Just FYI that this post will contain triggering content around miscarriage and first trimester pregnancy loss, and also will be pretty graphic so if you don’t want to read about bodily functions or are currently pregnant/sensitive to the topic of loss you’ve been warned! Also, I am not a medical expert, this is just my personal experience. Don’t take anything I say as medical advice, duh.
Never imagined I’d be saying this again, but a couple weeks ago I had another miscarriage.
I want to share my experience to normalize this horrible yet super common experience, and help end the stigma that keeps women feeling isolated and alone. Writing it out is also really helpful to my own healing process.
Additionally, I’ve found that it’s really hard to find information online around what’s “normal” for your body to do during an actual experience of pregnancy loss, and our bodies can do some really weird shit.
It’s even harder to find information for having multiple NON-consecutive miscarriages. It turns out that every time you’re pregnant, you’re back to the same statistical probability of loss, regardless of how many healthy babies you’ve had before.
I am doing well, now that I’ve been able to process and make it to the other side of the physical process.
But it still sucked big time.
The biggest blow was that I just never expected this to happen again.
I lost my first pregnancy in 2018, and it was completely devastating.
I went on to have a healthy, uncomplicated, full term pregnancy and delivered a perfect healthy baby boy in 2019.
I assumed I’d already had my fair share of “bad luck” and wouldn’t have any more issues in baby making. Well, sometimes life has other plans.
Trying for Baby #2
We always talked about having two kids, but after recovering from the newborn stage and then going through the pandemic, it took me until Thomas was about 2.5 before I finally felt ready to try again. By “ready” I mean, I didn’t start stress-crying from the mere thought of going through the newborn stage again.
I love being a mom, I love babies, I love my child more than anything but parenting a baby/toddler is not my favorite thing in the world. No one really admits that because we’re afraid of being judged or feel guilty but it’s ok if you don’t love every second of parenting. This sh*t is all-consuming hard!
So anyways.
We decided to go for it, and I ended up getting pregnant a lot faster than I anticipated. After everything we went through to have Thomas (we’re lucky not to deal with fertility issues, but it still took a year of trying/loss/trying to get pregnant with him), I was really happy and thought hey, maybe this time will just be easy!
Insert dramatic voice…
IT WAS NOT TO BE.
From the beginning I was waiting for the first trimester nausea and food aversions to hit me, but they never really did. The biggest and immediate symptom I felt was a raise in my resting heart rate and it took longer for me to recover after a run. I was extra fatigued and had a little bit of nausea if I got too hungry, but not to the level that I experienced with Thomas. I had lighter symptoms with my first pregnancy that ended with loss so I was a tiny bit on edge but not really concerned since everyone told me “every pregnancy is different,” so I considered myself lucky.
Here we go again…
In mid-July, my parents came up together to visit us for the first time since we moved to Michigan last fall. My dad and I were registered to run a 10k trail race Saturday morning with some friends that I’d been training for.
That Friday I hit 7 weeks of pregnancy, and that evening I noticed a tinge of pink blood on the toilet paper when I went to the bathroom.
I had an immediate and intense sense of de ja vu back to my first pregnancy, and my heart dropped through the floor. Spotting can be normal and safe during the first trimester, but I just knew this was not right.
I spent the rest of the evening completely freaking out on the inside and feeling like I was trapped in a living nightmare. I told my mom what was going on (we hadn’t planned on telling our parents about the pregnancy until later) and by the time I went to bed I gave my anxiety and stress up to God and felt a little calmer. My main concern was making it through the 10k the next morning.
The next morning the spotting was still really light and I didn’t have any other symptoms, so I attempted to swallow a little food and drove out to the ski hill where the event was being held with my dad.
Regular Anna would have loved the trail run. We ran up and down hills in the beautiful woods for six miles, then had to climb all the way up the ski hill and back down. Pregnant/potentially miscarrying Anna felt like she was going to pass out… but I made it and actually finished within 30 seconds of my personal goal time, ha.
I spent the rest of the day resting and recovering from the race, and Sunday we said bye to my parents. I started to feel some cramping and the bleeding got heavier, more like a period.
First thing on Monday morning I called the OB office where I was scheduled to have my first appointment in mid-August to cancel that appointment and let them know I was pretty sure I was having a miscarriage. The awkward part was that I hadn’t established myself at the new office yet or come in to confirm the pregnancy, so there were some communication errors between myself and the front desk receptionist, and I don’t think the assistants or midwives were actually informed I was having issues.
(Lesson learned: if you know you want kids in the near future, establish yourself at an OB/GYN as soon as you move to a new location so they have you in the system!)
Since I had been through this rodeo before and thought I knew what to expect, was at peace with losing the pregnancy by this point, and it didn’t seem like a medical emergency to me (in terms of bleeding or pain), I figured I’d just wait at home until the pregnancy tissue passed.
But it didn’t…
Getting diagnosed with a missed miscarriage
I just continued to have medium bleeding and off and on cramping. So on Tuesday I called back and had some blood work ordered, which came back indicating my progesterone was low but hcg (pregnancy hormone) was still high.
