I get a positive test result on a Tuesday. The next Tuesday I start spotting in the afternoon. I go to class, but I know what's happening and so I let my students go early, tell them I am suddenly not feeling well, that I need to leave.
Over and over I search "implantation bleeding" "bleeding early pregnancy" and then, finally, I dare to type the words I am scared of. I wonder what the word is for this automatic reflex of the 21st century, the way we dump our keyword worries into the machine. Jeff has a long day and evening at work, and so I do not text him. What can he do? What can I do except go home and make dinner for the toddler and rush anxiously back and forth from the bathroom? When Jeff comes home I watch him repeat my search terms, and he says, "It says 50% of women experience bleeding and still have a health pregnancy," which I know already. But this isn't that. I call my OB. They say to wait and call again in the morning.
In the morning my OB says to go to the emergency room. I need an ultrasound and their ultrasound machine is in use all day. I am exhausted. I didn't sleep. Somehow I feel a little grateful for that. That this night and morning my overwhelming feeling is simply: tired. My mom takes Fitz and Jeff takes me. There is no one in the waiting room at the ER and I walk up and tell them what is happening and this is the first moment I want to cry, but the nurses bring me back right away and I don't have to keep talking, and that's a relief.
It takes a few hours. My phone is almost dead and somehow I didn't think to bring a charger, and so mostly I just sit and stare at white walls and bleed and sit up when the nurse comes to checks me in, when the phlebotomist comes to take my blood, when the doctor comes to explain the next steps, when the ultrasound technician comes to peer into the center of me. Because I always want to be the good patient, the easy patient, the one who is mostly fine, I try to give half smiles and nod agreeably. I ask for the big pads I know the nurses have stocked and they bring me a few and those mesh underwear everyone tells you to steal after you give birth. Jeff and I talk a little, we laugh about something Fitz has done recently. When I finally text my friends, the ones I texted the positive pregnancy test to the week before, I do cry a little bit.
Every person who comes in is a woman. This doesn't matter and it does. Finally, the doctor comes back to tell me what she wouldn't say at first but what I've known for many sleepless hours, now. It's a miscarriage. "It's a completed miscarriage" is what she says, which is another type of relief. It was so early. It's not complicated. There's nothing I could have done. The pregnancy wasn't going to develop normally and so my body did what it needed to do.
I stop seeing ads for maternity clothes and baby keepsakes, so there must be some mercy in the algorithm.
I go to the follow up appointment with my OB and she's almost too kind. "I'm fine," I say. "I'm sad, but I'm fine." She nods and looks concerned but what I'm thinking about is the fancy coffee place downstairs and when I can try again. I don’t really want the sympathy. What I want is for this to be over. I still feel tired, and because this is ordinary (isn't it?), because life is going to barrel on and it's been a couple days and because if there is anything I've learned to do in my thirties it's to let go of those potential futures like balloons into the sky. You can't keep them or they'll become deflated, hanging in the corner of your living room long past their expiration dates.
I turn thirty-five. Fitz turns two. I drink more than one glass of champagne. I post about the miscarriage in my moms group and cry, for the last time, at the kindness that follows, at every comment that says, "me, too" and "I know exactly."
Because this is America having a miscarriage costs $600, after insurance.
I make room for these disappointing months, adjusting the weight to carry a new sadness. We pay the bill for the long white hours in the ER. Days get dark, but I'm fine.
Recommended Reading from September & October
“All the Pregnancies I Couldn’t Talk About”, Amy Webb at The Atlantic
“After a Miscarriage, Grief, Anger, Envy, Relief, Guilt,” Jessica Grose at the NYT