The Main Event

It happened.

Cramps ramped up almost out of nowhere yesterday afternoon. I was bleeding by eight pm and cramps and bleeding worsened until after midnight. And then it really got started. We didn't make it to lights out until four in the morning.

I was in full miscarriage-labor for about three hours, complete with out of body visualizations and spontaneous breathing exercises and, in the last hour, vomiting. Not to mention blood and plenty of it. Oh yeah. And pain. Yup. There was a long period where I could barely opened my eyes, because I needed to stay internally focused in order to cope. J~, loyally constant at my side, struggled to keep his open too, though for much more benign reasons (in other words: he was tired).

In my mind's eye during the worst moments, I saw a cloud of blue-green, an undersea bleariness. Focusing on the color, I urged whatever life-ishness that might still exist within me to swim out. Swim! I thought. And in my less graceful moments this helpful encouragement became a much more desperate: Get out of me, now.

The whole experience was much more intense than the last two times.

Also unlike the last two, unlike my sister-in-law's, unlike any of the growing circle of stories I've heard about miscarriages as early as this one (which stopped developing at 7.5 weeks, though it was one day shy of twelve when it actually happened) the tissue that finally sprung out through my cervix (and that's really how it felt, like it popped out) resembled an actual creature: An off-white tadpole on its way to albino frog. An inch-long, larval salamander, with a long tale and a shorter umbilicus, a narrow torso with the tiniest miniature sprouts of arms and legs, and eyes like sharp black pencil dots at the sides of its large, pale, salamander head.

I collected it in a plastic container, which J~ interred in the refrigerator until the light of day, when he took it in his lunch cooler to the hospital lab for genetic analysis. It is hard to think that my child, my albeit freakish amphibian not-yet baby, will now be cut up like a science experiment. No, not like a science experiment, but truly, actually, as a for-real science project.

Hope we get some answers.