Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day - My Story of (not) Loss

I have always considered myself to be one of the fortunate people who had three healthy pregnancies that resulted in three healthy and beautiful sons. I will never know what it is like to experience a miscarriage or a stillbirth. I will never know the horrific tragedy of losing an infant and I am so grateful for that. 

 What I did experience, though, was something called a "vanishing twin" and I am discovering that many people out there in social media world have experienced this too and consider it to be a pregnancy loss.  

Here is the thing though...I don't (in my case) and I never even really think about it. 

Am I a terrible person because I have never really considered that "twin" a baby?  Am I a horrible person because I don't  and never have grieved for it?  I don't, and never have, spent any degree of time wondering what kind of person it would have been or what it should/would be doing. 

  Soon after I found out, I was telling a friend about it and she said, "oh wow, you must be really upset."  I was surprised when she said that because I wasn't...at all.  It made me question myself..."Should I be upset? Am I supposed to be upset?"

In my defense:

I only found out about it because, after a couple weeks of slight complications, I had an ultrasound at about 8-9 weeks that showed the empty sac so I think the fact that I had no knowledge of it before I found out it no longer existed may have affected my reaction.


 I had not prepared my heart for twins and had not had time to be excited that I was expecting two babies . I was simply excited to be expecting a baby...and so I was beyond excited to hear that everything looked great with the one baby I was expecting.  

Add to that the fact that my doctor (physician who ordered the ultrasound) didn't even tell me this when he gave me the results of the ultrasound...I didn't find out until a whole 3 weeks later when I went to my first appointment with my OBGYN. He had the results of that ultrasound in my file and when I asked him what the complications were about if everything with the pregnancy was normal...he told me. 

He also told me that as many as 20% of pregnancies may begin this way and go undetected because they do not experience symptoms that would warrant the early ultrasound to verify the existence of an empty sac.

In the early 1990's ultrasounds just weren't done that early in pregnancy - if at all.   By 1999, when I had my third child, routine ultrasounds were performed at 6, 8, and 12 weeks...but not in 1990.  So, I suppose I can understand how a person who was told at 6 weeks that there were two sacs indicating twins and then found out at 8 weeks that one of the sacs was empty would consider it a loss.  It just didn't happen that way with me.  

There it is - my 'loss' story.  But, as I said, I don't ever think of it of it as a loss because the end result of that pregnancy was an unbelievably fantastic son.