Everything I wish I had known about miscarriages…

It seems like all of my symptoms really came on strong this week and I am feeling pretty darn pregnant. As hard as it is to be a highly functioning person while feeling like this, I am sooo grateful because it is reassuring things are going well. This post is all about pregnancy/miscarriages and thus might be a little yucky. So please don’t feel like you need to read it. I realize this is sort of a therapeutic post for me as I am trying to find “closure”. This post is very much from my experience and I know other miscarriages are very different and I might be wrong on some of these things.

I was thinking about the last pregnancy and my lack of symptoms. It seems like I probably lost the baby between 6-7 weeks and had a missed miscarriage so it took until 11 weeks to finally abort it. I remember many people telling me not to worry about not having symptoms. I remember looking at miscarriage info online and in books trying to see what was going on.

I’ve decided that most of the information that is given on miscarriages is misleading. It seems like they are trying to make women not be overly worried about things. A good example is that most places say, “Don’t worry too much about spotting in the first trimester because it is very common.” They don’t tell you on most websites is that 50% of women who have bleeding in the first trimester go on to have a miscarriage.

I saw lots of “don’t worry about not having nausea”, and a few warnings about if your symptoms stop as an indication of an impending miscarriages. I didn’t see warnings about if you don’t have symptoms at all. If you don’t feel pregnant at 7,8,9 weeks along, something probably is wrong.

I saw lots of “call your doctor right away”. My problem with this is that there is nothing your doctor can do to save a doomed pregnancy. That being said, some doctors still recommend bed rest to women in their first trimester in an attempt to stop bleeding. (This of course works for bleeding in later trimesters, I’m talking about early miscarriages). If there is nothing to be done for a doomed pregnancy, why do they do that?

I was very concerned that I had caused my miscarriages through my exercising. This is mostly because of the bleeding that usually followed any exercise. It is pretty well accepted now that anything that you did before your pregnancy, you can continue to do after. Some doctors are even rejecting the idea that there is a healthy heart rate to exercise at and they say you can do anything. There was one big study I read about that really bothered me. It found there is a dose response relationship between the amount of exercise done and the risk of miscarriage. Meaning, the more women exercised, the more likely they were to miscarriage. I couldn’t shake this study from my mind. The best conclusion I’ve come up with is that women who aren’t experiencing nausea and fatigue that comes from a healthy pregnancy are more likely to feel good enough to exercise a lot.

 

The last bit of information that I don’t know if I agree with is that they say if you are having a miscarriage, go to the E.R. If you were in your 2nd trimester, YES! Go to the E.R.! But for an early pregnancy? I had my miscarriage right here at home. It was very fast. Physically it was uncomfortable and was the equivalent to having a few contractions. It was more emotionally painful and scary. I don’t know what the E.R. would have done for me. Maybe given me some pain meds. Most likely given me a big bill. It was obvious after about half hour that the bleeding had mostly stopped and that I wasn’t in any real danger. So, I’m just trying to say, having a miscarriage isn’t like having a heart attack and unless you are hemorrhaging you probably don’t need to go to an E.R. Please, any health care professionals can correct me on this one.    

The last thing I just wanted to talk about was a D&C. A D&C is surgical procedure wear the basically clean out your uterus. Some women get a D&C if they know they have lost the baby and don’t want to go through a miscarriage. Other women will get them if a miscarriage is taking a long time and they haven’t passed everything. My doctor offered me a D&C, but (he’s so smart) said I could choose to wait a few days to see how I feel and if I needed one. So, I ended up not having to have one.

 

I probably should have named this post “my opinions about miscarriages”.  The things is that I didn’t really know anything about miscarriages before hand and felt pretty lost and confused, as wells as helpless and guilty about what was happening. I hope none of you have to go through a miscarriage, but if you do, maybe something I said helped.