miscarriage

A Journey Begins

February 22, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

This is a difficult post for me to write. On one hand, I’m excited about the journey ahead. On the other hand, this is more transparent than I enjoy being about this particular subject matter.

Before I had children, I had been underweight most of my life and had struggled with digestive health. I had been called “skinny” from the time I was born.

Fast-forward to not quite 11 years ago when I had my first child. About two weeks after he was born, I had shed almost every pound I had gained and was back in my normal clothes. The same thing happened after my second child.

Not so after my third child.

At the time, I blamed the fact that I hadn’t exercised as much during the third pregnancy as I had with the other two. But as time went on, it seemed I would never get my body back.

By the time I got pregnant again, I looked pregnant before anyone else should have been able to detect a pregnancy. When I lost that baby to miscarriage, I no longer had an excuse for how I looked. That miscarriage happened in 2010. It was followed by two more. In the meantime, my exercise routine went in fits and starts. I would exercise, get fit, continue to exercise into the pregnancy, but when the miscarriages occurred, I was exhausted. I didn’t realize at the time I was chronically anemic–just one of the reasons I wasn’t able to carry a baby to full term. In the process of digging to the bottom of the causes of these miscarriages, I received some excellent nutritional counselling, and at that time, I eliminated gluten from my diet.

Things around my middle got better, and again when I went on a candida diet in the fall of 2012, but it seemed no matter what I did, and despite renewing a routine of cardio, weights and pilates, a persistent “muffin top” remained.

Revelations

Recently, I experienced two revelations. First, I encountered Bethany Learn and her exercise program targeting diastasis recti. I had recalled reading about this condition on another blogger’s site, but it never occurred to me that this could be my problem. Her situation seemed extreme, and by this time, I was convinced that age had taken hold and I was giving up on every having the same level of fitness I had enjoyed before Sprout was born. But when I learned about Bethany’s program, and read the symptoms of diastasis recti and the information about how to check yourself for the condition, I realized this was me!

The second revelation is one of the reasons this post is so hard to write. In preparation for my launch on this journey, I knew I needed to take measurements and a “before” picture. Let me get more real than I’m comfortable with here: I am the queen of holding in. People still tell me all the time how skinny I am, although I know better (and so does my daughter, who refers to my middle as my “pillow”). For this picture, however, I literally had to let it all hang out.

But when I did, something surprising happened. While my middle is not what I want it to be, the camera doesn’t lie. The picture is not as bad as my mental image of myself. So it was obvious that I have more than just physical work to do on this issue.

I’ve committed to Beth to journal my journey to better fitness here. As part of the process, I’ll be doing the exercises she offers in her online program, Fit2B, for three months. During that three months, she suggests 10-minute workouts, four to five times per week.

I plan to check in here from time to time, with milestone updates at the six week and three month marks.

Want to join me? Click here for membership information to Beth’s online studio.

{This is a Mom Learns Too post. Sure, your kids have been learning this week,
but what have YOU learned. Link up below!}

Physical Signs of Grief

September 22, 2011 by Carey Jane Clark

After the most recent miscarriage, I decided to take a bit of a vitamin holiday. I’d been taking so many vitamins prior to conception and then during the pregnancy, I jokingly called my shelf in the cupboard filled with vitamins, my personal health food “store.” Need a vitamin? I’ve probably got it.

But I don’t think my little vitamin fast was the best idea. The miscarriage happened pretty early on–at six weeks. Some people don’t even know they’re pregnant by then. The bleeding was pretty minimal, compared to the last two experiences.

However, sometime in the middle of last week, I began to ache, starting in my lower abdomen, and gradually traveling into my low back and then up my back. Walking was becoming uncomfortable. I was also waking up in the morning feeling as though I hadn’t slept at all, and then I came down with the first cold I’ve had in months.

Turns out, even if emotionally, grief isn’t being expressed overtly, the body finds a way to express itself. Check out these physical symptoms of grief that the body can manifest, according to HelpGuide.org:

fatigue
nausea
lowered immunity
weight loss or weight gain
aches and pains
insomnia

Hmmm…I score about 6/6. Yikes!

I went back on my vitamins, especially beefing up on magnesium and B-vitamins (for stress), and my body has returned to its normal, happy self.

De-fictionalizing Miscarriage

September 13, 2011 by Carey Jane Clark

Everyone who blogs has a decision to make. How much information about one’s life is too much? Where does one draw the line between what is publishable and what is personal?

I have made a decision.

Last week, I experienced my third miscarriage. I didn’t even know at first that I had, until ultrasound confirmed no “products of pregnancy” remained. The first time was a blighted ovum. Although the fetus didn’t make it past six weeks, the sac continued to develop, so what finally had to be delivered was more like a 10-week pregnancy.

The second miscarriage was different too, because once ultrasound confirmed the lack of a heartbeat, I took some herbal preparations to hurry along the “delivery.” I didn’t want to wait around for the inevitable. I wanted it over, and quickly. I won’t do that again, though. I lost so much blood in one day, I nearly passed out, and it took me two weeks afterward to feel normal again. Not that I feel normal now.

We made a decision this time not to tell everyone we had conceived. We’d never made a secret of our pregnancies early on, but this time we felt it was important to protect our children, just in case. Even admitting that bothers me. We weren’t preparing for failure. And yet it happened. I can hardly believe it.

I conceived and carried each one of our three children with relative ease. The first miscarriage came out of nowhere and blindsided me, and I assumed it was a fluke. During the time I was having children, when I’d hear about someone who’d had a miscarriage I’d wonder, “How can she keep trying? What does that kind of disappointment do to a woman?”

I even wrote about miscarriage in After the Snow Falls. At the time, I had a lot of research to do to find out what it was like, what kinds of things doctors would be expected to say, what kinds of treatments my character might pursue. It was odd editing those portions of my story in the last week while I faced the same symptoms–for the third time.

But why talk about it? Why publish it here on my blog? Because I realized in talking about it after the first miscarriage how many women it affects. My first miscarriage happened while we were spending a week at family camp. We were surrounded by friends we get together with every year, friends who have been there to see each stage of my children’s lives, and to follow the unfolding events of our lives as we made the decision to go to China–friends I can confide in. As I did so, many women told me of their miscarriage experiences.

The strange thing is, although this is a pain many women share, few talk about it openly. It is this strange secret because it often happens before we have told people we’re even pregnant. As it did this time, to me.

And I didn’t tell my children. So I couldn’t explain to them why the progesterone supplement I was taking was making me dizzy and tired all day, why the many trips for blood tests and ultrasounds, why I have felt so strange since we returned from the hospital on Thursday and found out nothing was there, and it’s happened again.

But I’m saying something for another reason too. Despite the fact that miscarriage happens all the time, I do not believe it represents life as it was intended. And I believe there are answers out there as to why it happens. There is a strange phenomenon in women’s medicine. Something “wrong” can happen in our bodies, but medicine is content not to have an answer for that. I don’t think that’s okay, and I wanted to say so. And I’m going to continue to say so, and join some of the rare voices in medicine that are saying so too. Those voices tend to find each other, and so maybe I’ll be an encouragement to someone in this process, and maybe just maybe, someone will encourage me too.