Miscarriage: Same Song, Second Verse

Next week comes what would have been the due date for the first baby I lost. Six months ago I was thinking "Wow, I could be holding our new baby at the Thanksgiving table! But with my history, it'll probably be closer to Christmas, darn it". After that miscarriage, I forgot about it until I turned the calendar to November, and saw where I had written BABY!!!! in big block letters at the bottom of the page. I scribbled it out.

The next time, I knew better. Just after Josiah left for Ethiopia, I found out we were expecting again. But I only marked the weeks on the calendar page I was looking at. I knew the due date was around the boy's birthdays in May, but I tried not to think about that much.

At 8 weeks I was spotting and cramping, but it went away and I decided to ignore it. At 10 weeks, the midwives didn't hear a heartbeat. I was super sick. The last time I was that sick, I was pregnant with Asrat and also had stomach parasites at the same time. Surely, being that sick meant the pregnancy was going well? At 11 weeks I was spotting again and was sent for an ultrasound. "There's no easy way to tell you this..." said the nurse, but I already knew. After three kids, I know what a heartbeat sounds like and how very wrong the silence in that room was. Not only was there no heartbeat, but there was no form of a baby either. At that stage (and there was no question about the dates), there should have been. One of my regrets from last time was not having had even a glimpse of my baby, even by fuzzy ultrasound picture, before I lost him. This time I had the chance to see, only there was no baby there to see. Only a mass, which after a miserable day at the hospital, a D&C, and various and sundry tests, it was solidly confirmed that what had been growing in my womb was a molar pregnancy.

This left me hanging in midair. I couldn't crash, because there seems to be very little information about molar pregnancy, except that sometimes conception didn't happen but cells multiplied and grew in a wrong way, or sometimes conception did happen but growth was so immediately deformed that there was no possibility of a little heart ever beginning to beat, or sometimes in the midst of all the deformity there grew a little body that simply couldn't compete with the fast-growing molar cells. Even so, that's all googled information, and who's to say what's true or not, or what happened in my case? Was there ever a baby? If there was, did it live and then die, or just never lift off the runway in the first place? It's hard to fall apart when you don't know what you should be falling apart about.

I couldn't feel relief either, or closure. Molar pregnancy carries with it a risk of serious and long-term health problems, even cancerous growth. So every week for a while, and then every month for a whole year, I will go to a lab and have my blood drawn and look at my three little children around me and remember that I'm there because the fourth left early and the very existence of the fifth is in question.

I guess, at least, I can grieve a dream smashed, and hope crushed. That will have to do for now.