1 week after the miscarriage
One thing they don’t warn you about when you are going through a miscarriage is that they want you to come back once a week to get blood drawn to make sure that the hormone levels are dropping appropriately. When I walked through the doors of that OB office just a week after losing my baby I was angry, and hurt that I had to go back.
It all still felt like a blur. It didn’t feel real. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around what had just happened. I struggled with talking about it. I struggled with finding the words to explain how I felt.
The truth is I felt empty, and broken. I felt that my body failed me and my baby. I felt that I failed as a woman because my body wasn’t able to do the one job it was made to do.
Most of all I felt guilty that I was moving forward. I felt guilty that I was getting up every morning, going to work, and doing whatever tasks needed done. I felt guilty that there were brief minutes of time that I didn’t think about what we had just gone through.
I worried and felt guilty that I wasn’t more outwardly upset over everything that has happened in the last week.
The fact of the matter, though, was that I was grieving, I was struggling, I was upset and hurt and angry. I had all of the feelings, but I kept pushing them down and burying them so that I didn’t have to feel them. If somebody asked me how I was doing, I told them that I was fine simply because I didn’t want to tell them I was hurting.
I buried the feelings down until I couldn’t take it anymore and then I’d explode with emotion. I’d take it out on whoever was closest, usually my husband. I’d say things I didn’t mean and try to push him away because it’s what I thought I deserved. I thought I deserved to be alone and miserable because I couldn’t keep my baby alive.
Weeks 2- 4 after the miscarriage
I noticed that it started to get easier to talk about, not all the time, but some of the time. I found that if a new patient asked me if I had kids every once in a while I was able to say I had a baby in heaven, or that I’ve had one pregnancy. Again, not always and not often, but every once in a while.
I noticed that the tears came less often, but in its place was anger, irritability, and just an overwhelming feeling of depression. I felt like I was in a black hole. I felt like there was no light at the end of the tunnel. I felt myself sink further and further while on the outside I fought like hell to make myself appear “normal”.
I noticed that it didn’t take much to set me off. I noticed that I was angry all the time, and sometimes I was angry for no reason at all. Some days I woke up mad at the world, and some days I woke up not wanting to get out of bed.
There were some days that I would wake up content, or even happy, but I would immediately tell myself that I “wasn’t allowed to be happy because of what happened”. I found myself blaming myself more and more as the days went on. I found that I was starting to isolate myself more and more. I had no motivation or drive to do anything.
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