were the “winner”.  

I remember being in this old school, semi-dilapidated pharmacy near my doctor’s office. It was tiny like everything in NYC and I was constantly moving out of the way of sundry folks acquiring their medications. I felt like a loser standing there. That feeling was my constant companion for quite a while. I remember thinking, “Is this the only place in the city where you can get pills that end a pregnancy?”

I scheduled a day to take the pills. Dr. Noiret prescribed some Tylenol with codeine in case it was extremely painful. It wasn’t. I took the hormone pills, sat around my apartment with Phoebe feeling sorry for myself and spiraling into a quiet pity party in my head. “What if we can’t have kids?” Everyone I knew with kids just got pregnant and had their first baby, “Why did I have to be THE one who had a miscarriage. What if I never get pregnant? Would Jay adopt? Would my in-laws accept an adopted child?” Finally, I tamped down the fiery worries licking at my brain with the thought that my mom had a miscarriage at my same age and was pregnant within a month of it. I started to cheer up a bit as we watched old movies and I started my period.

I called the doctor the next day to describe the experience as he had instructed me.

Dr. Noiret, “How’d everything go? Did you pass the placenta?”

Me, “Umm. The what? I’ve no idea. It was like a heavy period. What does a placenta look like?”

Dr. Noiret, “Oh, you’ll know it when you see it. It’s not something you could’ve missed. I’ll prescribe more pills.”

I discovered that the weird pharmacy wasn’t the only place to get those pills. I purchased them somewhere less depressing, took ‘em in the morning, and then headed off to work. It was like having another heavy period day yet again until late in the day, out of nowhere I doubled over in the most excruciating pain I’d ever felt in my life — the Tylenol with Codeine made sense at that moment — and I felt something coming out of me. I rushed to the bathroom and something much larger than any tampon I’d ever seen fell out of me. It was a bloody mess and disgusting. I hemmed and hawed about what one does with a placenta floating in a toilet. This was the Stone Ages — pre-iPhone — so I had a choice to either go into the toilet to bag it up or flush it. I flushed it. Dr. Noiret was right, I knew exactly what it was.

Afterward, I started to feel good. Oddly, really good. So good, I kept my dinner plans to go out with one of my best friends from business school (technically my ex-boyfriend but we’d been friends almost as long as we’d dated at this point) as well as my husband. I told my friend, Quinn, what had happened in case I had to cancel last minute. So I reconfirmed we were a “Go” and that was that. I think I felt happier than I had in months. It was weird. I should’ve known there was another shoe to drop.

Halfway through dinner, Quinn said something innocuous but controversial as he is wont to do and I got really emotional out of nowhere and started crying. I’m not a crier. It’s not that I don’t cry — I once embarrassingly did so AS I was being fired — but as a trial lawyer’s daughter, I don’t generally cry over dinner party banter. Even my husband cries more than I do when watching romantic comedies. I excused myself to gather my wits about me because, despite everything that had happened that day, I didn’t understand why I was crying. It was an odd sensation. And then it got odder. I couldn’t stop crying. I came back to the table crying. Quinn had known me longer than Jay and immediately knew something was really wrong and suggested we get the check.

We shared a cab ride home and I remember feeling so thankful that Quinn recognized I was not myself. His genuine look of concern as I exited the cab still crying. Jay was a different story even though I continued to cry in the cab, the elevator, and our apartment. I couldn’t stop crying. I laid on the couch as Jay opened up a pint of Ben & Jerry’s across the room from me and said something to the effect of, “I just don’t understand why you’re crying. You seemed fine with everything and now you’re upset. I don’t get it.” I love my husband to the moon and back and will be forever grateful we found each other. But, I will never forget what an absolute dick I thought he was as he stood there eating ice cream across the room, talking to me with his mouth full of cream as I laid on a couch bawling and saying, “I have no idea why I’m crying. Please, just be nice. I physically can’t stop crying. I’ve never experienced this before, I’m not even crying about the miscarriage, I’m literally crying.” 13 years later, I still can’t watch Jay eat ice cream.

