We Found C-Word in a Hopeless Place
We Found C-Word in a Hopeless Place
After our miscarriage, we weren't expecting to get pregnant again so quickly, let alone what happened next.
Right, so, ostensibly this post from two weeks ago was about how I found out I had the c-word for the second time, and if you read it you remember it was a bit long and in the end I didn’t even get to the actual diagnosis. What I got to before abruptly stopping (on purpose) was the part when the nurse delivered the news that the CT scan I’d received in the ER that night showed two masses lodged somewhere in my belly, and then, narratively speaking, the “reveal” that this news arrived at a time when my wife was 10 weeks pregnant, and that it was our second time being pregnant after having lost the first pregnancy just a few months prior. And if you’re getting the sense that this digression might continue herein then you’d be correct, because I can’t tell the story of The Cancer(s) without also telling the story of The Pregnancy(ies). Navigating each on its own, let alone both together, has required the careful management of hope, a resource, I’ve discovered, that’s as precious as it is volatile. And so here goes.
Obviously, at 10 weeks during our second go-around, we weren’t telling people that we were pregnant. That’s generally the best practice, but we were especially wary the second time based on our experience the first time. Because we had told some people that first time, select close friends, a few family members—it was too hard to contain, especially for loved ones who’d been following our journey, which had entailed a year of trying the ol’-fashioned way before working with a clinic through several months of IUI, which eventually did the trick. Then, when we lost the pregnancy, we had to call all those people and tell them what had happened, and to some extent that was therapeutic, having a small community of people to talk through everything with, but it also felt like an obligation during a time when we’d have preferred not to have any.
When we got pregnant the second time, we were more guarded. In the ER that night when the nurse told me about the masses and Danielle was in Santa Barbara and I was lying there on the gurney with my mom by my side, I wanted to just blurt everything out, add to the heaping pile of news in the hopes she could help me sort through it. But each time it was on the tip of my tongue, I held back. As we’ve now covered, there’s this whole period during these preliminary quasi-diagnoses, before the tests and prognosis and treatment plan, when things feel extremely bleak—you just get fixated on worst-case scenarios. In that moment, it was hard to imagine this information being received as anything other than tragic, and that didn’t feel like it’d be fair to anyone.
Besides, if sharing this kind of news felt preemptive under normal circumstances, it felt even more so here. Danielle was a week or two away from her next checkup. This was the same checkup, chronologically speaking, during which we found out the last time that they could no longer detect a heartbeat, and that experience was so devastating that we were still feeling its aftershocks. This post is about to take a hard left turn into a full-on account of what that was like, so I suggest you buckle up.
I wasn’t allowed to accompany Danielle to that appointment in November due to COVID protocols, and so I was on FaceTime when things got started. At first, everything was proceeding cheerfully, because at 11 weeks we’d cleared several of the statistical hurdles that apply to a “geriatric pregnancy1,” and so the ultrasound had the air of a mere formality to it. But then as the doctor was moving the wand around, there was that initial faint sense, even over FaceTime, that something was wrong, because the heartbeat should be easier to find at this stage and now it wasn’t. Then the doctor said, “So this is not good news.”
“So this is not good news.”
Excuse me? What’s that? What is this news? It was hard to tell over FaceTime, but eventually it became clear what we were being told, what Danielle was in the room experiencing. I was pacing the hallway in our house, trying to astrally project myself into the small room so as to feel connected to my wife, to everything going on in this doctor’s office just a few miles away, but as the reality sank in it started to squish me, like I felt physically compressed, dense and immovable like a bag of sand. And then everything became very procedural. The term “baby,” which we were all using just minutes ago, was quickly jettisoned, replaced by “the pregnancy” or “the fetus.” There was a quick discussion of next steps, and before long Danielle was on her way home. The subsequent days would involve tortured conversations about various options for “expelling the pregnancy,” culminating with an appointment for a DNC, which we drove to through LA traffic on a rainy Monday morning2.
We took some time off work, but I couldn’t tell you how we filled our days. A week before, there was this whole new reality stretching out in front of us, which we knew better than to fully invest ourselves in, but as those first few weeks of pregnancy became six, became eight, became ten, and we got those initial ultrasounds and heard a heartbeat…well, we couldn’t help but start to imagine how everything was going to change, or at least I couldn’t. In my mind, I’d started to construct the scaffolding of this new life, this post-newborn life, one in which I’d work less, be more present, devote as much time as possible to the thoughtful raising of our kid. I had this fantasy of a garden in our backyard, this lush, overflowing assortment of flowers and vegetables, complete with fluttering butterflies and that perfect kind of sunlight, not too bright or hot, but like warming, nurturing, glowing…and I’d hang out in the garden with my kid and as they got a bit older would explain how nature works, the interplay of plants and insects, how things grow, where applesauce comes from…
And then, in the span of that 10-minute ultrasound, all of that collapsed.
