Soul Medicine

 Hello and welcome. You are listening to Dawn Stilwell and Soul Medicine. This past Sunday was Mother’s Day here in Canada, and there is a section of the population who are mothers without children. And what I mean by that is mothers who had early pregnancy loss or miscarriage. And this group of women have dates that are a little bit harder to get through than others. I’m one of them, and I just wanna bring some awareness to these women because often in society, we don’t know how to handle the topic of pregnancy loss and miscarriage. And also, we expect that these women are just gonna get over it and go on, and that’s not always the case.

We who have experienced a miscarriage, we carry grief, and to most of you, it may be invisible. And this grief doesn’t necessarily go away as the years go by. Miscarriage is often minimized. My one doctor said, “As many as 50% of pregnancies end in miscarriage.” And many of us have experienced this. In my case, I was on my third pregnancy, and I had the 16-week maternal serum screening, and the doctor called me in and said, “The results show that you possibly have a child with trisomy 18, which is incompatible with life.” And he, at that time, said, we can do an amniocentesis, find out for sure, at which point you’ll probably want to get an abortion.” Now, I am pro-choice I believe everybody has bodily autonomy, and if that is your choice, it should be allowed you. I was not in a position to do that. I could not see myself doing that.

I went home with that information, thinking it doesn’t matter to me if the baby has trisomy 18 or not, that this baby may potentially die. I think it is kinder for me to keep the baby in utero- And he passes there sooner than have a procedure where they basically have to take his life to take him from me. It was shortly after that, that I noticed one day that my hands and feet were swollen more than usual, and I thought that’s weird, ’cause I didn’t usually get that sort of symptom until later in pregnancy, at least from the two that I’d had already. And the doctor had ordered your 16 to 18-week scan. So my then husband and I went for that ultrasound scan, and we’re talking and, pointing at the baby, look at him and whatever, and the tech, she was good. She didn’t let on that there was anything wrong. But when I dropped my husband back off at work, one of his coworkers says, “Oh, it’s so exciting when you hear the baby’s heartbeat.” And I realized we hadn’t heard a heartbeat.

Now, in my mind, I’m hoping, “Oh, gosh, let that just be that the monitor was turned down, the speakers weren’t working,” something like that. But something… I had this little check inside that told me something might not be right.” And a few days later, the doctor called us in and told us that he suspected fetal demise, and told me what I should expect over the next few days, that your body’s going to try to deliver you of the baby and what to expect, the cramping and clotting and things like that. And he also wanted me to be checked out by the OBGYN, so I went from there to see the doctor in another building. And I’m, at that time, I’m like, I’m trying to absorb my baby’s dead, my baby’s dead. A baby that I very much wanted, a baby I very much loved already, and I was planning out his future. And I say his, I don’t know if that baby was a boy or a girl. But with the three children that I do have, I always seem to know what they were, so I had a feeling this was a boy. And I’m still trying to come to terms with this, and the OBGYN is basically parroting what the doctor had said, “this is gonna happen, and this is gonna happen.” I’m like whoa.” I said, “I’m still absorbing this, and you are all throwing this rather negative information at me, and it might be necessary, I need to sit with this. I’m still coming to terms with the fact that the child I carry is no more.” And he kind of- Took a couple steps back away from, his like rah, this has gotta happen and this is gonna get done,” and said, “Okay, today is Tuesday. I want you to come back on Monday. We’ll do another ultrasound, and if the ultrasound shows that the baby is in fact gone, I want you to go to the hospital because we’re gonna have to do a procedure called a D&E.”

Now, I know you’ve probably heard of a D&C, which is a dilatation and curettage, but a D&E is a dilatation and evacuation, which is what they do when you are further along, and at this point, I was halfway through the pregnancy. So I waited that time. I went to the hospital, had the ultrasound. The baby had no heartbeat, and then I spent the rest of the day in the labor and delivery ward basically having my body prepped to have the dilatation and evacuation. And when I went home that day, I was no longer pregnant. It was an emotionally traumatizing time, and in some ways it was a physically traumatizing time. I came home. I was sore. I was sad, and a few days later, it was three days later, my milk came in, so that just kinda added insult to injury. No one mentioned that at the hospital, that was going to happen. I felt unprepared for what I was going through, and I felt alone.

So I lost my baby on a Monday. It was December 10th, 2001, and the following Saturday was my husband’s Christmas party, and I got myself together, and we went, and you know what? I thought, ” it’ll take my mind off of it, and, hopefully we’ll have a good time.” I was emotionally a little bit lower than I normally would be that time of year, but I made an effort to have a good time. And between dinner and dessert, I went to the ladies room, and one of the wives of one of the other people from my husband’s work came in and she said, “I’m so sorry about your miscarriage, but you know what? I firmly believe that everything happens for a reason. Everything happens for a reason.” And I know she was just trying to express sympathy and to make a connection with me, but to say that your baby died for a specific reason, and not offer that reason, That’s hard to take. That’s kind of blasé, cliché, ’cause frankly it’s what was the reason then? Why did this happen? Why did the cosmos cause this to happen? ‘Cause God needed more angels in heaven? God needed my child in heaven instead of letting it stay with me?” There’s a whole road you can go down when somebody says something like that. And the reason that my child died is because he had a condition that was incompatible with life. Now, why did he have that condition? I don’t know. But it happened. And I like to think that because I chose not to pursue amniocentesis and an abortion, that he stayed with me, and he was cared for, and he was loved, and that’s all that he knew until the day he passed.

