December 8, 2020
It’s just me (Lindsey) today because I am getting pretty vulnerable, real, and raw today. I’m sharing very openly my miscarriage story. If you didn’t know I went through a miscarriage around the end of September/early October. Taking off a few weeks from the podcast, I knew when I came back I wanted to do an episode about my story. Mainly because so many women go through miscarriages and I did not realize that until I was one of them. Sharing my story on Instagram and receiving so many messages from women that resonated with me.
That is my heart with this episode, to show up vulnerably and share my story in a way that if you have been through this hell also, that you don’t feel alone. That this permits you to feel. Or maybe you’ve gone through another type of heartbreak and resonate with my story in that way. Or you might be somebody who has not gone through this at all but know somebody. Or you’re just listening to this episode and I hope in that case if this ever happens to you or a friend in the future you might know what to expect or how to grieve with your friend.
Our podcast name is Heart & Hustle. We focus a lot on the hustle but this episode is going to be one million percent the Heart. If you are in a season of being pregnant or just recently found out you miscarried, something where this episode might be triggering I would just please recommend that you stop. If this topic is in any way triggering to you, I don’t want this to unnecessarily trigger somebody but I do want to share it in a way that connects with YOU if you listen and to not feel alone.
We found out we were pregnant near the end of July. It wasn’t a funny story like how we found out we were pregnant with Eloise (if you don’t know the story it’s on my blog). This time I had an inkling that I was pregnant, I don’t know why, I just felt like it and maybe due to the fact I hadn’t had my period for a month-ish. We randomly had a pregnancy test in our bathroom, so one day I just took it. And it was positive. Immediately I knew I wanted to think of a cool way to tell Andrew because it did not happen the first time. I kept it a secret for a few hours and then he picked that day of all days to start talking about our healthcare because he was getting out of the Coastguard and needed to discuss what we wanted to do. He had found a few places but they wouldn’t cover pregnancy if you were already pregnant before signing up… I was going to wait a few days to tell him but when he brought that up I knew I needed to tell him then. I said something along the lines: ‘”Well if you call the insurance company that conversation is going to have to go a little differently…ask will you cover us if we’re already pregnant?”.
Andrew was very excited and we went to the beach that night with Eloise to take some photos to celebrate.
During this pregnancy, I was a lot more nauseous. Whereas with Eloise’s pregnancy I wasn’t sick at all, I felt pregnant but there weren’t any extreme symptoms. This time I felt nauseous and immediately Andrew thought it was a boy because it was different than Eloise’s.
Around mid-August, I had an elopement in Colorado, and Andrew and Eloise came with me as we were going to do a lot of traveling together. I had an elopement in Colorado and then in early September, we went to Alaska where I had a shoot but also meet up with our friends. I remember being nauseous still during all of this and then looking back on the Alaska trip I remember being nauseous around the beginning of the trip (first week of September) and then we did like a tour de force of Alaska traveling to all these places with our friends and I remember the second half of that trip not being nauseous at all. That’s not necessarily abnormal at all and again it doesn’t mean anything but I just remember thinking that’s so interesting I feel perfectly fine, I don’t feel nauseous.
Your brain doesn’t go to the worst-case scenario and so that’s just where I was at and didn’t think anything more about it.
After we left Alaska, I had a wedding to shoot in New Jersey so we went straight from Alaska to New Jersey and were only there for the weekend. Shot a wedding in Cape May and we originally were going to go back to Hawaii but decided to make a week-long stop in Kansas (where we are from and we had just bought a house there). The day after we flew there, so September 22nd we went over to our house we bought sight unseen to meet the contractors and interior designers to start renovations. Later that day when we got back from viewing our house I went to the bathroom and saw blood. At this point in time, I was around 11-12 weeks and knew it wasn’t super uncommon to bleed in your first trimester. At the same time, you immediately think what is wrong and that is where my head went.
On the verge of tears, I called Andrew over where he tried to calm me down, but because I had never spotted during Eloise’s pregnancy I knew something wasn’t right. I needed to see an OBGYN right away. As I said before we were in between insurances because Andrew had just gotten out of the Coastguard and we had not signed up for non-military insurance. Trying to think of ways to make an appointment with a doctor who would be cheaper than an emergency visit, especially if it ended up being nothing but just spotting. We called an OBGYN in Lawrence and we used to live there so I had connections with them, I had been there before and got an appointment an hour later.
The sucky part of this entire story is that we are in the year 2020 and Covid is a thing, so Andrew couldn’t join me for the appointment. Which just sucked. I know I’m not the only one who’s found out they have miscarried alone or had a baby alone. I know Covid has screwed with so many people this year as far as having to be in a situation where you need people but you can’t have people. And it just freaking sucks.
