Angels In My Heart
A Journey of Love and Loss
Kathleen Olowin
Smashwords Edition
PUBLISHED By:
Father’s Press on Smashwords. Copyright Kathleen Olowin
Kathleen Olowin holds the copyright of this book and has granted the exclusive right to publish it to Father’s Press.
First printing, Feb. 2010
All rights reserved.
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Father’s Press, LLC
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Cover design by
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For Zachary, Joshua, Victoria and Nicholas
forever in my heart
Acknowledgments
Throughout the journey chronicled in this book, we have had the support of friends far too numerous to mention individually here. To all of you who supported us with prayers, hugs, emails and phone calls, we would not have survived all of this without you. You gave us the strength to go forward each day, and we can never express how grateful we are to all of you.
There are, however, specific thanks that need to be mentioned:
To my parents, Jack and Ellen Crowley, my brother Michael and my in-laws, Mary and Ron Olowin, for convincing me that I should listen to this crazy idea to write a book and for their unending support of the process.
To my dear friends Ron Conescu and Peggy Reed for giving me the thoughtful feedback that made my manuscript fuller and stronger.
To Judy and Michael Tashji for their beautiful work in designing the cover.
Most especially to Aaron without whose support and gifts of time, I could never have completed this project before the arrival of grandchildren.
Mary Jo and Aiden Burke, Sharon and Ken Forziati, Melissa and Carlos Vigil and Peggy Reed: You have shared each step of this journey—you have prayed with us and for us, brought us food, watched our children, and held our hands in sorrow and in joy. Truer friends we could never have.
Donna Vinal and Paul Klas: You have given this family not only the best medical care possible, but your prayers, love and support through ten very challenging years. You helped me to have the courage to keep going in this journey—we would not be raising these beautiful boys were it not for that support.
Matthew, Ryan and Tristan: You are the miracles in my life, the incredible gifts from God for whom I am grateful every day.
Mom and Dad: You taught me through word and example what it means to have faith. I am blessed to have the love and support of such wonderful parents.
Aaron: You keep me grounded while lifting me up. Without you, this journey, these children, this life, simply would not be. You have always been and always will be the greatest gift in my life.
Angels in My Heart
A Journey of Love and Loss
Acknowledgements
A note to my readers
My Journey of Love and Loss
Epilogue
The Journey of Grief
Grief Differences
Am I Going Crazy?
Hurtful Things Well Meaning People Say
Ways to Memorialize Your Baby
Things to Say and Do
A Note to the Medical Field
A Few Final Thoughts
Footprints
Additional Resources
Suggestions for Additional Reading
Glossary of Medical Terms
A note to my readers
If anyone had told me when I graduated college that one day I would be writing a book about miscarriage, I would have thought they were crazy. Although I took a minor concentration in English as an undergraduate, I had no aspirations to be a writer. At the time I got married, I had heard of miscarriage, but assumed it was something rare that would never happen to me. Little did I know how common it is, or how much I would come to know about it.
Each year, in the United States alone, nearly one million women experience the heartbreak of a miscarriage. An additional 26,000 families are faced with the trauma of a stillborn baby. The numbers are staggering, and yet, unless they know someone who has experienced this kind of a loss, most of these families feel very alone in their grief.
Every person's story is different, yet we all share common feelings and experiences as we try to come to terms with the death of our child. I don't profess to know all the answers—there is no magic formula which will suddenly make your world right again. The words I offer come merely from my own experience. But I hope, by sharing my journey with you, I can help with one small step of your healing.
You are not alone.
“Let the storms around you cease now
Let the storm within you end.
Let your mind and heart learn peace now.
As the calm that God will send.
God who brought you through the tempest
Guide your spirit home to mend.”
—Marty Haugen
“The Song of Mark”
My Journey of Love and Loss
1
I knew, a second before the impact, that we were going to get hit. The screech of brakes preceded the shock as the car crashed into us from behind, propelling our car forward several yards. As my head slammed back against the head rest, my first thought was, “Oh, my God, the baby!” The panic that flooded me was quickly overtaken by the rational side of my brain, which told me, “You didn't hit the steering wheel; the baby is fine.”
