Birth Journeys: Lifting the veil on the birth experience
Did your childbirth experience go as planned? Then The Birth Journeys Podcast® is for you! We share powerful and transformative birth stories that illuminate the realities of childbirth. Hosted by a labor nurse and prenatal coach who specializes in transformational coaching techniques, this podcast goes beyond traditional birth narratives to foster healing, build trust, and create transparency between birthing individuals and healthcare providers.
In each episode, we dive into essential topics like birth preparation, debunking common misconceptions, understanding hospital procedures, and promoting autonomy in the birthing process. We also bring you the wisdom and insights of experienced birth workers and medical professionals.
This is a safe and inclusive space where every birth story is valued, honored, and deserves to be heard. Join us in exploring the diverse and unique experiences of birth givers, and discover how transformational coaching can empower your own birth journey.
Contact Kelly Hof at: birthjourneysRN@gmail.com
Birth Journeys: Lifting the veil on the birth experience
Grace and Grief: Marcella Jewell's Journey Through Miscarriage, Medical Termination, and Motherhood
When Marcella Jewell, a warrior in the realm of motherhood, shares her story, you can't help but be enveloped by a tapestry of raw emotion and profound strength. Her journey through the complex world of fertility is one that mirrors a mosaic of life's most tender and tumultuous moments: the joy of welcoming children, the heartache of five miscarriages, and a decision that tested the very essence of her hope and courage. Our conversation is an intimate exploration of those often unspoken struggles, a testament to the resilience required to navigate the unpredictable waves of pregnancy and loss.
Marcella's vulnerability in recounting the decision to terminate a pregnancy due to anencephaly, a decision made amidst a sea of grief and love, is both harrowing and deeply moving. It's a reminder of the silent battles fought and the strength found in the naming and memorializing of those we've lost—a salute to her son Caleb and a bridge to healing. As she speaks of the memorials that keep his memory alive, we are reminded of the collective need to find solace within our communities, and the profound impact of shared experiences in mending the heart.
Our episode journeys further into the depths of Marcella's fertility path, from the laughter-tinged tale of her amniotic fluid-filled minivan, to the solemn considerations of family planning amid the shadows of miscarriage. The discussions ebb and flow through the emotional rollercoaster of trying to conceive and the piercing reality of loss, culminating in a narrative that is both a beacon of hope and a safe harbor for understanding. Join us, as we embrace the complexity of our human experiences with grace, compassion, and a shared sense of enduring love.
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Basically, I'm your birth bestie! With me as your coach, you will tell fear to take a hike!
Basically, I'm your birth bestie! With me as your coach, you will tell fear to take a hike!
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Medical Disclaimer:
This podcast is intended as a safe space for women to share their birth experiences. It is not intended to provide medical advice. Each woman’s medical course of action is individual and may not appropriately transfer to another similar situation. Please speak to your medical provider before making any medical decisions. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that evidence based practice evolves as our knowledge of science improves. To the best of my ability I will attempt to present the most current ACOG and AWHONN recommendations at the time the podcast is recorded, but that may not necessarily reflect the best practices at the time the podcast is heard. Additionally, guests sharing their stories have the right to autonomy in their medical decisions, and may share their choice to go against current practice recommendations. I intend to hold space for people to share their decisions. I will attempt to share the current recommendations so that my audience is informed, but it is up to each individual to choose what is best for them.
This episode depicts pregnancy loss. Listeners who are sensitive to this topic may prefer to skip this episode. Hello, today I have with me Marcella Jewell. Marcella is the mother of three who works in non-profit fundraising. She's here today to share her fertility and birth journey, including nine pregnancies, three living kids, five miscarriages and one termination for medical reasons. Marcella, welcome, and thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. I appreciate you offering to have me tell my story. It's kind of long and complicated, but I am happy to share it with others.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm really appreciative of you sharing this because over the last seven, eight years, I believe, I've been watching this unfold and I've been incredibly moved by a lot of the things that you have shared. You've been really vulnerable and I think a lot of what you've shared has helped a lot of other people and I just really appreciate that you're willing to come on and use this as a platform to continue to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've shared some publicly on social media and actually it's been really kind of part of my healing and it has helped me a lot and I'm so glad that I did make the decision to share stuff publicly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's really helpful because I know a lot of people that have gone through a lot of what you're going through and I think a lot of people tend to just suffer in silence, but that helps no one. So having it out there, I think, is really incredibly important it is yeah. So go ahead and start from the beginning. What it was like for your fertility journey and your pregnancy journey, and just everything that that entailed.
Speaker 2:Sure, I kind of consider my journey starting when my husband and I got married in 2015. And after about a year of marriage, we were ready to have kids, because I was already 33 at that point and we thought we needed to get going. We made the decision. I went to my OBGYN and said I'm ready to take out my IUD, I'm ready to get going. Then she could not find the string of the IUD, so that was kind of surprising. She did an ultrasound and found that my IUD had actually migrated within my body, which I didn't know was a thing that could happen. But they found that it had gone through my uterine wall and embedded in my large intestine. So they told me that's not that big a deal. They scheduled a surgery. I did a laparoscopic surgery that was just like an hour at the health system where I work. They got the IUD out and told me it wasn't that big a deal. Sometimes that happens. And so my husband and I thought, okay, that's the end of it, that's the worst that could happen, which we were very wrong. We got pregnant pretty soon, I think at two to three months afterwards. We have gotten pregnant very easily over the years, but we didn't know at the beginning, so the fact that it was the second month or so, we didn't know that that was normal for us. I got pregnant. I had a pretty normal pregnancy. I went through some mental health issues and then I had my son.
Speaker 2:When I was 40 weeks and four days, I went into labor naturally at home and my water broke at home. I didn't really realize it at the time. I was having contractions and trying to measure how far apart they were and I I thought, oh, these are very far apart, I'll get in the shower. While I was in the shower, they started going back to back to back and I started like, oh, these are very far apart, I'll get in the shower. While I was in the shower, they started going back to back to back and I started like screaming in pain. I got out of the shower dripping wet, got on the toilet. My water broke which, if you're going to be anywhere when your water breaks, being on the toilet's probably the easiest best way and then I just had back to back contractions where I was. They weren't really breaks and I just started screaming and my husband and I had never been through any of this before and so I was scared that we weren't going to get to the hospital and I was yelling at him to call an ambulance and we were frantic running around his first time going through a birth. We went to the hospital and they told me I was pretty far along and so they had to play catch up with my epidural, which I was in a lot of pain, but they eventually got me settled in a bed and gave me the epidural, and it was about 9 am.
Speaker 2:It took a little while for it to hit and then I had a pretty good two hours of pushing on the epidural. I couldn't really feel the contractions, so they kept showing me on the screen when they were happening. There was a nurse that had a twisted towel and she was doing like tug of war with me and trying to get me to push through the contractions, but I wasn't really feeling them. I was having conversations and just thinking, oh, this is pretty easy, I can do this. But the baby had not progressed at all. So my OBGYN said we can't let you go past four hours of pushing. We recommend that we turn off the epidural so that you can realize when the contractions are happening and push into them, and that, hopefully, will help the baby progress. And so I was like, well, yeah, I don't want to go to four hours, we're already at two. So they turned off my epidural. This is the most pain I've ever been in in my entire life. It was horrendous, it was awful. I thought I was dying.
