If you are pregnant and in the first trimester, please don’t click the spoiler. There’s nothing helpful in there, just venting.
[SPOILER]We had an ultrasound at exactly 9 weeks. It was lucky, I guess, in a fucked up way. Originally our ultrasound appointment was for Wednesday, but my husband couldn’t miss a training day, so we rescheduled for Friday. The fetus measured perfectly for the dates, but no heartbeat. Which means “something must have happened yesterday or this morning.” So, we might have seen a perfectly healthy baby and still…
We have to go back Monday for another ultrasound to confirm that it is no more. It sucks.
Even with all the assurances that it happens to a lot of women, that most women who have a miscarriage go on to have a perfectly healthy pregnancy and child, that it happens because of no fault of the mother, just something wasn’t forming right…you just wonder what made it happen right then? To let it get far enough along that it stopped looking so much like a space monkey, where you could see arms and legs on the ultrasound curled up but all so still?
Ugh, it just really, really sucks.
And was it really not related to anything I did? We had the semi-annual MIL argument Thursday, maybe it was the stress of that? I haven’t been running lately, and maybe if I had, the increased blood flow would have strengthened the fetus? But plenty of women just sit around their entire pregnancy crying, so it couldn’t have been that, could it? Maybe I shouldn’t have had even just the one cup of coffee? Did I lay on my back too much even though that’s supposed to be fine this early?
There are a billion things that can go wrong, every microscopic step of the way, and for almost every thing that you aren’t supposed to do, there are women who have done that thing throughout their pregnancy and had a perfectly healthy baby. Bitches. 
So it’s pointless to play that game, but still, you kind of can’t help it. It’s a scab.
Next time, when there is a next time, I am staying off the internet. I read so many stories (and hey, look, I just wrote one, sharing the pain and paranoia! yay!) that made me worry. Pregnancies that felt perfectly fine but turned out to be blighted ovums, ectopic pregnancies, or just not forming…It was agony to wait so long to make sure everything was okay and then it wasn’t. I’ll never be able to tell myself again, “well, it happens to a percentage, but it’s still a minority, so odds are with us, and it will be fine.” My inner pessimist won this round.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting (aka The Tome That Will Make You a Paranoid Basketcase) puts the miscarriage rates at 40-65%, mainly I think because the tests are so sensitive now. But therate is supposed to drop from 25% after 6 weeks past the last menstrual period to 8%, and after 8.5 weeks past last menstrual period to 2%, so I had breathed a semi-sigh of relief–although it can take as much as 8 weeks for the body to stop acting pregnant and expel a “failed” pregnancy, according to our doctor, so I guess the simple passage of time is not much of a relief after all. And the last week and a half or so, I’d had some of my energy back, wasn’t quite as hungry, sleep wasn’t quite as restless, boobs weren’t as sore, but I was hoping that was an early transition to the fabled energy boost of the second trimester, considering those first trimester pregnancy symptoms showed up so early. I had a positive pregnancy test week 4, and it was a complete unsurprise, since I was running regularly and saw the effect on my breathing, PEL and heart rate, in addition to the aforementioned symptoms showing up so early. Every woman is different, every pregnancy is different, so I have no way of knowing if the lessening of the symptoms has anything to do with anything.
Um, so, back to next time.[/SPOILER] I almost agree with the with the idea of waiting until the child can introduce themselves. Some friends of ours had a stillborn child, and we’ve seen on these boards worse stories (as in, traumatic and helpless to stop the bad stuff from happening) even “worse” than that. Sigh. I guess once you sign up for parenthood it means never being completely easy in your mind about the health and safety of your child.
But we will probably try to wait until the end of the first trimester before telling anyone. It’s hard to wait though. Many women might sail through the first trimester, but for me it felt like time elongated, and it changes what you can do quite a bit with the first trimester being such a sensitive time for the fetus, it seems discovery or suspicion by others would be unavoidable, especially since I was practically narcoleptic and eating everything that was smaller than my head and stayed still long enough for me to cover it with peanut butter and put it in my mouth.
I had no idea how much I loved nitrate-y bacon and pancetta and hot dogs until they were taken away.
