NOTICE: This post is especially hard to read. It goes through the details of a medically-induced miscarriage and D&C.
As I mentioned in the last post, a blighted ovum or a missed abortion is normally found when one goes for an ultrasound and find only a gestational sac with no embryo or no sign of pregnancy at all. Even so, the woman has no outward realization that the pregnancy is not viable. It can take many weeks for your body to finally miscarry. I was already at 8 weeks and 3 days when I came to learn about the missed abortion. However, I have read of women reaching as far as 14 weeks before their body finally miscarried.
The doctor did not recommend that I wait to naturally miscarry. She said the miscarriage could become more complicated and decrease my chances of getting pregnant again later if I waited for it to happen naturally. There was also the emotional factor of carrying on a pregnancy that I knew wasn’t viable and waiting for the moment when my body would miscarry. Would it happen while I was in class? When I was on the bus? Would I wake up in the middle of the night surrounded by blood?
It seemed obvious to me that I would prefer to be in a hospital and do whatever was possible to preserve my chances of becoming pregnant again. So, that night I entered the hospital for what would be a six-day stay involving a medically-induced miscarriage and ultimately a D&C (dilation and curettage).
A medically-induced miscarriage starts with shots of vitamin K to limit blood loss. It also involves taking estrogen to dilate one’s cervix, allowing the mother to pass the gestational sac. Finally, they give you a drug like Mifepristone (Mifeprex) or Misoprostol (Cytotec) to induce the miscarriage. If everything passes cleanly, then you do not need a D&C. If not, the D&C ensures all tissue from the miscarriage is expelled, so it does not impact one’s ability to get pregnant again.
I spent the next few hours trying to organize my life. I spoke to Don, my boss, and offered what materials I had to help him and other colleagues cover my classes the following week. Once everything was arranged, Ben and I were alone in the hospital room, and I finally had the opportunity to weep.
I was in high school when I was first introduced to the difference between crying and weeping. I learned it when our choir sang the negro spiritual “Soon Ah Will be Done.” It talked about how this person would soon be done with the troubles of the world. They would soon go to live with God. Their life would no longer be full of weeping and wailing. My choir teacher Ms. Morrow wanted us to sing the song with the passion and pain of those who had created it. So, she told us that weeping was not like crying.
For me, crying is similar to rain. Rain can mist, it can drizzle, and it can pour. However, at the end of it all, the world is still about the way it was before the rain came. The sun comes out, and the water is dried up almost as if the rain never happened. People move on until the rain comes again. Rain can be refreshing. It is needed to make plants grow, and it provides humans with the precious water we need to survive. I think crying can be an important part of healing.
Weeping is different. Weeping is a thunderstorm. It is a hurricane. It is not just pouring, battering water from the sky, it’s also gusts of wind that can lift trees and their roots out of the ground. Weeping shakes the very foundation upon which you have always stood. Weeping engulfs and transforms you in the same way the Hulk transforms Dr. Banner. Your entire body shakes, and the suffering is so complete it seems there is no start or end to it. It seems as if it was somehow always there. And when it is finished, the landscape is battered and bruised and nothing like it was before.
That was how I wept when I finally had a moment with just Ben. I think it broke Ben’s heart to watch me, but a broken heart can be healed. My heart had been entirely shattered. My hope completely lost. My rose-colored glasses smashed. And I knew then without a doubt the entirety of my insignificance.
I, like many young children, used to believe that the sun followed me around. Even though I knew it didn’t make any sense, in my head all the evidence seemed to support the idea that the sun followed me wherever I went. It would take many years, until I was 7 or 8 years-old, at least, to accept that the sun was simply everywhere. In this way, it was able to follow everyone. Even so, I always believed that I was particularly special. I was particularly lucky.
Unlike Gabrielle Union, who only learned in her forties that she had adenomyosis after nine miscarriages, I had learned about it at 28-years-old. I had insisted on getting the care I needed at the beginning of the year. I had gone through four months of menopause. I had done everything I could do, right? I thought this was going to be the best story ever. I thought I would go from menopausal to pregnant to mom. I thought I had worked hard and sacrificed my health for just this moment. I thought, I realized, that hard work would always lead to a reward.
But it doesn’t.
I thought I was past those simplistic, inaccurate beliefs. I thought I had already learned that suffering is the natural, human condition. I thought I knew that bad things happen to good people every day. Even so, I realized that I was just like my childhood self, who still secretly believed that I was special enough for the sun to just follow me.
I’m not.
This was my mental state when the first nurse came in to give me a shot of vitamin K. Before she gave that excruciating shot in my butt, she asked me, “You don’t want the baby, right?” I found this an odd question since in all actuality there was no baby to want. That was the problem.
Ben ultimately responded for me, saying “是的.” Yes, I don’t want the baby. In other words, I did not want the empty gestational sac where an embryo had never bothered to grow. Was I ever really pregnant? What baby do you speak of? I thought there was new life growing inside of me, but really, it was just an empty sac. If I were honest, I would admit that I felt betrayed.
I had spent the last few weeks talking to a little embryo that didn’t exist.
