This article was written by a member of the Her Campus at VCU staff who has decided to remain anonymous.
It finally happened. I got pregnant (by accident).
Okay, let me explain.
I went on birth control almost three years ago when I first began having sex. I was with my ex-boyfriend. He and I made the conscious decision that he, at 19 and I, at 17 were in absolutely no place to be having a baby. Of course, young parents are not always bad parents, but we… we would have been bad parents.
So, fast forward about three years and I have a new boyfriend and he is absolutely wonderful. Everything was going perfectly until the price of my birth control skyrocketed. The price went up more and more every month and finally got to the point where I could no longer afford it.
The pill I was taking had been messing with my period anyway, so I decided to stop taking it. A friend of mine who just so happened to be taking the same birth control gave me a word of advice. “The same thing happened to me. Stop taking it for two or three months so that your period can reset itself. As long as you’ve been taking the pill around the same time every day for almost three years, like you said you have, it will still be in your system and you won’t get pregnant.” Believable enough, right?
That day, I told my boyfriend about the decision I had made to lay off the birth control. He offered to pay for it, but I declined because I was sick of being on my period for two whole weeks out of every month. I figured I’d save up for the things that mattered (i.e., rent, textbooks, parking tickets, etc.) all while saving my uterus lining from shedding twice as long as it normally should, buying a new box of tampons and pantiliners every month and having cramps that left me in the fetal position for hours at a time.
I had it all figured out.
I stopped taking the birth control after October’s set of pills had ended. That way, I’d be taking two months off and would be able to start the new year with a freshly reset period. Stupid. I know. My alarm went off at 10 p.m. every night to remind me to take my pill and I felt so much shame for cutting them out of my life that I didn’t delete the alarm for weeks. Every night at 10 p.m., I was reminded that I was having unprotected sex and that if I got pregnant, it was no one’s fault but my own. I was voluntarily taking the biggest risk of my life. While my boyfriend and I were not as sexually active as we were when I was on the birth control, we were definitely still sexually active. I was afraid.
In those next months, I waited for Aunt Jane to arrive like my uterus was the mailbox and my period was the package I had ordered a month ago. I was ecstatic when I finally felt the first cramp. My period came in November and then my period came in December by the skin of my teeth. So, in January, my period didn’t come… at all. If you’ve never gotten pregnant by mistake, then you have absolutely no idea what it’s like to pee on that damn stick and see those two lines show up almost immediately. I was just that pregnant.
I know what you’re thinking and the answer is yes, I was supposed to be back on birth control after two months. Well, I couldn’t afford a doctor’s appointment, so it didn’t happen. Surprise, surprise. My friend’s advice back in October played over and over again in my head and it made me want to slam myself into a wall. “Just stop taking it for two or three months. You’ll be fine.” I kept thinking about how long I had been on birth control and trying to make it all make sense for me. I kept trying to convince myself that it just couldn’t happen, but it did.
Well, luckily for me, my boyfriend was about 40 feet away when I took the test. I came out of the bathroom, sat on the bed, got my thoughts in line and went to get him. Once I sat back down on the bed and started crying, he knew what was up.
We then made the decision that we would have to sell some of our things in order to afford the abortion. The entire experience cost us $419. $100 for the ultrasound, $305 for the procedure and $14 for the pain and nausea medication that I was prescribed for the symptoms I experienced as a result of the abortion, by pill.
I got to the clinic at about 2 p.m. I was having my first of three mandatory appointments. Upon walking up to the door of the clinic, I was greeted by a sign that said to push the button for assistance. It was one of those intercom systems. I wondered why security needed to be so tight. I told the woman at the front desk what my name was, why I was there and the time of my appointment. She let me into a room about the size of a triple freshman dorm. I walked up to the front desk and the woman working asked if I had my phone. I told her I did and was told that she would either hold it or that I could leave it in my car. When I got back from my car, I signed in. After that, everything was pretty normal. I peed in a cup and I filled out some forms and waited to be called back. I went through a door that lead into a hallway that looked much more like a doctor’s office and I let out a sigh of relief. The nurse wasn’t wearing any scrubs, which I thought was strange, but she made me feel comfortable. She eased my nerves. She made me feel like everything was okay.
Eventually, it was time for my ultrasound. It was in that very room that I found out that I was actually six weeks pregnant, which meant I had been pregnant since the beginning of December, while I was on my period. Isn’t that something? Anyway, being six weeks pregnant means you don’t get a normal ultrasound with the “belly jelly.” You get to put a machine inside of you. I watched as the doctor put a condom on the weird ultrasound stick and then put some type of lube on it and my legs shut immediately. She let me put it in myself, which was weird, but still much less scary than it would be if she had done it on her own. She showed me what the inside of my uterus looked like and then gave me my own photo to keep, only after she asked for my consent, of course. After that, it went back to being normal. I went into the “patients only” lobby and waited to be called back to get my blood pressure and temperature taken and then have blood drawn.
After that, it was finally time for the last part of the appointment: the recording. Because the doctor wasn’t at the clinic that day, another woman and I listened to a tape of the doctor explaining what the procedure was going to be like. I had no idea whether or not the other woman was having a surgical procedure or the abortion by pill, but she went in another room to listen to the tape and I stayed in mine. The doctor said that the main post-abortion symptoms would be nausea and cramping that was similar to period cramping, except not at all. It was much, much worse. After listening to a long list of possible risks that probably wouldn’t happen, the tape was finally over and it was time to pay and get the hell out of there. I walked back to the front desk, jelly belly still sloshing between my legs and paid the $100 bill.
