Pregnancy After Miscarriage: What It's Like the Next Time

It was literally one of the worst moments of my life. I had felt crampy, as if I had a stomach bug. But when I went to the bathroom, I found blood.

I was miscarrying. I was nearly three months pregnant with what I hoped was a girl, and she was leaving me. My baby was dying.

My Tragic Miscarriage

She would have been my first child with my new husband, a man I had loved and admired since we were teenagers. When I was sixteen, I'd carved his name into a red candle and burned it slowly. He bore the last name I had written behind mine over and over, Jamie Wilson Jamie Wilson Jamie Wilson, in that crush-laden teenage mantra every girl chants.

And I had imagined this baby so many times: blonde curly hair, blue eyes, dimples like his, an enchanting smile that, like mine, hardly ever left her face.

But now, two years into our marriage, that baby was dying. My husband had left two days earlier for a training course, and would be gone for a month. It was just me and my boys, and the gore that would have been my baby.

I called my doctor, who I hadn't even seen yet; we had waited til after a vacation to make the appointment. It was late on a Friday afternoon, and he told me I would need to come in on Monday morning, first thing.

I spent the whole weekend sweating, in pain, afraid to take aspirin or other painkillers because the bleeding was worse than I wanted it to be. I lay on towels, which I staggered downstairs daily to wash because blood seeped through menstrual pads to stain them. My two sons were wonderful; the ten-year-old cooked TV dinners for himself and his brother, brought me water and anything I asked for, and ran to my neighbor's house whenever I needed anything he couldn't handle.

I couldn't tell my husband, though, and avoided answering the phone. I didn't know for certain what was happening - or I was just denying the reality.

Monday I went in, wearing menstrual pads that felt like diapers. The doctor saw me immediately when the nurses told him I was obviously in pain; he found no heartbeat, though he did find the baby. Almost always, he said, there was something wrong with the fetus when this happened. Usually a genetic flaw, or an error in development. The next one would probably be fine.

I didn't care. It was too late. "So I lost my little girl."

The doctor started to speak. "We don't know the sex - " he stopped.

I just looked at him. "She can be anything I want her to be now, can't she?"

He handed me a box of tissue and discretely left the room.

I called my husband that night to tell him, and of course he insisted on coming home. I insisted equally strongly that he stay right where he was. The training he was going through was special; he'd been hand-picked to go through it, and it could make a huge difference in his career. "I'm fine. And you can't do anything that you couldn't do in a month. The doctor says there is nothing they can do except give me a D&C on Friday, and I have a ride to and from the hospital already."

He didn't argue - smart man. It did take me the whole month to recover physically, though. Emotionally, it still hurts today.

My Joyful New Beginning

On Christmas Day 2006, by our count, I conceived again. It was a year and a half, approximately, since I'd had the miscarriage. I knew right away that I was pregnant; I felt the implant, a sharp sting in my side a couple days later (a few women in a few pregnancies feel this).

This was my fifth pregnancy, but it was so very different from the others! I was much older, for one thing. But more importantly, I had trouble believing in the reality of a pregnancy. I had to force myself to take the right vitamins, to watch what I ate, to not drink alcohol. I didn't have any real morning sickness, only a couple days of extreme nausea and then terrible heartburn. I was tired frequently. I had few cravings, primarily for banana splits (probably the potassium).

But the pregnancy wasn't real to me except when I was afraid of losing her. I had bad dreams about miscarrying, about losing her after she was born, about her disappearing. During the day, any little pain in my side terrified me. I was afraid to exert myself, afraid to drive even (though I did it anyway). Some of it was hormonal, of course, but there were times I'd cry for fear of losing this one.Not until I got through the first trimester - the most dangerous period for miscarrying - did I calm down.

But she wasn't real to me until a month ago, when we first saw her on the sonogram. She was blobby, and we could see her bones, brain, heart. She kept shifting away from the technicians, driving them nuts as they tried to see her face.

And then they caught her, perfect nose and eyes, her arm shielding her face as if telling them all to go away. I watched my husband's eyes fill with tears as he looked at his daughter with wonder, and wiped my own tears away. "Well," the technician said, smiling, "she's perfect. Right on time, right size, and everything exactly as it should be."Now, finally, she is real. My Scarlett Ann. And I'm getting to know her slowly through her kicks and fidgets, even though I won't meet her formally for another four months.

I'm really looking forward to it.