On The Edge

      A fellow blogger who I read a lot is currently about to miscarry according to all the signs. She’s had other miscarriages. Reading her newly posted entry, Not Good News, made me nauseous. Not because of it’s description of symptoms, but because it brought back all the memories of my loss last year.

      When you are on the edge of a miscarriage, you lose your grip on space and time. You cannot feel your body move, you cannot feel your thoughts process, and hours seem like years and days like lifetimes. I imagine that people in captivity, like prisoners of war, experience something similar. You wait for the inevitable horror and pain in state of heightened awareness—so sensitive to every stimulus around you—but incredibly numb, like you are watching yourself in third person.

      When I saw the ultrasound showing the lifeless black dot at 14 weeks and my doctor said it’s only a matter of time, I entered the space/time warp. I asked him to describe it to me please. What will I go through? As he rattled off the list of possibilities and began writing a prescription for a painkiller, I kept thinking the obvious: This is not happening to me. Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe there’s hope.

      Later (who knows how many days, like I said, you lose sense of time), in the middle of the night, cramping woke me up and I knew that metaphorically I was being marched into the daylight and soon the worse would come. While writhing in pain on the bathroom floor, careful not to wake my husband (I don’t know why I did this in private, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time), I ran the gauntlet. It hurt very much physically, but emotionally, I began to feel some relief. I kept chanting, “almost done, almost done,” with each contraction. After I passed the last of the fetus and the cramping subsided, the haze of sleepiness descended. I sighed and fell asleep where I lay on the floor. When I woke, time and space began to return their normal perspectives, but my heart was forever changed.

      I realize that’s a very dramatic account and I’m one of the lucky ones, my story has a good ending with a subsequent successful pregnancy. However, that’s how it felt to me, and I’ve only miscarried once that I’m aware of. I can't imagine going through this again.

      But if, like this blogger, when you shake the Magic Eight Ball every time you get “the outcome is currently unknown, but make different plans,” or “failure likely,” how can you not be cynical? That life is purely random and the only hope we have is an arbitrary fortuitous event? Are we just chaff just being blown around? How could this experience be something intended and something good to be learned from?

      I still don’t have the answer. She’s in my thoughts as she waits on the edge. I wish I could hold her hand.