Now, some people will say it would’ve been so much harder if you were, like, in your third trimester,” or say things like, “You can have another one.” But sometimes you want to grab ’em by the collar and give ’em a smack across the head, because it’s not helpful. It’s not helpful. It doesn’t matter that it could’ve been worse. It was still really bad for me. And I’m grieving the dreams that I had for that child, not just the pregnancy. And because we don’t talk about this, because people don’t know what to say, because let’s face it, as a society, we are uncomfortable talking about death and grief, and in this case, We are grieving someone we’ve never physically met, and somehow that makes it less real for other people. But for we moms who lost our babies, these babies were real to us. We saw the evidence in how our bodies changed, and how we felt them fluttering inside of us, and the joy that we had knowing we were bringing forth another child into this world, a child that was loved and wanted. And we thought about how our family was going to expand and change, and how wonderful it was gonna be, and then it’s like that, the rug was pulled out from underneath you, and it’s gone.

And my husband at the time he grieved as well, but I don’t think he knew how to put things into words. I was grieving, and my mom came to stay with me. But I didn’t have any social bandwidth to spend with her. I spent days in bed just mourning. And we have, as we’re working through those emotions, we have guilt that comes out because what did I do wrong? Why did this happen? What did I do wrong? Especially if the baby passes and there was no medical reason found. Or we have anger. Anger because we loved and wanted this child, and it was taken away. And sometimes that anger is directed at God or Source or even at ourselves. And we lay the fault at the feet of our bodies and say if my body was better, I would have been able to carry that child.” So I’m not saying these are true, but there is a gamut of emotions that come after the loss of a little one. And then there’s shame. Shame that maybe you’re not woman enough to carry a child, and feeling betrayed by your body because it couldn’t carry the child, or even by the medical system because they didn’t know how to save your baby. So while we’re grieving, and we usually do it quietly because other people maybe don’t understand it, don’t know what to say, we need permission to talk about it, just like we would if we had lost a mom or a dad or a friend or a spouse or a sibling or a child that, had lived with us. We also need to not be rushed through our grief or dismissed ’cause, “Oh, you can have another one.” Technically, yes, I could have another one, and I did. But that wasn’t the point. I loved the child that I lost, and I would like to have had that baby acknowledged as real and as loved, even though other than my expanding waistline, there really was no other proof.

I was blessed, though, because about a month after I lost that baby, a nurse from the hospital called and said, “I’d really like to come and visit you.” And I said, “Sure.” And when she came, she handed me an envelope, and I opened the envelope, and it was a nice linen card that said the name of the hospital on it, and when I opened it up, there was a tiny handprint and a tiny footprint there. And I even tear up talking about it. And she told me that the chaplain at the hospital accompanied my baby’s remains down to the morgue, and she is the one who did the handprint and the footprint. And because she cared enough to do that, I have that keepsake. And the thing is, it can’t have been an easy thing for her to do, because when I asked my OBGYN after the fact, “Was my baby a boy or a girl?” He very… he was very uncomfortable, but he as much as said that the baby did not come out intact. So that tells me that the chaplain had a not intact baby to, to work with and still did this for me. So if you were the chaplain at that time, I’m very grateful to you for what you did for me, so I have that keepsake. But that’s all I have. I have a handprint and a footprint, a pregnancy test, and one ultrasound picture. That’s the only proof I have that baby existed.

And like many other women, that was not my only miscarriage. Less than a year later, I became pregnant again, and we were away on vacation, and I started spotting. I was about 12 weeks. And as that week played out, I miscarried at home two days after that, and four days after that, I ended up in the ER needing a D&C because I had not passed all the products of conception. That one was… I don’t know if it was easier, but I’d been through it before recently enough that a lot of the feelings felt familiar. So I just wanna give a shout-out to all the moms out there who’ve lost their little ones during pregnancy.

I know Mother’s Day is one of those tough days, just like due dates. Raise your hand if you signed up for some sort of baby photography or gift basket or something, and somebody called you the week after your baby would’ve been due, being overly cheerful and asking how things are going at home with the baby, and you have to tell them that you don’t have a baby. Your baby died. It makes them feel like crap, and you too, because you’re reminded again of what you no longer have, about the loss that you had incurred.

Back to Mother’s Day. It’s a tough day. I just wanna tell you that, if you don’t have other children, you’re still a mother. You’re still a mother. You had life inside of you, and you’re still a mother. And you’re not dramatic if you’re grieving, even 20 years after the fact. And maybe we’re still grieving because society doesn’t let us be open about that grief. But yeah, you are still a mom. And that’s a tender burden to carry, that grief over that little one. That’s a tender burden to carry all the days of your life.

I just want you to know that I understand, and you are seen. This is one of my longer podcasts, and I’m gonna leave it there for today. We’re gonna come back and talk about this in a future podcast, because I think there’s more to this, and people really need to understand how this affects women and how it’s not something we just get over. Would you get over your son or your daughter passing away? No. Just because we didn’t meet them, there’s still the fact that they lived within our bodies, and we felt them, and we loved them. And there’s a hole in our lives because they’re not here. So think on that maybe for a few minutes today. Thank you for tuning in. This is Dawn Stilwell, and you’ve been listening to “Soul Medicine.”