Blood and Blight

CW: miscarriage and graphic imagery

The most vivid memory, but not the first, is of blood. I was told to expect blood, so much blood. I was told that if there was so much blood that, within an hour, it filled a maxi pad and ran down my legs and soaked through my socks, then I should go to the ER, but if it was less than that it was okay. I remember that, because the vision of blood-soaked socks made me queasy—although, to be fair, queasiness was something I experienced regularly then.

I was sliding out of my frenetic dream when I had the hazy realization that I was seeping. By the time I became fully conscious, I was in what amounted to the hallway of our tiny apartment: a square of laminate hemmed in on each side by a living room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom, with enough space for one person to stand and make a step in any direction to change locations. I stood there, in an oversize t-shirt and an adult diaper, and there was so much blood. The diaper was sodden and the scarlet blood dripped down my legs and pooled at my feet. I knew that if I took another step, the blood would splash down in big raindrops, and I didn’t want to stain the floor, so I just stood, frozen, and called out, “help,” in a tiny, tiny voice.

My husband heard me from the kitchen and walked approximately three feet—through the dining room, into the living room—before he stopped dead. “Oh,” he said with a puff of air, as if he had been startled into blowing out a birthday candle. His eyes were round, as round and almost as large as his John Lennon-esque glasses, as he stared at the floor, seeing the pool of blood I stood in, seeing the droplets that formed a trail back to the bed, seeing the splotches on the rumpled, sweaty sheets, seeing the plastic mixing-bowl-turned-puke-bucket sitting on the side of the bed he typically occupied. It only took a moment before he snapped out of it and awkwardly stepped around me to snatch towels from the bathroom. I wrapped the first towel around my legs like a loin cloth, and stepped onto a second towel Micah had laid at my feet. I scootched the towel along beneath me as I shuffled to the toilet.

Micah must have cleaned up the blood in the hall, but I don’t remember that. I remember sitting on the toilet, wanting to cry but anesthetized by the disbelief that my body contained, and could lose, so much blood. I rinsed my legs in the bathtub. I put on a new diaper. I went back to bed.

***

There are a few terms for what happened to me. “Anembryonic pregnancy,” is one, but I prefer another: “blighted ovum.” There’s something about the word blight that is apt.

My body grew a gestational sack, like a bird preparing a nest. A home for a baby chick. Except the chick—the embryo—never developed. It was infected, diseased, spoiled. It was a rotten, foul thing, and it sat in my body for weeks while I, unknowing, went about my days in a state of unwilling delusion, imagining each time I retched that the nausea was brought about by a tiny baby who would arrive in the spring, wondering if the little one was a boy or a girl, learning erroneously that the baby was the size of a marble, then a cherry, when in actuality there was no baby, at all. There was no cluster of cells, or electrical activity that would someday become a heartbeat. There was no “fetal pole,” at my first OB-GYN appointment. The embryo had stopped developing three weeks before, but my body was still busy building a cozy nest, tricking me.

Before my miscarriage, I thought pregnancy was very straightforward. Isn’t that a saying, that you can’t be a little bit pregnant? So what do you call it if you are pregnant but without a fetus? Can you mourn a child that in a very real sense only existed in your head? Sorry—you can. I did. But should I have? Doesn’t that make me a few checkers short of a set?

Can you abort a baby that never existed? Because the pharmacist made very clear, before handing over the Cytotec, that the tiny, white, hexagonal pills would cause abortion. Did I know that?

“Yes,” I said, my eyes to the floor, shame flooding my body as if I had asked for this, had wanted to terminate a pregnancy and was being required to declare it somewhat publicly at the neighborhood Kroger.

The pharmacist didn’t hear me. “Do you understand the risks? It’s really important for you to know, if you’re pregnant, that this will cause an abortion.”

I raised my head to look her in the eye, my face blazing. “Yes,” I croaked, then cleared my throat. “Yes, I do.”

“Are you pregnant?” the woman pressed.

I wanted to scream. The answer to that question was clear a few weeks before, Clear Blue in fact! A digital read out told me so in no uncertain terms. But a Clear Blue test, taken that day, would still declare, "pregnant." If I am, I wondered, would this be considered an abortion, even if there's no fetus? And good grief, what else do doctors prescribe Cytotec for?

I didn’t know how to answer, so I stayed silent. The pharmacist must have seen the tears welling in my eyes and backed off.

“Do you have a rewards card with us?”

I nodded and dutifully typed my phone number on the pad. Because if I had to give myself an abortion, I guessed I should at least get some fuel points out of the deal.

