Second Trimester Miscarriage Is The Worst Thing I Have Ever Been Through – by Shannon Mangicaro

This post is dedicated to Trey Joshua Mangicaro

I knew my first post I did for this community has to be about Trey, the baby I lost when I was 16 weeks pregnant last year.  He is the reason I started writing a blog, I needed to share my story because I found that it not only helped me with my mourning, grief, and confusion, but it helped others as well.

My story is a story of loss and love and a whole lot of pain, but also of searching for, and finding, the comfort, peace, and hope that can only be found in God. I hope I can share that with you in the months to come as part of this community.

I have chosen to share most of my post “My 2nd Trimester Loss” from my blog here because I wrote it 3 months after the loss and I was still in a pretty vulnerable, raw, emotional state, and that’s when the best words really just pour out of your heart. So, I didn’t want to change much of the body of it.

The pregnancy started out with a bang, before I could even suspect I was pregnant I started having symptoms, they came early and strong;  and I was so thankful, I thought that the worse I felt meant the better the baby was doing, and for a while that seemed true.  I was nervous about the pregnancy since I had miscarried around 8 weeks several months prior, but the severe morning sickness helped calm and reassure my anxiety.  I had an ultrasound around 8 weeks that showed that the baby doing great, at 12 weeks I heard a good strong heartbeat on the doppler at my check-up. I was beginning to relax. My morning sickness started going away at the beginning of the 2nd trimester, which is what always happens in my pregnancies so I was feeling good. I had a nice little baby bump that I just loved.

Then the day of my 16 week appointment I began having brown spotting,  I knew something was wrong.  I went in for the appointment and she couldn’t find the heartbeat on the doppler so I was immediately sent for an ultrasound on the spot.   The tech said “I’m so sorry, there is no heartbeat.”

I was in disbelief.  How, no, Why was this happening? Why was I losing another baby?  I was in the second trimester, wasn’t that when I didn’t have to worry about that anymore? And then the doctor tells me that I needed to go to the hospital to deliver the baby, at that stage of pregnancy the baby is too big for a D&C.  I didn’t even know what to say to her.

We scheduled to go in at 8am the next day, it didn’t feel real.  As we were walking into labor and delivery I remember thinking to myself I should be walking in here to deliver my other baby, it was only days away from the due date of my first miscarriage.  Walking in I still didn’t understand exactly what was going to happen, all the doctor said was I needed to deliver. I was having contractions already but I didn’t realize how much like a real birth it was going to be, I wasn’t prepared mentally, then again, how could anyone really prepare for something like that.  I didn’t know there would be talks about if I wanted an epidural, iv’s, painful contractions, or that I would feel my water break, I didn’t know I would get the chance to hold my baby and know the gender.  I had no idea just what an intense, powerful, life-changing, heart-wrenching experience it would be.

But I found out quickly.  I delivered my tiny little boy that morning, 4 3/4 inches, 2.2 oz.  The nurse asked if I wanted to hold him, of course I did, I had to see, I needed to, I had to cling to any memory I could possibly get of my son because after that there would be no new memories.  And so, I held him, in true amazement, counting his little fingers and toes, how could anyone not believe that an unborn child is a life?? The delivery went well but my placenta wasn’t coming out despite the strong contractions and blood loss.  I was shaking, I started slipping out of it, my blood pressure dropped dangerously low…my body was going into shock…so they rushed me into surgery, put me to sleep and did an emergency D&C.  My husband said it was scary, they pushed him out of the room as I was turning white and my lips blue, but he said they came to update him as soon as they could.  Once the placenta was out I was fine.  I was so overwhelmed by the loss of my baby that what happened to me after didn’t seem like a big deal, I didn’t have the space in my brain to worry about myself.

They asked us if we had picked a name, we chose to use the boy name that had been on our list of baby names for years, the name we would have used also….had he lived. Trey Joshua.  The nurses made a beaded name bracelet for him, for me.  They put together a whole memory box, took pictures, wrapped him in a crochet blanket thing with ties and laid him on a little blanket in the bassinet in the room.  He was cremated and there will be a memorial service for all the babies lost during this time in May (which happens to take place at his due date).  I will forever be grateful for how they handled it, for the sympathy, they were so sensitive to the emotions I was having, but mostly I am grateful for the respect they had for the life lost.

They days afterward were awful.  I was drained physically, eyes puffy from so many tears.  My heart was broken, quite literally it seemed, for weeks it felt like someone was pushing on my chest, that intensity slowly lifted and now 3 months later it only comes back every now and then, but it does come back.

For today I just felt the need to get my story, Trey’s story, out there…maybe it will help someone who can relate, maybe it will help someone who has a friend going through a loss and it will help them have a better understanding for what they are going through.   I could go on and on about the suffering you go through when you lose a baby but today on the anniversary of 3 months since delivering Trey I want to celebrate his life, his precious, special, oh-so-short life he had inside me.  Having a second trimester miscarriage is the worst thing I have ever been through…but I am so thankful for those extra weeks I got to carry him. 

I talk more on the days afterward on my blog:

http://lifewithlotsakiddos.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-first-week-after-2nd-trimester.html

and

http://lifewithlotsakiddos.blogspot.com/2015/02/helping-someone-after-loss-my-first.html

Since writing that the memorial service happened and it was such a special, beautiful thing.  It was extremely healing for me.

http://lifewithlotsakiddos.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-memorial-service.html

Thank you so much to this community, the writers and the readers, for letting me share something so personal, so hard, but so worth talking about.

This post is dedicated to Trey Joshua Mangicaro, you have forever changed my life.