Speaker 2:I pushed for a little over an hour and a half without the epidural. The baby was progressing, but he got somewhat stuck. They used the little vacuum to try to get his head out of the birth canal and then he got stuck. They called it a shoulder dystocia. He got his shoulder stuck in the birth canal and I didn't have any idea about this at the time. I was out of my mind, in pain, not really understanding, but apparently what I've heard afterwards is that the baby can suffocate because they are stuck and they're in the birth canal. So apparently there was a nurse that climbed on top of me and helped to push out the shoulder that was stuck, which explains some of the intense pain I had when I was not on an epidural and somebody did that while I was in labor. I'll be honest.
Speaker 2:The baby came out and I was so tired I didn't really hold the baby or understand what was going on. They brought him over to the warmer. People were crowded around and somebody was just like, oh, move out of the way so she can see her baby. And I just kind of like looked over and I was just so exhausted I didn't really understand what was going on. As soon as they got him out, they turned the epidural back on. But I'd had some tearing so they did stitch me up and about 20 minutes afterwards I kind of when I was back in my right mind on the epidural I freaked out and said, oh, I have to deliver the placenta. And my doctor was like you did that like 10 minutes ago. I had no idea I had delivered the placenta. I didn't know the extent of the tearing because they had just sewed me up. It was a pretty traumatic, awful experience, but I got through it and then I thought everything's okay.
Speaker 2:But my baby, ezra, was breathing really quickly. So they took him to the NICU. My husband went with him and it was such a surreal feeling After I'd been in so much pain. They cleaned up the room and the nurses left and the doctor left and I was basically in my hospital room for like two hours completely by myself. A nurse would pop in every once in a while. But I had just had a baby and had been in intense pain and then suddenly everybody left and I was just sitting in the hospital bed by myself. So like I asked for my phone and I played around on my phone and I texted people and said I had a baby, but it was. I didn't get to bond with him, I didn't get to hold him, I didn't get any of those real experiences because he and my husband just left the room and then no one was with me. So I was kind of alone in a really weird emotional place for a while.
Speaker 2:My baby Ezra was fine. He stayed several days in the NICU but it was mostly for fast breathing and they had to rule out a lot of bad complications. And once they ruled it all out, it was process of elimination that he was coming off of the psychiatric meds that I was on. So it wasn't that big a deal. They just wanted to make sure it wasn't anything else. But I didn't get to be with him for several days. I slept through the night and I barely breastfed, so it was a horrible setup for breastfeeding. I had major issues with him for months because I wish somebody had told me like be next to your baby, see them every single hour, get set up for success. And I was like he's in the NICU, I just pop in every few hours. And so we got off to a very bad start that way. But he was healthy and great. He came home and my husband and I thought this is our first child. We had one year of life with Ezra and he's just the most rambunctious child ever. But after about a year we were like, okay, we're ready to do this again. I actually got so excited I had had a second IUD put in after I had Ezra I got so excited and wanted to get pregnant so badly I took out my own IUD, which is not something you are really supposed to do, but it didn't cause any damage or do anything, it was just I'd had several drinks and I was like I want to get pregnant and I took out my own IUD.
Speaker 2:We got pregnant again right away and I was several weeks along I want to say five or six weeks along and I had my first appointment set with the OBGYN when I started bleeding and I was terrified and they had me come in and they did an ultrasound and they could see the gestational sac and they said it could just be bleeding, because sometimes there are every body is different, every pregnancy is different. We don't know that it's a miscarriage, we don't know what's going on. It's pretty early, so they had me wait a week, which at that time I thought that was the worst version of hell I could go through is a week of not knowing if I was miscarrying or not, and there was nothing I could do except wait an entire week to come back. I was pretty emotional and upset. They had bleeding and I came in and I should have been six weeks and they did another ultrasound and saw the gestational sac and measured it and it still was measuring exactly the same. So they told me that it was a miscarriage, that the embryo wasn't growing and I just had to let it take its course. I just had to let the gestational sac and everything come out.
Speaker 2:So I went through more time of bleeding and my husband and I were so upset I thought that was the worst thing that could happen. We didn't know what was going on or why it was so early. We didn't really tell anybody, we didn't tell any family. It was really tough. And so then we just said you know this happens, it's like one in five, one in four. You know it's just a fluke, let's try again.
Speaker 2:I got pregnant again right away, probably about a month later, and that was October of 2018. And I was terrified of miscarrying again. I just spent, and at eight weeks and at 10 weeks she used the little handheld Doppler and I could hear the heartbeat and so that was super reassuring and basically everybody had said after 12 weeks, you know, the risk really goes down. It's not that you're in the clear, but you're in a much healthier, better place and there's a lot less risk of miscarrying. Week ultrasound we went in for the ultrasound and I just was so scared of miscarrying and the second that they did the ultrasound, I could see the baby on the screen and tons of movement, just so much wiggling around and you could see body, you could see head, they let us hear the heartbeat. And so my husband and I just kind of like squeezed hands and I was just like, oh, we did it. Like we're at 12 weeks, the baby's moving, the baby has a strong heartbeat, like we're good, and the ultrasound technician was measuring the different valves of the heart and talking to us about you know those different things, and then measure, doing measurements and it.
Speaker 2:I don't have very strong recollection of this, but it was at least five minutes in, maybe 10 minutes in, when obviously she saw something on the screen and she, she said to us and this is my recollection, I don't, I don't actually know the exact words, but in my mind what happened was she said your baby doesn't have a skull and I screamed and I was screaming and crying and hysterical and my husband was and part of me is happy that it happened that way because she didn't sugarcoat it. If somebody had said we see something with your baby, we need to call in a doctor or there's this thing going on, you know it gives you hope and we didn't know any of the medical terms at the time. But when somebody tells you your baby doesn't have a skull, like every part of me knew that that baby wouldn't survive. You can't survive like that. It was no sugarcoating it, it was no, oh, it could be a heart valve problem and there's these surgeries or this, and that it was so black and white, but it was terrifying and I was screaming, I was watching my baby move, I was listening to his heartbeat and I was being told he didn't have the top of his head.
Speaker 2:My recollections are really really spotty during this time period, but I know what they did is step out immediately and get the doctor. They have a doctor who's kind of on call. I guess because of all the things that can go wrong or be discovered in an ultrasound they don't even have a proper room for it. We were in this. They took us to this staff room where somebody was taking a break and was in the corner on a computer. We sat down at a table with this doctor who told us that they had found something called anencephaly, which is a neural tube defect where the neural tube, which is kind of the spine and the skull, doesn't form correctly in the first few months. When it doesn't form correctly in the spine, it's spina bifida, and when it doesn't form correctly at the top, kind of at skull and encephaly, the baby doesn't have the top part of the skull and a lot of the brain parts. The brain functions aren't there like the. The brain stem is so that there is a heartbeat and growth. But would the baby be born, they wouldn't have cognitive function to be able to learn to speak or to walk.
Speaker 2:In that moment we didn't know anything and the doctor told us there were three options. One was we could choose to not believe him. We could choose to just walk away and get a second opinion, or choose to not believe him and just go forward how we've been going, he said. The second one was you can choose to take the pregnancy as far as you can. The embryo won't miscarry on its own. The baby will still keep growing and will still have a heartbeat, and sometimes they make it through birth. Sometimes there's a late-term stillbirth, like in eight or nine months, and then I would have to go through the trauma of delivering a stillborn. Maybe you can die during childbirth or can actually go through birth, and then you have minutes or hours or days. He basically was telling us how horrific it would be. And then he said the third choice was to terminate the pregnancy.
