The pain of a miscarriage is indescribable, but how do you cope with miscarriages that keep happening again and again? Queli shares how she went through this and the joy of becoming a mother.
Before showing Queli’s story, I have a message for all women who have suffered the pain of a miscarriage: To cope with the loss that a miscarriage brings, having emotional support is essential. That’s why I recommend finding a psychologist with experience in supporting women trying to conceive. Learn about Famivita’s psychology service and get a first free evaluation session. Click here to learn more!
I have always been crazy about becoming a mother, so I started trying for a baby right after I got married, but I didn’t imagine that making my dream come true would be so complicated. After about a year of trying, I finally got my much-desired positive. But the joy didn’t last long: in less than a week I felt cramps and started bleeding. I lost my first baby. I cried a lot, I was devastated. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. After a few days of staying to myself, I decided to start trying again. About three months after the miscarriage, I was pregnant again. My pregnancy was relatively smooth and my son was born at 40 weeks, via natural birth.
A few years later, I decided to have a second child. My anxiety started all over again and getting pregnant wasn’t hard, but keeping the baby inside me was. The happiness in my first attempt only lasted 6 weeks. On a rainy morning my baby was gone. Not wasting too much time, I got pregnant again. At 9 weeks, I went for an ultrasound and found out that my tiny baby no longer had a heartbeat. It was a shock! I could see in the image my baby fully formed, little arms, little legs, and motionless, lifeless. What pain! The next day I went to another clinic and repeated the ultrasound, a useless attempt to hear my baby’s strong heartbeat. I had to have a curettage because I was taking medication to try to keep the baby.
It was one of the worst days of my life because I felt as though I was going to kill my baby, to take him out of me. Seeing my husband standing at the door of the operating room with the saddest look in the world was the worst scene I have ever experienced. I was shaking from head to toe, from nerves, fear, sadness. At the last minute I even asked the doctor to try to hear the baby’s heart, but there was nothing that could be done. Well, there was: a curettage, and that’s what she did. The next day I went home, and the atmosphere was like a wake. After all, this was the third miscarriage, but it was the one that hit me the hardest, because I had seen my baby on the ultrasound with his heart racing one week and the next week he was dead inside me. I saw him alive, I saw his little arms and legs. But I lost him, he slipped away from me. I was defeated.
But life went on and time is like a balm. The problem was that the curettage was incomplete, I still had remnants of the miscarriage inside me, and this became infected. I was in so much pain I could barely walk. Result: hospitalized for an emergency second curettage. The doctor suspected hydatidiform mole and my husband and I were desperate with this possibility. But in the end everything turned out fine; the biopsy was negative for mole, it was just remaining pregnancy tissue.
I had to wait a few months before trying again and finally got my positive. Every new ultrasound was a moment of total suspense; we could barely breathe until we heard our baby’s heartbeat. So much agony, so much anxiety, so much fear! My daughter was born at 36 weeks—a little princess!
After four years, even while taking birth control, my period was late. I did a test just to be sure and discovered I was pregnant again. The mix of feelings was huge! I was desperate with this new pregnancy and at the same time happy about it. I spent a week getting used to the idea and by the end I was thrilled. But the joy didn’t last long. Again, bleeding, cramps, miscarriage. I lost my little baby. The pain was immense. The guilt hurts even more because I had been upset at first about the unplanned pregnancy. I talked to my husband and he agreed: let’s have another baby! Our luck was so great that the next month I was pregnant again. This time the pregnancy went until 41 weeks and my youngest completed my wonderful trio!
Recurrent miscarriage is a pain beyond measure. Besides the pain, we feel guilt, shame, and that terrible sense of helplessness, of defeat. In my case, we never found out the reasons behind the miscarriages. But that wouldn’t have made a difference, because whatever the problem was, we would have kept trying and would have done everything the same, because our desire to have our children was always greater than the pain of loss.
See also: Abortion – I Have Been Through That Too
Photos: Personal Archive