Since we had only one car, my husband, Aaron, usually walked to work, but sometimes I would take him if the weather was bad or he was running late. October 3, 1995 was a beautiful day, but Aaron had overslept. He was supposed to be at work at 7:30am, and since it was only a 10-minute round trip, I had just pulled on sweats and a T-shirt, planning to shower and eat once I got back.
After making sure I was okay, Aaron got out to check on the other driver, and I moved across to sit in the passenger's seat, since opening my door would have put me into oncoming traffic. I didn't dare stand up, as shaky as my legs were feeling, but sat there with my hand to my head, trying to calm my pounding heart. Aaron came back and reported that the other driver's airbag had deployed and he appeared unhurt. Aaron crouched by my open door and held my hand. Someone called 911.
After a few minutes, the rescue squad arrived. Sitting with my legs out the door and my feet on the ground, they began asking me questions. Are you feeling dizzy? Can you tell me what day it is? I knew they were trying to ascertain if I had hit my head. I assured them I had not hit the windshield but that my head had snapped forward and back into the head rest. One of the rescue workers had climbed into the car on the driver's side and was holding my head steady from behind, in case of a neck injury. After a few more questions, one of them glanced down to my baggy tee shirt.
“Ma'am, are you pregnant?”
“Yes, 32 weeks.”
Suddenly, the topic of questions changed to concern over the baby. Are you having any pain? Is there any fluid leaking? No, nothing like that. They asked if I wanted to be taken to the hospital. Yes, I definitely wanted my midwife to check me out, just to be sure. Was our car drivable? I was shaky enough that I still had not stepped out to take a look at it. The response was a shake of the head.
“Then I guess you all need to take me.” With that statement, I was labeled a possible neck trauma, and a large collar was placed around my neck. The emergency technicians eased me onto a stretcher and strapped me down, loading me into the ambulance just like on TV. I'm sure the guy who hit us was panicking when he saw that. There were probably visions of law suits from the family of a pregnant woman flashing before his eyes. It looked like I was seriously hurt, but it was all just precautionary. I felt incredibly foolish. We don't need to make all this fuss, do we? Can't I just ride on the bench back here? Aaron got our things out of the car and rode in the front with the driver. On the way to the hospital, the technicians monitored the baby's heart rate, which remained good and strong.
When we got to Martha Jefferson Hospital, Aaron filled out paperwork while I was taken back to an exam room so that the baby's heartbeat could be checked again. Once they had monitored the heartbeat for several minutes and had seen no signs of bleeding, fluid leaking, or contractions, everyone's worries over the baby seemed to relax. This little person seemed unconcerned about the traumas of the morning. They raised the head of the bed to a slant, but the collar remained in place. Aaron was brought back to wait with me. When the nurse found out he had also been in the car, she decided they should check him out as well, so he was put in the bed next to me with a collar on his neck. We went through X-rays and other tests that determined we both had a case of whiplash, but nothing more serious.
The emergency room staff had called my midwife's office and were told that she was upstairs on the Labor and Delivery floor with a patient. They paged her there and told her one of her patients had been brought into the ER from a car accident. Donna promised to be down when she was done.
By the time we were finished with all the tests it was almost 10 o'clock, and I had still not had anything to eat or drink. I hadn't even brushed my teeth before I left—this was definitely not how I had planned on spending my morning. The ER was fairly quiet, and while we were waiting for Donna, I finally asked one of the nurses if there was anything I could have to eat, since I had not had breakfast. She managed to find some cranberry juice and saltine crackers, which wasn't much of a breakfast, but after all the trauma of the morning, my stomach probably couldn't have handled much more, even if it had been offered.
When Donna finally appeared, she got the report on the baby's heartbeat monitoring from the nurse and then asked us what had happened. As we described the accident, she shook her head and commented that it must have been a bad morning out there because she had passed an accident on her way to the hospital that morning. She had contemplated stopping, as a rescue squad was not yet on the scene, but didn't want to leave her patient waiting, so she had gone on ahead.
“It was a bad one, though. The guy's airbag had gone off and everything.”
“Where were you?” I asked.
“On Hydraulic, on my way to the bypass.”
I gave her a little half wave. All the blood drained from her face.
“Oh, my God, you were in that car?”
“I was driving that car.”
