Sal’s Story

I’ve always loved kids. And I always knew I would want children, but I just didn’t really know if I would carry a child, or if my partner would carry a child or if we would adopt or become foster parents . . . It wasn’t until shortly before we started trying to get pregnant that I decided I wanted to experience pregnancy.

In the abstract I was a little uncertain about the process, because I identify as gender queer or gender non-conforming, and I was worried about how I would feel about my body when I was going through such a “woman’s” experience, but both times I went through pregnancy, it didn’t actually end up being a factor. I think the whole process of becoming pregnant and carrying a baby is so not feminine. It’s not dainty or clean or smelling of roses, it’s a very animalistic thing, and certainly both experiences I’ve had with pregnancy have been two of the most physically challenging experiences I’ve had in my life—and I’ve done a half Ironman before. I’ve hiked fifty miles in five days before. I’ve done physically difficult things before, and nothing compares to the slog of trying to get pregnant and then trying to stay pregnant. The actual birth wasn’t a problem. It was the rest of the process that was so intense.

I did feel betrayed by my body, but I didn’t feel like I failed at being a woman because I just never identified with that role to begin with. I just had really, really strong feelings of anger towards and betrayal by my body. But I think it’s because when it comes to our loss, there was nothing wrong with the baby. My cervix just opened, and I went into labor, and they couldn’t stop it. By the time they discovered what was wrong, I had uterine membranes coming out of me.

In the end, I felt really strongly for several months that I had killed my child. I felt like a murderer.

It’s crazy to think that way, because I’m very pro-choice. I would never use terms like “unborn baby” . . . so it’s interesting. I feel like there’s this whole world where I’m all, “It’s a woman’s choice. It’s not a baby until it’s born,” but then in my own personal experience, she was a person.

Estrella was a person. I felt very connected to her and felt like she had a soul. I got to hold her. She was a little tiny half-pound baby.

So I felt very strongly that my body had betrayed me. And I felt very responsible. For a long time.

For the first month or so, Fabiola and I were both grieving, but I feel that the attention was for the most part focused on me, and making sure that I was ok. I was as low as I’ve ever gotten those first few weeks. But over time, Fabi became more aware of and began participating more in her own grief. And at that point we were experiencing grief very differently and processing grief very differently. That was so hard for us.

Fabiola wanted to talk all the time. She wanted to talk about Estrella, about the loss. She really wanted to process it. And I just did not want to talk about it. It was too painful. It was always there, but I didn’t want it to be something that was constantly brought up, because I felt like I could barely function. It created a really big rift for us, and that’s where I really feel like grief counseling played such an important part about three months after the loss, because we were becoming very resentful that the other wasn’t grieving in the same way.

We met in Mexico in 2008, and we were married in 2012 right after we moved into our house, and we knew we wanted to have kids together, but things just kept getting in the way.

When we began making decisions about the process, we debated for a long time how we would select the donor from the sperm bank, we found a fertility clinic and did our insurance research and started the process, and it was just so wild having the experience of becoming pregnant be such a medicalized experience. I certainly had never experienced going to the doctor for intravaginal ultrasounds multiple times a week, and it took a long time to become comfortable with that concept. It’s such a big to-do . . . they monitor the egg and then fertilize the egg, and you think, “Oh! I’m going to get pregnant,” and then you don’t get pregnant . . . and then you wonder what’s wrong . . .

I got pregnant on the third time with IUI, which in retrospect was so fast. But at the time it feels like forever. Because you’re going and going and going to the doctor. It’s constant.

Every time you went to the doctor’s office, they ran every test you could think of: they took urine, blood, there was vaginal wanding . . . It’s so hard waiting to hear your pregnancy test results, because I feel like every single time we went through IUI, I convinced myself I was pregnant. Every time, I would feel something and convince myself.Every time.

I don’t remember the phone call telling us we were pregnant. It was such a painful experience that I’ve blocked out so much of it. The loss, unfortunately, is so clear.