Speaker 2:And my husband and I we both just automatically were like there's not really an option, like it was. For us it was three. Like there's. I mean, what do we do? Like? I thought about it for so long afterwards and I have gone down the rabbit hole reading about anencephaly on the internet and finding out everything and thinking through the trauma that my body would go through, the trauma that my one and a half year old son would go through, the trauma our family would, just everything. But in that moment it wasn't even really an option. It was like this isn't a baby, this is an embryo that doesn't have the top of its head.
Speaker 2:And so my husband and I both were like, okay, we need to terminate the pregnancy. And in my mind I mean I wasn't thinking, but I just thought I work at a health system. There's a really big OBGYN clinic. We're at the Center for Advanced Fetal Health. I figured I would be able to get my care there and then started this whole other awful stage of this journey where the doctor said we can't provide any care to you. There is a heartbeat, we are not allowed to do anything. We are not allowed to do anything.
Speaker 2:And we kind of came to the realization that the termination is technically an abortion and can only happen at a legal abortion clinic. Our hospital doesn't provide that and they were not really allowed to provide much information, but they did tell me that there was a Planned Parenthood and a clinic nearby. The clinic was actually my old OB-GYN when I was growing up, so I knew who it was and I said, yes, like I've had care there, I want to go there. And they were going to give me the information. And we were both hysterical and I said can you make the appointment for me?
Speaker 2:It was on a Thursday that we found out and I just wanted it to happen as fast as possible and I was so upset I don't know what to say. And they know this clinic and they've referred there before for really devastating birth defects and they were not allowed to help me. The doctor stepped out of the room and he said the nurse will help you make the appointment. And then they came back in and they said we legally cannot call the clinic, we can't make the appointment for you, we can't give you advice. All they could do really with say that Kansas has a law in the books where there was a waiting period and I would have to make an appointment and then sell out paperwork and wait, whatever the time period was. So on top of everything we were going through, it was like we're on our own and now we have to go find an abortion for a baby that we really, really, really, really wanted. That was January 25th of 2019. I was able to get an appointment.
Speaker 1:I believe for Tuesday.
Speaker 2:The next week I had to go home and spend a weekend at home, being 13 weeks pregnant with an embryo. I know wouldn't make it and I wanted it to end as fast as possible. I started just getting so emotional thinking about this embryo inside of me without the top of its head, and there were multiple times that weekend I just started screaming that I wanted it out of me. It's terrifying. And then there was this guilt trip of I'm a mother, I'm making this decision as a mother, as the best choice for this being, but how can I be so heartless to say I want it out of me when all I've ever wanted was that baby? And so then I would just guilt myself and think I'm the most horrible person for wanting this to happen and not being okay in my own body and wanting it out. And there were multiple times. I just laid in bed and I just screamed I want my baby, I want my baby, I want my baby. We had a one and a half year old, so he didn't really know what was going on. We had to tell our parents and our friends. I guess I didn't even realize the magnitude of it. I sent an email to the women I work with to the whole team saying like, get devastated, we're going to have to terminate this pregnancy. And in my mind it wasn't. It's not even connected to an abortion, it's a wanted baby that I was three months along and there's this devastating medical problem and it can't continue because the baby can't survive. I mean say that the term is not compatible with life, which is, I mean it's basically fatal. It's like is I mean it's basically fatal. It's like you need to just say it's a fatal condition. Nobody survives it, nobody lives. There is a 0% rate of anyone that has anencephaly who lives.
Speaker 2:We went to the clinic. They were the most caring, compassionate people in the world. The doctor had gone through a traumatic loss of her own at 20 weeks of twins and she was just so human and raw and so compassionate. I don't remember a lot of what happened. I was trying to walk it out. I used to know that I was sedated and in a room and then woke up and while I was still kind of, you know, coming out of the anesthesia, in my mind all I wanted, all I wanted in the entire world, was just to know for sure that that baby had had an encephaly. I just wanted to see. I just wanted to see a face off, and of course that's not something that they do. It was 13 weeks. It was really really tiny, but I was just what if it's not real? What if they were all wrong? Of course they weren't. They had to do another ultrasound at the clinic to check and they saw it and it's definitely immediately pretty clear. And so my husband and I were in survival mode and we got through that and we thought this is kind of the worst thing that can happen and wanted to move forward. And I grossly underestimated how emotional and devastating and horrible and I was.
Speaker 2:It was a full year of just. I was really messed up. I couldn't really care for my one and a half year old son very well. I had multiple times I would just fall down crying and screaming. There were times I just didn't want to be alive, but I felt like I had to be because I have a son.
Speaker 2:I was really struggling and I didn't know where to get help and I eventually in April, got connected with a wonderful therapist who specializes in women who have gone through loss. I also found a psychiatrist who who specializes in women who have lost in pregnancy. But between the end of January to April that's a very long time February and March were basically my own personal hell. I thought I just needed to find something and someone to talk to. I found a support group in my city that was for pregnancy and infant loss and I went to it and many of the women had had full-term stillbirth or multiple of them had had babies with severe medical conditions where they had gone through like ECMO and other interventions and surgeries and had passed away when they were several weeks old, and I felt like I didn't belong.
Speaker 2:I was only at 13 weeks of pregnancy.
Speaker 2:I didn't have nine months and have a stillbirth.
Speaker 2:I didn't have a go through birth and have a baby I could hold. I felt like my loss wasn't as big as theirs because I didn't have an actual baby that I ever saw. And then they talked about how much was out of their hands and how frustrated they were and I couldn't bring myself to tell them. I would tell everybody I lost a baby and I would talk about the loss of my baby, but in my mind I had to make the choice. I had to make the choice to stop this part and it's not the same. It's not the same at all, because I can't say, like it happened on this day, no, that's the day we had to go to a doctor and make it happen, and so I. It helped talking to the women in that group, but I felt like a fraud and I felt like I couldn't talk about. I couldn't tell them that I had had an abortion they had chosen that because they had fought so hard for their babies and they couldn't talk about the fact that I wasn't the one.
Speaker 2:They had to pay and fill out paperwork and go through hell to stop the pregnancy, but in my mind it was a loss, because you can't have that baby. That baby wouldn't live, that baby wouldn't ever become a real baby.
Speaker 2:It would either have a stillbirth or the baby would die right after birth. The one thing that helped me the most from that in-person support group was they all talked about their babies, like with their names, and they all had colors or like a symbol, like an animal or a bird or something that represented. And I got a call a few weeks after our termination that they had done genetic testing and found that it was a boy. Which is it just made it more real, like it's not just an embryo, like this was, this is going to be a boy. And then when I was in one of the support groups one night, I just thought this is my baby, I need to name him and I thought Caleb. And it brought me more peace than anything has, because I lost a person. I lost who would have been my second son. I lost who would have been our baby and then our toddler and then our son for the rest of our lives. I didn't just lose a 13-week memorial, I lost this whole future of what our family would have been and no one really understood the magnitude except me and my husband. But when I could talk and say, like when we lost Caleb, or oh, this would have been Caleb's due date, or thinking and talking about the baby with the name made it feel real and you can't ignore it and it can't go away. It can't be like, oh yeah, marcella lost that baby. Like no, this is, this is caleb, this was she would made part of our family.
Speaker 2:We have a christmas ornament for caleb. We put it up every year. I had a ring made that has Caleb etched into it. It's kind of woven together. It looks almost like a DNA helix, because I found out that little pieces of the DNA stay in your body after pregnancy for the rest of your life, and so it was really comforting to know there's tiny, tiny pieces of Caleb's DNA in my body for the rest of my life. So I have this ring. It makes me smile and it says Caleb on it. I had my brother-in-law planted a tree in his honor.
