7 Week Ultrasound

On Thursday afternoon we went in for our 7 week ultrasound. If you remember from my previous post, at our 6 week u/s there was no fetal pole to be found. Dr. L warned us that he needed to see that plus a heartbeat this week if this were to be a viable pregnancy.

So needless to say the past week was torture for me. I tried to stay hopeful but in the back of my mind I kept thinking "What if there's still no heartbeat..." But I tried to force myself to think positive and told myself that I may have bad luck but it's not THAT bad.

Well I was wrong.

I was sitting on the exam table when Dr. L walked in, and he solemnly asked me "You know what we need to see today?" And I told him "Yes." I laid down and he pulled out the ultrasound wand. As he started the ultrasound I saw right away that the gestational sac was still empty. It hadn't really changed shape since the last week.

Dr. L said "I'm sorry, I don't have good news for you. Let me take some measurements and then I'll let you sit up."

Once he was done checking my ovaries and all the measurements he needed, I sat up and looked over at Daniel. He had his head in his hands and was wiping away tears.

"This isn't a viable pregnancy. I'm so sorry. Take the time that you need to get dressed and meet me in my office and we can discuss what happens next."

Once he left the room, Daniel came over and put his arms around me. He was crying. I started crying too.

How could this happen? What did we do wrong?

I pulled on my clothes and wiped my tears and told Daniel that we needed to pull ourselves together to talk to Dr. L. We needed to get this part over with. So we met him in his office.

"I'm so sorry. I want you to know that there was nothing that you did wrong. There was nothing you could have done differently. So don't go thinking back over the past few weeks if there was something that you did that could have caused this, because I promise you it was not your fault. About 1 out of every 3 embryos is genetically abnormal, and that's what I think happened here. That's not likely to happen to you again in the future."

He said that the embryo had died in the early stages of development, but the gestational sac and yolk sac had still grown for a short time afterward. This is called a blighted ovum or anembryonic pregnancy.

Dr. L then started talking about what our options are.

1) We can wait to miscarry naturally. This can take a couple of days or a month. It will most likely be a very painful process as my body detaches the pregnancy and forces it out of my cervix.

2) The quicker and less painful option - have a D&C. But this runs a risk of scar tissue. Given the fact I have already had 2 uterine surgeries, this will be our last resort.

3) Medically induced miscarriage. We would be prescribed something that would induce the bleeding. But he warned that sometimes this can cause a dangerous amount of bleeding and at times doesn't remove all of the pregnancy tissue.

We agreed to try option #1 for 2 weeks and if I haven't started bleeding by then, then we will try one of the other options.

At this point I couldn't hold it together any longer and started crying. Dr. L apologized again and said that we could take as long as we needed, and he left the room.

The drive home I ugly cried. I yelled. I sobbed.

After all that we've been through, this is how this ends.

My little October baby just slipped through my fingers into nothingness. I have nothing to show for it.

This life I had imagined has disappeared and left me heartbroken. It was inside of me for such a short time, but I loved it. I loved it more than anything. I had imagined what it would be like to give birth. The look on Daniel's face when he held our child for the first time. Dressing our baby like a little pumpkin for Halloween. Showing him off for the holidays. I imagined a child going to school, growing into a teenager, an adult. I imagined that everything we have dreamed about the past 4 years was finally coming true.

And just like that, it's gone.

Maybe a part of me knew this would happen from the very beginning. I thought the paranoia I was feeling was normal after dealing with infertility for so long. I thought it was just part of the transition. But maybe a part of me knew that this wasn't going to end well.

Since then I've been wavering between sadness, anger, hopelessness, and numbness. I can't sleep.

Daniel is grieving too, in his own way, and I worry that maybe I shouldn't show him everything that I'm feeling. I don't want to scare him. But I scare myself. I'm not sure how long this grieving process will take. I never imagined 3 weeks ago when we got our positive beta, that we'd now be dealing with a pregnancy loss.

But this is life. And somehow I have to get through this. We have to get through this. We have to pick up the pieces of our shattered dream and eventually decide how to move forward. But for now we are still trying to cope with the loss and devastation of losing this pregnancy.