I was so happy the first time I was pregnant. I thought nothing could go wrong, and I was just blissed out, doped up on hormones happy. Because there wasn’t a single part of me that didn’t want this.

I was 100% in.

We went on a trip to New Mexico, because Fabi had a conference she was presenting in, and we decided it would be our babymoon. Everything was cleared to go—we had gone to the doctor’s office, and they had listened to the heartbeat, everything was fine. We had been seeing this baby every week, and we had gone to an eighteen-week appointment to check that everything was fine before we left.

We did a little whirlwind trip out to the Grand Canyon, we went to Santa Fe . . . it just felt so romantic and so wonderful. Throughout the trip, we were talking so much about the pregnancy, and it was just such a big part of it for us.

I started feeling pressure on my cervix around eighteen weeks, but I didn’t realize that’s what it was. I thought I was just starting to feel the baby move, because that’s when it’s supposed to happen. And so I thought I was feeling little kicks. My lower back was starting to hurt too . . . and these are all signs of cervical incompetence, but I didn’t know it at the time. I remember two days before I miscarried, I felt pressure, and I was spotting, but we had always heard that these things were normal. It’s only afterwards that you realize that all of these symptoms together are a problem. And you feel so guilty.

While we were in Santa Fe, it started.

At first, I started feeling period-like cramps, and then I started spotting. That’s when we went to the hospital. It was so slow trying to get admitted. It felt like they didn’t even want to admit me because I wasn’t twenty weeks along yet. Prior to twenty weeks, they basically write it off as a miscarriage. But I was nineteen weeks and six days along, and we were begging to be admitted.

But they still wouldn’t give us a room. The hospital emergency room didn’t have a transvaginal ultrasound, only a belly one, and so they couldn’t see the problem. From the top view, you can’t see the cervix. So they just kept telling us everything looked fine.

But you know when you’re not fine.

We went in at about 7 p.m., and it wasn’t until 1 a.m. that they finally got an OB to do a physical exam. At that point my uterine membranes were falling out of me. And they were doing ultrasound after ultrasound, and the baby was still fine. She was moving, kicking, you could see her, and everything was fine. But the liquid around her was becoming less and less and less. Because it was all leaving the uterus.

They transferred me to Albuquerque in the middle of the night by ambulance. It took an hour.

For a while I was so mad, because I wondered if they could have stopped it. But at that point, at nineteen weeks, they can give you medication to stop you from going into labor, but you have to stay on the medication for the rest of your pregnancy or your body will go back into labor. So they won’t give it to you at twenty weeks. They won’t give it to you until the baby is viable or close to viable. And even then, they’ll try to squeeze out a couple of extra weeks to allow the lungs to develop. But I didn’t know that at the time. I learned a lot afterwards.

When I arrived, they didn’t have an OB to examine me. I tried to sleep, but with the contractions, I couldn’t. And it was just so horrible, because I wanted nothing more than for my body to stop what it was doing. That’s all I wanted.

I was in labor, having pretty painful contractions for about twenty-four hours. And at that point, we still didn’t know if the baby could be saved. I think the reason the doctor didn’t come urgently is because they knew there was nothing they could do.

Even at that point, when they did an ultrasound, Estrella was still fine. She was moving around, her heartbeat was good, and that’s when they told me, “You’re going to lose her.”

It was so devastating. To see her on the screen, moving, this beautiful, amazing baby that we wanted more than anything in the world, and to know that my body is kicking her out and there’s nothing I could do to stop it. I had a panic attack. I could barely breathe.

They gave us the option to have a vaginal birth or a D&C, which is basically an abortion. And at the time we wanted the D&C. We didn’t want to see her. It was too devastating. But just as they were returning from prepping the OR, that’s when I delivered her vaginally.

I’m really glad I did, because we ended up getting to hold her.

The birth was just horrific, though. When she came out, she was so little that she and the placenta came out all in one motion, and we could see that she was still moving. Because she was still alive. And then they opened it up, and took her out, and wrapped her and handed her to Fabi, and she died. She died in Fabi’s arms.

