Along the same lines of pregnancy and flummoxing about in the world of medical issues, I have something that I find myself drawn to write about, and yet, I am having all sorts of trouble getting the details straight and timeline as accurate as possible. It’s something that I don’t talk much about and when I do, I have a tendency to be vague or to fudge some of the details to either make it less graphic or make myself look less culpable. I try to not over-dramatize it because there is enough drama and tears infused in the story already.

It’s one of my most well-kept secrets. The other pregnancy. The one where I just knew something was wrong the entire time, so the people who knew were few and far between. And, in fact, something was very, very wrong. The baby had a name though – Sage Parker.

The month before I left my ex-husband, I became obsessed, taking pregnancy tests almost daily. I just knew.  I would walk up to the dollar store with my little one in tow, buying handfuls at a time. It was the strangest thing – one would come up faintly positive, another negative, another strongly positive and another with no result at all. But, it didn’t seem to matter because I just knew. I told my husband at the time and would get this exasperated look as he would point out the one negative test, claiming that only that one could possibly be correct. So, I stopped telling him, putting the tests and their packaging in the outside trash immediately after using them.

I am going to tastefully skip over the details of my leaving for now, but it suffices to say – it was volatile. When my parents met me in the emergency room, I was in excruciating pain. As I lay there in the too brightly-lit, colorless room, my mother held my hand and I told her about the baby. She looked scared – just as scared as I felt. But, she did something that actually made me feel better. She ask me about names. I told her I wanted to name the baby Sage because I was almost certain it was a girl. She helped me scroll through all the possible middle names, and we finally found the perfect fit. She would be Sage Parker. It sounded beautiful.

The doctor came in and said that the pregnancy test was negative.  I was not pregnant. After a brief examination, he concluded that I had Pelvic inflammatory Disease and definitely had one of a variety of listed STD’s from gonorrhea to syphilis. They would do testing and I would know exactly what disease had besmirched me in three or four days. Until then though, I had to take a cocktail of the strongest antibiotics they could find. He added then that unless I was fooling around – my soon-to-be ex-husband would have not been able to be asymptomatic for very long. In all likelihood, he would have had to have picked it up within the last couple weeks. I was hurt, angry and positively livid, but above all – I was heartbroken that there would be no Sage Parker.

I had my prescriptions filled and noticed the plethora of warnings on the bottles, clearly stating to not take even if you thought you might get pregnant anytime soon. I had to also immediately stop nursing my son. I took them, feeling dirty and disgusted by this thing that the doctor said I had.  

The next day, I went to what had been my house to get clothes and some other items. My parents dropped me off, saying they would be back soon. I thought my husband was at work. By the time I walked in and saw him sitting on the couch with his mother – it was too late, my parents had already driven off. I raged at them both almost uncontrolably. My shell had cracked open and my temper flared fiercely. I knew he had another girlfriend the entire time we were married, but did he have to drag me with him down in to the filth.  This was his fault. His mother then spoke up. Well, he did have crabs, gonorrhea and something else years ago, but he hasn’t told me about anything else more recently. Great – more things I didn’t know.

I gathered up my and my son’s clothes and sat quietly on a chair to wait for my parents' return. The husband and his mother walked outside as my parents walked in. Everyone was tense and nervous. I tried to gather a few more items, but then the pain struck me hard. As soon as I stood up, I fell right back on the floor, unable to move. I must have been screaming because finally, in front of witnesses – the husband ran inside, fists raised and thoroughly fuming, ready to get me to shut up. My father lifted his cane, stopping the assault in mid-pummel. I was pushed into the car and rushed to the emergency room for a second day in a row as the pain continued to grow.

The husband showed up at the hospital to confront the doctors, demanding that they say I was a slut and that he had done nothing wrong. I must have caught it from another source. I was dirty and damaged goods, and he wanted everyone in earshot to hear it. The doctor cornered him as I was put on pain medications, telling him to settle down or the police would be called. It was finally quiet. I was sent home ten hours later with the same diagnoses and some strong pain medication to take along with the antibiotics.

It was two days later and much too late, when I got the results of the STD culture. There was nothing. I was clean and fine. There was no known cause for the pain I was in.

…

As my stomach slowly grew and the morning sickness came and passed, I said nothing. As the months rolled by and something still felt wrong, I said nothing. When my period never came, I said nothing. I never felt any movement, so I said nothing.

It was four months from the time I had been in the emergency room. I was at work near Christmas. My boss was on vacation, and everyone else in the small office had either taken off early or had not come in that day at all. It was around lunchtime when I went into the restroom. I had been cramping all day. It was there, in the dimly lit bathroom, that I started to bleed. It wasn’t merely blood though, it was Sage Parker. I knew it as soon as I looked into the toilet. But something was terribly, terribly wrong. There were mounds of clotted blood along with fleshy looking fragments. It was pieces of my baby.

I cleaned up and went back to my desk and briefly cried. I would love to say at this point that I responded appropriately or immediately, but I didn’t. I stayed at the office for the rest of the day, making periodic trips to the bathroom, as I felt myself get dizzy from the blood loss and flushed the pieces of Sage Parker down the toilet. After work, I finally came to my senses some and went to the urgent care clinic by my house. Luckily, my primary care physician was working that night. She examined me closely and found that, yes – I had just lost Sage Parker. I took a pregnancy test, and there was a faint positive. Something had been terribly wrong with the pregnancy.

She, then, looked back in my records from the emergency room. She had to sit down as she carefully worded her next statement. Since you were pregnant in the emergency room, why did they give you antibiotics for an STD? I told her that I had been told that the pregnancy test in the ER had been negative. She carefully looked up from the records. No, it wasn’t. It was another faint positive. I connected the dots, remembering the numerous warnings pasted on the antibiotics bottles about causing massive complications in pregnancy.

And, I finally sobbed openly. I had lost so much, but part of me was so glad that it was over.