Heavy period & passing tissue (Asking for MIL)

[WindyCityMom]

I posted in pregnancy and birth loss but then thought about it again and thought that maybe it should go here because there is no confirmed pregnancy.. anyways, here goes:

WARNING! GRAPHIC!

WARNING: Some of this is a bit graphic.

Trying to help my MIL out.  She's 39yo, obese, with high blood pressure. She thinks she's having a miscarriage.  Last month she said her period was weird and was "darker" than usual.  Today, while waiting in line for two hours, she felt a gush of blood with a huge clot.  She went home and told me the clot was actually tissue and was the size of her palm.  She is still having gushes of blood and bleeding heavily.  She is cramping which is unusual for her.  She says her period is usually 5 days long with only two days of real bleeding.

I gave her two pregnancy tests plus an ovulation test to see if it picked anything up.  The pregnancy test was negative, and the ovulation test had a faint line on it.  She showed me what she passed in the toilet and there was some blood and the tissue she passed was about 2" in diameter and was whitish-greyish.  

Any ideas?  She has no health insurance and doesn't want to go to the county hospital.  I asked her what the large piece of tissue looked like and asked if it looked like a placenta but she wasn't sure (she's never seen a placenta).  She told me it looked like raw meat.

She says she feels ill (no fever) but she vomited a little while ago.

Ideas?  Herbal remedies?  I have red-raspberry leaf tea.. would that help her pass things quicker?

[SuburbanHippie]

I have no idea.  Tissue the size of her palm is really big!  When I miscarried, the passing of the tissue was basically the end of the cramping and heavy bleeding.  The baby was about 8 weeks gestation and it was only the size of maybe a golf ball.  I would tell her to head into the doctor ASAP. 

[Arduinna]

Did she retrieve the tissue to take it in for testing? From my experience with my MC, it was very much like my labor and to have tissue the size you described the fetus should have been very obvious. Mine was very clearly the baby I lost. No mistaking it. What she is describing as raw meat looking sounds like a really large blood clot. It takes time for the HCG to return to 0, so a PG test would have probably still been positive. I wonder if she passed a fibroid? She really should go get checked out to find out exactly what is going on.