Where's My Baby

This story I am about to tell you will probably blow your mind and you will probably lean toward disbelief but I tell you it is true ... unbelievably true.

It was the end of 1986. There was a lot going on in my life. My husband and I were getting a divorce and it wasn't pretty. And to make matters worse, I was pregnant. It wasn't intentional. It was just something I had not thought about in years.... birth control.  It was just something I hadn't thought about since my husband had been *fixed*. And besides that, I was told I could not get pregnant. But none of those things changed the fact that I was pregnant.

I had already been pregnant three times, all without incidence. In fact, I was good at it. I had all three of my boys in a total of seven and a half hours of labor after normal pregnancies. And there was no reason to think this one would be any different. At least that is what I thought.

The father was an error in bad judgment to say the least. He had decided that I did not need prenatal care.   His reasoning was twofold.  One, I had been pregnant before and knew what to do. And, two, people in pioneer days didn't go to the doctor just because they were pregnant. I knew that the real reason was much simpler... money.

Due to these objections, I did not see the doctor after the first appointment for a long time. During that initial appointment, I had the standard checkup and was able to see the baby by ultrasound. I did not see another doctor for quite a while after that appointment. But everything was progressing fine until I was somewhere around seven to eight months along, then I got concerned.   Scared, really.

This concern stemmed from two things. It dawned on me one day that I had not felt the baby move. That made me wonder when exactly was the last time I had felt movement. Along with this thought came a realization that my stomach looked smaller.

Scared, I call the doctor and was able to get an appointment for the next day. The doctor came in and after saying hello, said she wanted to do an internal exam and follow that with another ultrasound. I told her my fears and asked for the ultrasound. She agreed and within minutes I received a shock I was not prepared for. There was NO baby. She searched and searched but there just was no baby. Blood tests indicated I was still pregnant but there was no baby. She called it a mispregnancy. She said the pregnancy was self-consumed. My body ATE my baby. I couldn't believe it.

It took months before my body accepted the fact that I was no longer pregnant... months before the blood tests were negative... months before my periods returned... but years and years have passed, and I still have not forgot.

Postscript... it is thirteen years later, and it is much more believable knowing what I know about my diagnosis of Polyglandular Autoimmune Failure. This is purely conjecture on my part but I think my antibodies saw the pregnancy as an invasion and destroyed it.

I have never been able to find mispregnancy in either medical books or the Internet but I do not doubt its' existence. I lived it. I know.

It's a JO thing!

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You are listening to Memories from the musical Cats, written by
Andrew Lloyd Webber and T.S. Eliot. I felt this song was a perfect selection
for this site because of the affiliation I feel with Grizabella. Although for her,
it was age and not health issues that changed her, neither of us are who we
were before, on the outside, and it can affect how we feel on the inside.