Speaker 2:We got some people made donations in memorial of him. I raised money for the health system where I work to buy a carrying cradle or a cuddle cot which is for stillbirth, to cool the process after there is a stillbirth, so that the family can have longer time with the body, with the baby, and I raised all of that in memory of Caleb and, like I said, that's the biggest part of my healing process naming my baby and talking about him. He's real, caleb was real and I will say his name and I will talk to my children about him. We got a plaque at the zoo Since we love you, caleb, because he was real.
Speaker 2:Even though no one in my life wants to talk about it after the first few months and people don't even remember, I will never, ever, ever, ever forget. My life would be 100% different if that experience had gone differently. We would have had a second boy, we would have stopped, we would have never tried again and we would have been a family of four with two boys two years apart, and that would have been our life. Instead, we lost him and went through hell for another five years and had more losses and more kids, and now we have three kids. And that never would have happened if we hadn't lost Caleb.
Speaker 1:So I want to give you a minute to breathe, but I also want to validate that termination for medical reasons is a loss, and it's a very specific loss, and I'm learning that there are very specific support groups out there for people that have had to make that awful choice, which isn't really even a choice, it's just. These are the crappy options that you're presented, and it's the option that makes everyone involved suffer the least. But that's relative, because there's going to be a lot of suffering no matter what.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I found an amazing online support group. It took me months and it was like six months after, but I found it online and it's technically like a hidden Facebook support group and you have to prove your loss to be able to get in because there are trolls out there who will go in and troll women who have had a termination for medical reasons. But once I was a part of it, it was the most supportive, amazing group of women. I mean, it's all over the world, but mostly in the United States, and people would want to hear your story and they would ask you questions and they would want to know everything and hear everything. And you could say all the stuff that you can't really say, like I can't go to a baby shower because I'm so mad at this person who gets this healthy baby. Like I can't be around it. I can't hear your great stories, like I don't care. And you can say all those real things and you can talk about being mad at parents or in-laws or somebody that just doesn't get it. And you can talk about being mad at parents or in-laws or somebody that just doesn't get it, and you can cry and you can swear and you can do all these things and it's I mean, it's just online chat, but somebody will respond back right away. And somebody has gone through the same thing.
Speaker 2:There's a girl in Nebraska who had basically my parallel journey just very soon after me and she connected with me and she had anencephaly for her pregnancy and it was about 13 weeks and I have no idea who she is or anything about her, but we connected and I will always think of her because we basically went through the same thing at the same time. And then we found a handful of other people in my same city and we met up in person and one person had had an awful experience and she couldn't really talk about it and it wasn't. She only met us once and she just couldn't handle it. And somebody else was in the thick of other things in her life, but one woman we stayed close and we started having lunches together. She didn't work far from me and I would have a breakdown at work and I would text her and she would just say let's have lunch and we would go off and we would just cry for an hour in a restaurant talking about our babies and she's probably the biggest support I've had this entire time because she knew she didn't have the same level of support from family and in-laws and couldn't really share it publicly.
Speaker 2:So she suffered in silence a lot, whereas I chose to share a long story on social media and kind of open it up to people, because I just was so frustrated and mad at the world and at everybody talking in politics and in media about abortions and I just snapped and was like you don't understand abortion. If you don't have a uterus, you don't get to talk and you don't get to paint with this broad paintbrush. Abortions are not all unwanted. There's this underground network of hundreds of thousands of women who have abortions, of wanted pregnancies, and it's not talked about. And I basically just like posted out of anger because I was like how dare you assume or think that you know what is going on If you take away the right to abortion?
Speaker 2:You basically like condemn a woman to carry a pregnancy that's not viable as far as possible. Like I would have been condemned to have a pregnancy that's not viable as far as possible. I would have been condemned to have a stillbirth of a child without the top of his head or go through birth or birth the baby and watch him die in my arms. That's what you're condemning somebody to when you take away their choices. And I shared everything because I was angry and I felt like there's a lot of people that don't share an abortion story because it was unwanted or sometimes, like determination for medical reasons.
Speaker 1:You don't have a support network and all of my parents and in-laws were supportive, so I was like, well, I could share this and I'm going to yeah, I think it's important for people that do feel empowered to share to share, and I think it's important for people that do feel empowered to share to share. And I also think it's important for others to come out and say that I'm a safe person that you can share this with, because that's a lot of work to vet people to know if they're going to be in your corner or not, because there's so much risk to sharing your story if you're sharing it with the wrong person, because there can be so much damage and trauma caused by somebody saying the wrong thing, so it's hard to find support in that situation.
Speaker 2:I think also, more than anything, my family, my husband's family, everybody around us, our good friend, didn't want to make things worse, so they don't want to say anything. They don't know what to say, so they just tell you you're doing well or like, oh, at least you already have a child or you know you can get pregnant. Or they say all the things that they think are supportive or they're scared of upsetting you so they don't say anything and that just riles you up, makes you so angry. I I've never been so angry ever in my life where I'm like you mentioning it doesn't make it bad. The fact that it happened made it bad. You pretending like I didn't have three months of a baby and then lose him is what's pissing me off. You saying the wrong thing isn't going to trigger me and make me grieve. I'm already there. You're just pissing me off right now by not validating my pain.
Speaker 2:And I had some co-workers who are really positive, wonderful, sweet people, but I almost consider it like toxic positivity when I came back and they're just like, oh, oh, we have this sweet, wonderful boy and oh, you know you can get pregnant easily, and oh, you've got this and that, and like they just would gloss over everything. And I was just like you are not validating it, like why can't somebody just be like, yeah, it sucks, it's hard, your baby died. That's what it is. Don't don't try to make it better. Just listen to me.
Speaker 2:And this in-person support group would talk about this like element concept of get in my bucket, where, if you feel totally overwhelmed, you don't need somebody to take things from you, you don't need somebody to solve things for you or to do it. You just literally need somebody. Get in my bucket with me. I am in the middle of grief, I'm in the middle of everything. Just get into the pain with me.
Speaker 2:And I very quickly learned who in my life could do that, which is almost no one, and people would try to keep their distance because they didn't know what to do and what they needed to do was just to listen, just to let me cry, just to give a hug or, like you know, all the women in the online support group we would just tell each other, yeah, this sucks, this absolutely totally sucks. You don't deserve this. You're a good mother, life's not fair. And we'd be like, yeah, life's not fair. And we would just support each other that way, because it validates that you're going through some shit and you're in pain and you are grieving and there's nothing anybody can do to take it away. So all you can do is just say it sucks and it's hard and that's not fair.
Speaker 1:It makes me think of this meme that my friend sent me like 10 years ago I think, and it was like I know you're sad, you know what do you want me to do? And the person just kind of sits there and then the next thing that the friend does is say I built a nest, would you like to get in it? You know blankets and pillows. And then the next one is what would you like me to do? Would you like me to get into the nest with you? And then at the end they're just sitting there in this comforting spot together and that's all really anyone needs during the time of grief is just someone to just sit, build them a nest and get in with you.
Speaker 2:There's literally nothing else anybody can do. No one take away the pain. No one can change it, no one can. Everybody would try to rationalize it or talk through it or make you feel better. You know, like, oh well, you can get pregnant again. I mean, like, who cares? Like let me grieve the baby that died, I don't care whether I can get pregnant again or not.
