Reader Caution is advised: this is a descriptive narrative of traumatic medical event and miscarriage.
“Ouch!” I yelp in pain. The emergency room physician has accidentally pinched my cervix with her tenaculum, shooting an incredible pain throughout my entire body. It has temporarily roused me from the conscious, but semi-dream state I am floating in.
I am perfectly aware of bodies moving in and out of the room, the sensation of the speculum cutting into the wall of my vagina, and the constant spurting and pouring, as if from a hose, of blood between my legs. Yet, my vision is foggy, the world around me seems to be slipping away, only to re-concentrate in waves.
My husband, an emergency room nurse, stands at the bedside, helping the physician with suction as she works. He is off-duty, but he is not going to leave me without his care. The canister fills, and fills, and fills, as she removes clot after clot. She is attempting to visualize if there is anything simple to remove, which would stop the bleeding. The obstetrician is on her way.
Our process had started the night before, when I took the first dose of cytotec, a drug which causes contractions, to help expel our baby whose heart had already stopped beating. I had taken cytotec for a missed miscarriage once before, I knew the intensity of pain and bleeding awaiting me. I had trembled as I prepared to take the first dose, looking earnestly in my husband’s eyes for the courage. I needed to do this right then, as the help which was available from our family in caring for our 4 kids, would be unavailable for a week. I hadn’t wanted to deal with miscarrying without help. Fear had threatened to choke me.
I popped the pill in my mouth, feeling the characteristic burning under my tongue, as I waited for it to dissolve. The cramping started within minutes of dissolution. “Here we go,” I thought.
However, unlike my first experience, I didn’t start passing anything meaningful until well after taking the third dose. At that point, I was exhausted. I had been up throughout the night unable to sleep, pain creeping down my legs with each contraction, yet passing nothing.
Finally, two hours after the final dose, waves of contractions overtook me. Coming steadily, in perfect rhythm, every 2-3 minutes for the hours that followed. What captivated my mind was that this induced labor for a pregnancy at 12 weeks, felt no different than the unmedicated full-term births I have experienced. It felt impossible to endure, knowing that I wouldn’t have a baby to hold on the other side of all of the pain and effort. “What can I do?” I pondered to myself. Nothing. “The only way out, is through.”
I reached for my husband’s hand to support me, as I rode each contraction, and I internally begged God to relieve the pain. I felt that my uterus was getting very tired, and I began to feel afraid. I told myself, “one more contraction, and if there is no baby, we will go to the ER”. As that contraction came on, I prayed to the Lord to allow me the mercy of seeing my baby’s body, rather than having to have a D&C. I longed to mourn the memory of a body, rather than fragments of tissue.
The contraction eased. Nothing. I looked at my husband in resignation, “I need to go in. I can’t do this anymore. I have to let it go.” I knew the risks of bleeding and rupture, and I could feel that my uterus was in a state of exhaustion, just like a muscle at failure on the final rep of a hard set.
As I stood up, I felt a pop and a flush of fluid. There in the hat in the toilet, floating in a pool of blood, was a tiny baby.
“That’s our baby!” I exclaimed, just like I did with my living children. Yet, instead of picking up a child to embrace, I collapsed over my husband’s shoulders, in tears. The sobs rattled me, as he held me upright. The pain of this loss cut right through me. That was the baby we made, in our love for one another. A baby that our children loved before they ever saw her. A baby I felt in my system before it seemed humanly possible. A baby I wasn’t quite ready for, but loved. A baby I had bought sleeper jammies for one week prior, imagining the little feet that would fill them. A gift, given by God.
My husband and mother-in-law worked in tandem to help me, moving deftly, as skilled nurses. My mother-in-law, with tenderness, placed the baby’s body into saline. She had done this before for many women, she knew how fragile they could be. I took a gaze at my baby, noting the fingers and toes; so small, but clearly a human. I thought to myself: “People kill their babies at this size, do they even know how human they are?”, and I felt sick.
With their help, I lumbered onto the bed, trying to keep the chux pads wedged between my thighs to prevent blood from splashing onto our carpet. My mother-in-law rubbed and massaged my uterus in a rigorous attempt to encourage the placenta to release. I groaned in pain with each moment of pressure. The bleeding was heavy, but they weighed every pad, every hat filled with blood, every chux pad, and for awhile, I was okay.
I started to drift off to sleep when the sensation of thickening glue stretching between my legs woke me up. There was something large, and gelatinous there, and I started to experience sharp, deep pain in my uterus, like a balloon threatening to pop.
“I need to get up right now!”
My husband walked me to the bathroom. He peeled off the chux, and the pad, so carefully pinned between my legs. They were already saturated with blood. He took them to the small kitchen scale on the counter to be weighed. Gently, I attempted to remove the softball-sized clot that had formed across the entirety of my labia. As I peeled the clot away, bits of it bursting like grapes between my fingers, the sound of gushing liquid flowed into the hat below me.
“That isn’t urine!” I told my husband.
“Are you sure?” He asked me.
“One-hundred percent,” I affirmed.
Blood flowed out of me like an open faucet. Fear rose in my chest, as I realized that I was bleeding at a rate that would kill me. My husband meticulously weighed every ounce that left my body. As the number crept up to 750 mL of total blood lost, we realized I was officially hemorrhaging.
Suddenly, my world started to turn black. “I can’t breathe!” I shouted, wild-eyed, to my husband. He tried to calm me. “No, I CANNOT BREATHE!” I said, looking into his eyes pleadingly, trying to show between my limited, gulping-breaths that something was very wrong.
Calmly, he and my teenage son wrapped themselves under each one of my shoulders, and guided me to the car. The car ride to the hospital was a blur, as I laid completely flat, staring at the whirring flashes of green and blue blowing past me. One moment I was there, one moment I was not, only vaguely hearing the sound of my husband’s voice asking me if I was still awake.
Once at the hospital, he sat me into a wheelchair, and whirled me in through the metal detector. He had called ahead to let them know I was coming. As I sat in the waiting room, receiving my wrist band from the frowning receptionist, a blue chux pad peeked through my edges of my pants for all to see. I threatened to tilt off the wheelchair, my head dipping and bobbing, like a buoy at sea, as I attempted to cling to consciousness. With force, another gush of blood flowed out of me. I felt it seep through the pad, the chux and my pants onto the wheelchair beneath me.
“Oh my gosh, there is so much blood. It is everywhere.” I said to whomever was listening.
I was humiliated considering that my blood might leave a trail through the waiting room, to horrify whoever would be there next. One of my husband’s coworkers had walked through the door at that moment to grab me.
“I don’t care about that.” He said in a gentle and reassuring voice.
I knew then that I was in good hands, and felt that I needed to surrender to their care. The nurse quickly wheeled me back into a room, and helped me get onto the gurney. The room filled with people. As they pulled off my blood-soaked clothing, to change me into a gown, and start an IV, I looked up into the lights above me. In that moment I felt a great sense of peace that I would be okay, and that my kids would be okay, even if I died. I simply knew with clarity, that God had it all in His hands, and I gently drifted into a kind of a dream.
Jess and The Fiat 