Most anyone who has known me for any length of time, knows about my sweet angel daughter Ruth who I lost at 16.5 weeks. I do not hesitate to talk about her and my experience with miscarriage because I believe that the stigma and silence surrounding pregnancy loss should stop.I also talk about her because she is my daughter and I love her.
But something I don't often open up about are the details surrounding my miscarriage. The nitty gritty medical aspects of it. Today I am going to talk about that. This is your warning to stop reading if you would rather not hear about it.
Once it was confirmed that our baby no longer had a heartbeat, our midwives called the doctor on call for a consultation. He recommended that I be sent over to the hospital to start an induction, however he was going off shift and told them to call the doctor who would be coming on call to get orders sent over. The new doctor they called wanted to see me in his office before he would write any orders, so I drove across town to be seen. They took me in for another ultrasound to get more accurate sizing information. That ultrasound was even harder to sit through than the first one. They had a large tv screen that the ultrasound was shown on and I watched my daughter's lifeless body in high definition as they took those final measurements. She was 6 inches long and weighed 5.5 ounces. The ultrasound tech didn't say a word to me the entire time.
Allen and I waited in an exam room for 45 minutes to talk to the doctor. When he finally came in he was gruff and to the point. He didn't think that I should be induced but instead should have the "fetus" surgically removed. At this point I started sobbing and he told Allen to "get control of your wife".
It was at this point we should have gotten up and walked out of that room. But both of us were in shock and not thinking very clearly. I "got control" of myself enough to tell the doctor that I wanted to be able to see my baby. He told me that it wasn't a baby, it wouldn't look like a baby, and seeing it would scar me for life and would be a trauma that I would never recover from. He told me that the "tissue" was already decomposing ( this is not true because according to the ultrasound Ruth had died less than 24 hours earlier and my bag of water was completely intact) and there would be " nothing to see". He told us that he had just enough room on his surgery schedule to stick me in the next morning. There was no time to think about it, it was 5:30 in the afternoon on a Thursday, if I didn't make a choice right then I would have to wait and "be a tomb for a dead body" all weekend.And even then he wasn't sure when he would have time to induce me or put me back on the surgery schedule. At this point I almost completely lost it and Allen stepped in and said we would schedule the surgery. It was only then the doctor showed any compassion and put his hand on my shoulder and explained that I had done nothing wrong and was not at fault for the miscarriage. He then wrote me a prescription for a sedative and left the room. The whole interaction took less than 15 minutes.
I slept the sleep of the drugged that night and arrived at the hospital at 5 am. I signed a consent form
( that I really should have read more carefully) but the procedure was never really explained to me. I had no idea what a D&E was. I do now. A D&E is the same procedure they use in second trimester abortions. Everyone kept using the word remove and niave little me had no idea that meant using a vacuum and forceps to tear apart my daughters body. ( At that point the doctor had me convinced that there really wasn't a body left because it had decomposed) It wasn't until a year latter when I read a copy of the pathology report, listing the condition and size of my daughters body parts did I truly understand what had been done. It kills me inside to know the disrespect that was shown to my daughters body, but I have the solace of knowing that she was no longer there and felt no pain. This is not so of the thousands of babies who are aborted using this procedure.
It was surprising to me that I was not in too much physical pain after the procedure and was almost feeling normal again within a few days, besides the copious amount of bleeding. However after about a week I started having horrible cramps and intense pain. I was told this was normal as my uterus was just shrinking back down to normal size. But it wasn't normal. A month after the procedure I was still in pain and still heavily bleeding. I went back to the doctor but luckily saw someone else in the practice. He did an ultrasound and found that I had "retained products of conception" in other words the first doctor had done a crap job and left pieces of placenta inside of me. So I had to go back in and get a a D&C, where they manually scraped the sides of my uterus to make sure everything was gone. It was hellish and I was in pain for weeks. In the years since that miscarriage I have had six more miscarriages all before seven weeks. Doctors can not explain why but some have suggested that I might have scar tissue in my uterus from those procedures that makes in hard for a baby to implant.
No one could have prevented Ruth's death.No one could have prevented the heartache and pain Allen and I experienced because Ruth died. But the heartache and years of therapy I needed because I had no closure, because I was not able say goodbye to my daughter, that could have been prevented. The physical pain I had to endure and loss of subsequent pregnancies, that could have been prevented.
It was not prevented because my doctor viewed my baby's body as a clump of tissue that needed to be quickly and efficiently dealt with. It was not prevented because my doctor did not view me as an intelligent adult that should be given the proper information and time to make an informed consent. It was not prevented because I didn't know that I had options. I didn't feel empowered to ask questions and insist on the time I needed to process what had happened and how I wanted to handle it. It was not prevented because I didn't embrace "My body, My choice" and instead let doctors make the decision for me. So I am going to embrace the hashtag and #shoutyourabortion, to let women know that you do have a choice. I understand that sometimes, especially in cases of miscarriage before 12 weeks, a D&C or D&E is unavoidable and medically necessary for the life of the mother. I also understand that for some women it is easier, going through labor or miscarrying naturally is not something they feel equipped to handle. But it should be because you chose it, not because a doctor made you feel small and stupid and you thought it was your only choice.
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