Donna stared at me, then glanced at Aaron, as if in doubt that we were both okay. I assured her the doctors had said we had no serious injuries. Then she got off the stool to examine me. As she did so, she commented it was probably a good thing she had decided not to stop. What would she have done if she had stopped to offer aid and been faced with one of her patients in the car? To leave her laboring patient waiting at the office would not have been fair, but she could not have left an expectant patient at the scene of an accident either. After checking me over, she monitored the baby's heart rate again. It was still steady and strong, and there were no signs of contractions. It had been almost three hours since the accident, and she decided that if I hadn't gone into labor by that point, I wasn't going to do so. I was released with a soft collar for my neck and orders to rest for the next several days.
A day or two later, the insurance company declared our car to be totaled, and we went to the junkyard to collect our personal things from the car. When the man behind the counter realized which car was ours he looked at my protruding belly and said to me,
“You weren't in that car, were you?”
“I was driving that car.”
“You okay?”
I nodded. He shook his head and pointed us to the spot where our car was parked.
We had been at a full stop in a 1979 Ford Fairmont and had been hit from behind at about 35 mph. For the first time, I understood the amazement people expressed at the fact that we had all walked away from the accident unhurt. The back right corner of the car was raised, buckled, and twisted, crushed into the back seat. The police officer who had brought us the accident report the day after the accident had told me that they had measured skid marks on the road for about forty feet leading up to the impact site. The driver had done everything in his power to stop the car—how much worse would it all have been if he hadn't slowed his car as much as he did? This baby must have a very special guardian angel, I thought.
Donna had made an appointment for me to come in a few days after the accident, just for a follow-up check on the baby. Aside from being sore, all was still well. We discussed the accident and how lucky we all were.
“God had angels watching over us,” I told her.
“He had an angel between you and that steering wheel.”
In the days that followed, the more I replayed the accident in my head, the more I came to agree with her. My head had snapped forward and back, but from the shoulders down I had not moved. Both the baby and I had come through an accident in a car with 16-year-old seat belts and no airbags, and all we had was some whiplash and a few bruises from the seatbelt. Yes, I thought, there were angels there for sure.
I had been wearing my neck collar at home, but not when I was out. I didn't like the fuss people made when they saw it, and wearing it for long periods of time would irritate me. Donna had warned me that it would take me longer to heal from this accident than it would Aaron, since my body was also doing so much work preparing to birth a baby. My neck tired easily when I wasn't wearing the collar, but I had no other complaints aside from the normal aches and fatigue shared by all pregnant women as delivery draws near.
A few days before my due date, I began having regular contractions, but they were neither particularly painful nor did they get stronger and closer together. After a full day of mild contractions and several phone conversations with Donna, she decided this was “prodromal” or “false” labor. The uterus was getting ready for labor, but these contractions were not actually going to lead to delivery that day. Eventually, it would turn into active labor, but that could be several days away, by which point I would be exhausted. She told me to drink two glasses of wine and get some sleep. Wine? While I'm pregnant? She assured me that at this point it would do no harm, but would relax the uterus and put me and the baby to sleep. For someone who drinks a half a glass of wine on occasion, two glasses was a rather bitter prescription, one I had a hard time consuming. But it did the trick, and the contractions stopped.
In the early morning hours of December 6, 1995, one day before my due date, the real contractions began. I had decided early on in the pregnancy that I wanted to do this as naturally as possible, without an epidural or other medication. The idea of a needle in my spinal column gave me the shivers, and I had heard that oral or intravenous pain medication could have effects on a newborn. Donna was a proponent of natural child birth and had assured me there were lots of ways to try and manage the pain of labor without drugs. But she had also told me that I needed to listen to her if she said an epidural or other medication was necessary, for it would be because she knew I was tired and we still had a long way to go before delivery. Okay, I agreed, that's fair.
