Her miscarriage left her bleeding profusely. An Ohio ER sent her home to wait

Christina Zielke and her husband were excited when she got pregnant in July. It was her first pregnancy at age 33 – everything was new. But during the ultrasound at her initial prenatal appointment in Washington D.C., there was no heartbeat. Bloodwork taken a few days apart showed her pregnancy hormone levels were dropping.

A doctor from her Ob-Gyn's office called her to confirm that the pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. They laid out her options: Take medication to make the pregnancy tissue come out faster, have a dilation and curettage or D&C procedure to remove the pregnancy tissue from her uterus, or wait for it to come out on its own.

The doctor suggested she wait, but didn't tell her how long that can take. After a few weeks with no change, she looked online and read that for some people it takes weeks before vaginal bleeding starts. "So I counted myself as one of those women – it was just taking longer for my body – and I tried to put it out of my mind," she says.

Soon after that, Zielke and her husband Greg Holeyman took the seven-hour drive from D.C. to northeast Ohio for a wedding party for her younger brother.

"On the drive to Ohio, I had some really heavy bleeding – to the point [that] we had to stop and clean out the car and change all the clothes," she says. She assumed her body had passed the pregnancy tissue and "that was really probably it."

But that wasn't