I felt like I was almost having an out-of-body experience or invasion of the body snatchers. All I could think was that passing the placenta isn’t just some gross animal planet experience, it must have had super happy hormones or SOMETHING in it that when they’re gone, it’s like going from 100 mph to zero. It was like falling off a hormonal cliff, one of those dreams where you can’t stop yourself from falling, and then all of the sudden you wake up. It’s over. 

I can’t remember how I stopped crying. I assume it was that night. There were more crying jags after that day but nothing uncontrollable. I think one of the toughest things for me was that after the miscarriage I’d have these realizations that unbeknownst to me, I’d started creating a timeframe around this child to be. I’d made mental plans. I’d thought about the due date without realizing it so that I’d have moments when I’d remember, “Oh that’s right. We’re not going to have a baby in the Spring anymore”. I never knew one could unwittingly make mental plans.

The worst part about this interregnum between pregnancies was telling people. When my miscarriage was somewhat of a secret, I could still pretend to be carefree, even if I wasn’t. It’s how I handled lots of life’s disappointments beforehand. I kept them to myself until I had triumphed. People only knew I failed if I chose to disclose it. But my miscarriage was like an embarrassing failure that I couldn’t hide.  I felt exposed as if my secret feelings of inadequacy and loserdom were there pinned to my sleeves. It was like having to announce I was fired. By whom I was fired was nebulous — by god, my body, my kid to be? Every time I told someone, I further cemented myself as a woman who had trouble having a baby.

I would never be one of those women who giggles and says, “Gosh, we weren’t even trying to get pregnant! It was SUCH a surprise. My husband just looks at me and I get pregnant.” Ah, if only I had a dollar for every thirty or fortysomething woman I encountered at that time who desperately needed to tell people that she accidentally got pregnant. As if they had somehow never learned where babies come from despite college degrees. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish I were one of those women I quietly resented. Although, I hope if I’d been that lucky, I would’ve had the grace to sound more grateful for this ease.

I left it up to my sister to tell my Cleveland Clan since she’d been the one to “announce” it in the first place. My husband told his family. It was what it was. I was so frustrated when my husband told people who hadn’t even known that we were even pregnant that we had miscarried. Those were some of the few remaining souls that I COULD pretend I was carefree, happy, and not a lower. It was like having him pick at my scab. These same people never sent a note, an email, a text, no extra tight hug when I saw them, any change in tone when they asked, “How are you?” No acknowledgment of the tumult I’d just surmounted.

I get it. Humans are awkward around sadness. Often we see acquaintances and friends only at happy social events and nobody wants to be the Debbie Downer who squeezes lemon juice in your wound and says, “Oh hey. Sorry about you losing your baby.” But, when you know someone’s address and their email or see them in passing, I’d tell you, that not saying (writing) anything is unkind. And if you have no idea what to say or fear saying something dumb, then, “I am so sorry for your loss,” a knowing look of compassion or any similar phrase while generic, is never in the wrong.  

That being said, people inadvertently DO say the dumbest things when they’re trying to be helpful. LOL. My father-in-law — who is a dear — made sure to share with me that he wasn’t that upset about the miscarriage once he heard it wasn’t a baby but a “blighted ovum”. Wow, thanks for trying to cheer me up — and he’s a sweet man! But, for every awkward fumble, there was a kind card from someone. I even received one from one of my uncles. It was a simple condolence card and perfect. I simply needed an acknowledgment of my loss because that’s what it was to me. When he and others acknowledged my miscarriage, it felt less like a personal failing and more like the death that it was.

We tried to get pregnant when the doctor gave us the all-clear and while I never understood the whole “wait a month”, I listened to his advice and let my body recover. I wanted to be pregnant and have a healthy baby (girl). We tracked my temperature for the right time to conceive and bought those drug store ovulation kits.

