All Things Considered
Content warning: Discussion of miscarriage and pregnancy loss. Please take care while reading.
Last week I had a miscarriage. A missed miscarriage.
Not only did the embryo stop growing inside me; my body apparently never got the eviction notice and continued to believe itself pregnant.
I was given three equally shitty options for dealing with this diagnosis, and I chose the fastest, most painless, and least bloody one: a D&C - which stands for Dilation (of my cervix) and Curettage (of my uterus). In hindsight, I realize that being given these choices at all is a privilege. Walking into a Church-run hospital and being offered a minimally painful way of resolving this with hardly a few days' wait, and being treated with dignity and empathy, is another.
What is there to say about this? This was one of the several worst case scenarios I had been worried about: miscarriage, abnormal NIPTs, something wrong in the anatomy scan. I suppose it is a small mercy that in the grand scheme of failed outcomes, this was one of the βbetterβ ones. Like most things in life, this could have gone better, but it could also have been much worse.
F. and I arrived at the clinic ninety minutes before my scheduled surgery. We sat in the waiting room, intermittently holding hands, people-watching, scrolling our phones. A little after noon I was called into the pre-operative waiting area along with an older Turkish woman. We were asked to change into hospital gowns, hairnets, cozy bathrobes, and flimsy plastic foot coverings so we wouldnβt have to walk around barefoot. I was told I would be waiting about ten minutes before being wheeled into the operating room.
I no longer know how long I actually waited. In retrospect it was probably closer to two hours, but time lost all meaning in that purgatory. Without my glasses I could only make out the blurry outlines of staff and co-patients. Without a phone or clocks in the room, my brain slipped into default mode, and the passage of time dissolved.
I had an absurd, fever-dream of a conversation with the older Turkish woman. Tearfully, in extremely broken German, she told me that my husband waiting outside was one of the good ones. She had seen him take my hand and declared that he was the right man to have children with (her own man, in her words, was not good for much, and such a man was not the one to have a family with - she had learned that the hard way).
She asked me why I was there, and told me fearfully that she was being operated on for suspected cancer. She cried out painfully when the nurse inserted an IV into her arm, turned to me, and said inshallah I would have beautiful children one day. She wanted to know if my mother-in-law was kind to me, nodding approvingly when I said indeed she was. She repeatedly asked what I was studying, despite my insistence that I hadnβt been a student in over a decade and attempts to explain my work. She told me I couldnβt be more than twenty years old. Perhaps she, too, wasnβt wearing her glasses.
I was alone for a period of time after they wheeled her in for surgery. In that liminal space and time I allowed myself to cry a bit, process this loss, and come to terms with the fact that I was now a part of an incredibly shitty but large club of women who had faced pregnancy loss. I felt a measure of gratitude for my body for getting me this far, and for being able to get pregnant at all. God knows I donβt nourish and treat her as well as I should. I mourned the plans F. and I had made for our potential August offspring. Speaking of plans, I recalled how excited I was to eventually tell my neighbor Ewa this news, to spend my summer maternity leave chatting in the garden with her, and here we were; there is neither Ewa, nor this pregnancy. I thought about odds - odds of conceiving within X months of trying, odds of a first-trimester miscarriage, odds of complications after the surgery. We went in knowing all the odds were in our favour, and I contemplated how meaningless those numbers felt when the worst had already come to pass.
Three days after leaving the hospital, F. and I stepped outside on an uncharacteristically clear January night and watched red-green waves of the Aurora Borealis dance above us. The sun has shone every day since. Two magpies arrive unfailingly each midmorning for their peanuts. A solitary wood pigeon makes his daily pilgrimage around my garden, pecking at the frozen soil. My physical and emotional pain ebbs and flows, but it dulls a little more with each passing day.
The metaphorical boulder of our lives has tumbled back down the hill, and we are ambling after it, preparing to begin the Sisyphean task of pushing it upward again.
Tomorrow will be a new day.
