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Real Women, Real Issues
Surviving a Miscarriage
By: Christina Caro
Posted September 2007

"We bought a Spanish red wine on the way home, thinking maybe it would hurt less if I focused on the sacrifices I wouldn’t have to make now. I sat on the couch in sweats for the next several days, a pillow on my lap, the wine untouched, in a fog of sadness punctuated by cruel ironies."

Maybe it should have occurred to me that something was amiss when my husband used PhotoShop to doctor a picture of my positive pregnancy test because the pink line wasn’t dark enough. But despite recently attending a family dinner where every woman past child bearing age recounted a traumatic miscarriage story, I never considered it might happen to me. Until, one morning in what should have been the sixth week of my first pregnancy when I ran down the stairs, late for work, and realized I hadn’t had to cradle my breasts. They were no longer tender. I fidgeted anxiously all morning, periodically poking an area that had been incredibly sore to the gentlest touch just the day before. In the bathroom, I tried to ignore the faint pinkish/orange streak on my toilet paper. But there was no ignoring the other kind of tissue I reluctantly flushed down the toilet that day. Something was terribly wrong.

After choking out the word, “bleeding” on the phone to my mother, I was on the way to the OB who would glance at the urine test result, give me a puzzled look and say, “But you’re not pregnant.”

I blinked hard. I guess not, I thought, not anymore. I had to explain to the confused doctor why I was there with something that resembled a period two weeks late. My bottom lip trembled when I heard the word I had dreaded. “It looks like you’ve had a miscarriage,” she said. I vaguely remember that next she tried to be compassionate; she said something about not giving up and allowing myself to grieve the loss. I wasn’t sure what that meant; how can you lose something you don’t yet have, I wondered, and how do you grieve?

According to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, up to 20 percent of pregnancies will end in miscarriage, or the more clinical term, “spontaneous abortion.” It’s possible that number is quite higher, as many women may experience miscarriage without having known they were pregnant. Most of these incidences are unexplained. My doctor assumed that something had gone wrong on a genetic level, and the pregnancy naturally terminated. That was it.

There were no more tests, except for one: a pregnancy test in reverse, designed to make sure I was becoming decreasingly pregnant by the numbers. We bought a Spanish red wine on the way home, thinking maybe it would hurt less if I focused on the sacrifices I wouldn’t have to make now. I sat on the couch in sweats for the next several days, a pillow on my lap, the wine untouched, in a fog of sadness punctuated by cruel ironies.

When I arrived home that first day, we stepped over an issue of Fit Pregnancy magazine I had ordered months before. I hid it from myself, along with the journal where we had marked the dates of progressing pregnancy on every page. My husband called to intercept cards we had sent to would-be grandparents and aunts and uncles. “We sent you a card to tell you we were having a baby, but,” he would say, rushing the conjunction in an effort to stifle misplaced joy. I cringed each morning as I took the prenatal vitamins, as my doctor had advised. And later, when it was safe for us to make love again, I hid a box of Trojans in the bottom of my shopping cart, upside down, under a bottle of lotion. I was angry; how was it that a woman who desperately wanted to become and remain pregnant was buying condoms? It just seemed like a joke.

Unfortunately I learned, when faced with tragedy, and despite their best intentions, that people say stupid things. There is one camp, the fixers, who feel compelled to determine, out loud, why this sad circumstance has befallen you. When I told a close friend, through inexplicably embarrassed sobs that I had lost the baby, she replied, “Do you think it could have been something you ate or drank?” Another friend asked how long I had been off of birth control before I conceived. “Maybe that’s why,” she offered. I managed to mumble a “maybe” when met with comments like these, as I stumbled off the phone or out the door.

Others, the Pollyannas, respond to news of a miscarriage with optimistic “at least” statements like, “At least you’re young and healthy,” or, “At least you know you can become pregnant.” And finally, and possibly most painfully, there are the philosophers. People who wonder, again, out loud, what fate might have brought had the miscarriage not occurred. “You never know what might have been wrong with the baby,” one person said. “Maybe this was a blessing.” I struggled with statements like this, wrestled with that theology long and hard, and I decided the only way I could survive was to reject that idea altogether.