Speaker 1:Like this is days and weeks out, it doesn't replace that. Yeah, we're not replacing this child. We are. This child is part of our family, regardless of how things played out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and my husband's really the person who's just you know, he'd been through it with me, but he could just be there in my pain with me and he, I wouldn't have gotten through it with me, but he could just be there in my pain with me and I wouldn't have gotten through it without him.
Speaker 2:And I don't even consider that I got through it. It's just that we went through a year of hell and then the pain just kind of fades a little bit where it's not as immediate all the time. But you don't get over it just because you have other kids and we actually went through hell because you have other kids and we, we actually went through hell because it happened in January. I wanted to get pregnant again immediately. I just thought like this is how I fix it. I just I have another baby. They say it's a fluke, you know, in encephaly. They don't really know what causes it, but you can take folic acid and reduce your risk. So I just went on a huge dose of folic acid and tried to get pregnant immediately and it took me like four months to get my period back. I got pregnant in June and got a positive pregnancy test and was elated and then like five days later started bleeding. So it was like an incredibly early miscarriage, but it was. I was obviously not emotionally ready to get pregnant again I shouldn't have. But I just thought this is the only concrete thing I can do to move forward. This is the only like actual step I have.
Speaker 2:So then I was just an absolute total mess because I was bleeding and had had a second miscarriage and now was one for four, and talked to some doctors, talked to my OBGYN. They wanted me to see the high-risk doctors and so they made an appointment. It took several months to get the reproductive REI doctors I can't remember what REI stands for and by that time I'd actually gotten pregnant again. I got pregnant in August because I just was convinced that as long as I could just get pregnant and have a healthy baby, that would get me through this. So we started seeing the high-risk doctors and I was pregnant and so they just followed me very closely for the first few weeks and I got to hear the heartbeat several times and I think it was like eight or nine weeks came in and they were doing the ultrasound. I could hear the heartbeat and I was like, oh, thank God. And the tech just kind of was like and the heartbeat had slowed down a lot.
Speaker 2:So even though I could hear it she was tempering it, saying like the heartbeat has slowed, like this isn't a viable pregnancy. I can't remember the exact term, but in my mind I've always called it like my miscarriage waiting to happen, like I'm miscarrying but not yet. There's still a heartbeat. So we had talked multiple times with the doctors about doing testing and they could take the genetic tissue and see if there was something that was causing multiple miscarriages. So I said, okay, I want that, like do that. And then they were like, well, there's still heartbeat. We can't, we can't do anything with you. And I was like, literally, the heartbeat is slowing down. We're waiting day to day for when it stops, but they can't do anything. So they told me to just get back in touch when the like. I just needed to kind of reach out periodically to see when bleeding started and they would try to test and see if there was a heartbeat. I started bleeding on a Friday night at my huge work event and I knew it was going to happen. So it wasn't as devastating because I knew the heartbeat had slowed. But then I couldn't get in to see the doctors over the weekend. I couldn't get in Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. I finally got in Thursday, which was very frustrating because they had told me they wanted to get the tissue to test it. They got me in Thursday for a DNC.
Speaker 2:By that time my body had basically expelled all of it, so they never actually got any tissue to test because it was almost a full week after I'd started miscarrying. So I was incredibly pissed off at the medical system and the doctors and the whole thing, for not, they couldn't stop the heartbeat to get the tissue and then I couldn't get in to see them for a DNC, for them to get the tissue. They had told me to collect what I had. So in this week of hell I had this tiny little Tupperware where I collected pieces of my embryo expelling from my body, which was highly disturbing and not great for my mental health. And I went into the appointment with these little pieces and they had told me I can't remember somebody told me that they didn't need that and I actually ended up throwing it away in a trash bag with my Wendy's from that appointment. And then the next day they got me in for a DNC and they were like, oh, there's no tissue left. I was like I had tissue. I collected all of this tissue. I had a whole tupperware of it and somebody told me they didn't need it and it wasn't worth it and like I threw it away. And then I was. So I was like I threw away pieces of my baby into a trash can, like I was. I was just in the absolute worst mind state. But they didn't.
Speaker 2:They put me under for the DNC and when it came out they said we didn't get any tissue. But I had given a history to the anesthesiologist beforehand and I had told her that the last surgery I had was to get out my IUD that had migrated. She had remembered that and so when there were multiple people in this room and I was under for the DNC, the doctor was like, oh, there might be some scarring here. And the anesthesiologist said, oh, she mentioned that she had a surgery for an IUD. That could be it. So when I got out of it, the doctor was like we'd like to do an exploratory surgery and figure out if there is actually scarring and if maybe that's what's causing you had three miscarriages now. But if I hadn't mentioned that on my own to the anesthesiologist and they hadn't made that connection, it would have been like, oh well, whatever, and they would have walked away, but they scheduled a surgery like a week later and they put me under and it was exploratory to see. Oh, was there scarring. Is that maybe why I'm miscarrying? I was under.
Speaker 2:When I came out the doctor was like you have holes in your uterus? She had found two big holes in my uterus one from the IUD that had migrated and gone into my large intestine that we had known about, and then my first IUD. That was about five years before that, when they were trying to insert it, the person inserting it went through my uterine wall, which I felt it's very painful. They take it out. They say, wait a few weeks, it'll heal, we'll put a new one in, which is what they did and I never thought about it again. It turns out your body doesn't always heal. I had two IUDs go through the wall of my uterus and I was told both times that the uterus just kind of heals itself. That was not the case. I had big holes. The doctor had sewn them up, which was great. It was amazing. But I was really confused and frustrated by all of this.
Speaker 2:We had to do some hormone treatment. I had to take estrogen and regrow the lining and try to regrow over where the holes were. We had to do some I feel like a saline sonogram, where they put saline in and look to see what they could see in the uterus. I had to go in for multiple sonograms and do endometrial biopsies to see what the lining was like, and then the lining wasn't thick enough. So for several months afterwards we basically were just trying to heal my uterus and get back to a place where I could get pregnant again.
Speaker 2:I was on some pretty strong hormone meds and really was in an awful place emotionally and I went off at work and almost lost my job because I just snapped on these hormones. And then we saw the doctor. She told us we were fine to get pregnant. It took like four months, five months afterwards regrowing, doing all these testing and saying like, okay, the endometrial tissue is good. She put me on. I can't remember what it is. It's a boosting drug that you take to try to boost the chance of getting pregnant or to support the pregnancy at the beginning. Yeah, it was Prometrium, prometrium.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like that one's pretty common Femera. Uh-huh, I think they both work a little bit differently. The Prometrium is for the lining of the uterus and then the Femera. I don't know if I'm saying that right. There's so many medications out there.
Speaker 2:Letrozole, that's it.
Speaker 1:Letrozole.
Speaker 2:Okay, was that the only one? No, I mean I took Prometrium to regrow the lining of my uterus and then they wanted me on Letrozole to help boost the pregnancy at the beginning. So my husband and I got the all clear to try in January of 2021. And I went on letrozole to help support and I got pregnant again. It was actually right around the end of January when I did the math from the date of ovulation. It was pretty much the exact same date right around when we last scale up, when I did the termination, and so in a weird way, that was actually very comforting for me to think like, okay, two years later, like I conceived this baby at the very end of January, probably the same day as two years earlier, I lost my other baby. We saw the high-risk doctors. I was boosted on that pregnancy with letrozole and watched extremely closely and had a pretty good pregnancy.
