A Cruel Joke

April 1998

On the cruelest April Fools' Day ever, we learned that we are four-time losers. Another anxious visit for another ultrasound, another tiny, crowded exam room growing suddenly quiet as everyone squints at the monitor screen, searching for another heartbeat, in vain.

Almost a year after our third pregnancy ended early, our fourth does, too, and in a fashion so similar that everyone, even my typically tranquil doctor, seems a little taken aback. The last was a genetic anomaly, but both I and (eventually) Jim tested normal in our karyotypes, so we aren't expecting another genetic loss. We maintained our heparin injections and baby aspirin zealously, and that seems to have worked, again. Until we have the results from lab testing of this baby, we feel shrouded in mystery.

Again, we decide to move quickly and have the D&C on the following day. Everything about the whole process was so similar to last May, it's hard to even find any variances. We even had the same anesthesiologist. Oh, my doctor was a little late to the D&C. After apologizing and offering me a sympathetic smile, he led my gurney down the hall to the operating room with a hand on my head.

Having worked in hospital settings, I know that the folks surrounding me had already shared with each other my tragic news, made all the more sad by virtue of the number of occurrences. No one was callous enough to be overheard, but I could almost see by their faces what they were thinking, and I'd had the very same thoughts myself while talking with people online: "Oh, my, how terribly, terribly sad... so many pregnancies, and yet no baby. Hope I never have to know what that feels like..." God, I heard myself thinking now, I've become one of those women whom I pitied.

My husband again provided me with something cuddly to hold afterwards, a sweet little bear. It helps as, again, I am wheeled out of a busy maternity hospital without a baby.