Aaron and I stayed at home through the night. When we arrived at Donna's office around 8:30 in the morning, I was only four centimeters dilated. As we got further into the labor and the contractions got harder, I began to have sharp pains in my back with each contraction. I had been prepared for labor pains in the abdomen, but not in the back. After trying massage and counter pressure for a while, Donna suggested I spend some time in the jacuzzi tub to see if that would help. Although it did provide some relief, I quickly came to a point where I was unable to breathe through the contractions as we had been taught in our childbirth class. The pain, combined with my asthmatic panic reaction that kicks in when I am having trouble breathing, caused me to begin to hyperventilate. Donna had me breathe into a brown paper bag between contractions to try to keep my oxygen supply level, but still my fingers and face felt tingly, like a limb that has gone to sleep. When I finally reached the point where I was being completely overwhelmed by the pain, it was too late to give me anything to help with it—Donna knew we were too close to delivery. She told me, “All I can do now is shoot you.”
“Don't tempt me,” I replied between breaths in the bag.
She was waiting for me to tell her that I needed to push, but that urge never came. Finally, she got me out of the tub to check and see what was happening and discovered that the baby's head was very close to delivery. The nurses quickly got me up into the bed. The moment I began to push the pain seemed to disappear. I was in control now. I felt strong inside. I could do this.
After thirty minutes of focused pushing, the baby's head emerged and Donna told me not to push while she suctioned the nose and mouth. She then offered Aaron the opportunity to “catch” the baby, which he declined with a wide-eyed shake of the head. On one final push, Matthew Ian entered the world, a beautiful 7 lbs 15-½ oz. Donna lifted him straight to my stomach, where he lay quietly blinking at me. I ran my finger gently down the side of his head and gazed at this perfect little miracle while Aaron cut the umbilical cord. All the years of longing and waiting to be a mother were over.
Other than being dehydrated from so much time in the jacuzzi tub, I recovered very quickly. A few weeks later, I passed what looked like a cashew nut, small and gray, about the size of the first joint on my thumb. Was this what it appeared to be, an embryo? I searched through my pregnancy materials until I found the magazine with pictures of an embryo at various stages of development. What I had just passed looked remarkably like a six week old embryo.
I thought back to my first prenatal appointment with Donna, at nine weeks. Though it was early, she had listened to see if she could hear the heartbeat—and to everyone's surprise, she did. As she listened, she said,
“Hmm, do I hear two?”
“Oh, don't joke about that!” we laughed nervously. I figured she probably said that to all her newly expectant moms, just to see their reactions. No, she was serious. As much as I longed to be a mother, twins had never crossed my mind. Donna listened for a bit and could not decide what she was hearing, but she did not see a reason to order an ultrasound either. It was still early enough in the pregnancy that the heartbeat was fairly soft and hard to hear clearly. On our next visit, there was one strong heartbeat, and Donna decided it must have been just an echo she had heard previously.
After looking at the magazine picture, I called Donna, and described what I had just seen. She said that it was too early after delivery for me to have conceived and miscarried and that the labor and delivery staff make sure no tissue is left behind after delivery. There was no reason for me to come in to see her until my postpartum checkup, still a few weeks away. I hung up with the vague feeling that there was something she wasn't telling me.
Although I did not mention it to anyone except Aaron, my thoughts kept coming back to the experience over the next few days. Was that really an embryo? Had there been two babies at one point? With no way to answer that question, I finally put it out of my mind. After all, I had a beautiful, healthy son.
2
As Matthew approached his second birthday, we were beginning to think about having a second child. But I had been having a great deal of trouble with my asthma in recent months, and we were advised to wait on a pregnancy until my body had had time to recover and get strong again.
In the spring of 1998, Dr. Klas and I tried a new combination of medications to help me through the pollen season. At the end of May, when I had survived the allergy season without too much difficulty, both Donna and Dr. Klas felt I was strong enough and gave us the green light to think about another baby after I weaned back to my basic daily medication. Since we had had no trouble conceiving Matthew and had had an uneventful pregnancy, it didn't occur to me that the next time would be any different.
In early August, I was feeling some early pregnancy symptoms. The time for my menstrual cycle came and went, but I waited a few more days before taking a home pregnancy test. Maybe, I thought, it is just wishful thinking. My cycles had never been a regular 28 days. By day 35, I felt it was time to check. When the test came back negative, I thought, well, not this month. But as each day of the next week went by with no cycle, I began to get more hopeful. At the end of the week I took another test, expecting to see a positive result. It was still negative.