The first month we were trying, we went to Indiana to visit one of my childhood best friends who had three small children. I was dutifully taking my temperature daily like the fertility books say to do and even bought one of those ovulation kits. We joked that if we got lucky that weekend in Indiana, they’d need to rechristen their guest bedroom. My sister called to tell me that she might be pregnant because, of course, a mom of two with the youngest barely two years old would get pregnant before me. And then guess who accidentally got pregnant that wild raucous Halloween weekend in Indiana? Not me, not my sister, my childhood best friend.

It’s not that I thought if others were getting pregnant, I couldn’t. But, it was starting to feel like everyone and their grandmother was getting pregnant and I wasn’t. Right up until the next month. Thanksgiving. A visit to my hometown of Cleveland did the trick. Or so we think. According to an ovulation kit, it was the right time.

When my period was due a few weeks later, we were about to head out to dinner with my friend Sophia, Jay asked if I’d gotten my period — I was supposed to get it that day. I knew what he was asking and didn’t want to find out on my way to dinner. I’d planned to take the test in a few days when I had truly missed my period. I liked to live in this realm of “Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not. I don’t care.” Only I did. Immensely. Not being pregnant the first month after the miscarriage was a punch to the gut. Who wants to get punched in the gut en route to a convivial night on the town? We argued. I said, “Fine. I’ll take it but if I’m randomly pregnant, I’m still having a glass of wine at dinner!”

And the rest is history or at least I was pregnant. I was a nervous wreck until I heard the heartbeat in Dr. Noiret’s office. After I heard it, I knew everything would be okay. My pregnancy was blissful right up until I took an airplane flight at 7 months to California for a family wedding. My legs and feet swelled up and never went back. I kept apologizing to wedding guests for having to look at my feet stuffed into these strappy heeled sandals because I hadn’t the good sense to bring any comfy pregnant lady shoes.

Something wasn’t quite right because toward the end, I had to go into the hospital every two days to have my amniotic fluid level checked. I’d never thought to Google why this was important and that I was at risk of stillbirth. Lord, I am glad I never did. I counted the baby’s daily movements religiously and would often eat M&Ms at bedtime to get him moving so I could fall asleep without worry.

I came to terms with my miscarriage when I first laid eyes on Teddy. I met him when he was a few hours old because I’d been knocked out with anesthesia during his actual birth. Teddy’s birth was not as uneventful as his pregnancy and something I’ll save for a sequel to this book, “Giving Birth: It’s worse than you could ever imagine.” I remember in my haze of first waking up in recovery, seeing his little, dark, brown eyes stare back at me as my husband introduced us. I still cry thinking of that moment both because it opens a gateway to that pain I felt losing the pregnancy before him and the incredible joy all parents know upon laying eyes on your child for the first time.

I didn’t get to hold him until the next morning and when I did, the feeling I had was sensorial, intangible, yet, solid. I would’ve had a million miscarriages just to hold this baby in my arms. As if we were always meant to be but the road to find each other wasn’t straight. He was why I had to go through that pain and sadness, a journey I would come to hold dear for what it created. All was right in the world.

 Advice:

There are two things I remember most strongly feeling after my first pregnancy and miscarriage. First, I felt like a loser and a complete failure. It’s not that I didn’t feel other emotions too. I was also really sad, embarrassed, ashamed, fearful, anxious, and angry. When wonderful people in my life told me I wasn’t a loser, I’d think, “Of course that’s what people tell losers.” I realize that sounds crazy. The thing is even if I wasn’t a loser, I felt that way and had trouble shaking that feeling.

Here is what I wish someone had told me at the time, “You are not a loser. You’re an incredible person who has found the strength to keep going. If you want a baby, it will happen. Have faith that it will and keep walking toward your finish line.”

To me, the mark of an incredible person is peeling oneself out of bed with a morning alarm and going about one’s day despite feeling as if they’ve been crushed by an anvil. Carrying on. Ironically, parents try to make their children’s lives as easy and safe as possible when adversity is often what makes us into our best selves.

Read Kelly’s Story Part II