Speaker 2:The pandemic hit in March. So I was about eight weeks pregnant. I went home and worked from home and so nobody knew I was pregnant. I had already had this devastating loss and then three miscarriages. So I was terrified to tell anybody. We told our family. So I was terrified to tell anybody. We told our family. I showed my coworkers on like a virtual call when I was about halfway through, when I was huge and I was 20 weeks. I never posted about it publicly, I never told many people, except for a handful of friends. I just went through the whole pregnancy being at home in the pandemic and the first time I said anything was after the baby was born, my second boy, luca. He was born at the end of September and I posted online and multiple people were like oh my God, I didn't know you're pregnant. I was like it's terrifying, terrified, terrified to say anything, do anything. I was just really scared.
Speaker 2:But that pregnancy was pretty uneventful, except that he was actually breech. He was not turning when I was 32 weeks and then 35 weeks and then my doctor was like if you want to try a vaginal birth which they did not recommend because I'd had multiple surgeries on my uterus and had two holes and had them sewn up and done all of this they said I want to try a vaginal birth. So she said, okay, we'll try a version, which is when they come in and try to flip the baby in my tummy, instead of being head up, to be head down so he can come out the birth canal head first. So we scheduled a version exactly three weeks before my due date and he came the day before. It was unexpected. I was starting to walk my mom through how to pick up my older son from daycare and what to do with him, and we dropped him off at about 8.15 in the morning. We're driving back at like 8.30 in a brand new minivan.
Speaker 2:My husband and I bought a minivan because we're going to have two kids and I thought I was peeing myself because I've been eight, nine months pregnant this was the second time and you just pee yourself a lot and I wasn't going to say anything and then I just kept. There was just multiple episodes and I was like, oh my God, I'm peeing myself like four times while I'm driving home and I wasn't in any pain yet. But we pull up and I opened the door and I realized like this isn't peace, my water breaking, and I get out. I mean gushed all over the car, all over the sidewalk, all over me, everything. So I'm yelling at my mom to get my husband. He comes out and we're just like, oh my God, water broke in the minivan. He had to do a lot of cleanup before he could get it ready to even drive me to the hospital because he was just like using multiple towels I'm soaking. It just keeps coming and coming and coming and gushing.
Speaker 2:I had bought disposable underwear. I went through like three or four pairs at home. I put them on again to go to the hospital and I was freaking out because he was still for each and I was like, okay, well, it's gonna have to be a C-section. And so I actually talked to my doctor and had the labor and delivery number in my phone. Thank God I did. I called them and said I'm going into labor, my baby's breech, and they contacted my doctor and had an OR ready for me and we're ready for a C-section.
Speaker 2:We got to the hospital by about 9.15. They got me undressed and into an OR by like 9.30. And he was out into the world at like 10 am. So it was incredibly fast. It was like 8.30, my water broke. If I hadn't called ahead I think it would have taken a lot longer to get a C-section kind of up and ready. But they were all on standby and the funniest thing ever was the nurses were trying so hard to get me undressed and I was like I'm wearing disposable underwear and they were like we love you and they just ripped it off of me and I was like it's not my first child, like yeah, I came in disposable underwear, like the kind of the tearaway kind.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, like basically a diaper. Yes, yeah, and they were.
Speaker 2:They were trying carefully to undress me and I was like I don't care, take off my clothes, rip them off, I don't care. They ripped off the underwear. I was in a lot of pain and having contractions and it was a much better experience actually than the vaginal natural birth, because they just got me a new one over and started the epidural right away and then I was out of it. I started the epidural right away and then I was out of it and I couldn't feel the C-section and I get the baby out right away. And then they set me up and I was like, oh, there's not massive amounts of pain and not hours of screaming, and they didn't turn off the epidural and I didn't think I was dying and I was like I don't know why I had been against a C-section. This was such a better experience and, honestly, the healing was better. I was healing from a surgical scar but with my first son, like I bled for like six weeks afterwards and I was in so much pain. But this was like one scar you heal and you move forward. So my son Luca, he was sweet and wonderful and he was our rainbow baby. We were just happy and posted about him and I think my husband had always planned on two kids and until I went through this hell, I'd always wanted two. And then I was like I want more, I want another one, it's not enough. I lost so much and I went through so much, I want a third. And I got my husband on board with it and when we were ready to start trying, I talked to my doctors and went off the pill and then I ended up in a pretty bad place emotionally and was like, yeah, I really shouldn't be trying to get pregnant again. I need to get through with the mental health crap I'm going through. So I started taking the pill again.
Speaker 2:Then I got my period and then I was bleeding and then I bled like a week. Then I bled like two weeks. Then I was like what's going on? And I just kept bleeding and bleeding and it was like weeks and my husband kept telling me to see somebody, my good friend that I met through that support group. She and I still met to talk through our trauma and everything.
Speaker 2:And I was, you know, at dinner. I just was like, yeah, I've been bleeding for like six weeks and she was like go see somebody. And she made me send a message from my phone right then and I got in to see somebody at the OBGYN clinic and I had actually I had taken a pregnancy test. Because I was like what if there's an off chance that I was pregnant and I'm miscarrying Still had HCG in my system and got a positive pregnancy test. So I was like, oh crap, well, apparently we're super fertile and I can get pregnant, even when, like, I just went off the pill for like a week and then was like no, I'm not mentally ready, this is a bad idea, went back on the pill, not even trying.
Speaker 2:We got pregnant but it didn't explain why I was bleeding. That wasn't helping my mental health. So eventually I got in, they saw that some of the expelled tissue had gotten stuck in my cervix. So I wasn't actually bleeding from like period or expelling more from the pregnancy, it was that piece of tissue was aggravating my body and I was bleeding because of the aggravation. So they took out that piece and I stopped bleeding.
Speaker 2:But they confirmed it as a pregnancy and a miscarriage, which was like a punch in the gut because one everybody thought we had fixed the problem, like once they had found holes in my uterus and done a surgery and done all of this. Everybody was like, wow, that's why you had three miscarriages, like it really sucks. You had an encephaly that's an oral tube defect, but it's totally separate. And then you had these holes in your uterus that's separate, and these miscarriage. And so they thought, oh, we fixed it. That's why you miscarried, turns out not I just miscarried this on my own, not even trying. So that really messed me up too. And then I wanted to get pregnant again. So we went back to the high-risk doctors, talked to them. They did more testing of endometrial tissue. I did more drugs to kind of regrow the lining and to test that. We got the all okay to try. We tried again, got pregnant right away and then that was probably like six months afterwards, we got pregnant trying.
Speaker 2:I was supposed to have boosted the pregnancy with the letrozole. Again. The high-risk doctor said prescribed it to me. I thought that you were supposed to start taking it as soon as you had a positive pregnancy test. I did not remember the instructions from first time around when I had Luca and you're supposed to take it right after you have your period to boost your ovulation and already be on it by the time the embryo implants and it boosts the pregnancy. So I started it, but I started it after I'd already had the positive test and they made it several weeks and then started bleeding, probably like six weeks for this pregnancy. That was my fifth miscarriage.
Speaker 2:And then I kind of like looked back at the notes and I looked back at what we'd done and I was like, oh, I was supposed to take that medicine before getting pregnant to boost the pregnancy. And so then I had all these guilt trips and I felt awful and I was like I started this after the embryo implanted and I was already pregnant. Like what if I had boosted earlier? Like I, I just had guilt with that and I just I was really frustrated and worn down and I'd been pregnant eight times. And then I am really stubborn and I don't give up and I just wanted to be pregnant and we tried a ninth time and I did everything right and I took the medicine ahead of time and I got a positive pregnancy test for the ninth time in my life, right when we'd moved into a new home and I was really scared of losing this pregnancy too, but it was a pretty normal, good pregnancy.
