R’s Story

This story discusses topics including pregnancy loss, grief, ectopic pregnancy, healing, and spirituality.

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When I met up with R to talk about her experience with pregnancy and loss, it was actually a beautiful day. It was a bit windy, but the skies were blue and bright, and the humidity was low. A tease for the autumn that was still a month away, perhaps. We sat at a table in a sunny spot outside of a coffee shop on our city’s main thoroughfare. There were buckets of half-forgotten herbs growing behind me, and when a gust came up from east, I could smell thyme. The wind pulled loose a few strands of R’s hair and she tucked them back behind her ear, adjusting her sunglasses after.

When she messaged me about sharing her story, it had been three weeks since her surgery. Emotions and thought-life aside, her physical body was not fully healed yet, and there she was, standing on the cyber-doorstep of my DMs, offering her personal experience for the world see and examine. “I just don’t think it’s talked about enough,” she wrote.

And I agree, I really do.

After R and K decided to start a family, R got pregnant on their first try. “My mom had seven kids, my sister easily had three. And my mom was one of ten, my cousin has triplets—yeah. So, that was kind of in the back of my mind like, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens the first time,’” she said.

And it did.

“We were watching Frozen 2, which I’ve seen before, many times. And there was one part that was sad and I just started bawling. And I was like, this is unusual. And then I found myself really, really wanting really cheap, shitty beer,” she said, letting out a breathy laugh. “And I was like, this is also kind of unusual.”

“Like, Natty or something?” I asked her, laughing, too.

“Yeah,” she smiled. Unrelated to pregnancy, beer—shitty or not—is out of the question for R. She’s gluten-free. So, a craving like that? Definitely flagged her attention. “So I took a test, and it was positive. And so that was really cool,” she said, recalling telling her husband, K. “Just getting to show him the test and be excited.”

That double line, or plus sign, or even the word “pregnant”—whatever your used brand shows—it means so many things to so many people. To R and K, it would mean life-changing events that they never could have anticipated.

“The whole time we were both saying, you know, ‘if everything goes well…blah, blah, blah,’ and like, ‘assuming we carry to term’, you know. Kind of as a safeguard, but…you can’t be at all protected from any of it.”

About five days after she tested positive, she started to feel what she described as extreme cramping pain with some spotting—a little bit of blood. Which is scary, but at the same time she thought, maybe this is normal. You hear about implantation cramping, or that some spotting can be pretty common, especially in the beginning, or even that you can feel cramping sensations because your uterus is already beginning to stretch. It’s hard to know what’s going on in your body, especially when you’ve never experienced it before. And honestly, previous experience doesn’t necessarily make it easier to tell, either.

After a little while the pain subsided and she decided to call her doctor, just to be on the safe side. The voice on the other end of the line met her with mostly reassurance. “It’s probably fine since the pain has passed,” they told her. “But if you want to make an appointment, you can.” So she did. She’d go see them in a few days for blood work and what not—just to make sure everything was fine.

“I was googling everything, which is a terrible idea,” she said.

But what else can you do in this day and age? As she read through the search results and myriad online prognoses, she and her husband experienced a strange duality of existence. She’d had this physical experience that initiated a lot of fear and doubt about what was happening inside of her body, but at the same time, they had this hope that they were wrong.

“I think the reason why we didn’t go somewhere right away—partially reading from google it sounded like, well this pain could also be from kidney stones, maybe? And so we wanted to hold out in hopes that it was that.”

But it wasn’t.

That same night as the cramping and the call to the doctor, in the earliest hours of the morning, in the still-dark of the night, the pain came back. It shook her from her sleep and led her, crying, into the bathroom.

“Excruciating pain,” she said. “Laying on the bathroom floor, screaming. Sweating. Shaking.”

She knew something was wrong. Hours of pain and bleeding passed. “This was not normal,” she said. But R has a lot of experience with hospitalizations in the past that have left her with fear and dread about ever having to go back. Understandably so.

“Please, please,” she’d said to her husband. “I don’t want to go to the hospital. I think we both know what’s happening.”

There was an excess of blood, and it seemed clear what was going on. It seemed clear that she was having a miscarriage. “Everything just felt wrong. Your body just knows, this is wrong.” And so they sat there in the bathroom together, and wept.

