Little Death

This week I had a miscarriage.  Troubling symptoms had been accruing for some time until they began to suggest the inevitable, the irrevocable, but it was still a hard, hard thing to see what we had begun to talk of as our baby so still under ultrasound, the same size as three weeks earlier and without a heartbeat.

Events, as I suggested earlier, give rise to choices, and thanks to the prompt organising and impeccable paperwork of our midwife, we spent Thursday in the day surgery at the hospital, where the kindness and warm efficiency of all the staff did much to sustain us through what was a difficult day.  In between the consultation and the surgery (which was what we chose from three options offered us) we walked in the city gardens on to which the hospital doors open.  It was a nor’west day with bright sunshine and the familiar routes seemed new, or perhaps just different.  We took a circuitous route, from bonsai collection to herb garden to rooms of flowering pot plants, cactii and orchids; we followed the river and talked, in our usual free-wheeling way, about our usual things: aesthetics and political philosophy and pop culture.  It was both memorial and distraction; it was the last formal thing we did as a three.

The pre-operative drugs I consented to take brought side effects in greater intensity than the consent forms suggested and I wondered if the pain was like labour at all.  I couldn’t concentrate on anything and struggled to find blank space into which to stare in the crowded waiting room.  Some of us were already in our gowns and swaddled in the pre-heated blankets that kept our hands warm and veins fat, while others stayed in their street clothes.  Those awaiting what I presume were cataract operations had a large marker-pen “X” on one side of the brow, above one eye.  The señor and I kneaded each other’s fingers and made eye contact, then didn’t, as the drug-pain overtook me.

After the surgery (now known not as D&C but as ERPOC) I was fed sandwiches–which previously were forbidden–and we went home with clear information and instructions.  It was the first time in a hospital setting that almost everyone looking after us was a peer; indeed, one the last things the anaesthetist mentioned before I fell asleep was that he and I were born just twenty-four days apart.  This kind of chat–the sort of thing friends-of-friends might exchange in a pub–was typical of the bedside manner throughout our experience, even as it was accompanied by solicitous kindness.  This, as I’ve suggested already, meant much.

Our home is filled with flowers and gifts and our inboxes the kind words of friends and family who are feeling our bereavement too.  There are so many worse things that can go wrong with a pregnancy or childbirth.  The first nurse who saw us explained that the most common course of our experience is some fault of single sperm or ovum, a guaranteed outcome of a random beginning.  To grow seven weeks in utero and then die was all this embryo would ever have been able to do.  This is a good piece of reasonable information, a counterbalance to that retained longing, that notion that we didn’t want a baby, we wanted this baby.  How glad I am that we had that early scan, that we saw its heart beating in what would have been its last days.

Tagged as: miscarriage, pregnancy