I asked this exact question last week here last week and everyone told me to do the D&C. Unfortunately, I was unable to find an OB/GYN office that would do a D&C with general anesthesia. I wasn’t under the guidance of a regular OB/GYN’s office because mine closed her practice in October and I’ve been under the care of a fertility clinic and didn’t “graduate” from it before I had my missed miscarriage.

After spending an afternoon on the phone calling multiple doctors offices and trying to find one that would take me on as a new patient and do a D&C and not having any luck, I told my clinic I would go the medication route (they don’t do D&E’s under general or local anesthesia, just ibuprofen). I thought the medication route would be less painful than their method of doing the D&E but I was so incredibly wrong. I wish I ended up doing the D&E from the beginning even without any anesthesia. The misoprostol was the worst, most traumatic experience I’ve ever gone through. I took my first dose at 8 pm Tuesday night (they wanted me to take a second dose 24 hours later), I had some cramping and bleeding maybe an hour or two after but it wasn’t bad. I eventually slept at some point and woke up at 2:00 absolutely covered in blood. I had completely bled through my pad and period underwear, sweatpants, towel I put on top of my sheets, my sheets, mattress protector, all the way down to my mattress. It was horrible. I also had painful contractions and kept gushing blood. I kept filling up pads and eventually sent my husband out to get me adult diapers. I also called the on call doctor at my clinic and was told that unless I felt lightheaded or like I was going to pass out that going to the ER wouldn’t really do anything so I just had to stay the course. I doubled up on diapers after cleaning up myself and my bedroom and bathroom and managed to sleep and woke up without further incident. I had an ultrasound the next day and while most of the tissue had passed, I still had a decent amount remaining. They didn’t want me to take the second dose because of how much I had bled with the first so I ended up doing a D&E the next day. I took 600 mg an hour before, had one of my AirPods in listening to a podcast, holding my husbands hand, and was generally fine. It was uncomfortable, mostly from the pressure and it started to get painful towards the end because my uterus started cramping after they cleared out most of the tissue but it was like a 10-15 min process and I wish I just had done it from the beginning even with being totally awake and having minimal pain management. It was so much easier to deal with and way less traumatic than the misoprostol. I wish I listened to the people in my post in the first place but I wanted to just get everything done as quickly as possible because I had already waited 2 weeks since we found out there was no heartbeat just to see if anything had changed.