“We just held each other at that point. And just sobbed.” In part, she said, from the sheer exhaustion of what they’d just experienced, but mostly from the heartbreak.

Two weeks passed by—two weeks of grieving and thinking and praying and feeling their way through this reality, this heartbreak that had happened in this traumatizing way; they spent that time trying to process what they’d just been through.

“The fact that it had happened and been extremely painful and then kind of subsided, but then happened again enough to wake me up, has led to a lot of anxiety.” She said to me, blinking behind her sunglasses and folding the edge of her gluten-free pastry bag. “I get a stomachache, which happens all the time, and…” she spread her hands palms up across the table from me, splaying her fingers. “Oh my god, what’s happening to me? I need to start freaking out now. Definitely a lot of panic and anxiety with it, feeling like I was dying or something.”

“And so, that was that,” she said. She happened to be on a short break from work already when it happened—a divine provision, she agreed—and didn’t have to take time off. She spent a portion of that break just trying to breathe her way through life—afraid of waking up with that pain, having a difficult time finding sleep and rest, moving in and out of the realm of panic attacks. She called her doctor again and was, again, met with vague reassurance.

“It sounds like that’s exactly what happened if the pain is gone,” they said to her. “We want you to come in but there’s not a rush, come in when you’re ready,” she quoted to me. Her doctor was out of town that week, and they offered an appointment following his return, which she took.  

And then, a couple more days after that phone call, her biggest fears came into fruition. The pain returned, and what was excruciating last time was somehow even worse now.

“We decided it was either, at that point go to urgent care or just go to the ER.” She knew, though, that if she went to an urgent care, they would likely send her away, telling her to go to the hospital. “So we went to the ER.”

A lot of ERs have a sign when you walk in that reads something along these lines: ‘Please notify staff if you are pregnant’. R saw that sign when she walked through the waiting room lobby and sat down at the check-in desk. Given her recent experiences, R and K had come to the conclusion that she wasn’t pregnant anymore, and by all accounts, that’s what she planned on telling them. “And I feel like it was from God,” she said, “just like, ‘tell them that you’re pregnant,’ and I was like…we’re not pregnant? And it was just this extreme nudging.”

So she told them that she was pregnant and they took her height and weight and she was placed in a room pretty quickly. “Within an hour,” she said. “We sat down to wait and K was like, ‘I love you, but why did you tell them that we’re pregnant?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I just felt this extreme need to tell them that,’” she recounts to me, shrugging and shaking her head.

She was placed in a room in the ER where they ran some tests—bloodwork, getting an IV placed, urinalysis, some imaging (usually ultrasounds)—that kind of stuff. “We were probably in a room for a total of two hours. And based on the imaging and based on the doctor like, just barely touching my abdomen and me just wincing, like could barely move, they were like, ‘It seems like you have an ectopic pregnancy, and it probably ruptured and we need to get you into emergency surgery.’”

She was told it would happen in about an hour, but within fifteen minutes, she was swept away into the depths of the hospital, back to the OR, where her husband wasn’t allowed to go. “I feel like I kind of blocked it out,” she said, talking about how scary that experience was—that huge reality shift from thinking they weren’t pregnant at all to, this new fact that she actually still had something going on with her pregnancy and now it was life-threatening.

In normal pregnancies, a fertilized egg will implant within the main cavity of the uterus, where it stays and moves through different stages of development. An ectopic pregnancy—which occurs in about 2% of all pregnancies—happens when a fertilized egg implants somewhere else, outside of your uterus. That’s what the word ectopic means: in an abnormal place. The most common location for fertilized eggs to ectopically implant—about 90% of ectopic pregnancies—is in the fallopian tubes between the ovaries and the uterus.

And that’s what happened to R.

She and K texted a handful of loved ones and close friends, updating them on what was happening and asking for prayer—prayers they attribute to not only the speed of the treatment she received, but also the quality of care she was given. “The nicest nurses and doctors,” she said. “And having them know what was going on right away. Because in my experience with doctors and hospitals is that there is a lot of ‘we don’t know’.”

While she was being prepped for surgery in the operating room, alone and trying to keep herself calm, her OB showed up—something that caught me by extreme surprise and moved me nearly to tears. “The gynecologist came to the surgery,” she started to say, when I interrupted her.

“Your OB?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. My hand landed on the table with a thump. “That is great patient care,” I said, baffled that he did that for her.

