Birth Stories (Part Two): We Were Still Three
This is Part Two in a series of stories about my pregnancies. It will make more sense if you read Part One first, which is here.
Content Warning: This post discusses pregnancy loss.
I always thought I wanted four kids. After my first pregnancy, I wasn’t so sure about that. But despite my brutal morning sickness and things I may have screamed to the contrary, I knew I wanted at least two.
I also wanted them to be about two years apart. This was really important to me. I thought two years was the perfect age gap if I wanted them to be best friends (which I really, really did).
When my daughter was one and a half, we started trying for baby number two. And I got pregnant right away. Awesome, I figured. This is just who I am. I will always get pregnant on the first try.
I expected this pregnancy to be very similar to the last pregnancy. And it was. Until it wasn’t.
At least this time I knew what was coming. My doctor called in a prescription for anti-nausea medication right away so I could start taking it at the first sign of symptoms. And so, while I felt nauseated and exhausted, I didn’t have to go through several horrible days of vomiting every time I moved.
Just like with my first pregnancy, I lost a lot of weight in my first trimester. I just couldn’t eat much of anything. Rice, pasta, the blander the better. I had left my job as a lawyer and was teaching LSAT classes two nights a week, and editing news clipsheets from 3AM to 9AM Monday through Friday. Plus, we had a toddler. I slept as much as I could with my new work schedule, but I was still tired all the time. Turns out making a baby takes a lot of energy.
I went in for a checkup when I was thirteen weeks pregnant. My doctor pulled out the fetal doppler to listen to the heart. That’s always a fun thing to hear, the little whoosh-whoosh of a developing heart. It was a pretty standard checkup. Nothing to be concerned about.
When I went in for my next appointment at seventeen weeks, my husband asked if he needed to come. Our daughter was napping and he wanted to get some work done. It was just a regular appointment again. No ultrasound, just a quick checkup. So, I told him it was fine.
At the office, my doctor pulled out the fetal doppler again, to find the whoosh-whoosh. She placed it where she had heard the baby the last time. Nothing. She moved it around a few times and couldn’t find anything. Neither of us was worried, though. She said the baby was being stubborn and wouldn’t get into a position where she could hear.
She asked for an ultrasound machine to be brought in so she could see the heartbeat on the monitor. She plugged it in, gooped-up my belly and started scanning.
She knew something was wrong right away. And I knew she knew something was wrong. She pushed some buttons to show a different view on the screen. Blood flow showed up in blue and red, but the blue and red was all me, my blood flow. There should have been blue and red coming from the baby. Showing its little heart pumping blood through its tiny body. But there wasn’t.
“I’m not seeing a heartbeat.”
In that moment, deep down, I knew what she meant. The baby wasn’t growing anymore. Wasn’t developing. Would never be born.
But she didn’t actually say it. So the most conscious and aware part of my brain thought there was still a chance everything would be fine.
She asked for a more detailed ultrasound to be done down the hallway. Part of me thought the more detailed ultrasound was to get a better view that would show that the heart was beating.
But what they were actually looking for was signs of what went wrong. It was clear very early in the second ultrasound that there was no chance everything would be fine.
And I was alone. My husband was at home with the sleeping toddler, because this was supposed to be a routine checkup. I was alone when the ultrasound tech told me that my baby had probably stopped growing very shortly after my last appointment. That it looked like there was fluid in the spinal cord at the base of the skull. That this was a sign of a fairly common fetal abnormality.
Once the ultrasound was done, and the technician left the room, I called my husband. We only had one car at the time, but we lived two miles from the doctor’s office. When I told him the baby had no heartbeat, he packed our daughter up into the jogging stroller and ran to the doctor’s office.
The doctor confirmed what we already knew. The baby had stopped developing at around thirteen weeks and four days, and the ultrasound showed signs of fetal defects that would never have resulted in a healthy birth and a living baby.
She told us we had two choices: either I could be induced and deliver in the hospital — in the same ward where healthy babies were being born and going home with their families; or I could have a D&C procedure. D&C stands for dilation and curettage. It is a procedure where the fetus is removed while the mother is under anesthesia.
