Miscarriage: My experience & the big debate on the great "12 week wait"

POSITIVE OVULATION TEST

July 21st, 2015 - Finding Out That I Was Pregnant

 My husband and I woke up like it was any other morning. We both jumped out of bed and headed out of our room to get ready for the day. I treated that day just like any other ordinary day. The very first thing I did was take an ovulation test. My husband and I have been trying to have a baby for over a year and half now, and using ovulation tests have become a daily thing for us by this time. The truth is, ever since the day we got married we were very anxious to start our family. Since it seemed to be taking us a while to get pregnant, ovulation tests were recommended to us by our doctor. This is why we have always followed the rules on the box, and had been doing so for three cycles in a row. However, this cycle felt different. To our surprise, the test showed positive. This would mean that I had ovulated three days in a row. This fact definitely seemed very weird to my husband and I. In the past I had only ovulated one day within each cycle. With this in mind, I began to Google what might cause something like this. As I was searching the internet I found the same results over and over again. On the Internet there were many women who had said that they received several positive ovulation tests in a row, and had found out that this was caused by them being pregnant. Now, after receiving this information I was in denial. I didn't feel pregnant, but nevertheless I decided to take a home pregnancy test. When I read the results of my pregnancy test I felt a loss for words. Finally after I snapped back to reality I quickly ran to my husband to share the good news. At this point my husband and I were in tears. We had been trying for so long, and we both could not believe that it finally had happened to us. As we were so excited we had driven down to our local health center where we were given another urine pregnancy test that also read positive. Here we learned that our pregnancy was extremely early. The lady had told us that we were in fact somewhere between 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 weeks pregnant. She was surprised that we had even tested positive this early, and frankly so were we.

The Big Decision: Should we, or shouldn't we tell everyone the big news?

With this being said, my husband and I were on some sort of high that is hard to explain. I think the only feeling that could come close to the feeling that we were having that day would be the feeling a person would have if they were to win the lottery. We were so extremely excited to tell everyone. We just COULD NOT wait. So, we called all of our closest family members and by the end of the night we made the BIG Facebook post. We just full on let EVERY single person we knew know. 

While in the event of telling everyone we knew, I couldn't help but feel ashamed by how far along I was. I was definitely aware of the "12 week wait". I knew that a lot of pregnancies have the possibility of ending in early miscarriage. So when people asked how far along i was, I felt some sort of embarrassment for announcing my pregnancy so early. I felt as if announcing so early was something women just don't do. While I had this overwhelming feeling I completely shrugged it off and blamed my excitement for my very early announcement.

The Bad News: Was it bad timing, or just bad luck?

Unfortunately, a few days after we found out that we were pregnant, I noticed a little bleeding. I wasn't too worried though because the Internet had said that implantation bleeding is something that occurs quite frequently. So I decided to just wait the next day for my appointment to address the bleeding. Fortunately my doctor had reassured me that the bleeding I was experiencing was indeed an implantation bleed. So I went home and hadn't thought about the bleeding anymore. Well, this was until the bleeding picked up quite a bit. After this occurrence I decided it was time to go to the hospital. This is where everything changed. The doctor took blood samples from me and had let me know that the test results would only take a few minutes to come back. So in a very worried manner I waited only five minutes for the results to come back. As I felt nauseous with anxiety, these five minutes felt like hours. Today I wish those five minutes would have felt longer than they actually did. At least within these five minutes I still had hope that my baby was okay. When the results came back I wished I hadn't heard them at all. These results crushed every ounce of hope that I had inside me of becoming a mother. The truth is that by this time I was expecting to be around 4 weeks pregnant, but the ER doctor had informed me that I did in fact loose my baby.

This devastating news hit me like a ton of bricks. After hearing that I lost my baby I immediately wanted to break down and cry and scream on the floor. I didn't understand why something like this had happened to my husband and I. However I decided to take the news and walk away. I suppose I am very weird about things like this. When I look back at how I reacted to this news I definitely can understand when people say that ""people grieve differently". It all amounts to the fact that I  hate to make people feel bad for me. I felt that if I cried and carried on that day, that I would upset my husband more than he needed to be. So I decided to revert my attention to something else. I began asking where we needed to go before we went home and what we needed to get done this week. I guess avoiding the pain was my way of dealing with the situation.

The Bottom Line

The truth is that I should have never felt ashamed of telling everyone about my pregnancy. Actually, telling everyone allowed me to build myself a support system that was there for me in my time of need. Several people who are close to me have checked in on me and have reassured me that everything is going to be alright. This is something that I really needed. Honestly I think that it would have only hurt me more if I hadn't told everyone. I believe I may have felt even more guilt if I had covered up the fact that I had been pregnant as if it had never happened. Regardless of how far along I was, or how much of the child was"developed", it was still a human being. Not only that, but it was my baby, and even in those short moments that we had together I had grown attached to the little boy or girl that was growing inside of me.