I felt disheartened, but even more I was confused—even for my irregular cycles, this was long. It had been six weeks since my last one. Besides, I wasn't feeling quite right. My stomach felt funny and I was feeling very draggy, like I hadn't gotten enough sleep for nights in a row. I had been very tired in the first trimester of Matthew's pregnancy and had napped a great deal in the afternoons. People often say you can be much more tired during your second pregnancy, since you are also caring for the first child, but this seemed much too early to be feeling the level of exhaustion I was experiencing. I wasn't even registering a positive test. And yet, by this point, the test should have registered positive if I was pregnant. My body was telling me one thing, the urine test something else. How could I be experiencing the symptoms of pregnancy and not be pregnant?
A few days later, I started spotting. I was bleeding, but very lightly and inconsistently. It was not like my regular cycle, so I called Donna and described the last few weeks. She said most likely it was a “subcutaneous miscarriage.” I had conceived, but the egg had not implanted. It was just taking my body a while to figure it out. She said these situations are very common—most of the time, the woman doesn't even know anything happened. But when you are trying to conceive, you are aware of every little symptom, all month long. The regular cycle should start up soon, she counseled me, but she warned me not to be surprised if it was unusually heavy. The hormones in my body had been preparing my uterus to carry a pregnancy, so the uterine lining would be thicker, and there would be more to shed than in normal months. Unless I felt there was something wrong, she didn't need to see me. She told me to call her in a week.
What do I tell Aaron, I wondered, as I hung up the phone. I hadn't told him about any of this yet, since there wasn't really anything to tell—the tests had come back negative. But I was having a miscarriage. Or was I? If I was never really pregnant, could it really be considered a miscarriage? Either way, Aaron needed to know what was happening. That night I told him I had hoped to have happy news to share with him, and then relayed the conversation with Donna. He did not know quite what to say. He seemed to find his role in offering comfort to me. But I didn't know what to think of this myself.
The bleeding did start up, and though it never got particularly heavy, it did continue for a bit longer than usual. When I phoned Donna at the end of the week, she figured it had taken care of itself. The next month's cycle could be thrown off a bit, she counseled, and told me not to be concerned if it went longer than usual before the next month's cycle began.
A week after the cycle ended, the bleeding began again. My cycles sometimes stopped and started again, but never with such a long break. I called Donna. Sometimes this happens with a miscarriage, she said. It is taking your body longer to clean out than we thought. Just like after delivering a baby, the bleeding can continue for several weeks.
Oh, great.
For most of my adolescence, I had had to deal with painful menstrual cramps each month. Most of those months would require Advil and a heating pad to relieve the pains that would have me curling up into a ball. But now, in the midst of a miscarriage, I did not have menstrual cramps at all. The bleeding was light and there was no pain involved. It just didn't seem to ever stop. Rather like trying to empty a container of water a few drops at a time, the bleeding continued to stop and start, stop and start, never getting very heavy, but never resolving either.
I began to feel very worn out. I would have a day with no bleeding and just when I would begin to hope that it was finally over, it would begin again. Each time that happened I got a little more depressed. Isn't this ever going to end? It was beginning to drain me physically and emotionally. Every time the bleeding began again, it weighed down my spirit. And the exhaustion continued—a tired that went deep into my bones. It was far worse than it had been during my pregnancy with Matthew. I have never before or since felt fatigue like that, not even during the sleep-deprived months of having a newborn child. I would lie down when Matthew took a nap and fall instantly into a deep, deep sleep, only to wake up two hours later feeling just as tired. Donna said later that my body was trying very hard to hold on to that pregnancy. It didn't want to let go.
I hadn't really told anyone else what was happening. I wasn't keeping it a secret, but it was hard to share with people because I wasn't sure how to explain what was happening. My parents were out of the country on vacation, and this was not an emergency that warranted a transatlantic phone call. The few friends that I did tell, I told over email, just after my initial conversation with Donna. I explained what she had said, but told them it wasn't really a miscarriage, since the baby had never really started to develop. It would be easier on my mind and body having this happen so early, I rationalized. I wasn't attached to anything yet, right? After all, since the tests had come back negative, I wasn't really losing a pregnancy. I was losing the idea of possibly being pregnant. It shouldn't be too hard to get passed that and begin looking ahead again. Right?
