Miranda's Story

I was seventeen, a senior in highschool, the first time I got pregnant. My boyfriend (current husband) and I obviously were not trying to conceive.

I suspected I was pregnant when I missed my very regular period and was having symptoms out of the norm for me. I didn’t have a car yet and didn’t have the opportunity to get a test right away. I spent a few weeks wondering if I was pregnant and getting used to the idea, how I would tell my boyfriend or my parents. I took the test I eventually got in the bathroom at school between classes. I didn’t wait the allotted time for the test to process. I peed on it, pulled my pants up, looked at it and didn’t see two lines so I assumed negative, threw it in my bag and ran to class.

That same night, I woke up in the middle of the night to really bad cramps and they continued into the morning. I don’t typically get period cramps too bad so when I got up for school and saw that I had begun bleeding, I just figured that it was my period and for whatever reason it was late was also why I was cramping. I assumed Mother Nature hated me and I went to school oblivious. Later at school, still having awful cramps I went to the bathroom and my “period” looked different. I got back to class and looked up what I was experiencing. Every result said “miscarriage” and talked about passing the sac. That hadn’t happened and since I thought the test I had taken was negative, I ignored it. I thought that couldn’t happen to me.

But later on, I was home alone and when I went to use the bathroom it felt like something was blocking the way down there. I gave the smallest push and out came the sac, just like I had read. It was in that moment that I knew what had happened. I was in shock. I didn’t tell my parents for months. I told my bestfriend and my boyfriend right away, but otherwise it was my secret. I dreamed of this baby two days later, a boy. We named him Harley.

Over the years, I heard awful things. “You’re gonna have another period next month, you wanna call it Lily?” “Good thing you didn’t end up a teen mom!” “What would you have done with a baby anyway?” “Probably for the best, you were only a teenager.” And so much more.

Years later, at 24 years old, that boyfriend was my husband. We were mid pandemic, and I unexpectedly found myself pregnant again. I had friends by this point who had experienced multiple pregnancy loss, but so many people still told me “you were young the first time, it won’t happen again.” I decided to not focus on loss and to enjoy my pregnancy. We told our parents, we went shopping, we loved that baby.

The day before my first ultrasound, I had a little bit of spotting but attributed that to overworking myself at my two jobs. At 8 weeks, I went for an ultrasound alone. My ultrasound looked like I should’ve only been 4 weeks along, not 8. They told me to come back in two weeks to see if there was growth, but deep down I knew there wouldn’t be. I bled more after the ultrasound. I tried to go back to work but I couldn’t be there. I ended up getting those familiar bad cramps. Then walking around my house, I felt everything literally fall out of me. I took photos and my doctor confirmed that I had in fact passed my baby. I dreamed of this baby too, another boy who we named Emery.

We had plans to try to get pregnant in summer of 2021, but our plans were put on hold when I was diagnosed with Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension. We postponed TTC for 6 months in order to get a handle on it and approval to stop medication for it.

We began trying and found out I was pregnant on Mother’s Day 2022. We were so excited but nervous. I had my first ultrasound at 6 weeks pregnant and I held my breath. There was a healthy baby on the screen, with a heartbeat! My first words were “my baby’s alive.” I had a second ultrasound two weeks later and everything was wonderful, baby had grown and was moving around. We found out the same day through a blood test that baby was a girl.

This pregnancy has been anything but easy. After 9 years of trauma and grief, we are so excited to welcome our rainbow baby girl, Kylie Jo, in January.