SCH: The Truth Is Out There

No real updates since my last post - the old brown bleeding has slowed down considerably over the past few days, and I have no idea if that's a good sign or a bad sign. But I'm not having strong cramps and heavy red bleeding (knock on wood), so I have to assume that everything is still proceeding as planned.

However. Remember when I said I wasn't going to look up statistics for miscarriage after sub-chorionic hemorrhage? I've kept that promise pretty well, but I did start asking Dr. Google more questions about why these hemorrhages happen in the first place. I understand that none of the doctors and nurses I've spoken with care about the reason because they just want to see what happens next, but now that I have a second hemorrhage, I kind of want to get to the bottom of this. I mean, everything has to have a cause even if we don't know it yet, right? The problem is that there are a ton of possible causes, and they might all be complicating factors, or it might be something I haven't thought of yet. Without further ado, here are the theories I'm considering so far:

- Clotting issues, part 1. I did have that DVT during my two-week wait, and even though my bloodwork came back with no genetic predispositions for blood clotting issues, maybe I do have some as-yet-undiagnosed problem that led to tiny clots in the uterine blood supply that somehow created the bleeds. I should probably go back on the Lovenox ASAP to help resolve the existing bleeds and prevent any others from occurring.

- Clotting issues, part 2. The first bleed (the biggest and scariest) happened while I was on the Lovenox. So maybe I never had a clotting issue in the first place, and being on a blood thinner disrupted the uterine blood supply so it bled and bled and bled in a random weak spot. I should definitely stay off the Lovenox until these hemorrhages have resolved, and talk seriously with my doctors about whether it makes sense to go back on it at all.

- Pregnancy after IVF. There's some talk that SCH might be related to embryo implantation, and of course when you get pregnant using IVF, the embryo is transferred back into your uterus with a catheter rather than traveling down a Fallopian tube and then choosing the exact perfect spot to implant. Perhaps it implanted in a bad spot after transfer, and that caused the bleeding several months later? Doesn't explain the second bleed, however.

- Retroverted uterus. I've been told repeatedly by gynecologists over the years that my uterus is seriously retroverted, or flipped backwards from those textbook pictures you always see. As late as March 28, the ultrasound tech mentioned how far back it was. On March 30 I spotted briefly, and the next morning I was idly rubbing my hand over my belly and realized that I could really feel my uterus in a way I hadn't before. Sure enough, on April 5 I was told that it was no longer retroverted - it "stood up" sometime in the past few days, which tends to happen between the 10th-12th week of pregnancy - and I had a second SCH. It's possible that the action of the expanding uterus switching position put enough stress on the blood vessels that the new, smaller, nearly asymptomatic hemorrhage formed.

- The Cigarette-Smoking Man. It's all a conspiracy, you guys! I mean, our baby does bear a certain resemblance to an alien...