Today would be my due date
And tomorrow is my surgery. How ironic.
I should be giving birth to our twins, but the doctors will be scraping my uterus instead. I’m upset. Really mad.
A baby is born
A good friend of mine delivered her baby a couple of days ago. I was happy for her and her beautiful daughter, but of course it made me remember about my own babies that would be born next month. We talked about having babies many times and while I started trying and had my first miscarriage, she was still deciding when it would be the best time for her, and we didn’t talk about babies again until earlier this year.
We got pregnant almost at the same time, she told me when she was 9 weeks pregnant and emailed a great ultrasound photo; I was 6 weeks with the twins and had just had the dreadful ultrasound where they saw the sacs and no embryos. It was her ultrasound photo that made me understand how wrong was the image at my own ultrasound. I will never forget the moment of realization when I saw that photo. It was the lightbulb turning on in my head – now I knew why my doctor said I was going to miscarriage again.
She had uneventful 9 months, just as it should always be, and had a wonderful delivery. The baby is healthy and they are thrilled. And I just wished my babies would be here in a month to meet their little girlfriend.
Preparing for the surgery
The surgery is fast approaching and I have been doing as much research and reading as I can. Someone from the miscarriages bulletin board I usually post sent me a great email about her septum surgery. She said she took one to two weeks to feel completely normal again and that her doctor didn’t opt for the infamous balloon.
If you never heard about this balloon: after certain uterine surgeries the doctors put a type of balloon inside of the uterus to help it heal and not develop any scar tissue. Problem is, all women who had the balloon complain that it is terrible and super uncomfortable. So I was happy to discover my doctor doesn’t think the balloon will be necessary in my case.
He said I should be ready to go back to work in 4 days after the surgery, and since it will be on a Friday, I won’t miss 4 days of work. I will have my husband at home to pamper me over the weekend so that will be good.
Bad part: doctor doesn’t want me to eat anything solid on the 24 hours prior to the surgery, he put me on a liquid diet for that time. So I can eat my last good meal on Wednesday and be hungry all day Thursday and part of Friday. That’s the only reason I am glad my surgery will be the first one of the day, at 7 AM. I will be waking up desperate for some breakfast once everything is done.
The end of the tests
So I went to the post-all-tests appointment to discuss the results with my doctor and decide what’s next.
Ovarian Assesment – blood test (drawn on day 3) and ultrasound (on day 10), normal. Great number of follicles.
Pooled Progesterone – blood test, blood drawn in 3 different days between days 5-9, normal.
Trombophilia panel & blood clotting disorders – 11 vials of blood drawn, all normal.
Thyroid – blood test, normal.
Karyotype chromossome for both me and my husband – blood test to check if we have any problems in our chromossomes, normal.
Hysteroscopy – videocamera to look inside the uterus to check for any abnormalities – septum found.
Ultrasound – two cysts in the right ovary that look like endometrioma. Doctor believes I have endometriosis but can only be sure as to what degree doing a laparoscopy (surgery through the bellybuttom).
Surgery is the only way to fix the septum, so that’s what I will be doing. Since I will be already having surgery for the septum, we will do the laparoscopy and take care of the endometriosis at the same time. My doctor thinks my chances of having a normal pregnancy after the septum surgery will be very good, and that I will only need to wait for 1 cycle after the surgery to start trying to conceive again. There is no way he can say for sure that the septum is the answer to all my past miscarriages, but he believes it is. I am really, REALLY, hoping that he is right.
Something that caused so much damage, so easily found
I went for a hysteroscopy. The doctor wanted to see if everything was normal with my uterus. After three pregnancies and countless ultrasounds without seeing anything that caused concern, we were not very hopeful that this would provide the answers we were looking for.
To my surprise, in less than 1 minute the doctor points out the culprit, an uterine septum.
She said she was happy to have found the septum, which was something “easy to fix”, that I could have surgery and all would be fine. It’s a small septum, but since it is located where the embryos try to implant, it makes for poor blood flow for the baby, causing the miscarriages.
I was glad for finally finding the problem, of course, but I was also devastated. I couldn’t believe that in one simple test, in less than a minute, she found the cause of almost two years of pain, the reason I lost my 4 babies. I spent the rest of the day in a mixed state of anger and relief.
Once my doctor is back from vacation next week, we will talk about the surgery.
It’s a nerve-wrecking waiting game
These past two years have been a mix of anxiety, hope and sadness. But the anxiety almost got the best of me. For many times all I could do was to anxiously wait for an ultrasound, for a test result, for a confirmation of something bad. There were days, weeks, that I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t concentrate on any tasks because I was so consumed by all the concerned thoughts that there was no room for anything else.
