August 25, Part 2: 131.5 B.P.M.

Thursday, August 25, 2011: one of the most emotional days of my life.

I had allowed myself to be distracted from my dread for the first time in 2 days. After much hemming and hawing, I had decided we should go ahead with our camping trip - we had stuffed the car to the gills the night before. I read an exciting, but long, chapter in my book.  I was still fuzzy from sleep. All the fuzzy vanished when I saw the blood clot.

It only took a second to make the connection: doctor questioned viability, I had been waiting for the signs of a miscarriage, here was a flashing neon sign. I started to cry, and that same horrific mourning came over me from last time. I apologized to the keiki, and began to sob. Eric woke up soon after that, tried for a moment to rationalize another reason, and then he just hugged me and we cried together in the bathroom. It was just before 8 a.m.

I spent 5 minutes researching miscarriages on the internet. What are you supposed to do when it's so early in your pregnancy that a miscarriage doesn't include the loss of full cups of blood? I spent another 5 minutes waiting for the clinic to open. When I finally reached them, somewhere in my mind I was impressed that there was only the smallest quiver in my voice when I said "I think I'm having a miscarriage and I don't know what to do." It only took a minute for them to slide me into the schedule to see My Doctor at 9:45 a.m.

I suggested we unpack the car. Eric just steered me back to bed, where he held me as I cried, where I apologized for killing a second baby, where he rocked me as he repeated over and over "No, you didn't."

The nail in the coffin was an even bigger clot that I found when using the bathroom just before we left. For the first time ever, I wasn't worried that a doctor was going to see my unwashed vagina. I wasn't worried about much other than surviving the drive to the clinic and the agony of the waiting room.

My Doctor looked sad, the nurse stood quietly in the corner. I told her about the clots, and that I had started cramping a few minutes after I had made the appointment. She was quiet and thoughtful, started to say something, then said we should look to see "what's still in there."

For once the monitor was turned towards me right at the beginning of the ultrasound, so I saw the sac still in place as soon as everyone else did. There was some zooming in, she used a cursor to point at a little blob and told me "there's the heart". The heart... flickered? Was that a trick of light by the ultrasound? She quietly took some measurements, and I watched as some numbers and letters popped up on the screen: 131.5 bpm

"The baby's heartbeat looks good," she said. Soon followed by announcing that the baby wasn't really that much smaller than it was supposed to be. The baby, with a heartbeat. The baby with a heartbeat safely in my uterus. The baby with a heartbeat safely in my uterus and alive.

She zoomed back in for us to see the heart again, and I saw that same little... hint at motion. She ended the ultrasound, and then the 4 of us all looked at each other in awe. We all believed it. We just couldn't wrap our heads around the fact that 5 minutes earlier we were all preparing to deal with a miscarriage.

Just to be sure, we cleared the camping trip with My Doctor, went home to grab some clothes and run some errands, and then we were off for the coast. Giddy. I think the best description of our emotions that morning were giddy.

It was hours later, as we laughed at Google Maps directions on how to enter the park (our little blue triangle drove straight through the invisible-in-real-life Visitor's Center), just what had happened that day. It was one of those experiences - good coming from bad, but on a monumental scale.

The pregnancy hadn't been real to me until I thought it had ended. The moment I saw that first blood clot, I believed the baby was real - and I had just lost it. The moment I saw that first flicker of quasi-motion from the heart, I believed the baby was alive. The machine's ability to calculate heart rate, followed by a second view of motion, and I believed my baby was alive and healthy. This terrifying morning had been the catalyst to make me believe in my pregnancy and acknowledge my keiki. If that morning hadn't happened... I don't want to think about that.