An Emoji For Miscarriage
There is no emoji for miscarriage. But if there was, it would be the empty box of an entire coconut cake my husband and I ate in the 48 hours after the first time my pregnancy ended prematurely. I was 14 weeks.
I want to emphasize the fact that my husband and I both ate an entire cake in 48 hours. Not because I wouldn’t want you to think I ate an entire cake on my own (because I have). And not because I want to shame my husband for (also) being an emotional eater. But because looking back it was obvious how much he was hurting every time I miscarried but it took me until number three to realize it.
The first time I got pregnant it happened very quickly. We decided to try, I peed on those ovulation sticks for a month and then I peed on the pregnancy stick and it was positive. The two weeks following the pee test were euphoric. I walked around with the biggest secret in the world and I couldn’t stop smiling. Then suddenly I was nauseous and exhausted and had a horrible heavy sense of dread and hopelessness. Everything, including people I loved, seemed to float away in slow motion. I felt like I had sat too long in a steam room. What was the point of life? Of creating a life? Of living? I knew this feeling before. I was Depressed.
I had asked my regular psychiatrist about the risks of staying on my anxiety and depression medication (two different medications), while pregnant. He took five minutes to look the drugs up in a medical book and then gave me the okay. I thought, ‘Dude, I could look stuff up in a book, too. I need more information.” So I found a psychiatrist who specializes in women who want to get pregnant, are pregnant or are breastfeeding and have depression and anxiety issues. After two long sessions, she presented me with a binder of the latest research about the two specific drugs I was taking and the risks they pose on each trimester. We decided together that the risks were very low and going off my meds would present a greater risk to any baby I was carrying. So, I stayed the course.
But now that I was pregnant and on my meds, why was I still Depressed? I spoke to the specialist and she explained that although it is not widely talked about, the flood of hormones in the body during the first trimester can trigger depression and anxiety.
Why don’t people talk about this? Thank God more and more people are talking about PPD and PPA and getting help when they need it. But women need to know that being pregnant isn’t necessarily the happiest time in your life. Sometimes it really kind of sucks.
The doctor recommended I stay on my current dose of meds and see how I felt in the second trimester.
Meanwhile, as soon as I peed on a stick and found out I was pregnant, my husband became obsessed with the fact that I was going to get Toxoplasmosis from cat litter. I had agreed that he should change our cats’ litter boxes but that wasn’t enough. He also told me he didn’t want me going into bodegas because of possible stray cats and that we couldn’t go to our friend’s annual Fourth of July BBQ because he had a cat. At the time, we didn’t know that this was his OCD flaring up. He was not yet diagnosed. So to me, he was just being controlling, insistent and unreasonable. I was so angry that I told him he was ruining my pregnancy.
When I was at 11 weeks, I started to feel a dull tightening in my lower abdomen that came in waves. I tried to ignore it. It was probably nothing, I said to myself. I was a first-time mother so what do I know, I said to myself. At 12 weeks, my Depression was lifting and I went to the doctor for my nuchal translucency exam. For the first time, when the doctor put the sonogram thingy on my stomach, I saw something on the screen that resembled a baby. I could even make out a bit of her little alien face. The doctor measured a bunch of things on the screen, went over the results of the blood test that I had taken at eight weeks and told me that everything looked good. After the exam, I told the doctor about the pain and I described it to her. She said it was probably round ligament pain but to keep her posted if it got worse. I could hear my phone in my bag on the floor dinging with text messages from my husband asking how everything was going. He was frustrated that he couldn’t come to the appointment because he couldn’t get out of a work meeting. Looking back, I feel terrible that he was drowning in anxiety while sitting at a work meeting. I texted my husband that the sonogram went great and sent him some pictures. He texted back the smiley face emoji that has hearts for eyes.
As I left the office, I Googled round ligament pain. It was described as a sharp pain around the lower belly. But what I was feeling was more like a wave. Everything was probably fine, I told myself that. After all, I was a first-time mother, I told myself.
A week later, around the middle of July, we headed down to Virginia Beach to see my husband’s side of the of the family for our annual “It’s a lot of people’s birthdays around this time so let’s celebrate” trip. The morning we arrived in Virginia Beach we all met for brunch. We told everyone the good news and passed around my phone with the sonogram picture on it. My six-year-old niece kept asking why I had to pee so many times and instead of getting into details about hormones I told her that I had to pee for myself and the baby. She thought this was endlessly funny.
The next night, I was in so much pain that I couldn’t sleep. I spent most of the night on the floor stretching thinking it must be round ligament pain coupled with my tight hips acting up. In the morning, I called my OBGYN. She asked if I was spotting. I said no. She told me to take more Tylenol and to come to see her when I got home. I spent the rest of the trip wincing in pain between the smiles and “thank yous” to all the congratulations from my in-law’s family, who lived nearby.
By the time we came back to New York, the pain was overwhelming. I was 14 weeks, supposedly past the window of worry, but I was in a full panic. My husband was, too. He had moved on from Toxoplasmosis and had become obsessed with the leak in our ceiling. He was worried mold was growing and it would harm the baby. I thought he was being unreasonable and annoying and as I became angry he became more focused on non-existent mold than my pain. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the way he was dealing with my pain and his anxiety surrounding my pain was by focusing on the mold. This is what OCD does.
