My Missed Miscarriage

April 23, 2022

Never heard of it? Neither had I, until it happened to me. 

In 2013 I had an early miscarriage. It was now 2015 and we had now been trying to get pregnant again for the last two years. My husband used to joke that I’d make us broke with the amount of pregnancy tests I bought. Every month, a week before my period, I would be desperately trying to see if the test would come back positive. It was incredibly draining on me emotionally.

When I finally saw the two lines on the test once again, it was completely surreal. As soon as I saw the double lines, I called my husband. He is a truck driver and was away for work. So when I said, “I know what I’m getting for my birthday!” He knew exactly what I meant and was overjoyed.

The due date was February 8, 2016, exactly a week before my birthday. I wasn’t sure what the next steps should be so I schedule a doctors appointment right away, which would have been around 7 weeks by my calculations. They scheduled me for a dating ultrasound, which happened the following week. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but I felt uneasy from the technicians behavior and then she scheduled me in again for another ultrasound in two weeks.

I was still throwing up on my drive to work in the morning, and I could tell a little bump was forming, I was overjoyed. We told everyone we knew and did a photoshoot to announce our great news.

My second ultrasound happened at around 10 weeks, and the technician made me feel uneasy once again, but did not say anything. The next day I was sitting in my vehicle during my lunch break and my phone rang. It was the clinic. When I answered, the nurse on the other line said, “Andrea? I’m so sorry, but the baby died.” I sat there in shock, she asked for me a few times but I couldn’t speak. So she scheduled me to come in on Monday to discuss how we would proceed from here. That weekend dragged on forever. It just didn’t make sense. I wasn’t having any signs of a miscarriage at all. I was still feeling nauseous, had sore breasts, all the normal pregnancy symptoms, with no bleeding and no cramping. Nothing!

On Monday, I anxiously awaited my doctors appointment. When it was finally time, she sat me down and told me I had experienced a missed miscarriage. Something only 1-5% of women who have a miscarriage experience. This is when your body does not recognize that the baby is no longer living and continues to change as if it were a healthy pregnancy. She said I would probably still test positive and everything else is normal, except for my baby. The ultrasound had showed that our baby had died at about six weeks even though I was already 10 weeks along. Which was the reason for the two ultrasounds, to make sure there was no growth and there was no heartbeat at either one.

I now faced three options.

1. Wait. However with a missed miscarriage your body does not expel the baby like in a normal miscarriage, so there is no timeframe for when this would actually happen.
2. Do a D&C, which she didn’t recommend since it has the potential to cause scarring and we were already having difficulty conceiving.
3. An induction. I take a medication that would induce labor and expel my baby.

I chose the medication.

I researched it and found it was the same medication often used for abortions, which was really hard for me to deal with. What if they are wrong? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. How had my baby died if I wasn’t bleeding or in pain? It just didn’t make any sense.

Those next few hours after taking the pill were probably the scariest hours of my life this far. My husband was on the road in North Carolina, so I had some girlfriends over that night to be with me. One of my friends had previously been through a miscarriage so she stayed with me most of the night. So thankfully I did not have to go through it alone.

Mama’s out there, you are not alone. Never feel like you can’t talk about your babies. They are a part of you, as much as anyone else in this life, even though their stay was brief. I felt alone, but as I started to talk about it, I met so many other women who opened up about their own miscarriages. Lean on Jesus, but also lean on your fellow mamas. We are all here, and we are all joined in heart.

-Andrea D

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