Jeffrey McManus

While I’m sitting here on the couch in my pajamas at noon composing year-end round-up blog posts I should take a minute to commit one more little tale to the posterity bin. This one has to do with Carole’s pregnancy. It’s long, very personal, a little icky, slightly heart-rending, and way off-topic compared to the stuff I normally post about on my blog, so if you come to this blog looking for information on shiny widgets and Web services I’ll move this behind the link so you can skip over it.

This summer Carole and I decided to try for another kid. After a few months of trying (always the most difficult part, particularly for the father, ha ha) she got pregnant in late September. Very exciting, joyous, etc. She made an appointment with her OBGYN for late October and all appeared to be well.

Until: One Sunday we’re getting ready to go somewhere with Celeste and Carole goes into the bathroom to get ready. From behind the bathroom door I hear Carole exclaim “OH, FUCK.” I open the door: bloody mess, distressed wife, what do we do, who do we call. It was so horrible that it took a good half-hour before we were able to get our heads around what this probably meant: she’d had a miscarriage.

Carole felt physically okay but I insisted on taking her to the hospital to get checked out. She got an ultrasound and the doctor pronounced her womb to be 100% embryo-free, so very sorry, here’s some literature about miscarriage, call your regular OBGYN when he’s in the office on Monday, take care, see you later.

What followed was four days of fairly profound grief. Even though she’d only been pregnant about 4-5 weeks, we’re both 38 years old, and while we knew we’d try again to have a kid, we had a sense that we might have just blown our last chance to have a second kid. (After researching this a bit further, we learned that having a miscarriage has no direct bearing on your ability to have a child, but that didn’t help much at the time.)

Simply telling people about what happened in situations like this is really hard. When I called the hospital, I wasn’t able to say the word “miscarriage” (I said “she was pregnant but she isn’t any more” and they figured out what I meant). I took on the responsibility of telling our families afterward. Carole’s mom, who’d had four children and two miscarriages, was particularly helpful and comforting to Carole.

Another thing that made this harder to deal with was the fact that just one month earlier, I’d hurt my hand and had to spend a Saturday morning in the hospital. After moving to a new house, both of us changing jobs (with Carole’s job turning out to be not the perfect fit she’d hoped for) and taking one trip after another to the hospital, there was a real sense of “when will this all start calming down?” around our house.

So Carole kept her previously-scheduled appointment with her OBGYN the next day. They drew blood and checked her out, and said they’d call her with the results of the exam in the next few days.

That Thursday (October 20) Carole found me at work, in tears. She said her OBGYN’s office had called and asked her to come in for another ultrasound immediately because her blood test indicated that had the hormonal levels of a woman who was still pregnant. We had no idea what that meant, but in the absence of a reasoned explanation from a trained medical professional, it sounded like something was hellaciously wrong with her. We frantically jumped in the car and hot-footed it back up to the city. By the end of the 45-minute drive we calmed ourselves down by thinking through the possibilities, including the (to us, remote) possibility that there was a perfectly normal little pre-human in there.

An hour later, after an examination by a sonogram tech who presumably was not drinking on the job this time, we received confirmation that that was indeed the case — there was a little six-week-old embryo in there, and we could see its little heart beating on the sonogram monitor. After four days of thinking that we weren’t going to have a baby, it was back on again. Hooray!

I got to call all our friends and family and tell them the good news, which was nice. Because I’m evil I called Carole’s sister Alicia and said “You remember that whole thing about Carole having a miscarriage? She was totally faking it. I’m so pissed.” Fortunately when I was doing this Carole was still lying on the exam table so she wasn’t able to get up and smack me on the noggin with a clipboard.

Afterwards, we went to Toy Boat on Clement and got ice cream.

So what happened? It’s really difficult to know because she was only in her first month of pregnancy, but our working theory is that Carole was originally pregnant with twins, one of which wasn’t viable, so she did actually have a miscarriage (we think). When we took her to the maternity E.R., the doctor figured “game over,” and he wasn’t expecting to see an embryo in there on the ultrasound, so he didn’t spot the viable one that was still in there.

This story isn’t over yet (the baby is due in June 2006), but things have calmed down at home sufficiently that we aren’t constantly worrying about when the other shoe is going to drop. Carole is feeling fine (she’s taking a nice long pregnant momma nap on the couch next to me as I write this) and her belly is starting to get big. I haven’t felt any kicking yet, but she feels it moving every so often. We’ll find out its gender in a few weeks (and I’ll post the ultrasound of that here when we get it because we are all about the sharing in our family).

One of the semi-unexpected things about having kids is how much they teach you, and how they mold your character.

We have a bunch of friends who started families around the same time we did. (There were five, count ‘em, five pregnant women at our wedding.) One of the things I noticed was this weird unspoken tradition of not talking about a pregnancy before the second or third month. This seemed really stupid to me — my thinking was, if you had cancer or something, you’d tell your friends about it, right? So why is pregnancy any different? This is of course a typical logical dumb guy reaction (particularly when you consider that a whopping 15% of pregnancies end in miscarriage). After having been through this, I’m now deeply respectful of the urge to keep the bun in the oven under wraps until momma’s good and ready to go public with it.

Related posts:

1. BabyTime(tm)
2. Why You Should Hire Carole
3. Carole to College of Cardinals: Play Ball!