I worked with a psychiatrist to deal with my anxiety and my panick attacks, to learn to identify them and to live my life without any medicine (after my stupid physician prescribed me anti-depressants by the occasion of my first miscarriage and I started having all sorts of bad reactions to the drug). That knowledge helped a lot during my two following pregnancies, but being pregnant for me it’s a nerve-wrecking game, because against all odds, we suffered three losses, that remain unexplained.
Now I am waiting anxiously for my test results, hoping we will find something, wishing we won’t have to go through life not knowing what took our babies away from us.
Adoption doesn’t sound so cool anymore
I used to think that adoption was a great option for people who can’t have kids. Why bother with so many expensive treatments while there are lots of kids out there that need a home? I even thought that maybe one day after having my own kids we should adopt one, since there are so many kids out there that need a family.
Now that we are in this situation and I see a lot of couples that had multiple miscarriages stop trying and adopt, I am not so sure I can do that.
It’s not about taking care of a kid that it’s not ours. I don’t have a problem with that thought. I am sure we can learn to love a kid in our care and that we would always treat that kid as if he or she was our own. When I thought about adopting after having my own kids it sounded wonderful because there was no pressure.
Adopting in our case means that we have given up. That we were defeated. That we won’t pursue our dream to have our own kids anymore because nobody can figure out what’s wrong. We will live our lives wondering if we could have had a kid after all, if the medicine at some point would have evolved enough that they could find an answer for us. And it would be to expose our intimate problem to the world, loud and clear. The adoption itself would be the declaration of our failure. It says “we can’t have kids” to everybody who can hear it. I may be ready for that someday, but right now it sounds awful.
Don’t tell me everything will be all right
I absolutely hate when the few people that know about our story tell me not to worry that everything will be all right. It makes me cringe.
I know they are well-meaning words, but they are so incredibly empty, so preposterous, pretentious, that I almost want to yell back.
Why is everything going to be all right? Because I am your friend or family member and nothing bad can happen to me? Because I am any better than all the people out there that can’t have kids? Why is OK for people out there to have a problem and we have to be so blessed and special that everything will be perfect for us? Because you have more medical knowledge than the doctors who are treating us? Because something in your mind tells you that we deserve it more than other people?
No. We are not better than anyone. It can happen to us. It could happen to you. It could happen to anyone. When you read medicine labels there are always those rare cases of adverse reactions, but they exist and we never know who is going to be part of that small percentage of people. Nobody is immune to that. Not even your loved ones. So don’t tell me that everything will be all right. It’s empty and it makes me angry that you believe your friends and family are too good for that.
Why doctors don’t care
One thing that makes me very upset in this whole miscarriage situation is the doctor’s attitude. They seem to think it’s not a big deal at all. I can see in their eyes they think we are so exaggerated, that we are being wimps and should just keep trying again. I tried to understand this behavior and although I will never be able to fully comprehend why they are so okay with miscarriages, I came up with a theory.
Doctors are trained to cure diseases. You are feeling sick, they look at your symptons and find a treatment to make you well again. They are not interested in your feelings. And miscarriages are usually not a disease they can cure. Most of the time they don’t know the causes and there is no treatment available. On top of that, most miscarriages (not recurrent ones) are really caused by an abnormal embryo that couldn’t survive anyway. And the grand reason of all: miscarriages (unless they are very late in the pregnancy) will usually not make you sick or kill you. They are not going to cause your body any harm. They will only make you miserably sad. But the doctors don’t treat sadness. They send you to counselors and psychiatrists for that. So they don’t care.
I wish they did.
There aren’t enough doctors looking for answers or researches going on to solve the mistery of multiple miscarriages. It might be for a purely economic reason, but I don’t think so. As long as most doctors are willing to dismiss miscarriages as easily as they do, we won’t see this medical field evolve as it should. 2/3 of the couples that have multiple miscarriages can’t find an answer for this personal tragedy, so there is a lot of research that needs to be done.
My husband has a kid, and this fact is gaining new proportions
My husband had a kid when he was really young. His girlfriend at the time wanted to have the child. The families made a mess of the situation, she broke up with him after a big family fight. She delivered the baby and gave him for adoption. My husband signed the papers and gave away his parental rights. For the longest time, he didn’t want to have any more kids. We got married, I would have had a baby right away, but he wasn’t ready. I waited for him to get his mind around it.
After our second wedding anniversary he said he was ready to try. Everything that happened after that I already told here. Three pregnancies, three miscarriages, a very hard time for us.
The thing is: it’s pretty obvious whose problem this is. I’ve heard from the RE specialist that 1/3 of the infertility cases is a problem with the woman, 1/3 with the man and 1/3 a problem with both men and women. In our situation, it’s very clear for the world that I am the cause. He has a healthy kid to show everybody that he has no problem having a baby. It puts me on the spotlight.
And of course I am always afraid that we won’t able to have kids and the only kid he will ever have is that one he had a long time ago. The kid that was given away. The kid that is growing up thousands of miles from here with another family and already has a dad. It’s so ironic.
