After all of that research, shouldn’t we have found the correct answer?

Whatever it is, you can probably find out all about it on the Internet. And concerning miscarriage, I found a lot – too much – of what I was looking for over the last few weeks: stories of hope.

Without trusting each individual detail of each individual story, I did read enough about misdiagnosed miscarriages (or, less pejoratively, situations in which a doctor initially suspected a miscarriage, and may have even suggested a D&C or a medication-induced clearing of the products of conception, only to later find that the pregnancy was in fact viable) to give me reason to hope that perhaps our situation was the same, that what at first appeared to be nothing was in fact a life.

Reading these misdiagnosed miscarriage stories, I took notes on hCG levels, gestational sac size, time between the initial diagnosis and the eventual detection of an embryo with a heartbeat – every detail available – and compared them to our situation. I was looking for our salvation in others’ stories of their own. I felt like if I found enough stories that started off as badly as ours but ended happily (or, rather, segued happily into new chapters), our own would follow.

As they monitored me, the hospital staff assured us that the chances of this were extraordinarily low – too low to beat, it turned out. But what a miracle it would have been, after receiving the initial diagnosis, to discover an embroyo hiding in the sac with its little heart beating as fast as ours would have been at that moment.