***

I didn’t even know. For about ten minutes after the ultrasound, Micah and I sat in the waiting room quietly, having two completely different experiences. I was logging purchases on our finance app, sending a text to a friend, waiting for the doctor to take my blood pressure and a urine sample. Business as usual as far as I was concerned—it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be a problem that the sonographer couldn’t find a heartbeat. It was early days, she’d said, and sometimes they just weren’t strong enough to detect.

My husband sat beside me; his world rocked. He had seen the ultrasound and the look on the sonographer’s face, and he knew there would be no baby. He thought I knew it, too. As far as he was concerned, we were both silently processing the information and beginning to grieve.

When the OB-GYN entered the room, he looked uneasy and sat down heavily.

“I’m really sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, looking stoically at me. “But this pregnancy isn’t viable. I’m so sorry.”

I was stunned. I looked over at my husband, who was stone-faced but did not look surprised. His prior knowledge felt like a betrayal for some reason. Numbly, I took the box of tissues the OB held out.

“I…what?”

“The fetus isn’t developed at all, it likely never developed past fertilization, but your body acted as if it did. I can see lots of blood clots on the scan. I can tell you’ll probably spontaneously miscarry soon, maybe even tomorrow. But if it doesn’t happen on its own, you can take some pills to jump-start the process.”

“But…” My head was reeling. I’d been so nauseous, throwing up for weeks.

“I’ve been so nauseous,” I said, idiotically.

“Well, yes, your body did think and act as if it were pregnant,” he said.

“Well, you are a hysterical crazy lady who formed an attachment to an imaginary infant that never existed,” I heard.

***

I laid low for a few days, waiting for the promised spontaneous miscarriage. Each morning, I threw up, my body refusing to acknowledge the fact that my brain now knew, that it. was. not. pregnant.

On Sunday I went to church to fulfill my assignment as coordinator of the annual children’s program. I knelt by the podium and reminded each child of their assigned lines. I waited in an agonizing state of suspension, wondering if, at any moment, a faucet of blood might erupt from me, and I’d be forced to walk off the stand, in full view of the congregation. How could I possibly explain that?

“Don’t worry, everyone! I’ve been expecting this. I was pregnant, except not really, so this is just my body getting rid of a useless gestational sac. Nothing to be sad about, except that I am sad. So, so, excruciatingly sad. Carry on!”

The miscarriage didn’t start that day, or the next day, or for a full week. Eventually I took matters into my own hands and…gave myself an abortion, maybe? At least according to the pharmacist? I bled through several diapers that first night, and then I kept bleeding for days.

Here’s one thing you should know, if you ever get pregnant and have a miscarriage: the blood smells like afterbirth, which if you’ve had a baby before, you know has a different scent to menstrual blood. Science says our sense of smell is most closely tied to our memories. As I was losing this non-baby, this idea of a baby, on the worst days of my life, I was repeatedly reminded of the best days of my life, when my three older children were born. Which, as you can imagine, made the experience starker and more horrifying in contrast.

***

A week after I took the abortion pills, I went to the bathroom and felt something the size of my fist slide out of my body. I sat there, in shock, staring into the dark red water in the bowl, until I could stand the curiosity no longer.

I knelt and put my hand into the toilet, my fingers immediately touching something incongruously both soft and firm. I drew it out and held it up toward the light to examine it.

It reminded me of the organs I used to dissect in my fifth-grade science class…hearts and stomachs and brains. While I expected a blood clot, this was actual human tissue, a baseball-sized reason for the exhaustion and nausea I’d experienced for the past six weeks. I sat, staring at the organ for a few minutes before dropping it back into the bowl and flushing.

I felt more satisfied than sad. I understood suddenly that the bleeding and the morning sickness would end. My body made a home. A good home, a safe home. But no one ever moved in. So, with a little help, my body razed the house.

I washed my hands and walked out of the bathroom, into my real house, to my three real children who needed me.

***

I have been pregnant eight times, and three of those ended in miscarriage, though this one was the most intense. I don’t believe, as some do, that I have three additional children waiting for me in heaven. My miscarriages weren’t of fetuses, just of hopes and dreams and plans. I’m happy with my life and I don’t mourn those miscarriages anymore.

I do still remember them, though. I remember the trauma and the cramps and the pool of blood in the hallway and the smell that announced to my brain that I’d just delivered a baby when I hadn’t. I remember being held by my husband and crying harder than I ever had, and whispering into his tear-slick neck “I’m just so, so sad,” while a cruel voice in my head said “Get a grip, you are mourning the loss of a made-up baby.”

I guess when people say time heals the pain, maybe they mean you won’t always be sad about blighted ovums. I'm not sad anymore.

But I will always be haunted by the blood.