A day after we came home, I was wearing my “work-at-home” uniform of oversized red sweatpants and a Northwestern University t-shirt, when I went to the bathroom to pee for the 100th time. Before I could make it to the toilet, my pants flooded. At first, I thought I pissed myself but then suddenly I knew — my water had broken. I sat on the toilet to mitigate the mess. When I looked down I saw a little blood. I burst into tears. A true burst. It was a sudden rising of emotion that violently wanted to be let out with tears and wailing and snot. After I calmed down enough to talk, I called my OBGYN who told me to come in right away and then I called my husband to meet me there. “Maybe everything is still okay,” he said optimistically. But I knew it was over. I just needed to hear the words come out of a doctor’s mouth to make it official.
During the cab ride over, I stared out the window in a trance. When I got to the office, I approached the front desk clerk with silent, involuntary tears flowing down my cheeks and told her the reason for my unscheduled visit. It was one of those moments where you have to forcefully make your face cooperate with you to make words come out because the crying is too intense. A nurse, who had taken my vitals on my last routine visit, gently guided me into an examination room, where my husband was already waiting.
At that moment, he looked so sweet and vulnerable. He looked like he did on our first date when he was too nervous to look me in the eye and our conversation was awkward. It had been nine years since that first date and at this point, we knew each other so well that we didn’t have to talk. We sat in silence, holding each other’s hand and waited for the doctor. A different doctor than I was used to seeing came in and began to examine me. She said, “I don’t know why, but your water has indeed broken and because it is still early, it’s impossible for the fetus to sustain life without it.” I had another explosion of tears and the doctor excused herself so my husband and I could be alone. For several minutes, I sat sobbing in my hands on the examining table as my husband silently cried standing next to me. “We’re gonna get through this, okay?” He said, holding me. I nodded while sucking in an intentionally long breath in an attempt to stop my face from crumbling again. Eventually, somehow, we made it into the doctor’s office and discussed our options. She said I could “deliver” the baby or have a D & C. I scheduled a D & C for the following day. It was my husband’s 40th birthday. The day after, a good friend of mine had an entire coconut cake delivered to my apartment. As I already mentioned, my husband and I both dug in and in two days, finished the whole damn thing.
During the next several months, I went to therapy regularly and stayed on my meds. I told my husband he should get therapy, too. Thank god, the therapist he starting seeing diagnosed him with OCD. He immediately started aversion therapy and little by little he started to feel some relief.
Forty-two weeks later, I gave birth to our beautiful, healthy and hilarious daughter.
Last January, when our daughter was about a year and a half, we started trying to have another baby. I got pregnant again quickly and experienced the same terrible Depression I did during both other first trimesters. It was even more difficult this time around because I was taking care of my toddler full time. At 10 weeks we were told the blood tests indicated that the baby had trisomy thirteen. At our twelve-week sonogram appointment, we were brought into an office to speak to a geneticist who explained the probability was high that the trisomy thirteen DNA they had detected came from the baby and not just the placenta but we wouldn’t know for sure without amniocentesis, which at this point, was four weeks away. It didn’t sound good. We went into another room for the scheduled sonogram. A nurse glided the cold wand over my belly and there was silence. She left without a word and the doctor came in and said very matter-of-factly “Yeah, there’s no heartbeat. Come see me in my office,” and then left. I burst into tears and held my face in my hands. This time my husband cried audibly.
Three months later I got pregnant again. I had peed on the stick the day before we went upstate to an Air BnB with my best friend, her husband and her son, who is my daughter’s age. As soon as we arrived to the house, I told my best friend that I was pregnant. My husband was mad I had said something so early. I distinctly remember him saying, “let’s hope this one sticks.” That night I woke up with horrible cramps. A few hours later, when the sun came up, I went to pee and I was bleeding. A lot. The cramps and the bleeding didn’t’ stop all day and I some point I saw a chunk of tissue pass. We told our friends what was happening but they didn’t know what to do except say they were sorry. With my husband standing next to me in large rural backyard, I called my OBGYN and made an appointment to get checked out when I came home. When I hung up, he opened his arms and said, “I know this is hard. But we’ll get through it.” And suddenly, I became angry. “I’m the one cramping. I’m the one that sees blood in the toilet. I’m the one this is happening to.” He stepped back and looked at me in that sweet vulnerable way he did that day at the doctor’s office when my water broke. “I know you’re experiencing it physically but it’s happening to me, too.” And suddenly, I realized he was right. He was in this with me. He may not have been experiencing the physical aspects of these pregnancies but was certainly as experiencing them mentally. And spiritually. All of the joy and all the sadness. We hugged tightly and spent the rest of the weekend giving our toddler too much ice cream.
As of the writing of this piece my second daughter is three months old. I’m still on my meds and now my husband is on meds, too. His OCD flares up from time but now we both have tools to deal with it.
I’ll be honest; our marriage isn’t perfect. There are days when my husband and I only interact as roommates — discussing chores, what our daughter or three pets need or what events we need to plan for. On top of all that, we are constantly struggling to find time for ourselves. To recharge. To exercise. To see friends. Sometimes, there are days when our only physical interaction is a quick peck on the cheek before we go to sleep. But since we’ve had these miscarriages, we’ve realized that were both in this ”life” thing together. For the long haul. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health and in coconut cake.