We grieved and we talked about that grief with our therapist and sometimes we wondered if we were grieving too much or not enough. We ate like shit; reviewing my journals from that week, it appears we accomplished the feat of eating McDonald’s, KFC, and Taco Bell on three subsequent nights. Eventually, we told our friends and family. Eventually, we went back to work. Eventually—and this part, understandably, took some time—we started to discuss IVF, because that was the obvious next step for a couple in our situation. In the New Year, we found a new clinic we liked3, started taking some tests, figuring out the timing of things. It was determined that we would begin the actual IVF process—with its daily injections, egg retrieval, etc.—in the spring, either April or May. But then a funny thing happened. In March, during a routine checkup, the clinic informed Danielle that she was pregnant. After nearly two years of trying, we’d gotten pregnant naturally.
We were shocked, dumbfounded. Our therapist encouraged us to view it as something of a miracle. To us, it was more complicated. Given our experience just a few months prior, we liked the idea of IVF, which would allow us to do genetic testing of embryos and avoid the “fetal abnormalities” that led to the first miscarriage; we could even choose the sex. A natural pregnancy felt like rolling the dice again. We discussed whether it made sense to keep it. We were just so afraid of repeating what we’d just been through.
But we pressed on—cautiously, guardedly. Five weeks became six, became seven, became eight. We’d go into the fertility clinic for weekly ultrasounds, and each time there was a part of me that didn’t just fear the worst but assumed it. During one such visit, the doctor handed us the little black-and-white printout of the fetus (baby?), and rather than go home and put it up on the fridge, we treated it like a parking garage receipt. We didn’t like that we felt this way, but we tried not to judge ourselves. It simply felt more natural to keep hope at arm’s length than to consider the possibility of inviting it in. Wounds heal, but they also scar; our hearts were knobby and tough.
The weeks stacked up regardless of how we felt, or wanted to feel, and it was around that time that I felt those first twinges of pain in my belly, which brings us back to where we started, back in that ER, and me trying to make sense of it all.
I’m still trying to make sense of it all. I think it’ll be a while still before that happens, if it ever happens. But here’s a thought I had at the time: Lying there on that gurney, what I found particularly obnoxious about being dealt this hand is that by the time the nurse was telling me about the masses, I had developed a small amount of pride in how we’d handled the new pregnancy information up to that point. All the hope I’d felt the first time around was now completely boxed up—cinched tightly, wrapped in paper, and stuffed way down in the basement. It wasn’t getting in the way, distracting us, doing whatever it is hope can do. And I felt proud of that! Proud of the sense of control I’d exerted. How clever, how savvy. Take that, hope!
It didn’t matter that I was always aware of it, could always hear it, the hope wrapping, wrapping, down where I’d buried it. It didn’t bother me, because up to that point in the ER, I’d had a plan. I figured that when the time was right—when Danielle was far enough along, when we’d had the tests and cleared the hurdles—I could unwrap that box like a kid on Christmas morning. I’d rush downstairs, throw the thing open, and blammo—puppies, rainbows, joy. We just needed to wait a few more weeks, just a few more weeks and all would be right with the world, provided nothing went wrong in the meantime.
Among the challenges of a geriatric pregnancy (on top of the nomenclature) is the fact that, due to “advanced maternal age,” you have an increased chance of miscarriage, fetal abnormalities, and just about every other potential complication, but these chances decrease with each subsequent week, with the bigger drops coming at the end of the first trimester. This applies across the board to all pregnancies, but for so-called geriatric ones the milestone feels especially significant given the circumstances. FWIW I feel stupid even attempting to explain this given my overall lack of expertise in pregnancy specifically and female anatomy generally, but here we are.
I doubt anyone’s wondering this, but just in case you are: We listened to Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher on the way to the clinic. It was very fitting, especially “I Know the End,” which strikes a perfect balance between mournful and ferocious, and came on right about the time we were pulling up. I bring up music because as a middle-aged man who went to high school in the '90s, my natural point of reference for this moment is “Brick,” by Ben Folds Five, about a guy driving his girlfriend to an abortion clinic. It’s unfortunate that certain people’s podcasts about canonical '90s songs are (one assumes) winding down, because I’d happily throw my name in the hat to serve as the guest interviewee for this one. You can imagine my qualifications given my predilection for fraught autobiographical storytelling with no small hint of dorkiness (wait for the bridge!).
The previous clinic, though objectively fancy (their headquarters was just off Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills), struck us as cold and disorganized, and this was epitomized in the way they handled our case in the days following the miscarriage. So we resolved to find a new place.