We went home. I stayed and Jeremy left for work. He had some things he needed to finish in person, and I couldn't blame him for wanting to stay busy. I wished I had something that I could stay busy with, but there wasn't really much I felt that I could do. The sadness was beginning to surround me, to permeate every waking thought, and I was sinking. I laid in bed for while, listening to music that would soothe me. Nothing seemed real, and everything was real. The phone calls I had made four days ago would have to be made again, and this time, I couldn't do it. The strength that I always called on in times of grief to help me muddle through was gone.
Then the cramping I had been feeling on and off for several days got worse. Just as I was trying to figure out how long I'd have to be out of work for this to run its course, I got my answer. Part of me wanted to laugh, saying, 'see, I told you medical people I knew what was happening.' The pain wasn't much worse than the worst regular cramps I'd ever had, so I curled up in bed with some ibuprofen and a heating pad. I sent a text to my husband telling him it was beginning, that I was all right, because I was. All the strength sapped out of me by that sadness had been granted a momentary reprieve to carry me through this ordeal. It can probably be attributed to endorphins or adrenalin cancelling out some of the pregnancy hormones that were making me feel crazy and sad, but whatever the reason, I felt peaceful. My body had to do this to keep me healthy, there wasn't a live baby in there, so at some point that afternoon, I surrendered and let it be what it was.
A few times I got up and walked around. It didn't seem to be better or worse whether I was laying down or walking around. So I did get up a few times, checked the mail, stretched a bit, and when Jeremy got home, moved myself onto the couch. He was in the kitchen working on dinner and I remember standing up and going to see what he was doing, since I'm nosy that way. I felt something slide out, not in a painful way, just a weird sensation. Almost immediately the cramping let up and I went to check and see if I needed to change my pad again. (The bleeding had not been as heavy as I expected, but in the interest of my health I was being very careful to make sure everything was as clean as it could be.)
And when I checked, I found a piece of tissue that was the roughly the size of a Kennedy silver dollar. Once again, I was reminded of things I had read, and some women who had expressed comfort in examining the remains of their pregnancies. I didn't really feel any need to dissect what I was looking at, since I knew that it was only going to be a little empty sac and didn't really want to take it out of the covering it was wrapped in. The outside, however, was morbidly fascinating. It was with interest and almost horror that I stared at it. It was made of all these long tube looking structures, some of which had filaments on the end. For a brief moment, it almost looked like hands and arms and legs...but then I realized that even if there had some remnant of an embryo inside, it wasn't old or large enough to have limbs of that size.
It didn't gross me out or freak me out the way I would have thought. In fact, it made me wonder about some of those pro life posters that people outside of women's clinics use to try and keep clients away. What if some of those pictures of hands or arms weren't actually babies, but were just tissue from the support structure inside the womb? It seemed like false advertising. At 6 weeks, a baby doesn't have any limbs, or even a face, just eye spots. I had been looking at those 'see what your baby looks like at x number of weeks' pictures on the internet, and at 6 weeks it kinda looked like a worm. I had been calling it my worm before I realized it never made it that far.
So that was it. I sort of reverently wrapped it up and set it on top of the trashcan. I didn't want to leave it there, I just couldn't do anything about it right then. At that point, the worst of the physical was over. In fact, the entire process had only taken three days, and had been a normal uterine pregnancy with an empty egg. It could have been a life threatening tubal pregnancy. It could have been a fetus whose heart had stopped beating. The egg could have stopped growing inside me and then not tried to come out on its own, causing an infection. It was literally the best of the worst circumstance that I could have had, so I guess I was as lucky as I could be while still losing my pregnancy.
We both called out of work the next day, to spend some time together and just be. Later on Tuesday night, we buried our little blighted ovum at the base of a tree, because that was all that made sense. Whoever it could have been was lost, but all the work that my body had put into making sure that little egg had a safe place to be shouldn't be wasted too. At least this way, it could re-enter life in a tangible manner, nourishing other living things as it returned to the Earth that it came from.
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