Trauma

In 2015, I had two miscarriages.

The first one I learned about at my 12-week scan in the spring, which I had gone to alone, just because of scheduling. I knew something was wrong when the tech wasn’t really talking me through it, and then her measurements were all coming up smaller than 12 weeks, and then she went to turn on the heartbeat and it was silent. She and the doctor were very kind about it and told me how I could exit through a different door so I didn’t have to go back through the waiting room.

That night I started bleeding. I had taken time off of a brand new job (where I hadn’t yet accrued sick days) to go to the scan appointment, and I knew I was going to have to take a day off later that week to go back for a d&c, and so I didn’t feel like I could take the middle day off, so I spent the day in a cubicle, trying not to talk to or make eye contact with anyone, all the while actively miscarrying in the shared employee bathroom.

It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve experienced, not just because of the loss, but because of the total shock. I hadn’t had any close experience with miscarriage (that I knew of) and I didn’t realize how incredibly common it is. And I was completely blindsided by it.

By early fall, I was pregnant again, but this time painfully aware of the possibilities. We were, you might say, nauseously optimistic. We didn’t talk much about it. At 7 1/2 weeks I started bleeding. I made a doctor’s appointment and confirmed what we had already figured out. We gritted our teeth and got through it.

That’s what today feels like. It’s the same level of shitty as the first time this happened, but at least we weren’t caught totally off guard, like we were in 2016. At least we knew this level of shitty was always a possibility.

There are a lot of people right now carrying a lot of trauma and feeling a lot of devastation and rage and hopelessness. This experience is part of what’s contributing to my trauma today.