The Impact of Loss
Another thought from Blue Ticket, this time about miscarriage. (So skip if you need to skip.)
A blue-ticket woman gets pregnant and frets when she sees blood in the toilet paper. After the blood dries up within the same paragraph, she talks about her fears with her doctor on page 81: “So it could end at any moment… How am I supposed to cope with that?”
The doctor responds: “Yet lots of white-ticket women manage all the time, he said. Interesting.”
The blue-ticket women, in some ways, feel more akin to infertile women. A pregnancy when you have a blue ticket is different; it’s unexpected. It’s hard to achieve. The stakes are the same, but they somehow feel higher.
Whereas white-ticket women expect to get pregnant, and they expect to get pregnant again in the event that they miscarry. The loss is the same, the devastation is the same, except…
Except I kept thinking about the stakes. If you have $1000 and you lose $800, you’re left with only $200 and limited options. How long can you feed and shelter yourself with only $200? But if you have $100,000 and you lose $800, you’ve lost the same amount, but you’ll see that loss through a different lens. It may be just as frustrating or sad in the moment, but it’s also what comes next. Do you assume you have options or do you assume (or actually have) no/limited options?
Of course, multiple miscarriages make all theoretical fertile women turn into infertile women, so fertility isn’t a constant (like having $100,000) but rather an assumption until proven otherwise.
But the book raises the question: Is miscarriage different depending on circumstances?
4 comments
My miscarriages have been different based on circumstances. (How convenient of me to have four of them for research purposes.) My first one, I had no children and it was devastating. My second I was seventeen weeks pregnant and labored and delivered and it was a much bigger deal. My third and fourth were at six weeks each and didn’t even really register because at that point I was expecting miscarriage and it was just more of the same. They were more of a “have $100,000 and lose $800” situation. The first one was “have $800 and lose $800” and the second was “have $1000 and lose $800.”
This is a very good question and it’s something I have thought about before. For example, I didn’t even bother to call my doctor about my fourth miscarriage, just told her when I saw her next. It had become routine. And if I ever want another child now, I kind of assume that I will have to have another miscarriage or two to luck out with one that makes it. I hope I don’t sound too callous talking about all this like this but I’ve spent almost fifteen years at this point with these feelings.
Around the time I was diagnosed with PCOS and about to begin my first clomid cycle – we hadn’t told anyone that we were TTC or about the diagnosis – we were visiting with friends who had young kids. One of them said “oh, we’re definitely going to have another child” in the course of a conversation and I remember, even then, being sort of amazed at the conviction, certainty, and calm with which it was said. There wasn’t an “if this cycle goes” or “if I don’t miscarry” or “if we can get pregnant” and it was at that moment I realized we were playing on a really different field from “normally fertile” people.
I do think circumstances can make miscarriages different. My first miscarriage, an added insult to injury was the fact that we’d paid around $15K for the IVF cycle (and over $5K for prior TI/IUI cycles). It was not just an emotional or physical loss, it was a huge financial hit as well. IVF also came with a limited number of tries because of the immense time/financial commitments, which made it feel less like “try again” and more like “oh cuss words, that was one of our few chances gone”.
The compounding effect of infertility on miscarriage or having multiple miscarriages (or all of the above) makes every miscarriage feel really momentous to me – more than the sum of its parts. It’s a cumulative thing – there’s the costs of the infertility/PCOS and what those have done to my body/mind, there’s the question about whether or not I actually *will* get pregnant, there’s the question about whether or not this pregnancy will stick if it does happen. I don’t know any fertile women who greet a positive pregnancy test with the immediate consultation of their calendar to see if there’s anything over the next 10-12 weeks that will be awful to reschedule if I have to deal with a miscarriage. There’s a reason I do that, though, and it’s because more times than not, I’ve miscarried (or my body has made a darn good attempt at it). It’s just an entirely different mindset.
Yes. Definitely.
The in-your-early-thirties-only-been-trying-a-few-months m/c (no underlying issues, get pg within a year) or the already-have-at-least-one-kid m/c are different from the in-your-late-thirties-or-early-forties-already-been-trying-for-years-and-already-spent-ten-of-thousands-on-IVF-and-finally-pregnant m/c.
Which is part of the reason the Hilar.ia Bald.wins of the world annoy me with their “I’m going public with my m/c to help others so there’s no stigma.” What stigma? People are devastated bc they have zero kids not b/c of stigma. I know some people call this pain Olympics. Yes it’s always sad but having 3-4 kids easily then a m/c is not the same as trying for years with no babies then having one. I also feel like the attempt to “normalize” m/c —“le.g. “almost X% end in m/c” “it’s natural” kind of deny infertile women —how do I say this? Their “right” to grieve. Like saying, eh, no big deal, happens to a lot of women.
And I don’t think the devastation is the same. The level of devastation is tied to the stakes.
After my second ectopic, when I was already 40 and waiting to heal from the ectopic to be able to try IVF, my sister-in-law visited. She was in her first trimester with either her second or third child. She was complaining about morning sickness, and said it was the worst way to spend a holiday. “Oh, I can think of worse,” I said, amazed at her (though I shouldn’t have been). After all, I had already expressed sympathy for her morning sickness. “I don’t care if I miscarry,” she said (clearly she was annoyed at my comment, so did she deliberately try to hurt me?). “I know I can easily get pregnant again.” I can’t remember if I responded, and she may have reacted quite differently if she had in fact miscarried. But to her, a pregnancy was easily gained, and if lost, easily replaced. A miscarriage was no big deal to her in the scheme of things.