Speaker 2:I'd made the decision with my doctor like, yeah, I need to do a C-section. I've been pregnant a lot of times, I've had a lot of surgeries, I've had all of this stuff, and so we just scheduled a C-section. And I was like, oh, I'm great, I'm golden. They were going to do a C-section right at 37 weeks. So I knew exactly when it was going to happen. It was going to be April 6th. Everything was planned out. It was like we've got our third child, we're great.
Speaker 2:I went into labor a week before that, at 36 weeks, my water broke at home. Again, I had been in a lot of pain so I was taking a lot of baths. I was taking a bath at like 10 PM. Once the two boys were asleep, I got up and I just start gushing water again in a bathtub. So at least placed with a drain. I kind of waddled through the house and I got. I had my water breaking, like I just had this trail of water through the house.
Speaker 2:I waited a while and I woke up my husband. I was like I think I may be in labor and he's like what? And I was like I mean, I'm not having any pain, I'm not having contractions. The two boys I was screaming in pain from contractions and he was like, okay, and we called labor and delivery and they're like, yeah, your water broke, you need to come in. So thank God my mother-in-law was here. She stayed with the boys.
Speaker 2:We went in, they checked it out and they were like, yeah, the baby's coming, you're having the baby. But I didn't feel the contractions. I just kind of laid around in the hospital bed for like a few hours while they got an OR ready and decided to do the C-section. About an hour before the C-section I finally started feeling the contractions. But it was a completely different experience. It wasn't frantic. I was in a pain, I wasn't screaming. They just kind of wheeled me in and did a C-section at 2.30 in the morning and they got her out. She's pretty small because she was at 36 weeks, but she's healthy, great, and it was the best birth I've had. They just told me back up after the C-section and I healed and I was like, okay, c-sections are not that bad. Like this is the best experience.
Speaker 2:That's our baby Amaya. She's our little baby girl. She's seven months now. She is healthy and wonderful, I think. From the outside we look really happy and amazing and wonderful, like we've got a six-year-old and a three-year-old and a seven-month-old. We've got two boys and a girl. They're all wonderful and sweet and the two boys adore the baby, they adore her. They call her baby Amaya and they're just like give me my baby Amaya, let me see my baby Amaya. And they are over the moon and we are happy in our home and with three kids and we are in a good place. But every so often I am just shocked at everything we went through in seven years.
Speaker 2:And in October, for Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, I always try to post something and I think about it. And I mean we've had five miscarriages. So I don't even think I didn't tell our family when we had the miscarriage and I wasn't even trying when I just bled for six weeks. I don't think we even told anybody. I don't think anyone really knows. There were nine times in my life I got a positive pregnancy test. Five times ended a miscarriage. One time I made it a month and had an anatomy scan and found, you know, a neural tube defect. And then three times I got a living child. One was a super traumatic vaginal birth and then two were much better C-sections, one of which the baby was breech.
Speaker 2:I just have a really hard time wrapping my mind around. Everything is from age 34 to age 40. And it feels really weird to close that door on that part of my life. It feels really good. I threw out all of my ovulation sticks and all of my pregnancy stuff and then I threw out all of my postpartum stuff and now I've gotten rid of all of my breastfeeding stuff and it feels so final. It feels like we made it through that part of my life and my fertility journey is now over. We're 100% sure we don't want more. My husband had a vasectomy. I'm on birth control pills because I have a deep hatred of IUDs. I'm on birth control pills because I have a deep hatred of IUDs and we're good in a lot of ways and I'm still really traumatized in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2:I will never forget our baby Caleb. I'll never stop talking about him. He'll never stop being real. I'm going to tell all three of our kids like when we get out the ornament every year and put it on the tree, you know whatever developmentally appropriate way Like my six-year-old, I say like this is the baby that we lost when we were little, like this was going to be your brother. He was a little boy and his name was Caleb. And then you know, my three-year-old's too little to understand. But we can say like, oh, mommy lost a baby. I want to not have it be a secret and not also have it be a huge big deal. It's like this was a part of our lives and we honor him.
Speaker 2:Certain times my in-laws, my mother-in-law, actually has sent flowers on Caleb's due date. She remembered it and that means a lot. People will say things like, oh, you have three kids, or you've had three pregnancies. I was like, no, no, I have three living children. That is like skimming the surface of what we went through. That's the ultimate outcome and that's what everyone will remember and that's what we'll have for a lifetime. But that's not our journey. Our journey was nine times and surgeries and hormones and every type of miscarriage you could have. You know, like the gestational sac not growing, and then you know watching the heartbeat decline and waiting for the heartbeat to stop and then miscarriage you can have.
Speaker 1:Do you think that maybe it sounds a little bit like because of everything that has been kind of piled on top of each other? As far as the experiences and the trauma? Did they ever tell you that what you have is PTSD?
Speaker 2:No, I mean, nobody's ever ever said that I have seen the same therapist since right after we lost Caleb and she is the most amazing person and we we work through a lot and she has made she. She talks about making space for my grief and talking about things and when I got pregnant with Luca and then when I got pregnant with Amaya, she made sure that I talked about my fears and that I talked about Caleb and that I made it part of that journey. So, even though I was going through a healthy pregnancy and I ended up with a living child, we still made Caleb's journey a part of it and we still talked about it. She's never really talked about PTSD, but we we talk repeatedly about, like, my grief journey and where I am in my grief.
Speaker 1:So this is something that I ask everybody. I feel like it kind of wraps it up for the listeners and also for the person that's gone through it. I feel like a lot of times we wish that we could go back and kind of talk to ourselves during some of these things that have happened, and I think that sometimes it's comforting to try to like imagine what that would be like if you could go back and talk to yourself during some of the parts of your journey. If you could do that, do you know what part you would go to and what you might want to say to yourself, knowing what you know right now?
Speaker 2:I think if I could talk to myself, I would talk to myself after we lost Kayla to anencephaly. It happened in January of 2019. To anencephaly it happened in January of 2019. I would have told myself to just be in the pain, to just be in the grief, to just go through it. I know I wanted to get pregnant so badly afterwards to try to not fix things, but to try. That's the only concrete thing I had. That was in my control. I couldn't change anything that had happened. All I could change was like getting pregnant again and I pushed so hard and I wanted it so much and I was obsessed with it.
Speaker 2:I would just go back and tell myself just be in your grief, just be in your pain, get in your own bucket, just allow yourself to grieve, just allow yourself to maybe not be the best mother to Ezra. You're in a really shitty place and it is a shitty place and just accept it and be in it instead of trying so hard to be like I need this support group. But I need these people. Maybe if I post online and then maybe if I see this fertility doctor and then if I try getting pregnant, and then I just I wanted to go in every single direction to just do something because I felt out of control and there was nothing to do. I would just go back and tell myself the same thing that I tell the women in the online support group and that they tell me like it sucks. It's not fair. The world is shitty and sometimes bad things happen to good people. You just have to be there in the pain. You can't push it away. I will say one moment on this whole journey that has always stood out to me that I think my husband's really the only one that can kind of like understand the complexity of this.
Speaker 2:But when we had had a miscarriage and the neural tube defect, and then another miscarriage and then that miscarriage, and then they did surgery and found the holes in my uterus and we kept seeing that same doctor she was a high risk doctor, doctor, and I would see her like every week and we would talk through things and right after the surgery came in and I felt like the most unlikely person in the universe. I'd had three miscarriages, I had had a baby with a fatal neural tube defect, I had had an exploratory surgery that found holes in my uterus and I was just like it's like lightning striking multiple times, like miscarriages and neural tube defect in no way related, just two shitty lightning strikes. And I just felt like the worst. I was in the worst possible spot in the world and I was talking to her and I just felt so unlucky. But I didn't say it, but she was talking through it and she was like I can't even believe how lucky you are.