One of my friends from my women's prayer group, Terri, wrote back and told me it didn't matter if I had ever been “officially” pregnant, conception had occurred and this miscarriage was real, just very early. The more I heard the term miscarriage in reference to what was happening, the more I began to think in terms of having lost a baby. Terri had told me that a loss is a loss, no matter when it happens. It is okay to grieve. But emotionally I was numb, fatigued with constantly waiting to see if the bleeding would begin again. How can you move past something emotionally for which there is a daily physical reminder?
As the weeks of off-again/on-again bleeding continued, my emotional state began to be affected more and more. I was edgy, frustrated and weary. And though Aaron was very supportive and sweet, bringing me flowers and letting me rest as I needed, he really didn't seem affected by any of this. It was something that was happening to me. I could talk to him about the growing sadness I felt at the loss of this child, but he did not share in that sadness. He didn't seem to be thinking about the fact that this would have been his baby as well. It seemed like he was treating this more as an illness from which I was trying to recover—he did what he would have done to help if I had had the flu, taking over some of the housework and playing with Matthew while I napped. As the weeks went by, I felt increasingly in my own little world, with Aaron on the outside looking in.
By the second week in September, I had been bleeding for almost five weeks. I called Donna again. I was unprepared to hear her to say that we needed to do a dilation and curtage, or D&C. I was so tired of the whole thing, and I agreed with her that it had been going on much too long, but surgery? I hadn't even considered that possibility. However, she was beginning to be concerned that I might become anemic from the prolonged bleeding. And the risk of an infection developing increased the longer this went on. It was time to put an end to it.
As a midwife, Donna is not licensed to perform surgery, so she transferred my care temporarily to Dr. Wolanski, the OB-GYN with whom she shares the practice. Wednesdays are his surgery days, so she put me on his schedule for the following Wednesday. Knowing I had to go through surgery was bad enough—now I had to wait for it also. Everything in my day to day life was now entwined with what was happening in my body. I wished we could just get it over and be done with it.
That weekend I found an ad in the Sunday paper for a silver cross that had footprints across the front. On the back was the last verse of my favorite poem, “Footprints”: “It was then that I carried you.” This poem speaks of walking the beach in the company of God, and it had been a favorite of mine since I had first read it sometime in high school. Walking on the beach has always been one the things I love best about going to the ocean. I particularly like the early morning to walk, the most peaceful time at the shore, for I feel the presence of God in the quiet voice of the ocean. I had recently lost the small silver cross I had worn daily for years, and I missed having it around my neck. Although I don't usually spend money on jewelry, I really liked this cross and decided I was going to buy it for myself. It was too big to be the one I wore all the time, but I needed something to help me feel happier right now, and the reminder that God is always there would be a comfort. Of course, these ads say “allow 2-3 weeks for delivery,” so I suspected it would be quite a while before I received it.
I went to the hospital on Monday and had blood drawn for the pre-operative work-up. The two days of waiting until the surgery seemed to drag on endlessly. My body was already tired, and the pending procedure weighed on me, making my body feel heavy and slow. And the knowledge of why it was needed weighed on my spirit. I tried not to think about it, yet it was always in my consciousness, like a cloud hovering just over my shoulder.
The surgery was not until Wednesday afternoon, so Aaron went to work in the morning, and I picked him up on the way to get Matthew from preschool. Terri had agreed to watch Matthew for us that afternoon—her son, David, was just a few weeks younger than Matthew, and we often got together to let the boys play.
It was an outpatient procedure, so we headed up to the day surgery wing. While we were waiting in my small room, Dr. Wolanski came in to talk to us and explain what would happen. He would forcibly open the cervix enough to be able to clean out the lining of the uterus. Sometimes this is done with scraping tools and sometimes through vacuum extraction. The decision would be made based upon what he found once he was able to view the inside of the uterus. He offered me the choice of being awake and just having a spinal block or being put under general anesthesia; he cautioned that most women prefer not to be awake. No, I definitely don't need to remember this, thank you, I thought. Put me out.
He also gave us the reports of the blood work that had been done on Monday. The pregnancy hormones were low, but they were elevated enough to tell him that indeed conception had occurred. That, at least, validated the need for the D&C and removed all doubt as to whether I had actually been pregnant.
