May 24, 2004, Miscarriage

On Sunday, May 23, 2004, I started to get some really bad cramps. They hurt so bad, and I was definitely worried about what was going on. However, being a Sunday, my doctor's office was closed. I couldn't really do anything but wait until the next day to call the doctor. As the day went on, the cramping got worse. And then the bleeding started. Heavy, heavy bleeding. I was still naive enough to think that things could still be okay.

I prayed fervently for Heavenly Father to stop whatever was going on in my body. I had Aaron give me a priesthood blessing. I remembered all of the teachings about having the faith of just a mustard seed would make it possible to move mountains. I honestly had never had more faith in my life that the Lord would fix whatever was wrong. I believed it in my core and with every prayer I said that day. I just knew things would be okay.

Aaron's family was getting together at Leslie's house for dinner that night. I asked him to apologize to them for me, but that I thought I'd better take it easy and lay down so that whatever was happening would stop. However, it didn't stop.

We went to bed that night with a lot of questions on our mind. It was pretty late and I finally called the E.R., hoping that they would give me some insight into what was going on and what I should do. They wouldn't give any information over the phone and said that if I needed any opinion from them that I needed to come in. I recalled my doctor telling me that I should go to the E.R. if I was soaking through more than one pad an hour, and I wasn't at that point. I wanted to call my sister, Stephanie, to ask her because she is a nurse. But it was midnight now and I didn't want to call her so late.

We decided to go to bed and call the doctor in the morning. I don't know that I ever fell asleep. Aaron did, and I tried not to wake him. The pain was so much and kept coming in waves, closer and closer together. I had never felt cramping like this. I went into the bathroom and was bleeding so heavily that I just sat on the toilet. I was still dumb enough not to go to the E.R. because I hadn't technically soaked through a pad in an hour, it was in the toilet, and how would I prove to them that I had soaked through a pad if I hadn't really? Someone obviously needed to clue me in, but I had never been through anything like this.

I finally woke up Aaron at around 2:00 a.m. to let him know that things were getting worse. He felt really badly for not realizing that I had been up all this time with so much cramping and stuff. We decided to go to the E.R. I remember my mom telling me a story of when she had a miscarriage that the doctor was upset with her for not bringing in the tissue in a baggie or something. I wondered what to do about that, but didn't think I could really scoop it out of the toilet at this point. So we got ready to go when suddenly I felt better. I told Aaron that maybe we should just go back to bed because the cramping stopped. So we did. Five minutes later it started again. We got up to head out and I could barely walk, so Aaron was helping me. Then after a couple of minutes, it stopped. So once again I suggested that we wait until morning. After a couple of minutes, it started again, and Aaron insisted that we get to the E.R.

While driving there, the pain subsided again. I contemplated turning around and going home because they would surely laugh at me if I showed up and nothing was going on anymore. Aaron had the good sense to keep going, and just like that, it started again. I realize now, after having a child, that I was in labor, hence the contractions/cramps coming every couple of minutes and then subsiding.

We checked into the E.R., and I don't remember a whole bunch from there. I don't think we waited very long. I was taken back pretty quickly and the nurses started to give me morphine in an IV for the pain. From that point on I was pretty out of it, but I still was crazy enough to think that they were somehow going to be able to stop the cramping and bleeding and that we would go on to have a healthy pregnancy. I'd seen it on t.v. plenty where the doctors give some sort of medicine that stops labor. I figured that's what they were doing and that soon enough, everything would be fine.

Finally around 5 a.m. a resident doctor came in to examine me. She said that she believed that I had passed everything but that she would need to examine me. After an exam, she said that there was still a little placenta left that she thought she could clean out on her own without doing a D&C. I was still hooked up to a morphine pump and didn't really notice much of what was going on. But suddenly it hit me, the doctor was cleaning everything out. She said that I had passed the fetus at home. The fetus. Wasn't it a baby? And then it hit me. The baby was gone. It had happened sometime around 2:00 in the morning on May 24th. What do you call it? Time of birth? Time of death? The medical term is spontaneous abortion. That's what's on my medical records. How awful is that?

Aaron and I drove home around 7 in the morning, stopping at the pharmacy to pick up some pain meds. He practically carried me into the apartment because the pain was so great still. He had to call my work to tell them that I wouldn't be in for my shift that started in an hour, and had to explain why. We went to bed and just held each other and cried. All I could tell him was that I was sorry that I lost our baby.