So on Wednesday I had to call back AGAIN and waited all day to hear back from a midwife, who was able to schedule me for an ultrasound with an OB on Thursday morning.
This entire week was just incredibly stressful since I assumed the pregnancy was a goner, but still wasn’t positive what was actually happening. Someone close to me recently had an ectopic pregnancy so I was paranoid of ruling that out too.
Finally Thursday morning rolled around and I had a great experience with the OB. I chose this practice based on the amazing reviews and the fact that it was a joint OB/midwives group (which I had and loved with Thomas’ pregnancy and delivery) so it was a relief to finally get past the admin and into the providers’ sphere.
Through ultrasound we confirmed there was a gestational sack and mass of tissue remaining in my uterus, but no heartbeat or sign of life which was a relief to me and basically what I expected to find. With my first miscarriage there was still a weak heartbeat visible on the u/s the morning I passed it, which made the experience extra hard and traumatizing. This time, it didn’t feel like I was losing an actual baby, just an nonviable pregnancy. I know it all sounds horrible, but I was just so determined to have a less negative experience this second time around and maintain as positive a mindset as possible.
More positive takeaways in consulting the OB were that my fertility is not a problem, and Thomas is the best evidence that my body can create a full term healthy pregnancy and baby so there are no major underlying genetic abnormalities. Also, my uterus is really good at sticking onto whatever it thinks is a baby… it never relaxed in between contractions while in labor with T for 14 hours so just further confirmation I have a powerhouse uterus. Yay? Lolz.
So I was officially diagnosed with a “missed miscarriage,” which means the pregnancy stopped developing but my body didn’t catch the loss and was still hanging onto the fetal tissue and producing pregnancy hormones.
Ultimately my OB thought it was another unfortunate case of random bad luck (statistically it’s estimated that up to 25% of pregnancies end in loss, especially once you’re 35 or older which I am now).
I was prescribed four rounds of Cytotec, a medication that triggers the uterus to contract, told to pound the ibuprofen and expect the period from hell, assured that I’d pass everything within 12 hours, warned to go to the ER if I started hemorrhaging blood, and sent on my way. Woo!
Luckily Ben works from home and had a lighter day so he was able to watch Thomas while I was taking care of myself (side note: it is so hard to lose a pregnancy while also parenting an energetic toddler who has no clue what’s going on… I literally don’t know how women do this if they don’t have support or time off from work… will not tangent down my womens’ rights and healthcare soap box at this time…) so I went to the pharmacy to pick up the Cytotec (had to confirm with the pharmacist that I was not using it to give myself an abortion before he’d fill it *eyeroll*) and some other essentials, then came home to take the first dose and set myself up on the couch with a heating pad.
I took a round of the meds every 6 hours for 24 hours.
And waited.
And waited.
They triggered really intense cramps, not just uterine cramps but my entire lower half of my torso below my stomach felt like it was getting punched from the inside.
Sitting around, waiting to pass the pregnancy tissue, and having no clue how bad or bloody things were going to get, made for a pretty horrible night.
Since I’d been through it before I kind of knew what to expect, but I’m not sure if that made the anticipation easier or worse.
I barely slept that night between the stress and the pain, but watching the latest season of Love Island UK got me through.
HIGHLY recommend this show if you are going through something tough! Last time I watched Say Yes to the Dress, which is also great. Something completely unrelated to having babies, but related to other people going after their hopes and dreams, with a dose of enough juicy drama and colorful personalities to take your mind off reality.
I also recommend telling a close inner circle friend or family member or two so you can have someone to be your support outlet through the process, especially anyone who has gone through the same thing or has the emotional capacity to hold you through your darkest times, because it is just so freaking lonely and isolating. And your partner can love on you and go through their own personal grief journey but they will never truly feel what it’s like from the inside.
I finally went to sleep around 4am, woke up at 7am to take my third round of Cytotec and passed a relatively small clomp of tissue when I went to the bathroom that looked like what I’d seen on the ultrasound screen. By small, I mean around 1.5”-2” circular clot with no extra bleeding. Much less graphic than I was anticipating.
It was honestly so anticlimactic I was almost disappointed. Like I just went through all of this, for that?! Kind of like when you’re a kid and there’s a tornado siren and you pack your favorite toys into your pillowcase and hang out in the basement, and then there’s no storm and you have to go right back to bed.
By this time it was Friday, a full week since I’d started bleeding.
I continued to have really bad stomach ache from the Cytotec and no appetite all day, and couldn’t sleep again due to the cramping but the bleeding was still light to medium.
On Saturday my stomach started to feel better and around 11am I passed another significant tissue clomp. I also had some pretty bad diarrhea which I assumed was a side effect of the medication and all the lower body cramping.
On Sunday I finally had no more stomach cramps, hooray!
And then I emerged, a beautiful butterfly! J/k. This is getting a little repetitive and sounding like the Very Hungry Caterpillar.
By Tuesday all the bleeding had completely stopped. The abruptness surprised me after how long and drawn out everything had been up until that point.
The rest of the week I felt more like myself than I had in a few months, as I’m assuming the rest of the pregnancy hormones cleared out and I got my energy and mental clarity back again. First trimester sucks!