“Yeah, I did not expect that. They were like, he’ll be here soon, and he held my hand and stuff. Cause I was mad at them that K couldn’t come in to the surgery room. But it was cool that (there was) at least a familiar face,” she said. “That’s just so important.”

“Praise God surgery went well. They ended up removing a fallopian tube. Which does not decrease chances,” she added, talking about her odds of conception in the future. “So that’s good.”

She described her surgery, which was performed laparoscopically, as “the little robot arms” that left three, small incisions that would heal into even smaller scars.

She said she woke up from her surgery and was discharged within a few hours, able to go home the same night and sleep in the comfort her own bed, husband at her side.

R talked a lot about the weeks following her surgery, moving through this sort of numb, shocked daze at the turn of events, grappling with the sheer fact of what had just happened to her, what her body had just been through. The loss that she’d just experienced. She talked about the physical pain—how unprepared she was for the basics of recovering from surgery, like how hard it would be to do anything by herself. Like sitting up, or walking to the bathroom and sit on the toilet. How sore and painful her body would feel, how much her strength felt like it had just been wiped away. She wore a binder on her abdomen to support her core. Leaned on her husband and best friend moving through the rooms of her house.

“It was a lot of laying, for days. And then a lot of sitting, for even more time. And a lot of humbling, from letting people take care of me.”

Something that is, when it comes to ourselves, infinitely difficult to do.

K, her husband, was able to take time off work as bereavement while he cared for her healing body, something that many workplaces don’t offer for spouses, let alone for the women who just experienced a miscarriage. R was able to use her paid-time-off to take off time to heal from the surgery, following that happenstance break she’d just had for two weeks before. And when she did return to work, they were accommodating and understanding, giving her light-duty tasks that were appropriate for where she was both physically and emotionally. This was a huge blessing, R said, considering the much more commonplace lack of support we tend to get from our jobs in these scenarios. For this, they are both incredibly thankful and want to encourage folks to explore the types of accommodations their workplace might offer for specific circumstances like miscarriage or related procedures.

She talked about the types of thoughts she experienced, the places her brain and broken heart took her mind to, in between reliving the really traumatizing parts of what happened to her—as if that wasn’t difficult enough to handle on its own. 

She described those thoughts as ‘wrong,’ and then gave me specific examples. “Like, I must’ve done something wrong for this to go so wrong. Or, we’re never gonna be able to have success in the future.” She paused, and cars passed by on the busy street behind us. “This is your fault. K is disappointed in you, or wishes he were with someone else. Things are never gonna feel normal, anxiety from this is never gonna subside.”

Combating those thoughts took a lot of work and energy. Prayer and active correction in the moment, R told me, were the most helpful. She remembered talking to God one of those days and bearing her heart to Him. “My body was made for this ,” she lamented to him, trying to make sense of it all.

“And He was like, ‘Your body is made to heal. I heal you from your deepest human condition, and I’ll heal you from this. You were made for healing.’”

Our minds can be particularly cruel to us, I have found, especially when we are in the midst of suffering. But the hope that R communicated to me then, not just for the healing of her body and soul from this experience, but for the future waiting ahead of her and her husband, her hope in and reliance on the provision of God for her life, was unparalleled by anything else I’ve ever heard before. It was amazing to listen to, really. 

Aside from prayer and choosing to deepen her intimacy with her husband—rather than allow her thoughts and fears to alienate them from one another—something else R talked about being deeply helpful for her healing was the support she received from her loved ones.

Their support system really showed up for them—with prayers and encouragement and care packages and meal trains. Her best friend invited herself over, not once or twice, but repeatedly, and just sat with her. Brought her treats, watched movies, did paint-by-numbers, cried and prayed with her. She never showed up with an agenda or something specific to say—she showed up to meet R where she was at, to hold a space for her and her pain to just exist.

Another friend, who’d had a very similar experience three years before, sat down with R and shared her own story. They met in their shared grief and cried together, and it was a balm on the tender and broken places on R’s soul. “Her crying as she shared her story from three years ago was really helpful. Because it’s like, this is not something that goes away.”

That same friend shared words that R carries with her now, reminding herself of them when her days feel hard and heavy and unfamiliar. “She gave some really helpful advice which was, in part, that there is no going back to normal. Something we both were craving was like, when are we ever going to feel normal? Are we ever going to feel like ourselves? And she was very much like, you are changed now. And the old normal is not gonna come back. But you will find a new normal, and fall into that.”

