Why?
An ongoing issue for me in dealing with my first, and subsequent miscarriages, was the desire to understand why it had happened. I was dumbfounded to hear my doctors say, “We don’t investigate miscarriages until you’ve had three.” Reeling from my first loss, it was hard for me to imagine multiplying that pain by three before anyone would throw me a lifeline.
I knew the chance was small, but still wondered if something repeatable - and addressable - had caused me to lose Loila. Why should I have to hazard my body and my emotions twice more before that would be considered? I dutifully went in for my Pap smear regularly on a much smaller risk of cervical cancer. The attitude of the medical establishment seemed to be that if I eventually had a successful pregnancy, then there was no problem: There is something telling about where they referred me after I had been through the requisite number of losses: the Repeat Pregnancy Loss Clinic was located within the Fertility Clinic. This was a problem of fertility, not of loss.
Doctors always came back to the issue of chromosomal abnormalities. Miscarriages are usually the result of problems in the DNA, they would tell me, and therefore unavoidable. But I did enough of my own research to know that “most” meant somewhere between 50 and 90 percent, and that the numbers were much lower for second-trimester miscarriages. I was told more than once, “We don’t investigate miscarriages because they are so common.” Where is the logic in that? Breast cancer is common; we still treat it. It appeared to me that what they really meant was, “We don’t investigate miscarriages because they are unimportant.”
Furthermore, doctors seemed to think if they could convince me not to feel guilty, I would be alright. This didn’t help at all. Guilt wasn’t at the root of my questions, but I think doctors wanted to believe it was, because that belief was more comfortable for them than an acknowledgement of what I was really going through. I was experiencing the loss of a child. That loss - that child - deserved an explanation, or at least an attempt at an explanation.
At my insistence, my doctor sent me for some blood tests a few months after Loila’s loss. Then I went to another family doctor and asked for a second opinion. He had no more information to offer, but he did say, “You never forget a child you have lost.” That simple statement brought more comfort than anything else anyone in the medical community said to me. In the end, all my efforts brought no resolution; nor did the further testing I eventually got through the Repeat Pregnancy Loss Clinic. It seemed to justify the doctors’ argument that there was nothing they could do, but it was important to me to feel that something had been done.
What I really needed was for someone to take a close look at Loila and tell me if she was alright. There was a pathology report, which my second opinion doctor retrieved for me: there was no real information there. My provincial health authority would not do genetic testing on the fetus until after the third miscarriage: it was “too expensive.”
I’m sure it was inevitable that the trauma of my losses would result in a fraught relationship with the medical community. This lack of understanding of my quest for understanding compounded my anxiety and frustration. I prayed after losing Loila, “Please help me to find a doctor I can trust,” but immediately got the feeling that prayer was not going to be answered. I dealt with a different doctor and clinic through each of those four pregnancies; I also changed my family doctor three times in the three years that followed Loila’s loss. It was for the most part a progression from bad to worse that left me feeling bitter and abandoned.
Looking back, I wonder if my untreated depression aggravated the problem, leading me to ruminate fruitlessly on the question for hours and months and years. I also wonder if the gluten intolerance I later discovered I was dealing with (I label it gluten intolerance, because I’ve never been tested for celiac disease) could have been the cause of my repeated losses. I’ll never know - and the decades that have passed have brought a large degree of acceptance of that reality. But the fact remains - I don’t know why, and it would have been a comfort to know, something concrete to hold on to in the void.