Today is Mother’s Day. And today is 4 weeks, a month, since I had my miscarriage. My very traumatic miscarriage. So, let’s talk about it. Finishing the experience from Part 1, here we go.
I left off my last post talking about that Monday being relatively normal with more slight spotting after learning of my pregnancy loss in the ER that previous Sunday. Now, this is going to get a little graphic, so fair warning. The spotting was brown. And it was coming out in hundreds of tiny, I mean itsy bitsy, specks. Like just really tiny specks, but a lot of them. Not really blood, just these brown specks. And that continued through Monday.
I had taken that Monday and Tuesday off of work to grieve and mourn. Honestly, I had made my sub plans for Monday and they were going to be the same for Tuesday, so it was an easy deal. And it turns out it was a darn good thing I was home on Tuesday.
I hadn’t gone grocery shopping that week yet. Normally I do my grocery shopping on Sunday mornings. But, as you know, that Sunday I spent in the ER rather than the grocery store. By Tuesday morning, I felt better enough to go grocery shopping. Now, I said that Monday was better in terms of my symptoms, and they were with the spotting, but the cramps had started to get bad. I had heard women say that miscarriage cramps are the same as contractions because your body is literally expelling the baby, this fetus, as you do when you give birth. I’ll say that I thought contractions couldn’t be that bad, but let me tell you, they really are that bad. The cramps I started to get on Monday night were really, really bad. And they came in waves, as contractions do. I got out the heating pad and had taken some ibuprofen and tried to treat it at home. And then on Monday night, I went to bed.
So, back to Tuesday morning. I decide to go grocery shopping because it needs to be done. My husband will sometimes do the grocery shopping with me but usually he prefers to stay home while I do. Luckily, this time he decided to come with. I had started to feel sick on Tuesday morning. Sick in the way that’s like, these cramps really really suck, they’re coming in waves, let’s make this quick because this sucks and I’m feeling miserable. I had even commented on it a few times to my husband and family about how bad the cramps were becoming.
I drove to the grocery store. I always do (partially because I keep my reusable bags in my car). The cramps were there but I figured I could manage. We started the shopping trip as usual, going to the produce, only this time silently mourning the fruit we sought as they had just recently been markers of the baby that never grew. After the produce aisle, we stopped to get donuts. We deserved it. We needed comfort food. Then we stopped by the frozen treats aisle to get some ice cream. Again, comfort food. We picked out a couple flavors and were about to move on with our shopping trip when the cramps hit again. I mean to the point that I had to stop and grab the wall for a second. Yeah, truly like a woman in labor. I even thought that, as I stood there in pain, clutching my abdomen, that anybody who looked at me would think I was acting like I was in labor. And I kind of was, symptomatically.
We carried on through the grocery store with the cramps hitting every few minutes. They started to get more intense. Towards the end of our shopping trip, where we stop to look at the chips we want to eat with our sandwiches for the week, it was becoming unbearable. I knew I needed to get out of that store, and fast. We hurried to finish up and went to check out at the self-checkout lanes, like usual. I was feeling horrible by this point. Horrible to the point that you don’t care how you act in public. So I started ordering my husband around, to “give me that, now, hurry,” about each product. The employee probably thought I was rude and bonkers. But I was beginning to feel true agony. I thought I was going to throw up. I finally finished checking out and told my husband, “I have to get out of here.” He grabbed the cart and hurried after me. I don’t think that I ran to my car, but it was pretty close. I hustled. I knew I was going to throw up. I got into the driver’s seat of my car, feeling incredibly miserable and horrible, grabbed a reusable grocery bag I kept in my car (one of my favorites, I’ll add), and threw up into it. Right there, in the parking lot, with my non-tinted windows. I hadn’t eaten anything yet that morning so there wasn’t really anything to throw up, but don’t tell my body that. I sat there for a few minutes just miserably throwing up into this reusable Trader Joe’s grocery bag in the middle of the grocery store parking lot, while people walked around outside just having an average Tuesday morning. And by now, I was in agony. I had never experienced this before. I wasn’t sure I could drive. Everything hurt so, so much.
And that’s when it happened. It felt like my insides just completely fell out of my body. It felt like I was carrying (this is gonna be gross, I’m telling you) my entire insides of my uterus and all the female reproductive everything in my underwear. It all just happened and expelled at once.
I didn’t think I could drive home, but I also couldn’t move. I couldn’t get out and switch seats with my husband. So I drove. It’s literally a 2 minute drive from the grocery store to our home. Two stoplights and that’s it. When we pulled up to the first stoplight, it was red. With no traffic. I truly considered running the red light because I was in so much agony.
