Empty

I just found out that the life that was growing inside of me is dying.

Apparently, this is a quite common occurance, however, due to the circumstances regarding it, the women who have gone through this kind of heartache have been granted the mercy of never knowing it happened to them. It is what is known as a "chemical pregnancy," and before a week ago, I had never heard of this. It is when a woman conceives, and the fetus dies within the first trimester of the pregnancy, in what is called an "early miscarriage."

I had been almost a week late for my monthly cycle when it occured to me that I might be pregnant, so, last Monday, February 8, 2010, after work, I had my friend take me to a WalMart and, at 11:23pm, I tested positive on a store-bought pregnancy test. The next morning, wanting to be sure before I alerted anyone to my situation, I took another one, which also tested positive. I began to have some hope that there really was life growing inside of me. I got ready for work, which is second shift, and headed off to work.

Later that day, Tuesday, I started bleeding heavily. It wasn't like a normal period, it was a lot of blood, and a lot of clots. I thought that maybe the pregnancy tests had been defective, as they were in the same box, but a small part of me knew that wasn't true. I looked online for reasons why a pregnancy test would show positive if a woman wasn't actually pregnant. Nothing I ran across was good news. Cancer and tumors can cause a false positive, though they are rare, and most websites indicated that false negatives can occur, but a false positive is almost unheard of. That is when I ran across this condition, this...horror known as a "chemical pregnancy."

By the time a woman thinks that she might be pregnant, her "period" has already started, and she writes it off to having just been late. Or she may never have even realized that something was going on inside of her body, something beautiful and heartbreakingly tragic. Sometimes, the woman realizes that what she originally may have thought was her period is something wrong, so she goes to see her doctor, who runs some tests, and a few days later, she finds out that she was pregnant, but is no more.

Talking with friends, co-workers, and family, I was told that it happens, and that life goes on. People said that sometimes the body thinks that the egg is a virus and the immune system works against it to try to stop it. Or that the baby may have had a small chance of living anyway, even if it were carried full term, and that this is nature's way of stopping a bigger heartache. There were many reasons, many thoughts and opinions, on how this could happen.

Wednesday, I went to a clinic, who took some tests, and they came up positive for pregnancy. Saturday, I went again for more, and today they called to tell me that my hCG levels dropped, which was a good indicator of miscarriage. I hung up the phone, and was about to lose it, but then remembered that the doctor had told me that sometimes the hCG levels would drop and then rise again in pregnancy and that there could still be a chance that the baby could be carried full term. So I called back, hoping and praying for some miracle, that the levels had not dropped significantly.

My blood test last Wednesday showed an hCG level (the pregnancy hormone) at 77. When I called back, they told me that the blood test on Saturday had shown an hCG level of 9. I knew at that point that it was true, the life inside of me was slowly dying, and I was losing a baby.


People keep telling me that it is good that I didn't carry it full term and then have a stillborn, or that it happened now instead of months down the line. They are trying to desensitize me, probably with good intentions to try to keep me from falling apart. But this is not what I want. I don't want to know that I had a life, a beautiful, wonderful, blessed life growing inside of me last week, but that now that life is bleeding out of me, one clot at a time. This is not something that I can just get over. I think people are expecting me to say "oh, well, maybe it's for the best" because the father and I were having some problems, and he is 800 miles away in a different state.

But I cannot bring myself to see the light in this. I cannot. No matter what, I could not bring myself to wish for this, and now that it is a reality, I cannot bring myself to be grateful for this. I can feel the emptiness inside of me where there was a tiny spark of life that in a few more weeks would have had a heartbeat detectable by a sonogram. I can feel the emptiness inside of me where once there was what may have been a girl, may have been a boy. I thought, though, that it would be a girl. Something inside me told me it was a girl. I thought Kelly LeAnn, the middle names of two close friends who died at 25 and 17, would be a nice tribute to them.

Now I am riddled with an enormous amount of guilt, which people would probably tell me is nonsense. I wonder if thinking about that name brought about a fate which her namesakes suffered. I wonder if all the stress of wondering and not knowing is what caused it. I wonder if when I fell in the bathtub, even though it wasn't a bad fall, caused this. I wonder if I am being punished for something. I wonder if I drank something or ate something that I wasn't supposed to and it didn't agree with the pregnancy.


For now, I am ignoring all texts and phone calls, sitting at home, crying my eyes out, and wishing people would stop telling me that it is going to be okay. Because this is not something I wish to be desensitized to. I don't want to say "oh, well, I lost a baby. I can always get pregnant again," as if that baby didn't mean anything to me. Because it did. She did. Regardless of whether the father and I had worked things out, regardless of whether I had to raise her alone, regardless of whether she had been born with some deformity that nature abhors, she would have been mine and I would have loved her and this is not okay. This is not okay. This is never okay. So if you ever have a friend or family member or co-worker who goes through this, don't try to tell her that this is probably for the best and that these things just happen. Let her cry. Let her grieve and mourn the life inside of her that is dying or has died.

When she calls you crying and telling you that she can feel the emptiness inside of her, don't chalk it up to emotions or tell her that she is just imagining things. Listen to her. Because that is all I can feel right now...emptiness.