I had trouble even looking at her at first. But when I did, I could see that she was tiny, but she was perfect. Just perfect.

We ended up staying at the hospital for several days because they needed to monitor me. And we loved our hospital. They had a special ward for bereaved mothers. All of the nurses on that ward had also had losses themselves. And it was wonderful. Because in labor and delivery you can hear all the other babies. And I couldn’t be there.

They kept Estrella under refrigeration for several days so that we could hold her and be with her whenever we wanted to. Which seems creepy but was so helpful. It’s just crazy because you hear stories of animals in the wild who will keep their dead babies with them for days, and care for the body and can’t leave it. It feels like that. Because you’re just so full of hormones and to be able to hold her was the only thing that calmed me, even though she was dead.

In the end they sent her away to be cremated and that was so hard, saying goodbye. But they gave us all of her little things—her bracelet, her little cap and blanket, her gown that a volunteer had made. My parents flew out, and Fabi’s parents were there, to help support us through it all.

We spent one night in a hotel after that and had a little ceremony to say goodbye. It’s amazing how strong these feelings are still. I don’t think about it as much anymore, but the moment I think about it, I go right back to that night.

Flying home, I bumped into someone I knew professionally, and she asked how I was, and how my vacation was . . . and I told her, “It was the fucking worst. I lost my baby,” and I just started sobbing hysterically. I was such a mess. And when I got home, my milk came in.

With my second pregnancy, our OB practice was wonderful. They helped us through the cerclage process, and when I requested weekly monitoring, they said ok right away.

The second time I got pregnant we used IVF, and we got pregnant with the first cycle. It was not a happy pregnancy. I was so afraid of losing him every day of the pregnancy. I was terrified that it would happen again.

I was fine, but I was scared. I just remember that every day of everyweek we were just constantly counting down, “Just ‘this’ much longer until viability.”

Actually, at first we were counting down until the day we could do the cerclage. And then just a couple of days before that, I started spotting because I had a minor hemorrhage of the uterine lining. Luckily that stopped, and we were able to have the cerclage. Then we counted town the weeks until we were past the date we lost Estrella. Then we were counting down the weeks until viability. And then, we counted down the weeks until the possibility of him being in the NICU would decrease. And every week I was just looking at percentages of viability.

By twenty-eight weeks, I was on bed rest because my cervix lengthened and then I found out I would need a c-section. It felt disappointing, but at the same time, I was glad I wouldn’t need to go through labor, because I knew it would trigger me after having given birth to Estrella. I was just so worried about losing him. Something happening to him. Every step of the way.

There’s no looking back on his pregnancy fondly. I was just so terrified every day. It’s important to name your grief and talk about it. You need to be able to feel the loss of it all. Everything that you were hoping for. Everything. I wish other people could know that the grief and the loss is real. Don’t try to minimize it or tell people it will get better, just leave room for their grief.

After the loss I became acutely aware that I was now a member of the world’s biggest, shittiest club. I can always tell when a woman has had a loss by the way her eyes change when I tell her my story. When I would tell people that we had lost the baby, you would just see this devastation in their eyes. And you can see instantly that they had felt that loss. I could always tell. And it happened with people that I had never known had experienced this loss. And with some of them it was twenty years ago. I don’t think I could have moved on if we didn’t have another baby.

But even though we have Silvio, we could never, ever forget our baby girl. We named her Estrella. It wasn’t her planned name—we haven’t told anyone that name—but when she was born it just came to me immediately. To me, she was a beautiful shooting star that came into our lives and just burned out too fast. Fabi has a tattoo of a flower called a “desert star” in memory of her, because we were in the desert at the time.

A friend of mine told me about a study that shows that cells from the baby pass into the mother, and they stay in the mother. So for the rest of my life, I’ll have y-chromosomal matter in my body from Silvio. And to me it’s really beautiful to think that there are cells of hers in him.

We’ll tell him about Estrella. Definitely. We already have in fact. He just doesn’t know it yet.