Elinoa: The Story of My Miscarriage
Elinoa. It’s a Hebrew name meaning My God is movement.
Geez. Is that the understatement of the century.
Sometimes He moves in poetry and prose. Sometimes it’s magical.
But sometimes there’s no poetry in the motion. Sometimes it’s just motion, clinical and plodding.
This is a story about the cruel progression of militant motion. This is a story about a miscarriage I had at 10 weeks and 4 days.
This is a story about losing our baby, Elinoa.
*If you are raw or triggered by discussion of miscarriage or loss of this kind, please proceed with caution. I endeavored to speak about my personal journey, but everyone has such individual experiences, and I realize that reading about my pain may not serve everyone well. I also realize that my experience can never convey the complexity of such a topic, nor could I ever speak on behalf of other women. I only speak for me and pray the words can be helpful to someone else.
I took a pregnancy test on Christmas Eve morning, hours after I’d tried to keep myself asleep with no success. I knew what it was going to say. I felt it in my guts, quite literally. The week before, I struggled to keep my eyes open past 6pm, and I thought I must be in the beginning stages of the flu or something equally as terrible. I never ended up coming down with anything, but my body was fatigued beyond normal human limits; I was exhausted all the time.
So when that pee-covered stick displayed the answer I knew it would, I felt like I was holding a Roman candle that kept shooting out fiery displays of dread and surprise and excitement and “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!” one after another. I didn’t ask for fireworks, but here one was in my hand and, you know, you kinda have to let it do its thing before you throw it down. Otherwise you could hurt someone. For me, it would have been my husband. I would have thrown that stick at his sleeping head, but I held onto it until the urge to injure had passed.
Instead, I calmly walked out of the bathroom and stood at the foot of our bed for a moment. It was enough time for Jonathan to stir and ask if I was ok. I answered, “Well. I’m ok. I’m also pregnant. So… you know. I guess, here we go?” I may have also called him an idiot somewhere in the mix, but He responded with perfect empathy, saying two very important things: “I’m sorry,” and “I love you.” If this were a test, he would have aced it.
See, having another child was not a topic of discussion. In fact, it was a settled discussion; the nuclear Sheltons were forever going to be a party of 4. But even when discussions are settled and plans are set, Murphy has a way of showing up, am I right? I won’t say it was immaculate conception. This wouldn’t be true. I will say, however, that it was a near miraculous conception, and for this reason alone I pondered the news with just enough wonder in my heart to ignite a dream.
We had become reconciled to our party of 4.
But what might a party of 5 be like?
This is the question I could not quit asking myself, the one that woke me out of dead sleep and wrestled me out of my best attempts at focus and work. It’s the question that fueled the little dream that was growing in my heart, the dream that had me drive to Lowe’s to pick up paint chips, and start a baby registry, and design a nursery, and stop eating sushi.
As the nausea set in, I slowly let my heart be won by this new plan. I prayed over this baby growing in my womb. Jonathan and I began telling a few people here and there because we needed others to be on this journey with us. We knew the risks of letting others in when it was still early, but those outweighed the risks of going it alone, at least for us. The other big factor was that I was 7 months post gastric sleeve surgery, and it’s recommended that patients not get pregnant until 18 months post surgery. What can I say, I’ve always been an overachiever.
The whole ordeal felt like a whirlwind, a cacophony of disparate emotion and uncharted territory. We started doing math which, in my experience, never leads anywhere good. It showed us just how old we’d be when this baby graduated high school, and we immediately needed to nap. Being the researcher I am, I did my share of reading and learning about pregnancy in late 30s and having babies after bariatric surgery. I entered all my information into a miscarriage calculator (yep, these actually exist), which told me that at 10 weeks 4 days I had a 2.3% chance of miscarriage. In other words, I am healthy and the odds were in my favor.
And then Sunday came. I just felt off all day but couldn’t put my finger on it. I wasn’t cramping yet, but I did notice a little bit of blood when I used the bathroom. It wasn’t heavy or dark, and I wasn’t too concerned. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. Around 2am, I woke up with heavy cramps in my lower back. I plugged in a heating pad and prayed it would ease up as I tried to keep flat on my back, as much of my skin against as much of the heat as possible. I coaxed myself back to sleep in pockets of time, but always amidst a growing sense that things were about to change.
At 7am on Monday, February 4th, I got out of bed, insistent upon making pancakes for my boys. I don’t know what that is in me, the overwhelming urge to cook when grief is looming. I did the same thing the day my brother died. We left the hospital, and I stood over the stove for a couple of hours, cooking food for the friends and family who dropped in to cry with us. I have an intrinsic need to be useful when all else seems useless, and what’s more useful than food? This is the same feeling that propelled me out of bed that morning. I stood over the stove, flipping pancakes and doctoring syrup for 2 hungry boys who had learned of their baby sibling only a few weeks earlier. A sibling, I should add, that they’ve both desperately wanted for years. I soaked the pancakes in the syrup, added a small one to a paper plate, and carried it back to my room where the heating pad was still warm.