As soon as that light turned green, I floored it. I was in our parking lot within 30 seconds. When we pulled up in front of our home, I threw my car into park and ran to the front door, leaving all groceries inside the car. This was an emergency. I ran inside our home, yelling at my husband to get me a bucket to throw up into. I went back to the master bedroom and bathroom and threw myself onto the toilet. That’s when I got a first look at the horror. A huge clot of tissue had passed. My husband showed up then and handed me a bowl to vomit into, which I did immediately. And then I started wiping. Blood and clots like I’d never seen or imagined. I threw all the waste into that bowl and changed my pants after throwing a pad onto new underwear (which my husband hurriedly brought me as I yelled at/to him in agony). The ER on Sunday had told me that if I started to pass clots the size of golf balls, to come in right away. And this very much felt like that to me. But, again, I had never been to the ER for a true, true emergency before.
I hurried and finished up in the bathroom, my body in the worst state I’ve ever been in. I threw myself onto the couch and lay there for a minute. Deciding. The idea of driving 10 minutes to the ER was another kind of torture. But, calling an ambulance seemed like a lot too. So I yelled to my husband and told him to take me to the ER. It was more like, “Get me to the ER, I need to go to the ER, NOW” a few times. He grabbed his keys and we were in his car in seconds.
Oh, the agony. Truly. I’ve never in my life felt like that or experienced anything close to this kind of pure misery, torture, shock and pain from my body. My husband drove the 10 minutes back to the ER. And the entire time, I prayed out loud, “please God let us get there,” truly praying that the minutes wouldn’t feel like minutes because I could not endure this agony for a moment longer.
And my poor husband, hearing this. Hearing and seeing me suffer like this.
He pulled up to the ER entrance and let me out of the car. As he did, some guy almost backed into his car, but I couldn’t pause to care about that. I waddled? into the ER and stopped at security to go through the metal detector. “Do you want a wheelchair?” the security guard asked me. That seemed a little extreme, so I said no (as I clutched my abdomen in pain).
I walked the few feet over to the check-in desk and very much felt like I was in a haze or fog. At this check-in desk, they have you sign paperwork to note your name and address and symptoms. I did that hurriedly, noting my symptoms of vomiting and passing large clots from my miscarriage. My husband showed up then. And that’s when I asked the front desk employee for a wheel chair. Because yeah, I actually did need it.
So I sat in the wheel chair, and my body began to shut down. I couldn’t even sign the hospital paperwork of all the yadda yadda disclosures. My husband signed them for me. And then, they wheeled me a few feet over to the waiting section where there were maybe a dozen other people sitting. A nurse came over to me after a minute to take my vitals. Then she said they’d call me back shortly.
So we waited. And waited. And people got called back that were very clearly not experiencing emergency to the level or effect that I was. About a minute or so after the triage nurse took my vitals, I told her “do you have anything because I think I’m going to throw up again.” She came over and brought me one of those long medical bags for vomiting right away. And right away, I made use of it. Right there, in a crowded waiting room, I let it all out, a couple of times. To hell with shame and decency in that moment.
After waiting for what felt like forever, I finally asked my husband if they could see me right away. I forget what I said exactly, but I said I felt really sick and faint. Another triage nurse saw me in her office and helped me work out my breathing. That helped a little bit. As she was checking me in, I asked if she had any pads because it felt like I was bleeding through and passing clots again. She handed me a few pads and the original nurse wheeled me over to the bathroom, my husband right beside her. He followed me into the ladies’ bathroom. I was so delirious by this point. I couldn’t really see straight, like my vision was blurred. I stumbled into the first bathroom stall and had another moment there. The pad was soaked again. Clots again. I did my best to clean up and then went to wash my hands. And then returned to the wheel chair, parked right outside the bathroom, facing away from the nurses.
We sat there for another few minutes. By this point, I felt so cold and truly felt like sleeping. I remember thinking about how in every movie or TV show, when somebody had been injured and is bleeding out and they want to sleep, everyone says “no no don’t go to sleep! Stay with me!” and that’s what I thought as I began to feel very sleepy. “Can you go tell them that I feel very sleepy? Like I just want to sleep,” I said to my husband. He turned on his heels and quick stepped right over to that first triage nurse again. “Uh, she said she feels really sleepy,” I heard him say. And then she was at my side almost immediately. “Let me take your blood pressure again,” she said to me as she wrapped the cuff around my right arm. And after a moment, “we’re gonna take you back now.” And there we had it. Finally, I was going to be seen. But also, uh oh. Probably not good.
This nurse wheeled me into the first room on the left when you walked past those swinging doors into the ER treatment area. No bed even. I think it was more of a supply room. She parked my wheelchair and another nurse came to meet me right away. She introduced herself and said she was going to get an IV started for me right away. She tried to poke my arm in the same place they had used just two days before, but (gross), she didn’t have any luck. It was then that she told me she was going to call another guy in to get a needle in because she was having a hard time. She explained that he was going to use a little bit of a bigger needle in case I needed a blood transfusion. I was really in and out at this point but that definitely caught my attention. A blood transfusion, shit, this was serious.
