3 broken hearts

I woke up this morning and before I opened my eyes I prayed for yesterday to be a bad dream. I prayed to wake up again on the last day of May to a different day and a different outcome. But I looked at my phone and there it was: June 1st. I wasn’t ready to accept that life didn’t stop for us. That our pain after our appointment yesterday wasn’t big enough to stall the month of June. But there it was the sun rising and entering through the window, Lenard meowing for his breakfast, the calendar’s reminder about the painters coming to the new house… And then, before I had time for a second prayer, Nick’s alarm went off. His eyes desperately looking for mine trying to check that I was fine or maybe hoping for a smile that would make him also believe that yesterday was just a bad dream…

But it wasn’t.

On Monday night we went to bed both excited and nervous, but more than anything happy for what Tuesday was supposed to bring. Our first FET resulted in a pregnancy that according to the blood tests was progressing very great. Now it was the time to see things in the ultrasound, measure the embryo and hear the heartbeat. According to an app that I downloaded the minute my pregnancy was confirmed, our baby was about to transition in size from a sweet pea to a blueberry. Then the ultrasound showed that it never even made it to a sweet pea. Our baby stopped growing somewhere around half of week 5. Today I would have reached my week 7.

Doctor was as puzzled as we were. On one hand, he couldn’t explain why I hadn’t had any bleeding or pain given the fact that the embryo was already detached from the uterus and blood could be seen around the sac. On the other, he was feeling–like us– very optimistic since the embryo was chromosomally normal and my beta numbers came very strong from the beginning, so he couldn’t understand a priori what went wrong. What he knew for sure is that the pregnancy wasn’t viable and that it needed to be removed as soon as possible in order to avoid an infection.

He was extremely sensitive and gave Nick and I a lot of time to process the information and grieve by ourselves in the examination room. I would be forever grateful to him and his team for that. He also decided to start testing for other possible reasons for the miscarriage, and ordered a bunch of blood tests (exactly 15 tubes) to see how my inmune system is responding to all of this. I will see him again tomorrow for a D&C, a procedure intended to remove any dead tissue and blood from the uterus that will be painless since they will put me under.

At least physically painless, because the emotional pain that Nick and I have been having since yesterday it’s hard to anesthetize. Tuesday was supposed to be such a happy day for us, and we left the clinic with an appointment for a D&C and 3 broken hearts. Our hopes are also starting to crumble since it seems that with every bridge we cross, a new problem arises. And we are afraid that at some point we will run out of answers. But for now, I don’t even want to think about the following steps. Now I need to mourn the loss of my baby, and take care of my husband and myself.

I am aware that many women have been through a miscarriage at some point in their lives –many through more than one– so I recognize that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that this is just a lost battle, not a lost war. I just need time to adapt to my new reality, to adjust my expectations and to find ways to not let this define me in terms of failure. I know that I did, and we did, everything we could and that the final outcome wasn’t under my control anymore.

Still I ask my baby-boy every minute of my day to forgive me for not being able to take care of him, and I know he will. I know that someday I will reunite with my angel baby and he will tell me why it wasn’t the right time yet to meet mom and dad. And it will be ok. And we will be ok.

Our dear baby Green, whatever your spirit is right now, know that you were very loved from the beginning, not only by mom and dad, but also by your grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends who knew of your existence. You will be forever in our hearts as the first one who made us feel like parents.

Forever grateful,

Carolina and Nick