5. And then something comes right out of leftfield...
- E.M.
- Jun 17, 2024
- 12 min read
Trigger Warning: TW: Pregnancy Loss/miscarriage discussed here
Well – it wouldn’t be my life if there wasn’t something unexpected coming at me.
I had to travel with work and yes there was work but while galivanting around Europe, didn’t I run right into an accidental relationship. (Is that a thing?? Well, it happened to me) He lived in France. We travelled back and forward to see each other – this was great, we weren’t in each other’s pockets but we could see each other when it suited. We were sensible enough about the whole thing, he wasn’t going to move to me nor I to him. This was great while it worked for both of us. Overall, we became great friends, became each other’s confidant, we laughed until it hurt and went on crazy adventures (driving across Canada and cliff jumping in gorges). Over time we gradually shared more and more about our respective histories and after a while I told him all about how I wanted to have children and the clinic.
We had become more friends than people in a relationship and that worked well for us both. He was keen to help and offered to donate sperm to my cause. I was really hesitant. I was somehow fine with using someone I didn’t know but had never really thought of using someone I did. That felt too complicated to me and fraught with potential risk for the continuation of our friendship. He wasn’t put off too easily, and said his offer was an open one. He didn’t want children but he was open to helping others who did.
Eventually I agreed. In my heart of hearts, I didn’t think for one second that I would actually ever get pregnant so I had created a little safe zone in my head that it would never be successful.
One day, a month or so later, I felt an acute pain in my stomach while in the office, like a cramp but more intense. I had been at an interval beach run class the night before (don’t ask…) and thought this was my body’s way of unilaterally objecting to me ever doing something like that again. However, the pain didn’t go away and then I felt a sudden urge to go to the bathroom, but not like I needed to wee – this was something that felt more like a period without the bleeding. The cramps worsened over the morning and were getting more painful. It wasn’t a constant pain; it was coming in bursts and when it hit … boy did it hurt. I’d never experienced contractions but it what I imagined they would feel like.
After a while, things felt so bad, I had to leave to see a doctor. I drove myself to an urgent care unit, and by now I was thinking that it must be my appendix. Urgent care did all the preliminary tests, but the pain was subsiding by this stage and I was almost ready to leave. After a while, the Doctor came in and said to me that blood tests taken had shown that I was pregnant.
You could have floored me. Er, what???
I was in no way expecting this. Couldn’t be, I had had a period about a week previously (it was strange as it was a very short bleed and then stopped), we hadn’t even started trying, I hadn’t charted my temperatures in an age, there was no preparation.
The Doctor told me that she wasn’t saying ‘congratulations’ because the blood results indicated this was very early and the fact that I was experiencing pain meant that further tests were required and that things might not be going so well. She sent me off to an early pregnancy department to be reviewed.
Off I went. I arrived in a small waiting room, with some plastic chairs and lots of posters on a small notice board, all layered on top of each other so no one poster could really be read in full. I must have read each of the partially displayed posters a hundred times. I waited and waited and waited. Time felt like it was going backwards.
My head wasn’t computing anything in a coherent order at all. I was sitting alone, just asking how this was possible over and over again. My fertility was a wasteland, a desert, barely a functioning thing, there was simply no way I could be pregnant. Every now and again a voice would creep in, saying that things weren’t good because of the pain and this would probably come to nothing. (I think this was some sort of internal defense mechanism, where my brain was trying not to get excited about the one thing that I had wanted, healed for, saved for…)
The doctor arrived and he brought me into a small room with a chair in it – it looked a little bit like a dentist’s chair and had a screen beside it. A nurse directed me into a tiny curtained area, handed me a sheet and told me to undress from the waist down and use this sheet to cover myself. When I say tiny area, I mean tiny. This was smaller than a swimming pool changing room in the 1990’s – It took some minor body contortion to get my skirt off.
Out I came from behind the curtain, holding a sheet around me and they showed me to the chair. I was going to have a transvaginal ultrasound. I sat down and the chair tilted back slightly. My feet were on little stirrups which they raised up. It was lovely, I quickly learned that any sense of shyness or embarrassment was left well and truly at the door. The nurse turned the lights off and there we three were, sitting in darkness, about to see if I was in fact pregnant.
I held my breath. I felt cold and when the wand was inserted, it felt cold. The screen was turned towards the Doctor and I couldn’t see it clearly. He had a good look at what was showing on it. I could feel him moving the wand and he was staring intently at the screen. Then he started clicking buttons and moving the wand again.
I was operating in automatic pilot, my brain was blindsided and not really forming rational thought. It was struggling to compute that I could have actually conceived in this malfunctioning, abused, deprived body of mine. “TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON” I was screaming inside my head. I think I was still holding my breath. (I might consider free-diving, as this was definitely some sort of PB in breath holding)
Eventually the Obgyn turned to me and said that I was pregnant. I was measuring 5w which was very early. There was no heartbeat but that I should come back for a review in 2 weeks. Flip. He also told me that I had quite a large cyst on my ovary which they would monitor as well. This all felt overwhelming. On one hand I was absolutely bloody thrilled, on the other, well the signs so far were not good. Two weeks to wait. I wanted to simply sit and watch a live screen for two weeks. However, the hospital assured me that resources would not quite stretch to that and duly sent me off to wait at home and go about my business.
