*Please note that details regarding this miscarriage are not withheld, and may be viewed as stark, grisly, and overwhelming.*
The last time I posted, I was expecting. My family was planning for a new baby. We were choosing names, deciding how to rearrange closets, planning the purchase of a new stroller, marking the calendar.
Now, when we flip the 2012 calendar over to May, we will see the due date marked, but we won't have a baby that is due on that date.
Our baby was born on October 26, 2011. She shouldn't have been. She had already died at 7 1/2 weeks gestation, but she stayed with me for another 6 weeks.
I had been to the OB, and and two ultra sounds confirmed that the baby was far too small, that there was not growth, and no heartbeat. I walked around for a month and a half knowing that the baby we had been planning for and had grown to love already, was dead.
For six weeks, the hormones that the baby's tissues and the pregnancy products put off rendered me still morning sick. My breasts were still tender, and constant hunger continued to plague me.
We told our children that the baby had died. They had many questions, good ones, too. They wanted to know if the baby was coming home soon, whey did the baby die, and would they get to see the baby. It helped to answer their questions. I didn't have a definite answer for all of them, but they accepted that, too.
I had a decision to make. I needed to decide if I would allow things to progress naturally, with out a defined time frame, take a pill that would induce labor, or have a D&C. None of those options sounded good to me.
So, I waited.
Then, I began to bleed. And I cried. I have miscarried before. Last time, that baby was only 3 or 4 weeks gestation, and we hadn't had time to adjust our emotions to expecting and loving a baby. That miscarriage was, physically, very easy. More like a heavy period and embarrassingly easy to dismiss. At least, I thought I had dismissed it.
Now, though, I called a friend, and told her that I was bleeding. She came to my house and picked me up, along with my little ones, and took us to her house.
Then, the surprise came. I started having contractions. They were hard, painful ones. Just like labor.
I bled and bled and bled. I'm not sure I have actually seen so much blood. Every time I had a baby in the hospital, the blood was cleaned up before I was up and around to see any of it. This time, there was no doctor, no nurse, no orderly.
So I labored, over a toilet. I already knew that the baby was too small for me to recognize. That even if I bled into a bucket and saved everything, I would never find it. So, I didn't. I bled into the toilet instead.
I flushed my baby down the toilet.
This slays me. This hurts, and disgusts me.
*more to come...*
1 comment:
I lost a baby before our Karson came. It slayed me to know that somewhere in the blood and the tears my baby was being flushed away. It was devestating. Along with that my greif was feirce but I felt as though it was only mine to bear. We already had five children at that point. I figured that people would just assume that would somehow make losing this one okay or somehow right. I really don't think it matters how many you have or don't have, losing a child no matter how long or short your heart had to love them is devestating and is worth grieving over. Even if the grief has to come later. I am so sorry you lost your little one.
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