March 18, 2014. 9:30 am. Standing on the A train. It’s one of those moments indelibly burned into my memory. I felt a hot, wet gush and new something bad had happened.
I have a short commute to work and as much as that memory on the train is crystal clear, the rest of the trip is a blur. My next clear memory is being in a stall in my office bathroom and there being a lot of blood and… gore. I knew immediately what had happened. I had just had my first miscarriage.
There are studies that say as many as 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. That doesn’t include those that end before the woman even knows she’s pregnant. I didn’t know I was pregnant. I’ve never been pregnant before. I wasn’t supposed to even be able to get pregnant. I am on the pill. I have been for the better part of the last 15 years. I don’t even get a period. I skip that week altogether and continue to pop those active little pills to keep me infertile and not menstruating. So I knew the gush and blood and gore meant something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
I cleaned myself up as best I could. I had been wearing a pad because I had been having what I thought was breakthrough bleeding for a couple of days. Something I didn’t usually get but didn’t think much about because it is always a possibility when you don’t have a real period. Besides things had been a little out of whack “down there” for a couple of months. (More on that in a bit.) But it wasn’t just breakthrough bleeding or spotting or mildly annoying cramps I also didn’t usually get. It had been the start of a miscarriage that ended that Tuesday morning in my office restroom. Physically, the rest of the experience was relatively anticlimactic. Emotionally, the toll hadn’t even started.
Let me back up. I had been seeing a guy for several months. I really liked him. I mean really. Like I was beginning to imagine what our babies would like. I, who had always been pretty ambivalent about even wanting children, was imagining babies with his sandy brown hair and my green eyes. His expressive hands and my dimples. I was finally falling in love.
About the same time, I received some shocking news. In January, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer. It was early days still and highly treatable, curable even, and my prognosis was very good. The week that elapsed between my abnormal pap, biopsy and treatment was incredibly nerve wracking and I had been terrified to tell him. I told him the night before the procedure… via text. He told me he was snowed in on some work retreat and didn’t have cell service. Telling the person you’re falling for that sort of news over text and not being able to see or hear their reaction is the worst. But he was incredibly receptive and supportive. He came over the next night, after the procedure, and we had a really frank discussion about my health. He held me when we went to bed and I cried from relief after he fell asleep. Part of me wishes he had just been a jerk about it then. His acceptance and understanding was the final nudge I needed to fall head over heels.
Intercourse was out of the question for the three weeks after the procedure so I could heal. I count those memories as some of my fondest because with sex off the table we got to just hang out. We joked about my “gimp vag” and put a “sex date” on the calendar for the first day when my lady parts could come off the bench. The date was three days after Valentine’s Day. As Feb. 14 approached, I wondered why we hadn’t talked about what we would be doing. Maybe it would be a surprise? Feb. 13… nothing. Feb. 14… radio silence.
I was devastated when I realized I had totally misjudged the situation. Shortly, after midnight on Valentine’s Day, I canceled the shared “sex date” in our calendars. So wrapped up in my own shit, and the fantasy of what our relationship could be, that I had missed what it actually was. I was falling in love. He was not. A couple days later, the day before what would have been our sexual reunion, I asked him to meet me and ended things.
Little did I know, I was already pregnant.
It turns out cancer can fuck with your hormones. Screwy hormones affect the efficacy of an oral contraceptive. So while my cervix was all “Grrr! Cancer!” My ovaries were all “Wee! Eggs!” All that great sex we had been having before I was diagnosed had unforeseen consequences. But I was on the pill and condoms just weren’t a part of the equation. Of course, they should have been. Because it turns out he WAS falling in love, it just wasn’t with me. And I was the only one being monogamous.
So there I am, that March morning in my office bathroom a month after he stops returning my calls or texts, knowing with that deep in your bones surety you only experience a few times in life that I just miscarried one of those brown haired, dimpled babies I never thought I wanted before I’d met him. And I shut down.
I told a coworker and friend who had seen me through some rough times and she told me to go to the doctor, or at the very least go home. But that would have meant admitting what had happened and dealing with the fall out. I wasn’t prepared to do that. We were in our busiest time at work and we had a huge trade show a week away and I figured I couldn’t afford to not be “on.”
So I powered through. I made it through that trade show. I did my job and no one was the wiser. And as soon as it was over, I fell apart. I went to the doctor. She admonished me for not coming in sooner but luckily I didn’t need a D&C. I was essentially a zombie for the entire month of April. I couldn’t sleep without Ambien. I couldn’t eat. I lost 10 lbs. that month. I was missing days at work and pretty much just phoning in my life. When I wasn’t numb, I was angry.
In one of those fits of anger mid-way through the month, I got drunk. Convinced he had blocked me, I tried his number. He hadn’t. What ensued was an ugly exchange. He told me he loved his girlfriend and in an effort to hurt him I told him I miscarried his baby. Not my proudest moment. I apologized the next morning. He thought I was lying. I’m pretty sure he still thinks it’s a lie. It made me sad to think about the kind of women he must have known to be able to think that and that he clearly never really knew me.
But the passing of time is an amazing thing. It allows you the sort of perspective necessary to see the lessons in tragedy. And I have learned some valuable lessons. First, I will survive heartbreak. I had been so afraid of having my heart broken, I never really let myself be vulnerable or fall in love before. But it happened and I’m still here (and yes, I am officially cancer-free.) Second, I want to fall in love with a man who appreciates that it’s not always going to be easy loving me but knows it will be worth it. Third, I want to have his baby. Our baby. Considering I’ve been a staunch non-breeder for a very long time, that’s a really big deal. Fourth, I have to have faith. Faith that things will work out the way they are supposed to. I continue to grieve for that miscarriage. It isn’t something I’ll forget. I still mourn for the future that could have been and it’s all a constant reminder of my broken heart. But there is also relief. I wasn’t ready. I definitely don’t want to have a child alone and doing it with someone who thinks so little of me would have been a disaster. So, I have faith. Faith that now that I know it’s something I want, it will happen the way it’s supposed to, when it’s supposed to.
Miscarriages are truly awful but it turns out mine was also a blessing.