I went into the hospital, went into the OBGYN office, and they checked me in quickly, and took me back to the sonogram room. I called Andrew on Facetime so he could “kind of” be with me. I have this pit in my heart and stomach. That I just know, if she shows me a baby with a heartbeat on the screen I will be shocked. Since I had seen the blood I knew something was wrong. You don’t think the worst is happening until it’s happening and then that’s all you can think. Before, you don’t have any reason to think that. At least I didn’t.
I was laying there with Andrew on facetime and I’m sure so many women can resonate with the feeling of having the sonogram go and just the silence of the technician. I sat there and I saw our baby on the screen and I saw that he or she wasn’t moving. Again maybe I’m ignorant and don’t know how to read ultrasound pictures but even before she said anything, her silence and just watching the lifeless image on the screen I knew. Then she said the words that no one wants to hear, which is “I don’t see a heartbeat”. Ever since I saw the blood an hour before in my mind I felt like I already knew. I didn’t want to be hopeful if I heard those words.
When we found out we were pregnant I remember being like I want to share sooner than what is “socially acceptable”, I don’t want to wait till the second trimester to share. I intentionally because if anything were to happen, a life is still a life and this baby is still loved.
I started to cry and she left me alone to talk to Andrew on Facetime. Then she takes me into a room where I waited thirty minutes, crying alone, to see the doctor. The last thing I wanted was to be alone, I just wanted Andrew, I just wanted to hug him. Finally, the doctor comes in and I’m sure he’s had a million of these conversations as well. He’s understanding but also very doctor-y. Cut and dry telling me this is what is going to happen, this is what you can expect, it was not your fault. When I heard there was no heartbeat my immediate thought was what did I do? Andrew knowing that was what I was thinking asks the doctor, “I just want you to tell her that this was not due to coffee, hiking too much, hiking, working, or traveling”. The doctor said no, it happens a lot, and often we don’t know why. Next, he tells me that when I go home to expect the heaviest period of my life. Expect a lot of cramping, bleeding and then if your body doesn’t do it naturally we can do the DNC (which is the surgery) or a medication that induces your body into labor if it’s not naturally going into labor. I wish they would just tell you to expect to birth a baby. I wish they said that point-blank.
They don’t say that your body will go into labor. Even though the baby doesn’t have a heartbeat anymore our body still needs to birth it. That is what happens and I wish they told you that.
One of the worst parts is I couldn’t remember my blood type and had to go get a blood sample to the lab. Finally finished and balling at this point I ran out of the OBGYN office. Andrew picked me up and he just hugged me and we cried. That was September 22nd.
Unlike when someone loses someone, was alive and now they are gone, but with a miscarriage, your body has to go through a whole event. The day we found out was just the beginning, when my body registered that I needed to birth this baby. We extended our stay in Kansas as the doctor did not recommend traveling before I birthed the baby. We canceled our tickets and waited it out. We didn’t reschedule our tickets back to Hawaii until everything had happened. I remember I just kept bleeding. It wasn’t the worst period in my life but the longest period. That is what it felt like. It felt like I kept bleeding every day and sat there feeling all the emotions and reminded every single time I went to the bathroom that death was coming through me. That is genuinely what it felt like. It had been a week and a half and the doctor said if I didn’t pass the baby naturally I would need to get a DNC or take the medication. Hindsight now realizing how long it can take I might have taken the medicine at the beginning, but again no one tells you, no one talks about this. At that week and a half mark, the blood slowly started to dry up and it felt like it was done? I had know idea if I had miscarried or not yet.
Friends informed me that the baby will come out. What? No one told me that! Now reaching out to the doctors and midwives asking how we know if I had passed the baby yet. We got a few recommendations from midwives and one said I should get another ultrasound to see if the baby was still inside. I booked another appointment to get an ultrasound and felt weird filling out the paperwork when it asked, “Why are you here?”. I wrote, “To see if my dead baby is still inside me”. The ultrasound confirmed that our baby was still inside me.
After that, the doctor said I needed to take the medication to induce labor. I took it the morning of October 3rd and that was the day that I miscarried.
Before I wasn’t sure if you would know when you miscarry, but now I know that you know. For anyone that doesn’t know or is just curious, the best way to describe it is that your body starts cramping (going into contractions) and mine didn’t start until 1 or 2 pm that day. It felt like labor. It got so difficult that I went into the bathroom and laid on the cold floor and listened to worship music. I remember feeling like a pop and then it felt like I had peed my pants, and that was my water breaking. After my water broke I took my clothes off and I got in the shower and just let the water run over me. Andrew came in and held my hand as we blasted worship music. I was standing and squatting as blood clots kept coming out of me for about thirty minutes. Finally, I squatted one more time and our baby came out and I knew right away. and I miscarried. This is the hard part. It looked like a baby. August was nine weeks and at nine weeks you can see their head, their eyes, their little face, and all ten fingers. It’s a baby. It’s a human being. I just remember August came out and I broke. I broke down. Andrew doesn’t cry, I mean never cries. He has cried two times in his life, one when I was in labor with Eloise and two on October 3rd when we saw our baby laying there on the tub floor. It was hard.
