A Flicker of Hope

One of the things that I was weirdly excited about for pregnancy was not having my period for nine months. For nine glorious months, even while my body did other wild, unspeakable things to cause me aches and pains and grief, I would not have to deal with the painful, heavy periods that endometriosis has graced me with over the years.

Not only that, but when you’re trying to conceive, periods take on a whole new level of evil. They are the physical death of all your hopes and dreams being flushed down the toilet, month after month. Maybe that sounds dramatic, but hormones make everything feel dramatic.

Perhaps because of this crazed enthusiasm for no periods during pregnancy, fate hath dealt me an ironic blow. Like I said in my last post, a little over a week after that beautiful positive pregnancy test, I started having more pink spotting. I knew that this could be normal, so though I had my moments of panic (including one where I took another pregnancy test before realizing that you can still get a positive result up to weeks after miscarrying), I had a deep peace about it all. After all, unexplained spotting between cycles was not exactly unusual for me.

After a few days of spotting, I was at work in the early morning, going about my business serving customers coffee, when I began to feel like I was peeing my pants a little bit. Attempting to remain professional, I rushed off to the bathroom as soon as I could, only to discover bright red blood in my panty liner. Thankfully, I had a pad handy just in case so I used that and returned to work like nothing was wrong, though I texted my husband who I knew was up and getting ready to come into work (thankfully we work in the same place). He told me that he would be there soon and that we should call the doctor as soon as they opened. 

I could feel the bleeding continuing and getting heavier, like a steady gush. I tried to maintain my cheerful Monday morning face for my customers and very new coworker until my man arrived. We went to his office where I cried and we agreed that we should both leave work in order to handle this. I called my boss and we left.

As we made our way home, I called my mom crying. She cried too and assured me that it could be nothing, and that she would be praying hard. I hated more than anything that that was how my parents had to find out.

It took awhile to get a call through to the doctor and the earliest they were able to get us in was late that afternoon. The bleeding had stopped after about an hour or two, so we felt relieved by that, but it was a miserable day sitting around waiting and wondering what was going on.  Fearing that this was perhaps the beginning of the end.

My personal doctor was out that day, so we saw a doctor we were unfamiliar with. She was very kind and had been through infertility and miscarriage herself, so she understood a little of what we were experiencing. She did an ultrasound and we saw the gestational sac and what looked like a little peanut—our baby! She seemed confused by the positioning of it, as it had implanted far up in the left corner of my uterus. She said my cervix was closed though, and there was no sign of an active miscarriage or bleeding. 

They drew some blood for hormone levels, and we left feeling cautiously optimistic about our first scheduled appointment with my actual doctor on Friday, where we hoped we might have some more answers. For the time being though, we had seen our little peanut, and that gave us the strength to continue hoping.

Two days later, I received a call from the doctor explaining that my HCG levels had come back relatively high, so she thought we should have seen more on the ultrasound. She ordered us to get an ultrasound from a tech that day, stating that she believed either I was miscarrying after all, or it was an ectopic pregnancy (when the baby implants outside the uterus, often in a Fallopian tube. In these situations, the pregnancy is not viable, and can threaten the life of the mother if left undetected and untreated). 

With this news combined with the fact that I had had another similar bleeding episode again the day before, we were suddenly feeling very defeated. We left work and called to schedule the ultrasound. For two hours we sat around and prayed and didn’t talk, both experiencing the fear and uncertainty in our own ways.

When we arrived at the tech’s office, we felt quickly at ease. It was a young woman and her trainee, and they were both friendly and caring when we explained why the doctor had sent us there.

As she began the ultrasound, the tech said, “This here is the gestational sac, and it’s in the uterus, so that’s good” —so we knew it was not ectopic—“and see that little flicker there? That’s your baby’s heartbeat.”

The weight of the world lifted off our shoulders and we laughed and I cried in relief. There it was—a little tiny heartbeat in our little tiny peanut. Our baby had a heartbeat. Our little flicker of hope.