Our Miscarriage Story – Part 2

So when we left off on part 1 of our miscarriage story, we were counting down the days until our first appointment with the doctor.

June 29 came and I was counting down the hours until we could leave. We ended up leaving earlier than we probably should have because I was so excited. We got there and had to wait a little while and they ended up having no rooms so we had to wait even longer but I finally got called in. I go to Kaiser and the way they do it is they call the mom in, check her vitals, bring her in the room and the doctor asks some questions. After that, they go get dad for the ultrasound.

After the doctor asked me my questions, she was prepping me for the ultrasound (which happened to be transvagional) and the nurse went to go get Sean. As she started the ultrasound, I could see her body language change from excitement to kind of a blank stare. She didn’t show us the screen for a few minutes and when she finally did, she had news we both didn’t expect.

At this point, I was a little over 8 weeks along. She told us that at this stage, she should be able to hear a heartbeat and see a baby that is moving around. However, all she saw was a tiny fetus and the sac. She said that I would more than likely end up miscarrying. She did want to send us in for a formal ultrasound the next day to confirm. We went to that the next morning and went back to her office and she confirmed that I had a blighted ovum. She told us we had three options:

1. The first would to miscarry naturally. We wouldn’t know when this would take place since it is up to my body to figure out the pregnancy wasn’t viable and miscarry on its own.
2. The second would to take medicine at home to speed up the process. I’d still miscarry at home but we would be able to decide when to do it.
3. The third would to have a D&C at the doctor’s office. This option would be the quickest, but there are some risks with any surgery.

I knew I didn’t want to have a D& C and I was leaning more towards doing it naturally, but she put the prescription in for the medicine just in case.

We got home and started mourning the loss of the baby we were so excited to meet. I ended up getting a call from a RN case manager at Kaiser. She told me that she was looking at our ultrasound and said she saw a fetus that measured 6 weeks and to not take the medicine and come back in for another ultrasound in a week to see if the baby had grown. At this point, we didn’t know what to think. I wanted to be hopeful but I was also scared to be. After researching blighted ovum, I read that there is no fetal pole when you have a blighted ovum but my ultrasound showed a fetal pole.

We waited a whole week and every time I went to the bathroom, I was afraid that I’d end up miscarrying. Finally the day of the ultrasound came (July 7) and the ultrasound ended up showing that if there was a fetus, it disappeared. My gestational sac ended up growing over that week so my body still thought I was pregnant. Once we got the confirmation that there was indeed no baby, we decided that the best route would be to take the medicine.

The rest of this post details my miscarriage. If you are not interested in reading that, I’d stop here!

We got home and ended up taking the medicine that day. The medicine is called “cytotec” and the way my doctor wanted me to take it was to insert one pill vaginally and take three by mouth and would need to repeat this the next day. I did the first dose on July 7 around 1PM. The doctor also prescribed me Norco and Ibuprofen. Around 3PM, I was cramping pretty bad. Around 4PM, I started bleeding pretty heavily. At around 6PM, I passed what I believed to be the sac. It was about the size of my palm. Prior to passing that, the cramps I felt were the worst I had felt so far.

We repeated the dose the next day at 1PM. At this point, I was still bleeding. Later that night at around 10:30PM, I started to feel really dizzy and weak. Sean called the advice nurse at Kaiser and they recommended I go to the ER. We went to the ER and the wait was 3 hours long. I knew that I couldn’t be in the hospital waiting room for three hours. We even went to another location and their wait was also three hours long. We decided that I’d go home and sleep it off. If I still woke up feeling like that, we would go back to the ER.

I woke up the next morning and still felt pretty dizzy and weak but now I had the worse migraine. We called the advice nurse again and she recommended we go to the ER. So we went and this time there wasn’t a long wait. I got seen fairly quickly. They hooked me up to an IV and gave me some fluids and some pain medicine for the headache. The doctor wanted another ultrasound to make sure that everything had passed, which it did. She also ran some blood work to make sure that I didn’t lose too much blood, which I didn’t. After my pain went down, they discharged me. I came home and slept it off and woke up feeling much better.

Stay tuned for Part 3!