In the beginning of this ordeal, it had been difficult to think in terms of losing a baby. Because I did not have a positive pregnancy test, in my head it hadn't been a real pregnancy. But as a Catholic, I believe that life begins at conception. Dr. Wolanski had just confirmed through the blood work that conception had occurred. For the first time, I truly believed I had lost a baby. She or he was tiny, had lived only for a few days, but had lived nonetheless. My baby had died.
When they took me into the operating room, I lay staring up at the bright lights over the operating table. There was very little talk in the room as the staff made the final preparations for the procedure. There were few risks to the surgery, so the nurses did not need to reassure me that everything would be fine. And what could they say to make me feel any better about why I was there?
While I was in recovery, Dr. Wolanski stopped in our room to tell Aaron that everything had gone fine. Once I was back in the room, he came back and told us that there had been “some tissue” caught that was preventing things from resolving naturally. He had cleaned out the uterus and found nothing unusual. There were no fibroid tumors or physical defects to the uterus that would be cause for concern.
After an hour or so in my room, when the liquids they had given me to drink were staying down, Dr. Wolanski discharged me with instructions to take it easy for the next day or two. I should recover fairly quickly.
When we got home from the hospital after picking up Matthew, I went to retrieve the mail. There was a small package with my name on it. Inside was the cross I had ordered. I had only mailed the order on Monday—even if the order arrived on Tuesday and the package had been mailed the same day, delivery was awfully fast. Someone knew I needed this cross right now.
3
The anesthesia had left me feeling tired and foggy, and I went straight to my bed once we got inside. I slept off and on for the rest of the day while Aaron took care of Matthew.
It took me several days to recover from the surgery, longer than I expected. My insides felt battered and bruised, and I was still so very tired. Terri reminded me that it was not just the surgery from which I needed to recover. It was everything my body had been dealing with for the past two months.
Aaron had been trying very hard to be supportive, but he had no way to really understand what I was feeling. I didn't even know what I was feeling, other than empty. But he didn't seem to be feeling anything at all. He seemed so far away from me. I felt like there was a large gulf between us that had been growing throughout this ordeal, and it was one we couldn't bridge. On one side, he was going about his life as usual and I was lost and alone on the other. Going through the surgery experience with me had made it a bit more real to him, but he still was not looking at it as the loss of a child. To him, it seemed a “missed opportunity.”
A week after my surgery, we went to Camp Trinity, an annual family retreat weekend given by my parents' church. Saturday morning I got up and went to the morning prayer service while Matthew and Aaron were still asleep. The sun was just coming up, and the mist was rising off of the pond across from the second-floor porch as we gathered in the chilly air. The musicians had set themselves up at the outermost end of the porch, and the group of about thirty people had made a large circle along the railings and the back wall of the building.
Halfway through the service, the woman leading the singing invited anyone who wished to come forward and take a flower from the bucket by the table and place it in the vase in memory of someone they had lost. Tears began to silently slide down my cheeks. I had been to the Saturday morning service many times over the years, but I had forgotten this annual ritual. Perhaps if I had remembered it, I would not have gone. My parents were not there that morning, Aaron and Matthew were not there, and no one at Camp Trinity knew what I had just experienced. I felt alone in the crowd.
As I stood with my back resting against the supports of the second-floor railing with tears running down my face, I sensed the presence of arms come around me from behind, and I felt a voice whisper to me, “You are not alone. You can do this. Go ahead.” I took a deep breath and gathered my courage to make the short walk to the table in the middle of the circle. I put the flower in the vase for “someone special” and returned to my spot by the railing.
A few minutes later, the service ended with the exchange of greetings of peace, and I found myself greeting a long-time family friend, Chris. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“No, not really.” I knew she had seen my tears.
She touched my shoulder. “Who did you put the flower in for?”
The tears welled up again as I told her I had just had a miscarriage.
She enfolded me in a big hug. “I've been there, twice. I understand.” The hug was more than just a friendly greeting. It had a depth to it that made me feel that perhaps someone did understand.
She warned me: “Make sure you are not alone on your due date.”
Due date? I had never even gotten to the point of going to my first prenatal visit. “I don't have a due date,” I told her, looking her in the eye for the first time.
She smiled and rubbed my shoulder. “But you know when this baby would have been due.”
I nodded, slowly. “Sometime in the third week of April.” Even without a prenatal visit, I could calculate the months.
