Losing Loila
Warning: In this post I discuss my D&E. It’s not particularly graphic, but may be upsetting to some readers.
I can’t overstate the loss I felt going into the hospital for a D&E. I was losing the possibility of delivering my baby naturally, the closure of having a body to grieve over. I had felt, through my prayers and priesthood blessings, that God had promised me a natural delivery. Now, along with the physical and mental toll of two weeks of waiting, my faith in God was shaken like it had never been before.
I had asked my doctor for sleeping pills when we knew we had lost the baby. She prescribed no more than half a dozen (and I understood why). Two sleeping pills the night before the D&E bought me all of two hours of sleep. I got up at 2:45 and wrote pages and pages in my journal. We were at the hospital at 7:00, and would be there all day. My loving, supportive, rock of a husband spent the day beside me.
More waiting. The doctor inserted an osmotic dilator into my cervix early in the morning; we waited till late afternoon for it to do its job. I had had the presence of mind to bring something to do: a little cross-stitch project of a hummingbird. One of my wonderful friends had driven over the night before to give me some embroidery floss. I was forming the idea of making a quilt as a memorial for this baby. This would be one of the squares.
Through the morning, I had a chance to talk to the doctor and the anesthesiologist who would be attending my surgery. They both said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” five little words, but they meant a lot to me. I asked the doctor for a chance to see or hold the baby after the D&E. I was disappointed to know that I would be under IV sedation during the procedure, but asked the anesthesiologist to make this as light as possible. He said, “Most of my patients ask for the opposite,” but he agreed to try. I felt I needed to be aware during the procedure: it was a step toward my healing.
I also asked if they would do pathological testing on the baby’s body. “There’s no clinical reason for it,” the doctor said. “What would be the benefit?”
“For my comfort,” I told him. Anything that would have shed a little more understanding on the obscurity of this loss - to know if it was a boy or a girl, to be able to name a reason for the baby’s death. But he said no.
At about 3:00 they sent Andrew to the waiting room and brought me into the operating room. This was the time when I would lose the last physical part of Loila. “Goodbye,” I kept saying in my mind, “Goodbye.”
I don’t know when I’ve ever felt so vulnerable. I was in a big, busy room full of people - kind people who introduced themselves to me. They removed most of my clothing and laid me down on the operating table with my arms at right angles to my body. Everyone was so kind and supportive, and yet it felt like a sexual assualt. I was aware during the procedure, but the sedation brought its own forgetfulness. When it was over, I remembered asking questions, but not what the answers were. I remembered a nurse holding my hand, and finally somebody saying, “It’s done.”
They moved me onto a stretcher and took me to the recovery room. My legs shook for a long time - whether from physical or emotional shock, I’m not sure. The staff really did everything they could to give me the experience I needed. There was only one other woman in the recovery room. When they moved her out, they allowed Andrew to come in and be with me. They brought me, in a stainless steel bowl, what remained of Loila. After weeks of deterioration in my womb and the D&E, there wasn’t much to see. We could make out two tiny, bulging eyes, and what may have been a mouth. It sounds awful, but looking at her wasn’t awful to me. It was, what was.
After the recovery room, a chaplain came in to speak to me. We talked about grieving. She asked me how long I thought the process would take. “A few weeks,” I hazarded. There was still a part of my brain that was thinking, “This is just a miscarriage. It isn’t a real loss.”
Gently, she said, “It can take a year.” Looking back, I can tell you: it can take much longer.
After that, they were too busy trying to get my bleeding to stop for me to think about much else. Eventually, even that got better, and the doctor gave me a choice: I could stay in the hospital overnight, or they could send me home. I don’t think anyone was surprised when I chose to go home.
I went to bed about ten that night, absolutely exhausted. I’d slept only two hours the night before, spent twelve wearing hours in the hospital, and bled heavily for two of them: my body was completely worn out. I was just drifting off when the realization welled up inside me: my baby was gone, and I was going to have to live the rest of my life without her. I cried for a long time in Andrew’s arms. It was then I learned something new about grief. You don’t just wake up to grief: grief stays with you when you sleep, and it can wake you from sleep.
