Blog.

I’m no stranger to the fact that our medical system is broken, but every time I engage with it, I feel renewed outrage. As a physician and a recovered people-pleaser, I’m well-positioned to advocate for myself. Yet still (!), I felt dismissed and subtly bullied by the systemic misogyny and adversarial attitude peppered throughout the medical system.

I also learned that the medical field has a poor understanding of what a body needs after miscarriage. My body was screaming for naps, baths, bone broth, soup, and gingersnap cookies. Instead, the medical advice I got was to run around the city to get additional sonograms, blood tests, and IV fluids. The morning after a miscarriage! I didn’t need IV fluids in an ER gurney, I needed to sip tea while lying on a couch under a blanket watching Jane The Virgin.

After an enlightening conversation with Kimberly Johnson (author of The Fourth Trimester), I learned that the time after miscarriage is essentially a post-partum period, but without a tradition of rest and time off from work (at least in our culture; and the U.S. barely understands the necessity of this even after childbirth, but that’s a separate conversation). She also recommended vaginal steaming to help my body heal.

If you’ve experienced a miscarriage, give yourself time to rest, stay out of gravity (standing, unnecessary activity), consider vaginal steaming, and nourish yourself with iron-rich foods like pate, bone broth, nettle tea, red meat, spinach, & blackstrap molasses, along with citrus fruits for vitamin C. Floravital can be a helpful supplement.

Give yourself space to process, and welcome all feelings, whether it be sadness, grief, defeat, anger, rage, relief, ambivalence, questioning your faith, or deepening your connection to the divine.

Trust what your body is asking for and, within reason, question the knee jerk medical advice. My follow-up sonogram can wait a couple days (I already had one in the ER to rule out ectopic pregnancy, a true medical emergency). For now, my focus is on rest, nourishment, and turning inward to process this experience.

Sunday night, I miscarried.

A week ago I announced my pregnancy. I did this to normalize talking about pregnancy in the 1st trimester so: women don’t need to hide that they’re tired and nauseated, and–if and when a miscarriage happens, it’s not a shameful secret. Women don’t have to suffer in silence, and we can begin to understand just how common miscarriage is.

I knew I was taking exactly this risk, that there was a chance the universe would call my bluff. Was I really comfortable talking about this? Well, here are some rough draft reflections:

I’m not actually devastated. It almost feels like I’m supposed to be. Yet, I feel okay, and I’m letting myself be okay with feeling okay. In no way do I mean to discount anybody’s immense sadness after pregnancy loss. That is truly understandable. But I also need to be honest, and I want to give people license to feel however they feel. There’s no right or wrong. I have a daughter, my life is full, I know that my body has already given birth to a healthy child, I trust that it probably can again, and I love my body and myself even if I no longer can. My worldview, which has been shaped by grief and ecstasy alike, is to surrender and trust this journey that feels vastly beyond my conscious understanding. I can understand how someone might feel worried they’ll never have a baby, can believe there’s something “wrong” with their body, and can feel an unimaginable sense of defeat after multiple pregnancy losses. At the very least, my hope is that we can all drop the shame and self-blame, and that miscarriage can serve as a call to action to get quiet and ask your body what it needs. But also, miscarriage happens even when your body already has what it needs. Miscarriage happens, full stop. It’s a part of the childbearing journey. It’s part of the “full catastrophe” of being human. This understanding helps me feel less attached and less devastated.

If you have experienced pregnancy loss, my whole heart to you. I hope in some small way this post can give you comfort and new ways of understanding what so many of us go through.

I’m pregnant. Ten weeks pregnant. Typically, people don’t announce their pregnancies until they’re in the “safe” zone of the 2nd trimester (12 weeks), because there’s a lot of uncertainty in the 1st trimester. Miscarriage is common: ~10-20% of pregnancies. So people wait until the risk is lower before they tell the world. But there’s a problem with this: we rarely hear about the early pregnancies that end in miscarriage. It creates the illusion that all pregnancies you hear about magically work out. And then, when women have a miscarriage, they’re left suffering in silence. They wonder: what’s wrong with me? Why did this happen to me and not to everyone else? ⁠
⁠
But in reality, it does. Miscarriage is so common, yet it’s a last bastion of secrecy and shame. While we work to blast away any residual shame around mental illness, let’s go ahead and add miscarriage to the mix. It’s not shameful; it’s common, natural, and normal. It’s mother nature’s version of genetic screening. It can happen to anyone. And it’s tough, on a physical and emotional level. So I’ve decided to use my platform to announce my pregnancy. Not because I necessarily want the world to know this personal detail of my life, but because I want to model announcing early pregnancies. If I miscarry, as much as that will be physically and emotionally difficult, I will again use my platform to talk through that experience. If you’re early days pregnant too, consider letting a few people in on your secret. See how it feels to welcome them into the excitement and uncertainty. And if you miscarry, if it feels okay, talk about it. Let people support you. And remember there is zero shame in miscarriage. These things are hard enough without shame. ⁠
⁠
To any patients reading this, I hope you will understand my telling you this way. Since it is so early, we have a lot of time before anything changes.⁠