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Yesterday  evening Casey and I dropped Kenny off at my sister’s house and went to the home of a semi-retired OB who is the father of  a good friend of ours.   He started the OB practice that I go to many years ago, and is still in charge of operations there, even though he no longer delivers babies.   We had about two hundred and twenty questions, and desperately needed to talk to someone who A) wasn’t on a time clock, and B) actually believed in God and creation and the reality of life in the womb.

It was such a healing time.   He was fatherly and kind, specific and clinical, and jovial in the midst of sharing our sorrow.   At one point he looked quite seriously at me and said, “These were  children you lost.   You’re not going to forget it; it will be part of your life forever.”     He also answered our questions about statistics and common assumptions about miscarriage and subsequent pregnancies.    He was frank, too, about the reality that when you have a viable pregnancy, there is truly  nothing  you can do to actually  cause a miscarriage (like exercising, being “too busy,” or, to quote him directly, “Doing jumping jacks until your tongue hangs out”), and if the pregnancy is not viable, there is nothing you can do to save it (bed rest, taking vitamins or hormones – unless you have a clinical condition warranting them).   When Casey asked him, “If this was your daughter who has had two miscarriages in four months, what would you tell her to do?” he replied, “Get pregnant.”   Then he said, “You call me the minute  you get pregnant, and I’ll get you in right away with the best OB on the East Coast.”     He explained that early monitoring was the best thing we could do for peace of mind and good health.   I can’t begin to express how relieved I was at his generosity; I nearly disolved into tears.     When we asked him about timing, he dispelled the current trend of telling women to wait three months, and said that physically, it made no difference if you got pregnant five minutes or five months from miscarrying… that the most important thing was giving yourself time to emotionally heal.

The biggest gift of the whole evening  was the peace of mind and encouragement that he gave us.   It never hurts to have the head of the practice on your side.   And it never hurts to have someone who truly believes in the miracle of life encouraging you to try again.