A Time to Weep

Note: Please bear with the length of this post. Future posts will be much more brief, I promise.


It has been a fortnight full of tears and prayers.

I wouldn't normally have written this post, but I feel strongly prompted to share this experience in the hope that it will help someone else who may be going through trials. (Warning for the squeamish: This post contains, among other things, medical procedures and other potentially-but-not-overly graphic details.)

This fortnight actually began eighteen days ago with excitement and expectation. On the morning of Thursday, July 9th, we had our second doctor’s appointment and were eagerly looking forward to finally hearing our baby’s heartbeat for the first time. The inevitable wait for the doctor to come into the examination room seemed longer than it actually was, so we were almost bouncing up and down with impatience and anticipation by the time he arrived. When he couldn’t find the heartbeat on the Doppler, it was a little upsetting but not a huge deal since it’s not uncommon. Plus, it meant we got to go downstairs to the ultrasound room to check, so we would not only get to hear the heartbeat but see our baby as well.

The doctor hooked up the machine—which, off-hand, I would say was from the late Cretaceous period—and started looking. The first thing he noticed was that the baby was measuring small for the dates. We thought we were almost twelve weeks along, but he said it looked like we could be two to three weeks off. He pointed out the fetal pole but was having a hard time seeing a definite heartbeat. A bit disturbing, but we weren’t panicking just yet. After all, if the baby was smaller than we’d thought, combined with a prehistoric ultrasound machine, it was more than understandable that it might be hard to see. Because the machine was so old and grainy, the doctor decided to schedule us for a dating ultrasound at one of the nearby hospitals so we could figure out exactly how far along we were. We ended up going, not to the hospital next door to the clinic (their earliest appointment was late that afternoon and we wanted to get it all resolved as soon as possible), but to the community hospital one city over. “Start drinking a lot of water,” the nurse told me as we left, “and good luck.”

Drinking the water actually was a blessing because it kept my mind off of the questions about the baby and focused on the more immediately urgent issue of how embarrassing it would be to die from an exploding bladder. So I didn’t have much extra thought to spare during the abdominal portion of the exam, and therefore didn’t notice how unprofessional the sweatshirt-and-jeans-wearing technician was until after I came back from the bathroom and we started the transvaginal scan.

Per a sign on the waiting room wall, I already knew she wasn’t allowed to discuss any results with us since she wasn’t a doctor, but she barely spoke twenty words to us the entire time. She didn’t ever let me see the monitor, just kept clicking away and taking pictures and notes. Then she sent us back to the waiting room and said she would get our doctor on the line.

In the meantime her next appointment had arrived, so she didn’t even try to call our doctor until she finished with them, keeping us sitting in the waiting room for nearly 45 minutes. When she finally came out, she had us go over to the receptionist’s desk, where she handed me the phone and transferred me to my doctor’s line, which was playing soothing faux-Celtic hold music. Then she went to lunch, leaving us there holding the line at the receptionist’s desk and trying to ignore the butterflies in our stomachs. There wasn’t anyone else in the waiting room, thank goodness, but that didn’t make me any happier about waiting to hear medical results in such a public place. While I was holding for about 15 minutes, Shallow Man tried to see if there was any other phone we could use. The receptionist said no, there wasn’t. Finally, one of the other nurses walked through the room and noticed us, and arranged for us to move to one of the back-office phones. At that point my nerves were shot and I was just focusing on breathing when my doctor picked up.

“I’m so sorry.”

I concentrated on holding myself together as he explained. He had thought, after our appointment, that everything was normal and it was just the late-Cretaceous that was preventing us from seeing the heartbeat. The up-to-date machine at the hospital, however, showed that the baby measured 8 weeks and four days—nearly four weeks off—and that there was definitely no heartbeat.

We somehow made it back to our doctor’s office to discuss our options: do a D&C, take some pills to induce the miscarriage, or wait to see if it passed naturally. We somehow made it home and after talking it over, decided to pick up the pills. We had already contacted our respective places of employment letting them know we wouldn’t be in for the next couple of days. Since our bosses had been in on the news, we also told them why. We began the process of notifying the few people we had told to let them know and get the worst of it over and done with. We arranged for a sub for Primary on Sunday. We wept and talked and sat in silence and slept for a time.

