I Had a Miscarriage by Jessica Zucker (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

When I started to urinate, something I to this day have trouble even recalling occurred. Something that would change me in ways both diminutive and profound. Something that, unlike the “pop” that may or may not have occurred, I cannot force my mind to question. My baby slid out. I saw her there, dead, dangling from me mere inches from the toilet-bowl water. There was some movement—maybe just from falling? I don’t and will never know—and, just like that, I was overcome with physical relief, after having labored for hours. A relief that anyone who’s experienced childbirth will understand: the quick kind that’s instantly replaced with an overwhelming gravity. My window-clad house should have shattered from the pitch of my prolonged primordial scream. It didn’t.

I did.

• • •

I frantically texted my doctor; somehow I had the presence of mind to know that if I didn’t, not only would my daughter die, but so could I. She called immediately. I was loud, clamoring for instructions on how to handle the medical chaos.

Her first direction was to get a pair of scissors. Scissors! I walked from the toilet to the medicine cabinet for a pair that had previously only been called to duty for eyebrow trimming. I reached down and held the baby, clutching her close to my vagina, which was all the umbilical cord would allow. I knew I had to get back to the toilet to make the cut—to be near the phone and my doctor’s counsel; to spare my hardwood floors. One can’t explain the places our brains go in these moments. Nothing can prepare us for these confounding traumas—nothing—so I try to grant myself the grace that comes with knowing I survived as best I could. I cared about the hardwood floors, because some part of me knew my mind could not focus on much more.

I crouched over the toilet and cut the umbilical cord, then immediately began to bleed in an obviously emergent way. She was in my hands ever so briefly. She. But as the medical emergency I knew I was experiencing grew more dire, I placed her on a nearby hand towel. No longer part of a symbiotic union, dizzy with despair and confusion over this separation, I somehow found a way to stay the course on the practical matters of caring for myself: attempting to get dressed, stuffing towels into my underwear because the hemorrhaging wouldn’t stop until the placenta was delivered. My doctor talked me through what to do, stressing the need to get to her office, and quickly, with my baby in a bag to send to the lab for testing.

I wish I had had it in me to spend more time with her connected to me, before the cutting and the bleeding and the primal rush to save my own life; before the hand towel and the completely incongruous plastic grocery bag. But it didn’t feel possible. Things were moving fast. My heartbeat. My doctor’s words. The blood.

Alone with her in my bathroom—the bathroom where I had envisioned giving her a first bath, or watching her and her older brother splash playfully in the tub—I continued to flush the toilet over and over as the bowl refilled with my blood. This was an emergency situation, but I knew if I called 911, I’d have to somehow make it down four flights of stairs, including ones outside, to let the paramedics in. I couldn’t manage it, nor did I really want a group of strangers running through my home in the midst of this intimate collapse of my life.

And there she was. She. She was bigger than I would’ve expected at sixteen weeks along. She seemed robust. She seemed possible. In her face, I saw such a clear resemblance to my sweet little Liev, my son who had just been robbed of a sibling.

My doctor insisted I stay on the phone with her until Jason arrived, as he darted through Hollywood traffic to get to me. He ignored red lights and stop signs, but still needed to weave up jam-packed Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I had texted him in the late morning with an update about the change in hue and intensity of the blood, and so when the baby emerged there on the toilet, I texted again in earnest. “The baby fell out. I need you. Please come home,” I wrote as my hands shook. (On that particular day, he was working in close quarters with colleagues, hence the texting instead of calling.)

An eeriness set in after the initial rush of adrenaline—a surreal, documentary-like feel. My mind slowed. This level of intensity was something I had only seen in movies, I thought, and was aware that I could either die here or summon the fortitude to push on.

• • •

The truth is, at sixteen weeks pregnant, I had thought I was out of the woods. I assumed braving the first trimester and making it into the second meant I was in the safe zone, where pregnancies stuck and fetuses were bound to become babies. Somewhere around eight or nine weeks, I shared the news of my pregnancy with family and friends. I wasn’t necessarily a proponent of waiting until the second trimester, as our culture tends to advocate, but I’ll admit, a tiny part of me was concerned that sharing my news early might somehow jinx it. I had long figured that if I were to miscarry, I would surely want my cadre of loved ones in the know, tucked in by my side and supporting me.

My belly bulged, prompting patients to ask about my current state of affairs. “Yes, I’m pregnant,” I’d reply. “Due in the spring, early April.” I’d answered the standard gamut of questions: “How are you feeling?” (Like crap, mostly.) “What are you having?” (A girl. This time we found out the sex, unlike my pregnancy with Liev, in which we decided to keep that a surprise.) I suddenly realized I had a lot of people to