By Anonymous
It was a dark moment. My gynecologist was trying to make me understand as calmly as she could that my two month old fetus had stopped growing. The sudden trauma was so overwhelming that I barely managed to tell her I will come back to meet her when I was ready. After a couple of days, she explained it again. It was a missed abortion. The fetus had stopped growing. The reasons could be many or none. She explained neither of us should feel guilty about it. It was not our fault. Then she spoke about the ‘cleaning up process’. I could either go for a D&C or wait for my periods to arrive naturally. I chose the latter. I thought the former could be painful. If it did not arrive naturally, she suggested I meet her after a week and take pills to induce abortion.
After about a week and still no sight of my period, I met her again. My doctor always makes it a point to explain what to expect when we try something new. The pills she said will ‘open my cervix to allow the fetus to come out.’ “It doesn’t matter the fetus is just 2 months old. The cervix will still open up and the pain will be one-tenth of labour pain” she said, handing a more effective painkiller than the normal ones.
Even then I never knew what she had really meant. I Googled a lot, found out that I have opted for ‘medical abortion’ against ‘surgical abortion’ and read up about experiences other women underwent while going through medical abortion. For most of them it was ‘heavier than normal periods’ with clots and more painful than usual. That was pretty manageable.
After my first pill, I started bleeding. I spoke to my gynec and she suggested I should still take the remaining pills after 48 hours. Just to ensure the clean up process was complete. The next three days were uneventful. I chose to go out for dinner on the third day and slept off almost peacefully. Everything has been fine till now and since I was bleeding for three days with some pain, this was probably the end. The ‘process’ was perhaps complete. Google also said so. That after the second set of tablets, the process may take place within four to five hours and will be complete within one or two days.
When I woke up the next day, I felt a strange uneasiness in my stomach. I had to make many trips to bathroom and called up another doctor friend of mine for pills to stop ‘diarrhea’. The diarrhea stopped but I soon began to have a constipated feeling. It was over two hours and the pain was excruciating. I Googled again and assumed I was probably suffering from irritable bowel syndrome. It never mattered to me that I had not experienced anything of this kind ever before. The pain was unbearable now and all my attempts to control it were boomeranging. I couched on the sofa trying to getting myself distracted with television, and then sleeping on bed listening to some music. The pain would not go away. Two hours after having a painkiller, it was only getting worse. By now I was rolling on floor not knowing what to do. It then struck me. This was probably what my gynec had warned me about. I grabbed my bag and reached out for that more effective painkiller she had given me. Popping it up, I went back to sleep again.
When I woke up a good three hours later, I did so only after feeling a warm sensation gushing down my stomach. I rushed to the bathroom and felt a light pinkish wisp of a tissue leaving my body along with lots of blood. Flushing it down, I felt an inexplicable calmness engulfing my body, I could even feel the pain subsiding. It was complete just now and not as I had assumed. I felt ashamed about how little I knew about my body; about how heavily I had relied on Google to know my own body.
I went back to my bed thinking of my body. Reaching out to my stomach which I had always detested for being bloated, I was proud how it had endured the pain and all the assault of painkillers. If it was bloated, it was my fault. It still did its job despite my negligence. I was thinking of all the men in my family and among my friends - wondering if they could survive a miscarriage leave alone a pregnancy. They call us biologically weak and yet we could survive both, I thought.
I have never taken a meal on time, I binged on junk food for most part of the week and slept well past midnight most days even when I could afford to sleep early. Yet when required, my body showed remarkable resilience. It showed me I had the strength to survive a pain that was killing. It complemented the strength of my mind to put me back on the road to normalcy. With only a little more care and love, my body could do even more wonders. The miscarriage has given me the resolve to do so.