OK, as an introvert, I promised myself I won’t post this before either I give birth to my 2nd child or am really ready with possible response I might receive from anyone reading the post. No, it’s not that I’m in too much sadness. I really am OK. I just don’t like to disclose this kind of private thing with others.
We found out we were pregnant again when our firstborn (let’s call him ‘baby A’) was 13 months old, still very small and haven’t seen the outside world that much due to the pandemic. To be honest, I wasn’t that happy to be pregnant (my husband was); instead, I thought about soooo many things in my head, especially these: how am I going to take care of baby A later when my belly is growing bigger, will we be able to sleep comfortably with the ever-shrinking (feeling) bed, is baby A going to be OK that I will have to wean him earlier???
In short, I finally accepted everything, including the fact that we must postpone our plan to move to a house (a landed one, not this kind of ‘shoebox’ apartment) because it’s believed to be bad luck to move when you’re pregnant. Apparently (this comes from me who is not a preacher of any kind) God loves me more that on the 10th week, in the morning after I dropped off baby A at his grandmother’s place (daycare 😀 ), I found spots in my panties. It was Thursday, the day my obstetrician is scheduled to practice in the nearby hospital, so I quickly made a phone call to him. He asked me to get to the hospital for him to check, and there we were in front of his room, waiting until I was called in. “It seems like the fetus is not developing well,” he said while looking at the USG monitor in front of him. “I would give you vitamin penguat kandungan (I’m not from medical background and Google translate doesn’t work well for this) even at the slightest sign of fetal heartbeat, but it’s not there.. so I would prescribe you with abortion medicine instead. After you have this, you will feel small contraction like when you’re in your period, but a bit stronger and with more blood coming out.”
Everything was normal, I didn’t really feel anything different than when I’m having my period. So on Saturday, I went to my parents’ house as usual. In the afternoon, suddenly I felt a quite strong contraction (I defined it as ‘5-6th opening contraction’) that my face started to look so tense. I can still talk and smile, but needed to spare some strength to hold the pain. I laid down in my sister’s ex-bedroom, then very quickly the pain got tense and lots of blood leaked out that I almost ran to the bathroom to clean up the mess. I ducked in the shower to ease the pain, then a rubber balloon-like substance slipped out from down there, covered in blood, and I felt relieved.. the pain went down from a 6/10 to the normal 2/10 until the day I wrote this.
In case you’re wondering, this phenomenon happening to me was blighted ovum (you can Google it yourself); 1 in 8 women has experienced this ’empty pregnancy’. I read about it a lot before because some friends had this, so I wasn’t so surprised when it happened to me. Oh, and I’m more relieved than not that I wasn’t really pregnant this time. We have always been planning on having 1 more kid, but the timing is faster than expected, so I guess I wasn’t that well-prepared. In the past few days before the spotting, I’d been consumed with my own fear of labour. I know that I want to have another normal delivery for my 2nd child, but it felt too soon after my 1st one.
I’m not saying it’s OK to have blighted ovum – it will upset me so much if I had it during my first pregnancy, but I would say I’m just fortunate enough to experience it for my second one which I had always doubted since the start. Oh, and even though there’s really nothing there, but the woman’s body thinks she’s pregnant, so still the womb (and belly) size is increasing. One week after the so-called ‘abortion’, I went to see my obstetrician for another USG check up (all clean, thank God, otherwise I would have to undergo curettation). Just like after you give birth, you will need to wait until the bleeding stops and your uterus size is back to normal before you are allowed to have intercourse. Plus, we had to wait for another 3 months before we can get pregnant again.
P.S.: Even though I didn’t expect this ‘pregnancy’ and somehow had a feeling that there was not a baby in there, I still cried the night after the ‘abortion’. Thankfully it happened on a Saturday, so I didn’t have to go anywhere the morning after (with the after-crying eyes).
P.S.2: I gained significant weight during this ‘pregnancy’ and never lost it until my pregnancy with my 2nd child (which only happened almost 1 year later, during which all my pants were no longer fit). 😛
BABYRABZ 