With my second miscarriage, I will have two stories to share with you. This post will be about my horrific experience with the hospital and doctor. What you read here will make you cringe and you might even read it and think “there is no way this is real. She has to be exaggerating.” My story is so insane; I wish I was making it all up. It haunts me to this day even though it was a year ago.

I have to share with you the suffering and hell I went through to explain (in the second part of this story) the redemption and how my faith saved me from falling into the abyss of despair. I have never been so close to giving up on my faith. Thank God my cousin, Whitney, was there to pull me back at the right moment.

So let’s begin shall we with the story of the most horrific medical experience of my life and if we were in the States I would have a lawsuit that would set me up financially for a very long time.

After our first miscarriage, Chris decided no more natural family planning because he didn’t feel it was working with our past track record; so we stopped charting and thinking about babies for a while. We moved our lives to Bangkok, enjoyed seven months of being expats and in August 2013, I was a day late.

One day late, just like the last time two times… There is no way I’m pregnant again.

Blood test taken at the hospital confirmed I’m pregnant. We aren’t scared to death like last time; we just simply go with it.

I make an appointment with a doctor at the hospital. (I will not be disclosing either of their names.) We get to talking and I run through my history, one healthy baby, one miscarriage and I need progesterone right away, etc.

She agrees she will give me progesterone but also wants me to try two other pills. I ask her if this is something that I will be picking up at the pharmacy on the way out. She says no. “Alright, what do these medicines do and where do I get them?” I have now learned that doctors in Thailand do not like to be questioned at all… “The medicine make baby grow. Every patient I have has taken these medicines and they have baby no problem. It’s illegal in Thailand so you can buy on Amazon.” At this point, this should have been a red flag but I just thought “whatever” and went on my day. I didn’t plan on buying the medicine for the simple reason I didn’t have a good enough answer as to why I should take it; in addition to the tax I would have had to pay customs to have something sent here.

A few weeks later, we go in for an ultrasound. She called us in at five weeks, which was far too early to see anything. We left with another appointment to come back. We make it back at 6 weeks. There is no heartbeat. “It’s ok! You come back in one week and we will see baby!” At this point, Chris is getting mad because he thinks she is just bringing us back for appointments to milk the system.

We go back at week 7. We have our ultrasound. She is looking on the screen and I hear “ooooo no good.” “What do you mean no good? What’s wrong!?” With her big Thai smile she looks at me and says “nothing wrong! You go to another machine, better ultrasound to see baby.” So we wait for what seemed like an eternity. I sat in the waiting room crying; I knew what was happening. I was losing another baby and I had absolutely no control.

We go in for the ultrasound on the better machine. The ultrasound tech does not say anything to me and she starts the procedure. I can see the screen and I can see it’s not good. I ask her “where is the baby?” She proceeds to get an attitude with me and says “I don’t know what your other ultrasounds look like. There is no baby here. You have no baby.” I don’t think there could have been a worse way to go about it and to top it all off; when Thai people are uncomfortable they laugh and smile. I have the two nurses in the room smiling at me and giggling, because they are so uncomfortable with my crying and the bad news that I have lost another child. (I want to punch someone in the freaking face!)

I go back to the doctor’s office. As I dry my eyes, I am told “Don’t worry so much. You are a good person. This will not happen again to you.” (This must be from her Buddhist beliefs of karma.) I look her in the eye and asked “Is that your professional medical opinion that because I am a good person this won’t happen again? Science doesn’t work that way.”

We leave and that night I lost the baby at home. Not the way I wanted it to happen. I had wanted a D&C. The trauma of losing a life at home and the physical pain to go with it was more than I thought I could handle. I call the hospital to make an appointment as a follow up since this had happened at home.

(This is where the story gets a little unbelievable.) I decided since this process was over, or so I had thought, Chris didn’t need to miss work again to do a follow up ultrasound; in addition to the fact he was leaving that night to go to a rugby tournament for the weekend.  The doctor proceeds to do a vaginal ultrasound. With the machine inside of me she starts to say “Ooooo this is not good. Nope not good at all.” Then her cell phone rings. SHE ANSWERS IT, WITH THIS THING INSIDE OF ME! She keeps the machine inside of me while she has about a 3 minute lovely conversation with a friend and they chat, they laugh and all I can think is get me back to the US. This can’t be what doctors do here. She tells her friend goodbye and decides to continue the appointment. She tells me “not all baby come out.” (As I type this I am about to have a heart attack… it is bringing up such bad memories I am shaking.) “What do you mean baby not come out?” (Also I talk in broken English because everyone here talks in broken English so this is really what we sound like.) “I want D&C now! I am not going to take anymore pills to make me lose the baby because it doesn’t work. Get me scheduled for D&C.” As I sit there crying and my legs spread apart, she says “No, we do now.”

“What do you mean we do now? No! We do D&C now. You are not doing this now!” (I do not want to trivialize rape in anyway but I felt like I was being raped saying please do not do this! please stop! and she wouldn’t.) It all happened so fast, as I sat there crying begging her to stop she shoved the metal clamps inside of me, suctioned something out, which was extremely painful, and then said “All done. You see not so bad.” With a proud smile on her face, she shows me a cup full of blood/leftovers of a baby. I look at her in total disbelief. I am in shock. (In hindsight I should have kicked her in the head.) After I get dressed, she is sitting at her desk and she says “you are such a strong person.” I just look at her and say “all I have is my faith” and walk out.

I went back for a follow up to make sure everything was clear. (Again, I have no idea why I keep coming back to this doctor.) The ultrasound shows it still has not all come out and I say “That is it! I want a D&C NOW!” So after a month of complete torture, which could have been completed in 5 minutes in the operating room, it was over. I was traumatized. I still am. To top it all off, we kept it a total secret from everyone back home. As I sat at home crying every day for at least a month; I would put on my happy face to FaceTime with friend and family back home and they had no idea the hurt and pain we were experiencing.

This traumatic event in my life almost made me lose all faith in the world and God.

Previous posts in this series:

• Trouble in paradise
• Miracles: Apparently they do happen
• We talk in whispers