My parents came down from Salt Lake that evening so my dad and Shallow Man could give me a blessing. The pain didn’t miraculously stop, I wasn’t promised that everything would work out perfectly, and I didn’t wake up to find out that it was still only that morning and time to go to our appointment where everything would work out perfectly. But I felt and knew that somehow, even though it was astronomically NOT okay, I (and we) would get through this. That I would be okay.

I woke up the next morning reluctant to take the pills. We talked it over again and decided to schedule a D&C, thinking that it might be easier to have someone else take care of everything. But as the day wore on, I became less and less satisfied with this decision. I was still numb from the news and still couldn’t make myself understand it. Denial, perhaps, but remember that I was never allowed to see the scans or any pictures. The doctor had said that the baby had only recently stopped growing, from the images. And I knew that there were many people who had the experience where they couldn’t find a heartbeat but went back again later only to find the baby alive and kicking with a strong heartbeat. I knew our chances weren’t good, but I also knew that I needed to know for sure before doing anything permanent. We decided to wait a week and, if nothing had happened, to go back for a second opinion. After all, I’d had no symptoms that anything was wrong; on the contrary, my pregnancy symptoms were still going strong.

Once we’d made that decision, it felt like a weight had lifted off my shoulders and I felt relieved and almost happy for the first time in 36 hours. I made arrangements to work from home for the next week and we started waiting.

Things continued normally for the next few days. Then, on Wednesday morning, I noticed that when I wiped, the toilet paper was coming away faintly pink. I thought it was my imagination but as the morning went on, it started getting more and more distinct. When Shallow Man called me from work around 1:30 to see how I was doing, I was starting to panic. I told him what was happening and he came straight home. We called the doctor’s office and they recommended that I rest as much as possible and play the wait-and-see game. This meant that we couldn’t go up to Salt Lake for my mother’s birthday party (where, incidentally, we had originally planned to make the first official public announcement). I was frustrated, but I had calmed down somewhat after spending the rest of the afternoon and much of the evening watching fluffy, popcorn movies and was therefore able to resign myself to being at home for the evening.

Around ten-thirty (we had just started watching “Napoleon Dynamite”) I got up from the couch to use the bathroom and as I opened the door I felt a gush of water. When I sat down, my underwear was covered in blood.

After four of the longest and worst hours of my life, the sac passed and it was over. By then I was too exhausted physically to feel much of anything emotionally. During the process, the pain of the contractions had kept me distracted from thinking about the loss. By the end, the relief of it all being over was the predominant emotion for both of us. This numbness lasted through the day on Thursday and most of Friday. (Which was fortunate, because on Friday we ended up staying up until 4:40 a. m. trying to locate a leak in our air conditioning. In the one bit of good luck we had during the last two weeks, we were able to fix the problem for less than $20 the next day. But that’s another story.)

On Saturday afternoon all of a sudden everything hit me and started to sink in. My body was healing enough to let the emotional side out, and I realized with the full impact of the revelation that my baby was gone. January 20th no longer held the same importance that it once had. There was no more urgency to rearrange and consolidate our offices so the smaller room could be converted into a nursery. We wouldn’t be finding out the gender for Shallow Man’s birthday. We wouldn’t get to buy baby things for Christmas.

At one point during the week, a well-meaning and dear friend had, in an attempt to be supportive, pointed out that at least we knew we could get pregnant now. She and her husband had also struggled with infertility before she became pregnant, and she understood the frustration of not knowing. In other circumstances this may have been true, but added to the sorrow of our current loss was the fact that this is our second miscarriage. Now the benefit of knowing that it’s possible for me to get pregnant was overshadowed by the wonder of whether it’s possible for me to stay pregnant. Would we go back to the same problems and struggles of hoping and praying for a baby, only to have the same troubles month after month? Would it take us another year or two to get this far again, only to have it all go south?

The uncertainties and fears still intrude. The pain is still there, on the back burner, under the surface, and it asserts itself from time to time. As with the first time, I don’t think it’s something we’ll ever truly get over. But I have also, with the tears and the pain, unmistakably felt the Lord’s presence and support and love. Each time my soul cries out, “O God, where art thou?” I feel the reassuring answer: “My daughter, peace be unto thy soul.”

I think it’s significant that the scripture reads “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” Life does not end with weeping; we do not have to mourn forever. We are promised that a better time will come. We will heal. We’re not okay yet, but we will be.

“Thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; and then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high.”

This fortnight has been one of tears and prayers. It has also been one of an outpouring of support from loving friends and family, and a feeling of being close to and being known and loved by God.

It has been a fortnight of hope, faith, and the beginning of healing.