Over the New Year’s holiday, my husband and I received the surprise of our lives: a positive pregnancy test. The pregnancy was unplanned, but very welcome. Getting pregnant with our first two children had been somewhat of a grand undertaking, so the idea that I could just get pregnant was novel to us. Two positive blood tests at my OB-GYN’s office confirmed the pregnancy was progressing as expected. For the entire month of January, my husband and I smiled more than ever before as we marveled at our surprise, miracle baby.
But a few weeks later, the first ultrasound erased those smiles. The baby was measuring behind and had no heartbeat. Our miracle baby had died.
Along with the diagnosis of miscarriage came a new health condition for me: recurrent pregnancy loss. This baby marked my third miscarriage, and my doctor in Tennessee was concerned I would never again be able to carry a successful pregnancy without further investigation into what was going wrong in utero. As such, my doctor recommended I have a procedure called dilation and curettage (D&C) to remove the pregnancy tissue. She would send it to pathology for further testing so she could better understand how I could get pregnant — and stay pregnant — in the future.
