I watched ‘What To Expect When You’re Expecting’ with a few girlfriends this weekend and it dredged up some emotions that are eleven years old, but are still as fresh as if they occurred yesterday.

Once upon a time, my husband and I decided that it was time to try to get pregnant and start building our family. We did the deed (multiple times), we (I) became pregnant, and at about the five-week mark, I was hit with the physical symptoms of pregnancy. I was exhausted, my regular diet of chicken and salad became replaced with ALL OF THE CARBS, and I laughed/cried at ridiculous things.

When I was eleven weeks in, the symptoms had calmed down and I thought that the magical second trimester I’d heard about was the reason behind it. Then I started spotting.

My husband and I went to the ER and I fully expected that everything would be fine. Everything is always fine. We had an ultrasound and we met with a doctor who told us that there was no heartbeat.

There was no heartbeat.

We then drove to my family doctor who met us on her lunch hour and cried with us. We had the option to wait for my body to miscarry on its own, or we could have a D&C. We talked a lot and we walked a lot and we cried a lot and two days later, we were admitted to the hospital.

After we returned home, I was consumed with reading about statistics. The statistics of miscarriage, the statistic of subsequent miscarriages, the statistics of women who conceived again immediately after miscarrying, only to miscarry again. My doctor told me that if we waited until after my next normal cycle to get pregnant, our odds of having a full-term pregnancy would be back to normal.

(Did you know that 50% of pregnancies end in miscarriage? And that if you include pregnancies where the woman didn’t know she was pregnant (late period), that rate is 75%? Having babies really is a miracle.)

We waited that one cycle, tried again, and nine months later our first son was born. We went on to have another son and a daughter, with no more babies lost. The emotion of losing that baby was very raw when it first happened. I would cry in the shower, I would cry when driving, I would cry … a lot. I only cry now when it happens to someone I know or I watch an almost identical scene in a movie.

It gets better with time — everything does — but there will always be a piece of my heart who wonders who our baby would have been.

Have you ever dealt with miscarriage?

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