My doctor told me she did not perform D&Cs for fetuses larger than twelve weeks, but she could refer me to another doctor if that’s what I chose to do. She said it had a slightly higher risk than delivering.
But I chose the D&C anyway. After doing some research on D&Cs, I felt it was worth the minor increased risk to avoid the trauma of going to the delivery room.
The D&C was scheduled for two days later. I had to go back to old calendars and emails to double check that, because in my memory, it was at least a week. It seems like it must have been at least a week because I had a week’s worth of feelings in that short span of time.
I felt sad for the loss of this specific potential life. I had already anticipated so many things happening with this baby and what its relationship with my daughter would be. My daughter was still in the crib, converted to a toddler bed by this point, and would need to vacate to make room for the baby. I had bought material to make a quilt to go along with the “big kid” bed she would need. Sometime in the few weeks after all of this, I put that fabric in a drawer and didn’t look at it again for a long time.
I felt frustrated about the loss of time. I really wanted my kids to be close in age. I immediately started doing the math on how far apart they would be if I got pregnant right away again, how far apart they would be if it took two months, how far apart they would be if it took six months.
I felt angry that I had to go through the worst part of pregnancy — nausea, exhaustion, hardly eating — and I had nothing to show for it. The baby at the end was what made the horrible first half of pregnancy worth it. Otherwise, it felt like it was all for nothing.
I felt relieved that the baby’s heart had stopped before we discovered the defect. I was so grateful that I was not put in a position where I had to choose between continuing with a physically difficult, exhausting pregnancy knowing there was no chance of delivering a living baby and terminating a wanted pregnancy.
I felt panic at the idea that I might not have been given that choice at all.
On the day of my procedure, we went to the hospital. I can’t remember where my daughter was that day. She must have stayed with a friend. I should remember who that was, but I don’t. My husband thinks she came with us and stayed with him in the waiting room. I don’t remember her being with us in the recovery room, though.
There’s not a lot to say about the procedure itself. I was wheeled in and helped onto a table, legs up in stirrups. They put a mask on me. I was told to count down from ten and I was out before I got to one.
In the recovery room, the nurse put these large wraps around my legs. They felt like blood pressure cuffs. They would increase pressure and then decrease. They were supposed to help prevent blood clots from forming.
The nurse asked if my husband and I wanted to talk to a grief counselor, I said no. It’s hard to explain why. I was having trouble naming what I was feeling as grief. I knew I was supposed to be grieving but I wasn’t sure I actually was. But after sitting with my husband alone in the recovery room for awhile, I told the next nurse who came in that I would like to speak to someone after all.
I can’t remember what the grief counselor told me, except about the burial of the remains. She told us that there was a mass grave for fetuses under a certain number of weeks and that there was a service quarterly. We have never visited that grave site. I think about it every once in awhile, but I never really wanted to go. I’m sure there are people who do. People for whom it’s important to have somewhere like that to go. But it isn’t meaningful to me.
My husband and I talked about planting a tree in honor of the baby we never had, but we never did that either. I can’t say exactly why. We were busy, is the easy answer. I only took one day off of my morning job and a week off from teaching. And then I was back to work. My husband was back to work. We still had a toddler at home. Time just slipped away.
But if it had been a priority, we would have made time. I think, for me, the truth is I never really wanted to plant a tree. I felt like I was supposed to want to plant a tree. I was supposed to want to do something visible and permanent to mark this loss. But I knew I would never forget it. And the way I honor the loss is in my love for my children.
One of the hardest things was explaining what happened to my daughter. She knew there was a baby in my tummy. We had announced the pregnancy on Facebook with a video of our daughter.
“Can you tell me what you are going to be?” I asked, from off-camera.
She answered, in toddler-speak, “Sister.”
“A sister?!” I replied, as if shocked.
“Baby?” she asked.
And I replied, “Because there’s going to be a baby!”
She was so sweet and excited. When I explained there was not a baby in my tummy anymore, she took it fine. But it was hard for me.
I did not tell her she wouldn’t be a sister. Because I knew, one way or another, she would be.
But for the moment, we were still three.
