losing number three

Yesterday I went in for my first ob appointment and left with a delivery date for my dead baby. At 14 weeks, there was no heartbeat and the baby wasn't moving. I remember looking at the baby during the ultrasound, knowing something was wrong, but not allowing myself to admit it, until it was obvious there was no heartbeat when a flat, green line raced across the screen. The doctor said that most likely the baby had just died because it was measuring exactly the size that it should have been for this far along.

So, my husband and I face the pleasant task of showing up at the hospital next Tuesday morning for an induction procedure that will start labor se we can deliver our fifth child. I don’t anticipate it to be pleasant for anyone involved, including the hospital staff. I also am not looking forward to waiting six days with a dead child inside me. It's morbid even on paper.

I don’t imagine, if you’re a doctor, that it gets any easier to tell a patient that you can’t find a heartbeat than it is for me to face my third miscarriage. You’d think because you know what to expect that the reality would be that much more real. Or that the whole process would be somehow less emotional.

It’s not. In fact, in some ways it’s a bit worse because you tend to look at the injustice a bit more closely and question why this could be happening again. Along with the pain of loss (that is severe and overwhelming itself), you also feel even more punished than you did with the first or second even.

You tend to think, “How many more times can this happen to me?” It’s not just a matter of losing a baby, but now of losing three babies. And, losing two of those babies under situations where miscarriage is so rare that you have to be making some sort of record that of course no one wants to make. Miscarriage occurs very rarely after 12 weeks – after that milestone there’s only a five percent chance of losing the baby.

None of this is comforting because ultimately there are no answers. There is no lesson. There is only a cold, hard fact with no explanation behind it - we lost our third baby - simply, tragic and true.