At that first appointment, Dr Nug made me feel SO grateful and hopeful. Grateful because when I'd been married to my ex, I only went to Planned Parenthood for any kind of female healthcare, and PP in rural Texas was NOT quality healthcare. One lady there took almost 10 minutes of digging to find my cervix. I know 10 minutes doesn't sound like very long, but when someone is digging in your cooch, 10 seconds is pretty long. Anyway, Dr. Nug started me on some bio-identical estrogen (estrogen made of yams and soybeans) and then said he was going to run several blood tests, including a pregnancy test, just to get all my baselines. I kinda laughed at him, but he was very reassuring and said "Even if you are pregnant, this estrogen won't hurt anything." I believed him. When the nurse called later that day and left a message on my machine saying congratulations, I was elated, but only for a moment or two. Because remember all that bleeding? It was still happening. When I called her back, she told me to stop taking the estrogen, and I told her that the doc said it wasn't unsafe during pregnancy, and she said "OK, then keep taking it." Now, I knew that progesterone was the hormone that supported pregnancy, but I figured the good doc knew what he was talking about. When the bleeding didn't stop, Sean and I pretty much resigned ourselves to an early miscarriage. It was a heartbreaking Christmas.
My gift to Sean that Christmas was a trip to Washington DC to see the new airplane museum at the Dulles airport. He's a total geek like that, and besides, we'd never really gotten to take any kind of honeymoon, since we married at the height of planting season that year. The trip was scheduled for the second week in January, and when I still hadn't actually miscarried by then, I started kinda getting worried. I called Dr. Nug's office and asked for progesterone supplements. The nurse said she could probably call in a prescription for me. The nurse promptly called back and said Dr. Nug wouldn't prescribe the progesterone, because this early in pregnancy, there was nothing to be done to prevent a miscarriage and she suggested canceling my trip unless I wanted to end up in an out-of-state emergency room. We went on the trip. I still didn't miscarry. My boobs started feeling fuller. I started feeling pregnant. We allowed ourselves to hope, and get excited. We came home. We moved across the street. In the middle of moving, I miscarried. January 15, 2003. I labored most of the day at work, having what I'm now are certain were 45 second contractions every 2 minutes. I finally left a little bit early, came home, and spent several hours sitting on the potty. Sean kept coming to the door asking about me, and I got irritated at him interrupting my concentrating on the handle of the drawer in front of me. I finally kinda felt a huge blob come through my cervix, pushed a little bit, and there it was. A big blob of blood in the potty. I didn't call Sean in. I didn't do anything. I looked for a moment, then flushed. It took about 3 days with a heating pad for my uterus to stop being sore. It took several weeks to stop bleeding. It took several months for me to be able to talk about it. It took several years to feel not-guilty about it. In fact, I felt guilty until my first appointment with my RE, when I told her my history and she said "If the doctor had given you the progesterone when you asked for it, it probably would have prevented that miscarriage." I tend to feel guilty over everything (lordy, lordy, parenting is plagued with guilt), but I finally feel ok about this miscarriage. I did what I could do for as long as I could do it. I think that baby was a boy. I searched and searched until I found what he looked like when he passed. I have two friends who got pregnant about the same time I did, and they both have little boys. When I'm around them, I always think of mine.
(Please note that this picture came from a pregnancy that had to be terminated because it was ectopic.)
