Until I had a missed miscarriage, I didn’t know it was possible to miss one. I can see with hindsight that things were missing; the nausea and exhaustion I experienced at the beginning of my pregnancy tailed off in week eight. I didn’t know a drop in symptoms could be a sign that the pregnancy was failing. As long as I wasn’t seeing blood in my underwear, I reasoned that everything was OK.
I went to my pregnancy scan, confidently, alone. The sonographer, who was jovial when I arrived, grew quieter as she moved the probe across my tummy. There was no heartbeat. I learned the pregnancy had ceased weeks ago but my uterus was still holding onto it. It would, of course, have to end somehow. I was given a pamphlet of options to remove the pregnancy from my body (medication, surgery, or wait for it to happen naturally). It’s a personal choice, they said.
I wasn’t sure which option to choose because I didn’t want any of them. What I wanted was to have a baby in seven months, and possibly a doula to support me through the process—like Gigi Hadid and Anne Hathaway and many other mothers now use. I read over my options time and again, as though one might suddenly become appealing.
I also turned to social media (of course), where I discovered Arden Cartrette, otherwise known as the Miscarriage Doula. The role of the miscarriage doula (Cartrette is a leader in the field) mirrors that of a birth doula, but works in the shadow side of motherhood. They offer guidance and tools to navigate the physical and emotional toll of pregnancy loss. “My original thought was that there are doulas for those who are pregnant and for those who give full-term, live birth, but what happens when someone gives birth in the first or second trimester?” she tells me. “We should have access to doula care for those births too.” Like Cartrette, many miscarriage doulas have experienced miscarriages themselves, creating a kinship between client and doula.
As I scrolled through this new and unfamiliar world, my bleeding started spontaneously (option three in the pamphlet). On Monday, five days after the scan, it was uncomfortable but not unbearable. By Tuesday I was losing so much blood I could barely get off the bathroom floor. I was taken to the hospital, where they inserted an IV line and stickered wires across my chest to monitor my racing heart. When I was stable, I was sent to the maternity ward to wait alongside full-term mothers for another scan. The specialist told me it was “good news,” the “product of conception has passed.” Is that all this amounted to, a “product of conception”?