They lie. Miscarriages can hurt like a Mo Fo.
When we first found out we lost the heartbeat, my doctor told me I should experience “some cramping and bleeding.” And to only worry if the bleeding was severe enough to require more than a pad and hour. Considering how common it is to miscarry, I was expecting just another female right of passage. I learned my lessons well from Margaret. I know to belt on that sanitary napkin and even if I don’t believe in God, I knew that us girls are all in it together. Or I did. Until I found out you biatches didn’t tell me that a miscarriage is more like living through Eraserhead then a Judy Blum novel!
Here is how it played out. I was all set for a D&C on Christmas eve. Then, the Saturday before, I started bleeding and passing black blobs. My cramps were worse than normal, but bearable. At 2:00 a.m. Monday morning I woke up with even worse cramps. And they were steadily getting worse. I took two ibuprofen and waited for them to kick in. They never did. I took a bath in lieu of a heating pad. It looked like I was swimming with Jaws and wasn’t helping anyway. I couldn’t get comfortable sitting or laying down, so I just started pacing. I took another ibuprofen and wished I could down the whole bottle. Still the cramps were getting worse. I took my vibrator and for once actually used it as a personal massager. 1 Nothing helped. I got up again and kept pacing. This went on for hours. Until I finally had the urge to push, went into the bathroom, and at 5:00 a.m. I heard a weird plop fall into the toilet. Instantly I felt better. I couldn’t resist poking it. I was huge-bigger than a mouse–and kinda felt like one too. You could see something that sort of looked like bones but mostly it was just a wierd dark red blob. Why the hell was it so big!??! There was no heartbeat at 9 weeks, it passed at 12, shouldn’t it have been the size of my fingernail? And how will this compare to labor pains? I’ve since googled “labor pains and miscarriage” and those folks are much more forthright about how much this fricking hurts. I hope you don’t have to go through this, but you should know that if you do 1) you aren’t alone; 2) sooner or later something will come out; and 3) when it does you’ll feel like a million bucks. So now, only three months after getting pregnant, my uterus is finally empty and my nails are back to broken stubs. Just as soon as my boobs shrink back to normal, I hope to feel less like a cow and more like a trophy again. I bet Botox is a bad idea right before we start trying again, hu?
1. From my husband’s perspective: He woke from his slumber to find himself next to Linda Blair in the Exorcist. Apparently I was curled in a fetal position, jamming the vibrator into my abdomen, moaning and writhing in pain. Thankfully for him there was no pea soup involved to soil the sheets.
