My husband is on a business trip, and yesterday I had to call him and tell him that I had a miscarriage.

A few weeks ago, I started feeling like I was pregnant.  Part of me thought it was all in my head.  In June, we decided to try on our own.  No fertility treatments, no OPKs, no temping — just the good old fashioned way. We didn’t really have high hopes because I have PCOS and a history of annovulatory cycles.  We weren’t sure if or when I even ovulated, so I tried not to get my hopes up when I started feeling nauseous and when my breasts started to feel tender.  Then sheer exhaustion kicked in, so we decided to take a pregnancy test.  The first one read negative.  The next morning, though, we got a very, very faint positive.  We agreed that we’d test again in a week and decided that we wouldn’t tell anyone until we knew for sure.  Based on our calculations, I was about five weeks along.

I started cramping one evening, and I woke up the next morning with stronger period like cramps, heavy bleeding and passing clots that only got worse throughout the day. I called my RE first, but as she pointed out, I conceived naturally so this wasn’t their turf.  She urged me to call my OB, and consoled me.  With this much blood loss, she said it was likely I was having a miscarriage.  My OB gathered more information from me and told me it most likely a chemical pregnancy, but also used the term miscarriage.  She said that there was likely a chromosomal abnormality and there was absolutely nothing that I did wrong, and nothing I could have done to prevent this.  She said the miscarriage happened before an ultrasound could have even shown a gestational sac, which is something we were able to see with Chloe around 5.5 weeks of pregnancy.

Since then I’ve struggled to make sense of what happened. Being pregnant for four days. What does that mean?

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What is a Chemical Pregnancy?
According to my OB, chemical pregnancies are rather common and most women mistake their period for one.  If we hadn’t been trying, and I hadn’t been compulsively peeing on a stick, I likely never would have noticed that I was pregnant.  A chemical pregnancy happens when a fertilized egg does not attach itself to the uterine wall. This is also known as a very early miscarriage. According to ACOG (the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists), chemical pregnancies account for 50-75% of all miscarriages.

Grieving a Chemical Pregnancy
We’re grieving the loss of our child but I feel tremendously guilty.  We both acknowledge that there was nothing we could have done.  We were still in a state of surprise, wondering if we were actually pregnant, and four days later it was taken away from us.  I think we’re both in shock, still.  We were pregnant, and then we weren’t.  Just like that.  Part of me feels like I’m lying when I say I miscarried, and part of me feels like I don’t deserve to grieve.  After all, I only knew I was pregnant for four days.

Trying Again
Both my RE and OB are in agreement that we should wait 1-2 cycles before trying again.  My husband and I agree that this time around, we will be heading straight to the RE’s office instead of trying on our own. My husband pointed out that it’s the first and only time in the span of five years that I’ve been able to get pregnant on my own.  It’s really the only silver lining I can see through all of this.