Speaker 2:And she was like you had two holes in your uterus and you had Ezra, like implant and grow, and you had a healthy nine month pregnancy and gave birth to a healthy boy. And it just like everything just snapped for me and I was like oh my God, my first child. Like no one had any idea, but like I had two holes in my uterus and I grew him and had a healthy pregnancy and a healthy birth. That's phenomenal and really weird looking back on it, and she's like I cannot believe it, like I don't understand how. And she was calling him like my miracle baby and I was like no, he's the easy one, he was the one that there were no complications with, but he's the miracle child that I didn't know about till years after and I thought about it and I was like she's right, like maybe I am the luckiest person in the world that I had this like huge, horrible thing wrong with my uterus and he still was perfect and was healthy and came out great.
Speaker 2:That is really incredible, like I had no idea and I didn't think about it like that. But she just said that one thing and everything flipped and I was like, oh my God he's my miracle baby.
Speaker 1:Yeah, your poor uterus had been through so much without even really knowing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I used to talk to multiple doctors, like for this ninth pregnancy with Amalia, and they were like do you want to try to do a vaginal birth? And I was like I don't know what do you think? And my doctor was like no, she's like, your uterus cannot handle it.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:And I was like, yeah, she's been there a lot. It's like my poor little uterus.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, maybe she could have, but really is that what she deserves? Well, but like why? Why push it Exactly? You know what it was like for the vaginal. You know what it was like for the C-section. The C-section was better for you. Just go with what you know, yeah.
Speaker 2:She's like why roll the dice? We know that you apparently have a thin uterine wall because it breaks, and we know they're scarring because we've done an actual surgery.
Speaker 1:Right, and then you had to do so much to grow the lining every single time as well. Yeah, and I'm assuming that that's the reason that they had elected for a 37-week C-section was because of the holes that you had previously had in your uterus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my doctor had super strongly recommended a C-section because of that and they wanted to do it 37 weeks just to try to catch before I went into labor. Naturally, I just have a scheduled one For your body it's like, okay, hold my beer, I can go into labor earlier.
Speaker 2:All three of the pregnancy youth were just like I had no idea my water broke and everything, just pandemonium broke out. I have had friends that have talked about birth plans and like people have talked and I'm like that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Like no one can control their birth. Maybe there's one in a hundred women who can like go in and have their birth plan go to what they expected, but just being free form and knowing like, oh, your water's going to break at 10 at night while your kids are sleeping or in a minivan, while you're driving or while your baby's breached you have a C-section right away. Like you can't control any of it, so just let it all go. A birth plan is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. I'm sorry to say that to everybody and Norg said to go through that.
Speaker 1:No, I think that there are. I think a birth plan isn't a plan, it's preferences, first of all because you can't plan for that and second of all, I feel like it's a way that we gloss over the complexity of a situation and make us feel like we're in control, when really physiology is in control and whatever happens we respond to and if it goes the way that you had put it in your plan, well, you're incredibly lucky. If it doesn't, we have a lot of options. So, either way, you know we're going to work together to figure it out. But knowing what the possibilities are, I think, is one of the advantages of the birth quote plan. I prefer to call it preferences.
Speaker 2:I think being flexible is more important than anything. So if you think like I would love to do this if everything went right, but I know people where it's like you set it up in your mind this way and then it goes a different way and you can't shift it and you just think, oh, it's all out of control. Now the entire experience is out of control.
Speaker 1:It was never in control.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, if you just go in thinking I'm just going to be flexible and whatever happens happens, then you can just shift.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yeah, I totally agree. I think that's the mindset that everyone needs to have going into their birth, and I agree that those that have the very rigid birth plan are the ones that usually end up with trauma because they're not able to reframe it emotionally and they believe that they have failed, when really it's just you were never in control to begin with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I've had multiple nurses and doctors, like through each pregnancy and through each birth and everything, just asked me all these questions and asked me like well, here's the different options. And I'm like no, no, no, you are the medical professional. What do you recommend? And sometimes I just have like, do you want me to do a C-section or not? And they're like I highly recommend it. I'm like, okay, then that's what I'm going to do, because my preference doesn't really change anything to do, because my preference doesn't really change anything the fact that you're a medical professional.
Speaker 2:I want you to recommend, and I have a lot of friends that are just like no, my doctor wanted this and like oh, I don't want that and I'm like how many times have you gone through this and how many times have they?
Speaker 1:Right, well, and the other thing is finding a provider that you trust is important. So if you're disagreeing with your doctor a lot, then maybe there's a trust issue there. And, additionally, if you really really like this doctor and that's what you've chosen and their experience says that this is a better option, because that's what they do best and they can help you with a better outcome, then probably go with that, yeah.
Speaker 2:I've had three different doctors just because they have left the health system. I loved all three of them and they have all been wonderful. And the doctor I saw at the clinic when is an abortion provider, when she is the most compassionate person. I had a follow-up visit afterwards which you know my body had healed. There wasn't really anything medically to follow up on. Like they look quickly and we're like you're fine, and she basically used it as like a therapy appointment. She just sat with me for like half an hour and talked to me because I was just several weeks out from that trauma and she just listened and talked and was validating and I know that's not typically what doctors do Like she was just sitting talking with me.
Speaker 2:But it was exactly what I needed. I didn't need somebody to look and say like, oh, yeah, like your body's healing. I needed somebody to be like yeah, you went through hell, you went through trauma, how are you doing with that? And I can't speak highly enough of her and I think every nurse there was. Phenomenal to me that the people that work in an abortion clinic are the most amazing, wonderful healthcare providers I've ever encountered. I wish people knew and understood that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, if you choose that line of work, you have to be. I think you have to be able to step into someone else's shoes and empathize, Because I mean, just as someone that cares for people who are going through loss. It's really hard. It's really hard for me to do and I can't even imagine somebody that does that day in and day out. You have to be really, really emotionally strong and empathetic.
Speaker 2:I could never do it. I'm not emotionally strong enough, Like I. Just I feel like I've been through hell. I feel like I went through like a seven-year war zone and I never thought I would do that. I thought you get married, you get pregnant, you have kids. That's what your journey is, that's what TV shows you and movies and that's even what you see. People around you Like you, co-workers just get pregnant. They have baby showers and they have their cute babies and you just you never hear or see any other side of like the experience or the journey. You never hear or see any other side of like the experience or the journey.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, marcel, is there anything that we didn't touch on, that you wanted?
Speaker 2:to talk about. I can't think of anything. I just would say for anyone who has any amount of loss, whether it's termination for medical reasons or stillbirth or medical problems say their baby's name, talk about their baby, ask about their baby. It may be highly uncomfortable. People who have had stillbirths want to show the photos of their stillborn baby. In my experience, the friends from my support group who have had that they want to share the photos of their beautiful baby and talk about them and it is the best thing you can do is to ask those questions and to say that name and to be a part of that journey. Don't pretend like it didn't happen and don't think you're going to trigger them or make their grief worse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. Well, Marcella, thank you so much for sharing your journey. I really think that there are a lot of people out there that will feel less alone after listening to you share what you've been through. So I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I appreciate the opportunity to be able to share my long, twisted but ultimately happy journey.
