Guest Author - Krissi Danielsson
If you read a lot about miscarriages like I do, you probably find a lot to get frustrated about. For starters, it just plain sucks that in so many cases there's nothing doctors can do to stop miscarriages that are in progress. But one thing bothered me more than anything, and that was the idea that asking "Why?" was pointless.
I'm encountering this in another area of my life right now, which I won't get into here, but the situation is the same. Something happens that should be fixable, and everywhere I turn looking for answers it seems like there are people trying to get me to stop looking. It brings back a lot of memories of miscarriages. One of the things that particularly stands out in my mind is reading a response to a Q&A with a physician in which the doctor suggested that women who have had miscarriages should all read that old prayer about, "God grant me the courage to change the things I can, and to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know this difference." I suppose that might be comfortable to some people but it came across to me as being terribly condescending. Why wouldn't I want to know why I was miscarrying? It didn't even matter so much if it was something that could stop it or not; I just wanted -- maybe needed -- to know why it was happening to me.
I'm looking back on that now and trying to pinpoint exactly why I felt that way. I guess, for starters, I needed to know for sure that there was really nothing I could do to stop it before I could let go. And that didn't turn out to be the case for me. I ended up getting pregnant. But I don't think I would have had the courage to keep trying and trying and trying if I hadn't been able to get the workup to look for treatable causes. I actually had the miscarriage workup twice, and the first time around we did not find anything treatable, but through research I later learned that not all tests had been done the first time around.
In between the first and the second round of testing, I felt helpless and powerless about the idea that I didn't know why I was miscarrying. I could have accepted it being unchangeable if we had done a karyotype and found a certain chromosomal abnormality, I suppose. But without a definable reason, I would constantly work out worst case scenarios in my mind and had myself half convinced that the only way we would ever have a baby was going to be through adoption or gestational surrogacy. Or something else radical like IVF with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.
So in this other area of my life, people keep constantly pointing out that knowing a cause will not change the reality of the situation. And that might be true of miscarriages too. Knowing why you miscarried won't change the fact that you miscarried. But I feel like for my personal problem and also for miscarriages, knowing why helps with the idea of taking charge of life again. It either gives you the power to take action or absolves you of the need to take action (if the reason is something not changeable). It lets you stop feeling like you might possibly be at fault (even though this is rarely the case for miscarriages) and helps with closure and the process of moving on.
Interestingly, some studies have actually confirmed that knowing the cause of a miscarriage often helps women move past it and cope with what happened. Here's one such study:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1471-0528.1999.tb08402.x
Just some food for thought. It seems like some areas of medicine are still catching up to the idea of miscarriage being a highly traumatic experience to begin with, but I do think that broader investigation into the causes of losses would be doing a great service to women everywhere.