I ate what I could but didn’t get very far. Jonathan came to the door and I looked at him with as much fortification as I could muster and said, “I think something’s wrong.” I decided to take it easy for the day and wait for my OB appointment scheduled for the next day. An hour later, it became clear that plans— all the plans—were changing.
As I positioned myself on the heating pad, I started reading, like I do, about miscarriage symptoms. My heart sank as my suspicions were confirmed with every query. Still I prayed. “If it’s possible, please let this stop. Please let Elinoa be ok in my womb.” That prayer was answered swiftly. “No” is the answer that came to pass in gruesome detail.
8:30 am was the official beginning of the nightmare.
The next section will unapologetically describe my experience and, although it is without apology, I do add a word of caution. Please proceed carefully, especially if you are pregnant, or if you have miscarried or are grieving. What I have to say may be helpful for you, but it will not be gentle. I determined that I would write about miscarriage in ways that I could not find when I needed it. In the moment, I did not need poetry. I did not need spiritual bypassing. I needed to know I was not alone in the trauma. I needed to know that someone else had felt this hell and lived to tell about it. I know what I hold to be true, and I know that silver linings exist in almost everything. But I also know that not giving our current emotional landscape the dignity of identification and validation can cause another kind of death. I don’t want to do that. I want to live, in health and with authenticity.
I often share my dreams and my rainbows. Here, I share my nightmare.
I felt something drop urgently, and my eyes became wide in horror and disbelief. I ran to the bathroom and knew it was the beginning of the end. Blood escaped in terrifying volume. I remember tears bursting and I yelled, “Oh no! Baby, I’m miscarrying!” Jonathan ran in and held my head and shoulders, standing over me as I sobbed and steeled myself for whatever was coming next.
I spent the next 6 and ½ hours twisted up in heating pads while the cramping and tugging clawed at my back and abdomen in rhythmic motion, determined to bring ruin. And there was me, helpless to stop it in the slightest. I split my time between the heating pads and the bathroom, writhing in pain and then passing blood clots the size of my fist, every 15-20 minutes, the same thing. It’s the cruelest sort of joke that your own body plays on you. It’s disturbing to see your own body reject bits of a thing it’s supposed to nurture. To see what was once life, torn apart by yourself, and you are helpless to stop it. It’s a betrayal of the deepest kind.
I needed to see someone talk about this. But I couldn’t find it. No one was talking about the mechanical way your body expels this object that was once the source of all sorts of dreams and paint colors and wall treatments and clothes and headbands. That little dream was now somewhere in the toilet bowl, amidst the bloody aftermath of massacre, the result of labor that was, unfathomably, still necessary. I sat on the floor of the bathroom, not knowing how to feel in my own skin. I was betrayed by my own body, and then I was made to stare at what it had done. It was like waking up after a blackout, holding a knife and surrounded by blood, but with no knowledge of how it happened.
I found no one was talking about what it feels like to be the one responsible for destroying hope. Nobody told me that I would be using old razor handles to stir through the toilet contents, trying to distinguish everything; tissue, or fetus, or blood clots, or whatever the hell else. And because nobody talks about it, I had to Google images to figure out if what was happening was normal or if I should go to the ER. But let’s be honest, none of this is normal. It’s disgusting and mean and horribly unfair. But it isn’t normal.
Nobody talks about how one flush of a toilet bowl can elicit such strong emotion, about the crippling confusion over whether or not it was ok to flush or if I should have fished out pieces of tissue for burial. Or how the questions start flooding in without restraint; “Oh my God, did I just flush my baby down a toilet?!” “What is wrong with me?” “Should I have done something different?” “What should I have done?”
No one wrote about having to get a sonogram for my own safety in the middle of the nightmare. Or, how I would stare at an empty womb as she scanned for extra tissue or signs of problems. That womb, where a baby was growing just days ago, now barren. I wasn’t prepared for how incredibly sad and shocking it was to see, how disappointing and depressing and dark it all feels.
And no one said anything about the small tinge of relief I felt in it all, and how that relief translated to incredible guilt for even having the gall to think of relief for one second. But it was all true, all at once. The whole messy ordeal was full of shocking grief, the painful efficacy of my own body, the death of the plan we had fully surrendered ourselves to, and one small pinch of relief, all wrapped up in immeasurable guilt.
My God is movement.
I hate that.
I hate the movement without my permission. The movement without my control, even that of my own body. As I said in the beginning, sometimes there’s no poetry in the motion.
But motion… you can count on it. That’s why we call our lost one Elinoa.
Whether I like it or not, things move. And so does my heart, and my mind.
And so do we all.
For those who have lost, you do not have to wrangle your experience into a pretty package with a nice little ribbon before you share it. The appropriate packaging will come along, and healing will inevitably create scabs. But, let your loss bleed and let your heart have a good rending. We need to learn how to be with each other in the middle of the brutal mess, and your story could, perhaps, be one that creates connection where there seemed to be no way.
I love you and will always hold a special place in my heart for the mothers of babies who slipped away while the dream still lived.