Some people were less helpful, as they are wont to be. People really say and do the wildest shit at the most insensitive times, and in my opinion, it comes back to plain old self-centeredness. Time and time again, R had people show up to spend time with her and offer ‘advice’ rooted in their personal opinions—which almost always lacked personal experience with pregnancy loss or ectopic pregnancy—on how to ‘move past this’. Or showed up with a clear agenda of what they wanted to say, or what they thought she needed to hear at the time, rather than what she expressed that she needed. Some people asked thoughtless questions about details of her miscarriage, or asked her when she planned to ‘try again’.

“If you’re gonna ask questions, being obviously compassionate, considerate, gentle—but, being very general.” Which I think is a great point. Why are you asking specific questions, anyway? Who is that helping? What’s the point and purpose behind this thing you’re opening your mouth to say? Let’s take a pause and think that through before you let it out—how could that land? What could that imply? What might it feel like to be asked that question in the midst of these other feelings this person could be having?

And maybe, just maybe—my own personal opinion again, here—if you don’t know the answer to those questions, you shouldn’t be the one talking to begin with. I’m gonna say this once (and probably a thousand more times) to the friends and family of someone moving through grief: this is not about you. So don’t make it about you.

Figuring out how to grieve was, like all things, an ever-changing process. Understanding that the normalcy R had known in her life was now, and forever, a thing of the past, was helpful. But grieving this kind of loss was completely foreign to her.

“I’ve grieved the loss of a friendship, or the loss of a relationship, but I’ve never grieved a death. And honestly, it was hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that it was a death,” she told me.

It wasn’t until after the operation, when her medical team came in to explain what had happened to her, that this concept even began to click together. “They said, ‘we removed the fallopian tube and the fetus was attached to it.’ Which I was like, why the fuck did you tell me that, that you saw the fetus?”

She went on to tell me that she would’ve just assumed that everything was kind of a mess down there, and they went in and did the thing and when it was done it was done; she didn’t really need to know those kinds of details. “But to be like, its physical form was there…I still don’t really know if that means I technically was pregnant after the miscarriage…”

We talked about that for a bit—wading through what could’ve been happening inside of her body during those first two rounds of pain and bleeding that she experienced, and whether she still was pregnant during those two weeks after that lead her to surgery. Whether she really was pregnant when she walked into that ER and felt that unexplainable urge to tell them that was the case. And how strange of a thing that is to navigate through, this not knowing of what actually happened. And how to grieve that, and how receiving different information about it can change the way that unfolds.

I asked her if she thought, from where she stands now, that receiving that information from her medical team was helpful for her, which warranted, of course, a very complex answer for an equally complex situation.

“I know you can’t really be this particular—like, how are they supposed to know what’s best for each person?” And you can’t. It’s true. You can’t know the impact, as a healthcare provider, that your exact words are going to have on any given person. But R went on to tell me that learning this information disrupted her sleep in a tremendous way, initiating a series of nightmares about the details of the miscarriage and surgery that they’d shared with her.

“But now,” she continued, “if I could choose and they would tell me now, I don’t know if that would help with the acceptance—and, we shouldn’t need permission to feel fucked up about this, but hearing them say that almost gave me, in my mind, permission to be wrecked by this.”

Their words, confirming her pregnancy and subsequent loss, affirmed the reality of the emotional pain she was experiencing. Them saying that to her communicated yes, this was real. What you are experiencing is real. And the emotional response she was having was, therefore, warranted.

“Women are seen as overly emotional, dramatic, weak. So anything that could be associated with that, it’s like, no.”

She meant “no” as in, ‘I don’t want to be perceived that way, so I better tuck all of these feelings and thoughts down to the very bottom of me.’

But the truth is that we don’t need permission from anyone else to feel every part of the pain and loss and grief of this. This is absolutely real in every aspect of itself, and the grief that comes from this type of experience is absolutely warranted. And we don’t need anyone else to tell us that in order for it to be true.

She talked about the passing of time, too, and how that has impacted her thoughts. Her fears. Her emotions.

“I started to feel like, oh my gosh, am I pathetic? That I am still physically healing? Or that I’m still crying over this every day? And it’s like, no. Absolutely not. You need to sit in it, in the grief, not try and get out of it as fast as you can. Which is our survival instinct. But, you have to sit in it.”