The woman at the front desk scheduled my second appointment, the actual procedure, and then my third appointment, the follow-up. You know, to make sure that the abortion was finished. The procedure was a week later and the follow-up was two weeks after the procedure.
The days leading up to my abortion were some of the most anxious days of my life. I had no idea what to expect. God, I had sold seven pairs of shoes just to afford this entire thing. I cried myself to sleep most nights, thinking about what it would be like to have a daughter or a son. I began thinking about all of the risks that the doctor had talked about on that tape, and I was so afraid. I wanted to call my mother. I wanted her to comfort me. I thought about her and how she had always told me that getting pregnant at a young age was the worst thing you could do, and I couldn’t even tell her or anyone else other than my boyfriend and my best friend all because I was ashamed. I felt like I had let my mother down. I felt like I had let myself down. How could I be so stupid? How could I be so careless? How could I throw money away like this? I told myself it was just the pregnancy hormones but it was really just the feeling of my life spiraling downhill.
I got to the clinic just shy of 5 p.m. a week later. I signed in at the same desk where about four other women stood in line before me and this time. I left my phone in my car. The lobby was already filled with about 12 women and there were more coming in and out all night. It wasn’t nearly as empty as it was the week before.
While I was waiting to be called back into the doctor’s office, I met a woman who had come in for her second abortion. My boyfriend and I talked to her as we waited for the doctor to call my name. She had such an interesting story. She was a single mother of two children already and she was basically playing the same game of Russian Roulette I was. She just didn’t think it would happen to her. Her first procedure was done surgically, but that day, she would be taking the pill. She told me all about how scary the surgery was. She was awake the entire time. She told me about the cramps and the extreme bleeding. She gave vivid details on what it was like to have your uterus vacuumed out. She told me about what she saw afterwards. She told me about how guilty she felt. She told me that it was something she would never put herself through again, which is why when she found out that she was pregnant this time around, she wanted to end it immediately, to avoid the possibility of another surgical abortion.
That wasn’t her only story. She also told me about a friend of hers who hadn’t turned 18 yet and had to get an abortion that wasn’t done by a medical professional simply because you need parental consent to have the procedure done by a doctor before the age of 18 in Virginia. She told me about the tools they used and how she was bleeding and cramping for days. Just when I began to think about throwing that clipboard on the ground, standing up and running out of the clinic — the doctor called my name.
I took one huge pill that day. It took two and a half of those little Dixie water cups to get down. After that, I took another much smaller pill. Then the doctor handed me four more dissolvable pills that I was to hold in my cheeks for 30 minutes and then swallow what was left the very next day at the same exact time. He then wrote up two prescriptions: one for the nausea and one for the pain.
Well, the most expensive part was over with. I went back into the lobby where my boyfriend and our new friend were sitting and they looked so confused. I guess they thought that the procedure would take a long time, but it was really exactly what the doctor described – swallowing a couple of pills. I felt fine right after. I thought that I would start bleeding my brains out immediately or something, but I had no idea what the future had in store.
About 20 minutes later, I had my first cramp. It wasn’t too bad. It was kind of like a PMS cramp. Later that night, I got really hungry, but when I tried to eat, I got nauseous immediately. After that, since I already emailed my teachers to let them know I wouldn’t be in class the next day due to illness, I decided to go to sleep. When I woke up, I was even more nauseous and the cramps hadn’t gotten any worse, but they were still there. I tried to eat lunch later on that day and couldn’t keep it down. I rested for a while and then later that afternoon, I was finally able to eat. I wasn’t supposed to take the four pills to complete the abortion until 7 p.m., so at 6:30, I took one pill for nausea and one pill for pain, just to get it in my system before everything went down.
The four pills felt like chalk between my cheeks. I hated the taste. It was dry and flavorless. I watched a funny movie to keep my spirits up while I let the pills sit in my mouth for the required 30 minutes. Once the clock struck 8 p.m., I swallowed what was left in between my cheeks and couldn’t keep that down either, but you bet it still managed to get into my system. I got back in bed and after a few minutes, the cramps got really, really bad. I stood up to go to the bathroom because I knew it was the feeling of my uterus contracting. I sat down on the toilet while I experienced the worst pain of my life. Imagine a period cramp that was 100 times worse and even a 325mg Percocet pill wouldn’t do the job. That’s what the pain was like. My boyfriend tried to get me to hydrate and remind me to breathe, but I was too focused on not dying to pay him any attention. Have you ever experienced pain so bad that you couldn’t even cry? I rocked back and forth on the toilet for about 20 minutes, sweating and in pain until the pills put me to sleep. I looked down into the toilet and saw what looked like a pint of blood before my boyfriend got me up and took me to bed. I was calm for about five minutes before the feeling came back. God, it was so awful. I wanted to cry so badly, but I couldn’t. I listened to him tell me everything was going to be okay as I fell asleep.
I woke up the next morning, pain-free. I got up to go pee and I felt something drop into the toilet. I wiped myself and flushed all while keeping my eyes forward. There would be no looking back.