After conducting an ultrasound that morning, her doctor told her that her baby didnt have a heartbeat.
Even advice to seek grief counseling seemed more perfunctory than sympathetic.
This was not Koroliss first encounter with pregnancy loss, nor would it be her last.
KatarzynaBialasiewicz
She had one miscarriage before that and has had three since.
She isfar from alone in her heartache.
Ten to 20 percent of all pregnancies end inmiscarriage or loss.
After returning from her honeymoon in 2004, Korolis paid a visit to her gynecologist for a normal check-up.
She was shocked to learn she was pregnant, and excited to start a family.
While still in her first trimester, Korolis felt some sort of change.
Whatever it was that I felt inside of me, I didnt feel it anymore, Korolis tells SELF.
When she visited the doctor again, she was told that she was going to have a miscarriage.
They dont consider anything to be wrong with you, she says.
Korolis was inclined to believe what they told her.
A few months later, she got pregnant again.
She had a full and healthy pregnancy, giving birth to her son Nicholas, now 10.
It doesnt seem like that kind of thing exists.
The doctors understand what theyre telling you, but you dont want to believe it.
Theres a baby in you, and youre preparing to give birth.
When Samantha, 7 lb.
1 oz., was born, the room was silent.
Its extremely isolating as a woman, legs spread open on a table giving birth to a dead baby.
The baby comes out and just stays there because the doctor has to figure out what happened.
The baby is just there, and its just kind of quiet, Korolis describes.
Miscarriage can be an amazingly difficult thing to talk about.
Dionne Martinez, 56, experienced two early miscarriages in the late 1990s.
I was 38 years old and had been married six years.
I got pregnant right away, but I had a miscarriage at six weeks, Martinez recalls.
No one wanted to hear me talk about it.
A month later, if I got emotional, no one quite understood why I was crying about it.
It was lonely experience, she says.
When she got pregnant again shortly after, Martinez wasboth ecstatic and fearful for another loss.
She wanted to relish and experience every moment [of the second pregnancy], no matter what.
The doctor would scrub the fetal tissue from the uterus and abort the pregnancy before Martinez could miscarry.
Shocked, Martinez and her husband hesitated to make a decision on the spot.
Ultimately choosing to continue the pregnancy, she miscarried her son, Cashew, at 20 weeks.
Martinez was given a pamphlet on grieving and ushered out of the hospital.
But it’s not just the loss of the pregnancy that’s saddening.
Its the loss of the dream of having a family.
Jaffe provides psychological support to families who have experiences miscarriage or infant loss.
She chose to specialize in this sector after her personal experiences with miscarriage.
Like Martinez, Jaffe received little support or acknowledgement from family and friends after her miscarriages.
“It was a silent, lonely loss,” Jaffe said.
Fetal, maternal and even paternal factors can lead to miscarriages.
Ironically,in vitro fertilization (IVF)is another potential cause of chronic miscarriage.
We think the treatment were giving them to get pregnant is also whats causing subchorionic hematomas, Sayago said.
But causes for many miscarriages go unexplained.
And the earlier the miscarriage, the less equipped professionals are to understand what went wrong.
Communication problems among couplesmay also exacerbate womens feelings of isolation after pregnancy loss, Jaffe says.
While women are inclined to grieve through tears and talking, men tend to grieve more privately.
Its a sad paradigm that Martinez has witnessed in her own life, and in the lives of others.
Today, she continues to volunteer at the support group while raising her two adopted children.
In her practice, she urges patience.
It really takes time, and thats something that people dont understand.
They want to hurry up and just be parents.
It will have an end, she says.
The Korolises are working on their next chapter.
Two months after delivering Samantha, Elle was pregnant again.
Despite being highly monitored, Korolis lost the baby at nine weeks.
She became pregnant two more times, but each time miscarried again before the reaching the second trimester.
Still, her fertility specialist found nothing physically wrong with Korolis.
To this day there has been no explanation at all.
Korolis is currently pregnant and hopeful.
She is due at the end of June.
Photo Credit: KatarzynaBialasiewicz / Getty Images