A guy came into the room shortly after and took my other arm to get the IV started. It took him a minute but he finally got it going. I think in hindsight I was so dehydrated that my veins were nearly impossible to access.
I’ll pause to show you a picture my husband took of me to show my parents of my state.
So yeah, very miserable. After they got the IV going, I felt better. Not like “ok thanks guys I’m gonna head home now” but like “ok I don’t think death is immediately imminent anymore.” They then wheeled me down the hall to admit me to a room. Yeah, one of the big boys. They brought me to a Trauma room, capital T because that’s where the big cases go. They probably brought me there because I needed to be treated right away and no other rooms were available, but nonetheless.
They transferred me to a hospital bed in that room when I got there. One of those beds with wheels for transport. As soon as I was in that bed, the head/charge nurse came in and introduced herself and got me attached to a bunch of EKG stickers to monitor me. That felt pretty serious too. Then she moved the bed head part so I was laying down. She said something like “this’ll help” and again that felt pretty serious. They threw another blanket on me because truly nothing felt good enough. I was so cold and my body was shaking.
Here’s another picture or two of that:
Oh, I forgot to mention that in that first room they brought me to, the nurse had taken a few vials of blood for lab work. Anyway, another nurse came in to my Trauma hospital room and explained that they were going to take me to ultrasound to see if there was an infection.
After a few minutes, transport came and rolled my hospital bed down the hallways and to the ultrasound rooms we had just been in two days before. The tech was there and ready to examine me. She got my hospital bed set up so she could do the exam. I explained that I was bleeding heavily so she put a big blanket pad on the bed under my butt and another one on the floor. She did the exam and moved things around and within a few minutes, the exam was done. I dressed and changed my pad and waited for transport to bring me back to the hospital room.
You aren’t supposed to take pictures in the ultrasound room but I figured that meant of the screen and our baby was no longer with us (to be very crass and terrible) so I took pictures of my husband and me to update family.
See? I started to look a little better by this point. Mind you, my body was basically convulsing with shakes from being so cold when she started the ultrasound and by the end I was feeling a little better.
Anyway, after the ultrasound, Transport came and got us and they brought us back to that Trauma hospital room, where we waited. And waited. I was finally starting to feel better and began texting my family. My husband had taken over communicating to my parents because I was unable to. The last thing I had told my family was that I was going back to the ER. My sister had asked if I was ok, and I said “no” and I think that’s when things felt really scary for everyone.
After like an hour maybe, I got the text that a test result was in. My ultrasound. First off, no infection. So that was good. But the big thing: there was nothing there. The embryo that had been there in my uterus two days before was gone. Everything was gone. It was officially and medically labeled as a missed abortion. My body had naturally expelled of everything on its own with no medical intervention. And, it had all happened at once. In one giant fell swoop. The nurses later explained that I was hypotensive, meaning my blood pressure had dropped way low from all the (sudden) blood loss. And it caused me to be dehydrated, which again added to the hypotension. I later read the medical report and saw that they had discussed admitting me to the hospital. That felt scary too. Like this truly was a big deal.
The nurses had me go through two IV bags and then they discharged me. The nurse who came to discharge me was so amazing. She explained everything and that I should stay doubly-triply hydrated as I was going through this miscarriage. She mentioned that the same thing had happened to her, where it was a lot of bleeding. Ugh, and ah, the solidarity. We’d both had miscarriages. She set me up with mesh diapers and extra pads to use over the next few days. Then, she had me take a walk around the ER nurses station to make sure I was good and ready to go, and I was.
I hadn’t needed to use the bathroom when the other nurse had asked twice before I was discharged, but I felt the clots again and asked to use the restroom as I was about to walk out of the hospital. The nurse pointed me to the restroom and I went inside to clean up again. I pulled my pants down to inspect the damage, because again it felt like just giant parts of me were falling out. And there it was. Truly, a clot the size of a goofball. I think it was the gestational sac. I think that’s what it was. But I cleaned up and flushed and didn’t dare examine.
And then, we left. We called my parents on the way out. My husband drove us across the street to Starbucks to get me more fluids right away. We updated all of our family phone call after phone call as we made our way home. We stopped to pick up dinner and then finally came back home after a very traumatic experience. And it was. That kind of experience is very traumatizing. I was afraid of going back to the ER for a full week after that day and experience. I was guzzling Gatorade to maintain my fluids. The bleeding continued for a week, and when I say bleeding, I mean the big clots and tissue and real bleeding. After that, it was the brown little spotty tissue pieces for another week.
And with that, this is where I’ll end Part 2 of my traumatic miscarriage. I’ll probably finish this out and bring things up-to-date in one more post, but for now, this is where I’ll stop. I’ve been writing this for over an hour and this is a lot. I mean, this was a major experience. And it’s still scary to think about.
I’ll end this post with the last selfie I took in the ER that day because really, how else could you document this?
Sarah's Story 