She learned lessons while sitting in her grief—lessons that she still has to sit through, wade through, pray through. She learned that it’s okay to not be able to hold a simple, small talk conversation because everything feels wrong, wrong, wrong. That it feels wrong because it is. “That’s okay,” she said. “And that’s not weird or weak. It’s just so important to accept how big it was.”

And to know that some people simply will not understand that—how big it was. They’ll move on and stop asking about it because they don’t have a category for its bigness. For how lifechanging it was. How you are fundamentally different now, on this side of everything that happened. How, really, there is no “this side”, because this grief, this change is not something that you walked away from unscathed but is something that you will forever carry with you.

That friend from earlier, the one with the good advice, talked to her about that, too.

“She said that something that gets hard is like, months down the road when you might not be thinking about it every day—so then when you think about it, you feel guilty that you haven’t been thinking about it.”

We talked about that for a minute, going back and forth about that guilt and the way our brains work. R elaborated on that thought process.

“Like I should care more,” she said. “Like you don’t have a proper respect for it. And it’s like, that’s not what that means. But also, you get the lie in your head that it’s been too far removed now for me to still talk about it with people.”

Which makes those safe people—those select few who will sit and grieve and be what you need, not what they want to be—so, so, so important.

I did ask R, at the end of our time together, what she really wanted people to know. What, if she could take anything she’s learned, she really wanted people to take from her experience. And she did not leave me wanting.

“I was mad about that,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

 “Not that people have to talk about their personal experience, but even doctors. Nobody warns you what to look for.” She shook her head again.

“So, you’re googling everything. You’re checking the color of your blood against a picture of blood online and they’re like ‘if it’s this color you’re fine, if it’s this color, you’re not.’ And it’s like, okay, what are these sources? Or they’re like, ‘don’t worry about it, I thought this happened to me but it was just this’, so you just...if the symptoms, what to expect, and the likelihood of it, and what to do first in those situations; if all of that would have been explained, I think it wouldn’t have been half as bad.”

“Do you think you would’ve gone in sooner?” I asked.

She paused for a moment, pressing her lips together in thought. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”

A recent publication from The Lancet, a widely known medical journal, stated that the general rate of miscarriage for known pregnancies is around 15.3%. But this can be hard to measure, because it requires women to know and report their pregnancies and miscarriages, and sometimes women experience a miscarriage before they ever know they were pregnant. Some sources say the odds of miscarriage are 1 in every 4 first pregnancies.

Cramping, vaginal bleeding, lower back pain, abdominal pain—these are all reasons to seek medical attention in early pregnancy. At any point in pregnancy, really, but miscarriages are more common earlier on, before thirteen weeks, and that’s what we’re talking about here.

This information is difficult to talk about, uncomfortable for most parties involved, but, when it comes to women who have to go through it unprepared—a lot of them wish they would’ve known more beforehand. A conversation, perhaps, that healthcare providers should be willing to initiate when their patients come to them preparing to start a family.

About the dark and twisty narrows her mind maneuvered through in grief, R had this to say to fellow women experiencing pregnancy loss:

“There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing you did wrong or that you could’ve done. You are not viewed any differently because of having lost that. That it’s very likely that you will have healthy pregnancies in the future, but if not, that doesn’t say something about you. You have to do like, literally whatever you need. If you’re someone that, you know, heals for a few days and then goes right back to work and that’s what you need in order to grieve, do that. If you’re someone that needs to tell everyone they know, do that.”

She went on, encouraging women--and their partners—to sit in their grief. She said, “It’s okay to feel resentment for healthy pregnant women or people holding new babies. That doesn’t mean you’re fucked up. And you don’t need to feel like a failure.”

She talked about how you can’t take responsibility for your husband’s grief and healing—you can be there, and support one another, but you can’t control their healing. You can only influence your own. And giving yourself grace for the dishes in the sink and the laundry piled in the corner and for staying in bed until noon for the third day in the room—it takes time. And it’s okay to feel the pain of it.
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If you’re concerned about symptoms you’re experiencing, please seek medical assistance immediately. This article is meant to relay information about someone’s personal experience, it is not intended to provide medical advice in any way. If you are experiencing a medical emergency, please seek emergency care or call 911.