Chris smiled softly and squeezed my arm. “Don't be alone.”
Later in the weekend, I thanked Chris again for her support. I was so glad she had been there that morning. I told her about the experience at the railing of feeling hugged from behind when no one was there. I felt the presence of an angel there, and I am pretty sure that angel told me, “Now, go find Chris” as the service ended. God knew that I needed someone to provide a bit of comfort right then, and no one can do that better than someone who has been through it herself.
4
The process of working through the grief really began after Camp Trinity. I had not been able to deal with the emotional aspects of this loss until the physical sensations went away. But once we had taken care of that, the emotions hit hard. Terri knew right away when she saw me a few days after that retreat.
“How are you? It hit, didn't it?” The sadness must have shown on my face.
“Is it that obvious?” I asked.
“No, only if you know what to look for. I've been waiting for it. It had to come out at some point.”
Terri had lost a baby at 20 weeks, before we had become friends. In talking with her, at first I wondered what right do I have to be upset over my loss? Look at what Terri had gone through—this was nowhere near the same thing! But Terri continued to tell me that it doesn't matter if you are pregnant for several months or only a day—you lost a baby, and it's okay to grieve. Never once did she tell me her situation had been worse or more real for having happened later. Slowly, I began to see that if she was giving me permission to see our situations as equal, it was okay for to me to feel sad.
Several friends recommended books to me during this time, some on miscarriage, some just on grief. I had majored in psychology; I knew all about the stages of grief. The numbness of disbelief gives way to anger over the loss. Irritability, anxiety, and guilt can all be a part of that stage. Then after a while, depression sets in and finally, over time, acceptance. But it's one thing to know about grief; it's another thing to grieve. I had felt sadness when my grandparents had died—but nothing like the feeling of loss I now experienced. Knowing what stages of grief to expect did not make them go any faster. And the one person I really wanted to share this with wasn't experiencing our situation the same way I was.
Anger is a part of any grief process, and it needs to come out in some way. For me, most of it was directed at Aaron, though I tried hard not to let it actually show. I was angry that he didn't share my sadness and loss. He was still viewing this as a missed opportunity. My head understood why he didn't feel the same way I did. Because, in this pregnancy, he had never been an expectant father, he felt no sense of loss. It is hard to miss something you never knew you had. And he had not endured any of the physical loss, the bleeding, the surgery. How could he possibly see all this the same way I did? And yet, it was his baby, too. Why didn't he feel sad that we would never get to raise this child? I knew it would not be fair to let the anger come out at him for something he was unable to control. It would only hurt him and make him angry in response. But that didn't change the fact that I felt I was getting more support from my friends than from my spouse.
One night when we were talking, Aaron commented that “something important happened to you...” At that, the anger did erupt. “No!” I screamed. “To us! Something happened to us!”
But he had really summed it up. It had happened to me. I was dealing with this alone. What should have been our joy was my loss. And that just wasn't fair.
I began to view that early morning service at Camp Trinity as symbolic of the whole experience. I was there alone. Aaron and Matthew weren't there, my parents weren't there—none of the people closest to me were there to comfort me. And yet I was not alone, for the presence of God was very strong. The feeling of those arms around me let me know that even though I felt alone in the crowd, I was never actually alone. God was right there with me and would never leave.
While my head understood that, my heart felt so alone. Aaron seemed so far away and I desperately wanted to bridge the gap I felt between us. But I couldn't figure out how.
I had a long conversation about this dilemma with Sister Pat at our church. Sr. Pat suggested to me that perhaps we would not be able to bridge it. Perhaps this was one of those times in life when I must stand alone with God.
I felt more peaceful after that. Accepting that maybe Aaron couldn't enter that circle made it easier not to direct my anger at him.
In the middle of October, about three weeks after the retreat, I saw Dr. Wolanski for my post-operative check-up. My cycle started again that morning; as he had predicted, my flow was very heavy. I called the office to ask if I should reschedule the appointment. Don't worry about it, I was told. He's used to doing exams this way.
He might be. I'm not.
Though the exam was not any more uncomfortable, physically, than a regular gynecological check-up, having the waterproof pads put under me to absorb the blood flow while he poked and prodded made me feel even more exposed than usual.