How do you continue with your day after that? It feels so morbid but we picked him up with a plastic spoon. I’m saying him because we thought it was a boy but it could have been a boy or girl. We put him in a plastic bag and kept him in the freezer because we wanted to do something to commemorate and memorialize him. We planted a tree a week later at our house that we had bought. We got a redbud tree because every spring it blooms beautiful pink flowers and I was due in April.
We named our baby August. It felt right. It felt right to name him. It felt right to commemorate him. Because I think when a baby is born and is alive everyone celebrates and is so excited. Everyone rejoices and we talk about it a lot but when a baby doesn’t live (that no one got to see), we don’t talk about it. We shove it under the rug. In society, it’s stigmatized. I didn’t want that for my story or for August. We wanted something that would honor his or her life.
After the miscarry I kept bleeding, not as much as before but I think this is what makes this part hard. Is knowing how similar a miscarriage is to abortion. I don’t want to touch on this a ton because it’s such a tender topic. It’s emotional, for everybody! The reason I wanted to hold off on taking the medication and wanted my body to do it naturally was because again what no one tells you, the medication you take to induce labor is the same if you have an at-home abortion. They have you take two pills, the first one mifepristone- it stops the pregnancy from growing. Then you take the second one which is misoprostol which induces labor. When you have a miscarriage you don’t take the first one but the second one if your body isn’t naturally doing it.
I wanted to hold off taking that because in my mind it felt too sickly twisted and close-knit to abortion. It also made me so sad for people that do have an at-home abortion because they say it’s going to be the worst period of your life, you’re going to cramp, have some bleeding, have some tissue come out and they completely gloss over the entire fact that it is a birth. The reason they don’t say that is because it would validate the life of the baby. I am not afraid to say it. It is a birth whether the baby is alive or gone.
This issue ties into why in our culture we are encouraged to keep our pregnancy a hush-hush in our first trimester. Mainly because you don’t want to share your news just to have to take it back. That is why I wanted to share in the first trimester in the first place. Even before we knew we miscarried. I wanted to validate that life. I know so many people don’t share for that reason or many other reasons. Who knows when I get pregnant again if or when I’ll share, I don’t know. So I completely understand why people don’t share in the first trimester. When I did share a lot of people responded saying they had even miscarried in the second and third trimester. Goes to show that waiting after that first trimester isn’t necessarily safe. Life is so precious and miscarriage can happen in any trimester.
As women, we get into this mindset that we’re not allowed to share or validate that life until it’s “safe” to do so. I think that attributes itself in the abortion industry to not looking at a first-trimester baby as a human being. I am very passionate about this and I was before my miscarriage and I am REALLY passionate about it after. There’s nothing like seeing your nine-week baby on the tub floor and seeing people think it’s pregnancy tissue. It solidified my perspective.
It’s sad in our culture that we are afraid or don’t want to share until it is “safe”. It’s never actually safe. That is why we shared before, even though this is our story, I don’t regret it one bit. I don’t regret the fact that I gave people and family exciting news just to take it back. Because even amid the suck, that by announcing, sharing, and not keeping it in we were able to have so many family members, friends, and strangers on the internet lift us in prayer. I genuinely can not thank you enough. If I don’t know you and you sent me a message on Instagram or prayed for me, I just want to say thank you. You have no idea how much that meant to me. It truly blessed us and me and I am just so thankful. I am thankful for every single person that sent a message or was praying.
A few weeks after I miscarried we were heading back to Hawaii God kept putting it on my heart to share a picture of August. I kept going back and forth in my head thinking that might be crossing the vulnerability line online. I think there is a boundary and there should be a boundary a lot of time. But I felt God kept urging me, saying I want you to share the picture of August online. I was worried about what people would think, that I was doing it for attention. I had so many fears. I posted it on the day we got back from Hawaii and ironically was the day that is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. It felt right. I was so nervous. I had never been more scared to post anything in my life. But I made a post and if you don’t know what I am talking about it is on my feed with a photo and the name August Roman.
We named him or her August because it is kind of a boys name but can also be gender-neutral and we thought it was a boy from the beginning. The second reason is we found out we were pregnant at the end of July and I’m assuming we lost August somewhere around the beginning to middle of September and so I looked at that and the month of August was the one month that our little life was growing and our little life was beautiful and alive.
