“Do you have kids?”
She remembers the first time she miscarried. She began bleeding during the night of a 28-hour shift. This could be normal, she thought. But the bleeding increased, and she locked herself in a bathroom and sent a desperate text to one of her classmates: Will you be able to do an exam after I get done with work tomorrow. A quick reply: Of course. And, Don’t be too worried, this could be normal. They were resident physicians and had cared for many women in this situation.
But later in the night when the bleeding continued and she began experiencing the deep cramps that only happened on the worst day of her period, she knew. When day arrived and she led the other residents around the hospital to see their patients, every third thought was I am losing my baby right now.
Late in the morning she sullenly sat on the couch with her knees bent up to her chest, tears salting her cheeks, her husband solemnly bringing her tea, asking if there was anything he could do. There was a worse cramp, and then something came out of her vagina into her underwear. In the bathroom, she carefully examined it, looking for a little hand, a foot, a spine. Nothing looked remotely like a fetus. She flushed it down the toilet. She was back to work the next day.
She remembers the second time she miscarried. Just a week before, the double lines had appeared on the stick. It was a secret inside of her, I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant. It was a busy clinic day. She went to the bathroom, and there was blood on her underwear.
This could be normal. She found a pad in an exam room and saw her next patient. But the next time she went to the bathroom, there was more blood. And she knew. When clinic was over, she rushed to her car and sobbed.
She remembers the third time she miscarried. This time, there was no warning, only stillness. The pregnancy had gone on long enough that it should have been easy to see the lima bean of a baby with its pinhead beating heart, bouncing in a tablespoon of amniotic fluid. Instead, there was placenta and a sac and nothing else. She had her classmate use a vaginal ultrasound probe, to get the best images, but there was nothing to see.
During a lunch break between patients, she walked over to the OB unit, where she desperately asked one of the attendings what to do.. She had an official ultrasound, the first official ultrasound she had ever had, and a few days later she met with a midwife who told her what options she had.
This time, she asked for time off. For a Friday, so she could recover over the weekend. On Friday, she shoved four tablets up her vagina, as close to the cervix as she could manage. For an hour or so, nothing, and then a slow building of cramps worse than she had ever had before, and then the bleeding started. It was almost a relief. Sitting on the toilet, she felt something pass, and she caught it and put it into a plastic specimen cup. Later, the lab would analyze it and find a mosaic of chromosomes that probably happened a few days after conception, guaranteeing the clump of cells would never be born as a baby.
She remembers Lindy Anne. It was hard to get excited when she got her fourth positive pregnancy test, but she was. She purposely avoided ultrasounding her pelvis until her OB appointment, but at the appointment, there it was: the jumping bean, the beating heart. She wept.
After that, she stole looks whenever an ultrasound machine was nearby. There was the head, the heart, the arms, the legs! They made it past the treacherous first trimester and on to the second trimester anatomy scan, an opportunity to admire how beautiful their baby was!
The ultrasound tech was chatty and bubbly, like techs usually are, pointing out the anatomy as she took measurements. The tech became more quiet as the exam went on, but she and her husband didn’t notice. The exam went on longer than it should have, but this was their first anatomy ultrasound and they didn’t know any better. Then the tech left and they sat together for a long time, talking about their beautiful baby. The tech returned, and asked them to follow her into an exam room, and they waited a little longer.
The obstetrician and her nurse came in, and she knew that was a bad sign. “I’m sorry,” the obstetrician said, “your baby has trisomy 18.”
That was the start of the appointments, the ultrasounds, the tears, the research. In the meantime, Lindy grew, slowly, and the amniotic fluid grew, more quickly, until her abdomen sometimes felt as hard and tight as the skin of a drum. The ultrasonographers always had a hard time obtaining the desired images because of her wiggles. She is a diva, they liked saying.
It was her first day at the new job. All the older female patients smiled, When are you due? And she smiled back, Not for another two months. Later in the afternoon, she stopped typing at her desk so she could breathe. Once, she reached for her phone to time how often this was happening, only to push it away. She just needed to get home and drink a lot of water and put her feet up. She cried on her drive home but dried her tears as she waited for the garage door to lift, and her husband met her at the door and she smiled and he saw that she had been crying but he smiled too, two strained smiles, and she sat at the table and drank cups of water and the contractions were no longer something that could be ignored.
They ignored them for two more hours, until she vomited and began to cry again. She was almost unable to walk from the parking garage to the elevator, thank God there was a wheelchair, he was nervous and bumped her into the wall and for a moment they were both in agony, but they made it to labor and delivery and after a few more tortuous minutes the resident performed a cervical check and announced that she was ten centimeters dilated with a bulging bag of amniotic fluid, and she fell completely apart knowing that Lindy was coming too soon, they had agreed on this, she needed to wait one more week.
In twenty minutes, after an astonishing gush of amniotic fluid, Lindy Anne arrived and she was perfect. She breathed, her skin was pink, she had crazy eyebrows, she wiggled. Not a lot, but she did. She made a darling noise with each breath, and her mother was afraid, afraid that this noise represented a desperate effort, that she would be too weak to sustain it very long. Lindy kept it up beautifully for the next few hours. And then she became quiet, and her skin turned dusky, and she didn’t move anymore, and a nurse finally listened to her heart and said it had stopped beating.
The nurse was wrong, but barely. When the nurse practitioner came in to verify, Lindy’s heart was beating, slowly, softly. It didn’t stop for another hour or two, and in the meantime her parents cradled her and each other in the hospital bed.
She remembers the fourth time she miscarried, four months after Lindy was born. She tested too early, the day she was supposed to get her period and didn’t. The next day was Thanksgiving, and they told everyone. Two days later she got her period. Next time she will wait a few more days, before she tests.
She hopes there will be a next time.