The real beginning.

When we found out I was pregnant in December, we were overjoyed and thought everything was going well until we went to the gynecologist for our first routine prenatal visit last Monday. 

We were holding hands when the image flashed up onto the ultrasound screen. I raised my head, impatient to see the new little life inside me. “Lie back down,” she said firmly. I watched her measuring a black circle on the screen. A moment later, “Are you certain of your dates?” My heartbeat accelerated and I knew something was wrong. I was certain of the dates. “Is it there?” I asked. 

“We’ll speak after the examination.” 

“But is it there!”

“We’ll speak after the examination.” 

We passed the minutes until “after the examination” in a stupor. Once I’d redressed, not bothering with my tights, she told us that she could see nothing in the gestational sac, that she thought it had stopped growing a week or two beforehand based on its size, and that there was no heartbeat, as there should have been at that time.

She suggested that perhaps I had mistaken the date of conception, but I was absolutely positive of it, and even if I weren’t, the only other time we were together during that window could not possibly have led to a positive test result on the day we got one. 

It seemed to be a silent pregnancy or missed miscarriage, where the embryo or fetus dies but the woman's body still continues to behave as if it's pregnant. The doctor recommended a test of my beta hCG levels with another to follow two days later to confirm the end of the pregnancy. Numbly, we agreed. The nurse took my blood. And there was nothing to do after this but to go home. Empty.