Love, luck and blight.

My sister called a few days ago, asking all kinds of questions about how I'd felt and what happened when I was pregnant, when I asked if she was pregnant. There was total silence on the other end of the phone. I was so happy for her. Unfortunately, just a few days can change everything. She is in the throes of a miscarriage now. Her gestational sac was empty, something they also call a blighted ovum. Interesting choice of words. Blight. It's a much larger word than the object it describes. Her pregnancy hormones are falling and she now has to take Plan B or have a D&C to flush her uterus. She has chosen Plan B.

I have no idea how to describe how awful I feel for her. During Christmas, she held Evelyn and cried because she said she didn't know when she'd be able to have a baby herself. There was no end in sight - her husband hadn't been employed in more than two years, they had student loans to pay and a mortgage and she was trapped in a job she hated because she was carrying everything financially and had been for two years.

Then, like magic, things began to come together over the last six weeks. Her husband got a job, which allowed them to feel comfortable starting a family. She discovered she was pregnant, got a new job and quit her old one. Then the part that meant the most to her was taken away.

I know miscarriages are very common in early pregnancy and that she will probably go on to have a healthy pregnancy. And if she was only five or six weeks into the pregnancy, but still. It represented a lot to her and now it's gone. And it sucks.