“Hey, at least your baby wasn’t too far along.”
“At least it was young.”
“At least you have kids or a kid.”
“At least you are young you can get pregnant again.”
“At least you are successful or you have a husband or house.”
In general, at least statements are not helpful. I joke that nothing good follows the words at least because what it feels like to the person is you are minimizing the grief or the loss. Especially in the thick of it.
A lot of people forget is that life may have moved on and you may have moved on from that person’s news but they didn’t. They are still sitting in that suck. Check on them and don’t forget about the loss.
Imagine a picture of a box and a bowl. There’s this box and inside this box, there is a big ball. Immediately after you lose something, someone, pain, heartbreak, or grief the box is average size and the ball is so huge it fills up the entirety of the whole box. It’s a really big ball that barely fits in the box. Imagine this square box has a pain button on one side on the inside and as you’re carrying that the ball jiggles around and since it is so big will hit the pain button often. That is kind of what grief is like at the very beginning. You are in the thick of grief and the ball is hitting the pain button all the time, incessantly. It feels like all the time you are drowning. It’s why when someone goes through loss immediately after you don’t care about anything. You are in pain, you cry all the time, you are gone to the world.
As time goes on that ball gets smaller but it still is bouncing around in that box and every so often it will hit that pain button. That pain button feels just as hard at the beginning of grief even if it is six years later. Even though the ball is smaller and doesn’t hit the pain button as frequently but when it does it is still just as bad. Grief doesn’t go away, it is always with you.
As more time passes your ball is smaller and you’ll have many good days but the moment it hits the pain button it sends you right back to when it happened. Such a beautiful picture of grief in general. Makes you feel validated in having bad days. Especially when you are years beyond.
Don’t feel guilty for having days when your ball hits the pain button. It’s going to happen and that’s okay. You should give yourself grace and know there is nothing wrong with that.
A few days after I miscarried, I asked all of my followers for songs that are life-giving or anything that feels healing. I compiled them all together and made a playlist called August. A playlist that is healing. Curated from all the suggestions people gave me.
There was one song that was my lifeline. It just touched me, God spoke it to me. It’s called The Story I Tell by Maverick City Music. This is what I am believing. What I was believing in the midst of it and what I am still believing. Here are some of the lyrics:
The hour is dark
And it’s hard to see
What You are doin’ here in the ruins
And where this will lead
Oh, but I know
That down through the years
I’ll look on this moment and see Your hand on it
And know You were here
And I’ll testify of the battles You’ve won
How You were my portion when there wasn’t enough
And I’ll testify of the seas that we’ve crossed
The waters You parted, the waves that I’ve walked
Singing, oh-oh-oh, my God did not fail (Yeah)
Oh-oh-oh, it’s the story I’ll tell
Singing, oh-oh-oh, I know it is well
Oh-oh-oh, it’s the story I’ll tell
I love that song because it gave such hope in a season that felt completely hopeless. In a season that felt like it was going to continue on and on forever and would never get better. I felt hopeless and it gave me hope in that season of hopelessness. It allowed me to see purpose. When something like this happens we ask, God, why, why why! And it was a lifeline. I believe with my whole heart that while my pain was hard it wasn’t supposed to be this way. That God creates beauty from ashes. He brings redemption from destruction. He brings life out of death. He is a good God. His heart for his children is full of joy. Death is a part of this world because of sin and sin because of satan but, I wholly believe that God uses the pain, heartbreak, and suffering in this life because of sin and he always brings good from it.
I wanted to empower you. If you have gone through some heartache or loss that plain isn’t fair, know your pain is not in vain. Your story is not over. God will bring beauty from ashes.
While August’s life was short it was not in vain. While I never ever thought this would be my story, I fully believe God is using August’s life to touch others lives. I pray that, hope that, I am living that hope. I know He will because that is who God is and what he does. He brings hope from pain. To me, that is the story I tell.
No matter what I go through, if you bring your pain to Jesus, He will bring you through and He will redeem it. He will not let your story die in vain. This is not the end of my story or August’s story even though it is the end of his life. I am praying that I can use this story somehow to bring hope and redemption, to pain and such a dark world.
You are not alone.
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This helped me so much reading it. I found out I was pregnant at the end of this past July/early August, and ended up miscarrying at the beginning of September. The day before my sisters baby shower that I was hosting. It was literally the hardest thing I had to do. This was my second miscarriage, and it definitely doesn’t get any easier. Thank you for sharing your story, and posting what people shouldn’t say – people can be so insensitive when it comes to this, and it makes the grieving process so much harder. I’ve come to think of it as, “heaven needed our babies more than we did.”
Oh my gosh! Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. You are truly an angel and a blessing to our Heart fam. You are so strong!
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