The next few days in the hospital would consist of similar questions. It was clear that the nurses were not informed of my medical history. They knew that I was having an abortion because of the tests they were performing or the drugs they were administering. And, yes, my medically induced miscarriage is still considered an abortion. So, the nurses are always, not so sneakily, trying to get more information about why you don’t want the baby. During the medical miscarriage process, a nurse had to check the opening of my cervix twice a day for bleeding. During these invasive procedures, the nurses would ask about why I didn’t want the baby, where I came from, and how I did my hair.
On one occasion a nurse started the conversation by saying, “So, everyone in your country sings well, huh?” As I paused to think about how to respond, she asked, “Can you understand me?” in that slow, loud way people tend to speak to foreigners who they think don’t understand the language well. I assured her that it wasn’t my language comprehension that was the problem.
To say I wasn’t in the mood to have these conversations would be an understatement, but these were the women meant to take care of me. I didn’t want to offend the nurses, so I did my best to endure what was easily the most dehumanizing experience of my life.
Even the cleaning lady was curious about my reasons for being in the hospital. Having discovered that I could speak Mandarin, she told me that one of the girls down the hall was a university student and accidentally got pregnant, so she was here for an abortion. You know, the kind of abortion you normally think of where a woman consciously decides to end a viable pregnancy in the first trimester.
The cleaning lady kept saying that I looked like a university student too, even though Ben had told her that we were both already working. He ultimately told her that I was not only not an undergraduate student, I already had my master’s. I told her I was 28-years-old when she asked, and Ben answered that we had been married for three years already. She still kept saying I looked very young. She probably had assumed I was there for the same reason as the “careless” undergraduate down the hall.
It’s probably hard for her to believe the young black “girl” (I mean me) is educated, employed, married, and very much desiring a child. It’s much easier to believe I’m a promiscuous undergrad who was careless. I’m not sure she believed us after our initial 10-minute awkward conversation, where she also went on and on about how beautiful I was (especially compared to other black women, who are normally overweight, very dark-skinned, etc.).
I was always relieved when she went on to the next room in the coming days where we continued to have variations on the same conversation. I’m not sure she believed my and Ben’s story, which was fine. I didn’t believe her story about the woman down the hall either. There did happen to be another black woman down the hall. I wondered if this was the “careless undergraduate student” the cleaning lady was talking about. I wondered what, if anything, this black woman had heard about me.
One day the cleaning lady asked me about my race. I wasn’t sure I understood. I confirmed the question and then told her that I was black. She said that I wasn’t and pointed to Ben’s black water bottle cover. This, she said, was black. The woman down the hallway was black. She also apparently didn’t speak Chinese. It was as if over the course of our discussions the cleaning lady started to believe my story and assumed that I was a different type of black person. Someone who speaks Mandarin, who is educated, and who takes the time to talk to the cleaning lady certainly couldn’t really be black.
Besides the emotional difficulty of the miscarriage, the physical was no walk in the park either. First, they wanted me to catch the gestational sac. This means that when I started bleeding, losing blood clots, I had to do so over a bucket. I would then call in the nurse to have her check if any of the clots in the bucket were the sac. At first, I didn’t mind this. I had read that if you catch the embryo, the hospital can run tests to determine what caused the embryo to stop developing. However, I wasn’t sure if there would be any embryo at all.
I wasn’t sure I was emotionally prepared for what I’d see.
Then after finally losing the gestational sac, I learned that there would be no tests run. The hospital would just dispose of it like they did with medical waste. Apparently, if I wanted to have testing done, I would have had to have gone to a different hospital. So, I just went through all of that for nothing.
I wept again.
But it would get worse as an ultrasound two days later revealed that not everything had passed. I would still need a D&C. More importantly, a D&C in China is conducted without any anesthesia. I was taken to a back room where there were four doctors. The first doctor went in to have a look and decided that this would be too hard for her, so she had another doctor take over.
During the excruciating process of having my uterus scraped clean, the other doctors in the room seemed to be on a kind of coffee break. They weren’t drinking coffee, but they were discussing their daily lives as if I were not having a painful procedure done. I’m not at all sure why they had to be in the room at all. It felt like they were there out of curiosity, like they wanted to somehow be a part of the foreigner’s abortion. Thoughts of privacy or the suffering I might be enduring did not cross their minds. If my hand accidentally grabbed at the sanitation paper on my stomach due to pain, I was reminded not to touch it as if I were a small child touching the trinkets at a porcelain shop.
When it was finally over, the other doctors patted the doctor who had done the operation on the back and told her the equivalent of “Good job. That must have been hard work.” My pain, suffering, and loss taken entirely for granted and my humanity completely forgotten.
The doctor who had done the procedure, as if to emphasize the meaningless, routine for her, showed me the large plastic cylinder where she had scraped the remaining tissue. “See, how much was left?,” she asked with the tone of Aren’t you glad I took care of that for you? How painful it would be for me to look at the red stained container, the last vestiges of my pregnancy, obviously never crossed her mind. I just nodded my head, and I probably said thank you as I gathered my clothes and the remainder of my dignity and walked out.
Those six days in the hospital are not days I would want to live again, but I wasn’t alone.
I had Ben. I knew then that I would certainly love him for the rest of my life.
**5 years to the day before this miscarriage, Ben and I met in Shanghai and said for the first time that we loved each other. We promised never to give up on each other easily. And we haven’t, no matter what. The featured image is from that day five years before.
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