Keeping me on my toes...

So I've decided that I like things much better when they go the way I plan. But life doesn't always happen like that, right? Sometimes I think Heavenly Father likes to keep us on our toes. Case in point: I just had a miscarriage.

We had planned to welcome a new baby to our family next April. I was excited to be pregnant again during the same seasons - so many holidays to help things go by faster, I wouldn't have to buy too many new maternity clothes, and it would be getting warm outside by the time we had the baby, so I could take it outside and not have to worry about RSV and the like. Plus, Holland and new sibling would be 3 weeks short of 3 years apart - pretty good spacing - she could help out quite a bit and it would be easier to explain the idea of a new sibling. And she has been so cute - pretty much everyday telling me "there's a baby in there!" and "mommy get bigger!" and "baby's growing"...and when she'd try to sit on my lap and stick her elbow in my stomach, to which I told her she had to be careful, she'd say "I no want to hurt the baby". The one downside is that my due date, Bryan's birthday, our anniversary, and Holland's birthday would all be within 3 weeks of each other. But I guess we don't have to worry about that anymore (at least not this go around).

Labor Day, Sept. 5th - I was 7 weeks along and had some spotting. Not too uncommon - it was light brown (a good sign), and barely anything and just happened once that day. So I had Bryan give me a blessing and I called the doctor the next day and they told me yes, I would indeed need the Rhogam shot. Darn. So, 6 vials of blood on Tuesday, and a shot Wednesday, and I was still hoping the spotting would go away. It was only happening once a day (at the same time too), and each time was hardly anything. Thursday = same thing. Friday (Sept. 9) - a little bit of the spotting was bright red = not good. Call the doctor again. They have me come in for an ultrasound. And here's the one good piece of news - I have good blood pressure (102/69!). Oh, another good piece of news - no weight gained yet :)

From Bryan's blessing I had a pretty calm feeling about the spotting, so I was not worried. The gist of it was that the baby would be healthy and I'd see it to full term, but w/ complications. When we were talking in the car on the way to the doctor, I realized that that may be the case, but not with this pregnancy - this pregnancy could be the "complication". So now that I was more worried about it and REALLY had to pee since they make you have a full bladder for the ultrasound - the 10-15 minute wait in the lobby lasted forever. The tech pulled us back, started things up and said she was going to take some measurements....I'm not super great at reading ultrasound images, but when she was taking all of the measurements I could tell - nothing was there. There was no baby.

Turns out the gestational sac only measured 6 weeks. I was 7 weeks 6 days. No heartbeat, no fetal pole. And everyone knows I'm not the crying type, but that's when I couldn't hold back the tears. The tech said try not to worry too much - this wasn't conclusively the end and maybe my dates were just off. My dates were not off. I was 100% sure. So we met with the midwife and we pretty much decided that things didn't look promising - although she said she had seen cases where situations like this still turned out to be viable pregnancies. So she ordered some blood tests and scheduled another ultrasound for the following Friday to see how things looked and if blood tests don't look good & u/s still didn't show anything and things hadn't passed naturally, we'd talk about a D and C - something I absolutely want to avoid. So more blood drawn on Friday and two days later on Sunday for the hCG levels - if you're counting, that's 3 blood draws in one week and now I've got some nice bruises to show for it. I talked with the midwife again - hCG levels rose, but not doubled like they're supposed to. But by this point I was already sure that miscarriage was inevitable....and I think she was kind of surprised with how "ok with it" I was. Really, I just wanted to speed things along since I knew it was going to happen.

Yes, I have had mixed emotions about it....the biggest thing I'm sad about is that the spacing between Holland and the next sibling will now be much larger than I had planned - we're talking well over 3 years...plus now there's a possibility of being pregnant in the summer - ugh...and if we needed this humbling experience, why weren't we prompted to start trying for another baby sooner?...and why has it taken my body SO LONG to figure out that it needed to abort this pregnancy? But miscarriage is usually a pretty sure sign that something with the baby wasn't quite right - which I'm glad that if it wasn't healthy, that it passed now.

Hopefully the worst part is over. I just passed it today, so hopefully the bleeding dies down and everything quickly goes back to normal (sorry if that was TMI). Luckily the pain has been tolerable. And now we have more empathy for those who have gone through this too. And speaking of that - my intent in writing this post is not to get sympathy from people. I cried on an off for about 2 hours when we found out, but pretty quickly we came to terms with it. Plus, Bryan bought me some Tillamook Udderly Chocolate ice cream, which I drowned some of my sorrows in. And we went to the temple on Saturday which helped to resolve a few things. We really are at peace with this whole situation. But I wanted to make this post mostly to document it and also to let others who have had miscarriages know that I know what you're going through.

And so now we start the whole process over....pray that things go better for us this time around :)