OMG IT NEVER ENDS
AND THEN…
Over the following weekend, I started having weird stretchy pinkish discharge, and uterine cramps that turned into more of the bad lower stomach cramps. Nooooooo. I had another 24-48 hours of the exact same post-cytotec symptoms, intestinal pain and diarrhea, to the point that I wondered if I had caught a GI virus? It was weird because it was the exact same but it had been 10 days since the miscarriage so it couldn’t have been side effects to the meds.
All I can think of is that my uterus was doing its little “last stand” to clear out ANY residual gunk.
A similar thing happened to me the exact same time (10 days) after my first miscarriage too, it just felt different. That time was completely debilitating uterine cramps, with no bleeding but I was still passing some brown tissue.
This time, there was no bleeding or tissue, but another few rounds of lovely diarrhea, then I had a little of that post-GI bug feeling like your digestive system is burned out and hurts after eating any food.
I warned you this would be graphic! I want to share anything just in case anyone else has had a similar experience because having a miscarriage is such a unique and WTF thing.
At the time of writing this, it has been two full weeks since I took the cytotec and I finally feel completely back to normal, physically and energetically.
If the weird cramping returns I will call the doctor, otherwise I’m going to wait until my follow up appointment in a couple weeks to discuss everything and get more blood work done to confirm the hcg is cleared and my menstrual cycle is getting back to business.
If everything goes like it did last time, I expect to get an actual period from hell in a couple weeks, then back to regular cycles.
How I’m doing, and what’s next
Since I don’t feel like I need any more time to grieve or emotionally process, we will get back on the TTC wagon after I get my period back, and pray for no more bad luck.
Honestly my main emotions right now are peace in this journey, gratitude that I can enjoy the rest of summer being not-pregnant, and annoyance that this happened to me again and that I will have to go through the first trimester again for the FOURTH time, without having more babies to show for it. Blah.
Losing your very first pregnancy is extra hard because you don’t know if your body is capable of getting pregnant again or even having a baby, so knowing that my first loss resulted in Thomas (who is the best!) makes me really really optimistic and faithful that our next baby will be worth the wait.
What I learned
Every pregnancy is different, every miscarriage is different.
It still amazes me what our bodies are capable of!
I’ve learned there are 3 main types of miscarriage, kind of like what I think of as the 3 different types of birth.
-You can miscarry “naturally” which is called expectant management (like waiting for your body to go into labor on its own). This is what happened with my first loss.
-You can take medication which is called medical management (like being induced if baby is being stubborn or medically necessary). This is common if you have a missed miscarriage where your uterus doesn’t realize it’s hanging onto a non-viable embryo, like I did this second time.
-You can get surgery with a D&C (kinda like having a c-section). This can happen if your body doesn’t naturally expel all the tissue, or if you have a missed miscarriage farther along in your pregnancy.
I mean obviously it is not like childbirth at all… but it kind of is.
You don’t have to push a 6-10 pound turkey out of your vagina, and recovery is probably faster than with a full term baby.
But a miscarriage is more than just a “bad period.”
There is extra gestational tissue in your uterus that will be released, which can range anywhere from mildly gross to extremely traumatic depending on how far along you are and your personal experience.
And even if it’s the early stages of pregnancy, your body is still pumping full of extra hormones and those hormones will crash afterwards so you might have mood swings (on top of the full spectrum of emotions around loss), energy changes, even weird gunk in your nipples especially if you’ve breastfed before.
There is no right or wrong way to FEEL about a pregnancy loss. You might feel relieved, happy, sad, disappointed, or need months or years to grieve. Most likely you’ll feel a mix of emotions. Your partner will go through their own process. It is very helpful to see a therapist to process it all, or at least share with a trusted friend.
From a physical standpoint, anything weird you experience is “normal” and most likely completely fine unless you are experiencing an ectopic pregnancy, have extreme pain and/or gushing blood and need the ER. Good times.
If you experience spotting at any point in pregnancy, call your medical provider ASAP (don’t hesitate to use the pager if it’s a weekend or the office is closed) and ask to have blood work ordered and an ultrasound as soon as possible. I wish I had advocated for myself a little harder right away just for the peace of mind it would have saved me.
I truly believe that early pregnancy loss is not your body failing you, but rather your embryo “failing” and your body doing its job.
Remember that at least 15-20% of pregnancies end in loss. Many times before a person even realizes they’re pregnant.
Sometimes there are things we can do to support our hormones and bodies in holding a healthy pregnancy but most of the time it’s just random genetic abnormalities that you have zero control over.
Giving up control is hardest part of trying to grow a family. Each healthy baby is truly a miracle, it’s insane when you really look at what has to happen.
But through the process we can grow so much if we choose to see it as a spiritual journey of surrender, faith, trust, and love.
Your body didn’t fail you - it is protecting you. Your body is wise and strong. Your healthy baby is on their way. Your family will be complete in perfect timing. Your life is unfolding according to divine plan held with love by the creator of the universe.
I can’t wait to meet our future baby when they decide it’s time to arrive. I know they will be 💯 worth the wait, just like Thomas was. And every day until then I am working hard to shift my anxiety brain to live in love and not fear.
xo Anna