My Miscarriage

A year ago tomorrow I learned I had lost our baby. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year already. So much has happened in the space that filled that time. I never got the chance to properly mourn the loss of our child. Truth be told, everything got out of hand with my health so quickly that I couldn’t. I had such high hopes of being a mom, of having a birth that was not in a hospital and that was guided by a midwife as opposed to a doctor. Most importantly I had such high hopes of giving birth to a healthy baby after a healthy pregnancy. I fully expected to be spending time at this point with my almost 5 month old and enjoying motherhood. Instead a year ago today I traveled to first see my midwife and shortly after we couldn’t detect a heartbeat to the hospital for an ultrasound, it was there that it was confirmed that I was losing our baby. I was given options as to how to proceed and I chose to let my pregnancy pass naturally at home. It was at that point in my life one of the hardest physical and emotional experiences I had gone through. I had no idea at the time this was the start of the war. I had no idea my body had launched its first attack at me.

I was distraught, I was traumatized. I had already started having symptoms that would later be used to diagnose Antiphospholipid Syndrome. About 3 days after the miscarriage I began having Silent Migraines. I would get the visual auras but the headache phase of the migraine I was use to getting afterwards wouldn’t arrive. I started having up to 10 of these a day. This continued all summer. Silly me thought that because I wasn’t getting the headache though that it was an improvement, that it was a sign that my migraines were getting better. Hindsight is always 20/20. I know now that there was a big error in my thinking and that I should have gotten into the care of a doctor right away. Things happen for a reason though. So I try not to beat myself up too much over my lack of acknowledging there was a problem at that point. If I’m really honest with myself though, even last June there was a little voice in the back of my mind telling me that something was wrong, that something wasn’t right somewhere and I needed help. I convinced myself it was because of the emotional turmoil of the miscarriage. I also thought it was possibly hormonal, so I began taking herbal supplements to help my body flush excess hormones. This was back when I still believed herbal treatments could solve everything.

I tried hard last summer to be the smiling happy person my friends were accustomed to me being.  Inside I was torn apart though. I was experiencing a grief like none other. It’s amazing how quickly you begin loving a tiny human being when you get pregnant. I never got to hold my child, or see them in a form that is recognizable as a human child. Still to this day I miss them more than words can express. A part of me left with them. I do not know if I am mourning my son or my daughter. My instinct is that it was going to be a son. I can not explain why I feel this way, but I do. Sometimes I refer to them in the male form. It just feels right. When he left this world I learned that sometimes broken hearts don’t heal. I don’t think they are meant to, sometimes it’s the pain that reminds us that these moments were real.

I heard so many times over the last year, that the pain would go away, that the hurt would eventually fade to the background. That someday I would wake up and eventually when I thought about my child the pain wouldn’t be there. I haven’t gotten there yet. We made it through all the milestones. They were all painful. We made it to when my baby shower would have been. That sucked. We made it to December, that month when we should have been in the homestretch, awaiting the arrival of our baby. Then we made it to Dec. 27th. That magical date that the calculator spit out when they entered in my conception information and they estimated my due date. That really sucked. So on top of all the anxiety of being sick, and the diagnosis, and doctor appointments, and all this, we made it through to our due date, and was empty.

Now we’ve made it past that first Mother’s Day and it was awful. It should have been my first Mother’s Day as a mom. Instead I spent it thanking people who acknowledged the fact that I was the mom to an angel. It was heartbreaking. I also spent the day with my family and I had to lock myself in the bathroom to cry a couple of times just to let the emotions out so I could continue being the happy person the day required me to be for them.

Now here we sit, May 28th, 2014. This marks the eve of learning we had lost our baby.  I was already aboard a hijacked train that I had no idea I was on. 1 year ago Antiphospholipid Syndrome and Lupus were already beginning to make their marks on my life. 1 year ago they had already taken a life from me, they had taken my child from me.

My heart hurts no less at this point in time than it hurt a year ago. I honestly don’t think this is a hurt that ever goes away. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of him. There’s not a day that goes by, that I don’t feel like a part of me died that day, that a part of me is forever missing.