Early ultrasounds are a complete minefield. I felt like I was living in limbo – time could not have been moving slower. Two week waits (TWW) seem to be present throughout all things pregnancy and during them time seems to enter some sort of vacuum in which one minute takes an hour to pass.
Obviously when I went home, I began to google. Everything ‘early pregnancy’ was searched – heartbeats (commencement and rate), size, symptoms, signs of miscarriage, cramping in early pregnancy, implantation bleeding and so much more. I read everything I could find.
After what felt like a thousand years, I went back to the hospital. I remember walking along the corridor and the rain sounding loud on the windows. Back into the same waiting room and again, I waited. There was one other couple in the room this time. We made eye contact briefly, smiled nervously and then everyone’s gaze went back to their phones or the wonderous poster wall. It was a horrible, tense, nervous atmosphere. They were called in first and I watched them walk in. I knew that I had at least another 20 minutes before being called. Eventually out they came, clutching a little ultrasound picture and smiling with relief. I was up next.
Five minutes later, the door opened again and a nurse called me in. Funny, having waited so long to get in, my initial reaction was dread, I wanted to stay in the waiting room being suddenly content and safe in my little world of uncertainty; I was petrified of getting bad news. Anyway, up I got and walked back into the room with the white chair, stripped off again from the waist down and sat down to be reclined back. The lights went off and I waited. The sonographer was clicking away. I could hear clicks and see she was moving the camera. She told me that the length had increased. I asked if there was a heartbeat and she said, “not yet”. She told me that it might still be too early. There was some comfort to be taken in that the embryo had grown in size, but it was still too early to be definitive on viability of the pregnancy.
She told me I would require a further review in…. yep, you guessed it … two weeks. Agghhhh, another two weeks. My phone couldn’t handle anymore googling, my head probably couldn’t either. It hard to describe how I felt after this – I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t sad. I was just wondering how I was going to distract my thoughts over the next two weeks. Work, work, work. I threw myself into it. Trying to work at night as well so that I wouldn’t start searching more websites for answers they were never going to give me.
Over the course of the next two weeks, I began to feel much more pessimistic. I felt cold a lot of the time and instead of lots of discharge, I had very little. I was reassuring myself by searching “loss of pregnancy symptoms successful pregnancy” and reading lots of articles where women had discussed losing all symptoms but still having a healthy baby. My tender boobs, were no longer so and my initial tiredness seemed to have evaporated. However, more than the physical symptoms, I felt different. I felt like I was going to be the recipient of bad news on the next occasion. My French friend was amazing. He was really supportive and was focusing on the positives such as lack on any further cramping and an absence of bleeding.
Eventually the next appointment came around. This one was early in the morning as I had to go to a work conference after. The wait wasn’t as long this time because it was early in the morning. I walked back into the waiting room and sat down. There was no-one else there this time and I was glad about that. I sat alone with my thoughts, which were not positive. I felt different, I hoped against hope that this feeling in my gut was wrong. In I went. Again, behind the little curtain and again with the sheet wrapped around my waist. Back into the white chair I climbed. I felt the coldness of the wand pretty quickly. The sonographer was the same as two weeks previously. She was calm and kind. She watched the screen. I watched her watching the screen. Again, I couldn’t see the screen, only the side of it and the light reflecting off her face.
She turned to me very calmly and said that she was sorry, but there was no heartbeat. She told me the growth was not much more than two weeks ago and there should have been a more substantial change. She told me that she was very sorry, but this pregnancy was not viable.
Everything stopped. I could actually feel my heart break. Even though I thought this might be the outcome, it didn’t make it any easier. Did I want to see the screen? I said I did. She turned it around and she gently talked me through the images. She answered my questions and let me have as much time as I needed to look at the screen. As soon as I looked at the screen, tears came quickly, I felt a sadness I had never experienced before. Sure, I had lost family, friends and it had been utterly devastating, but this was somehow different.
Another nurse brought me water and they gave me a picture to take home. She talked to me about the options. I could wait and eventually the baby would come away itself, or, I could take some tablets that would bring on the bleeding, or I could have a dilation and curettage (D&C) - the surgical procedure to remove tissue from the uterus. I opted for the latter. She told me that she would call me that day with a date but it would likely be in… here we go again… two weeks. She said that I might experience a natural loss in the intervening period, but I could call them if I did.
It was so strange, there I was making decisions, answering questions but my mind was paused. Everything felt blurry and dream-like and I felt cold.
I don’t really remember walking out to the car, my legs obviously got me there, somehow, even without my conscious brain in gear.
I was numb now. I had to go to work. I went to my conference walking about in a daze, no -one knew my secret, and I operated on automatic pilot. I drifted about the room, talking to people, presenting to the group, even smiling and pretending everything was A-Okay when that couldn’t be further from the truth. The bigger question is why didn’t I feel able to announce to the world what had just happened and go home to grieve?
Eventually, my work day ended and I came home that night. Sitting on my sofa I looked at the picture given to me at the hospital and my heart broke again. Tears came easily. I was broken. Eventually I pulled my body up to my bed and went to sleep, holding my picture.
It happened that the D&C could be done in eleven days instead of 14. Every day for those eleven days I checked for bleeding at what felt like ten-minute intervals. No bleeding, no cramping, nothing. There I was, just walking about carrying a baby in my body that would never cry, would never say ‘mama’ and I admit that I struggled hugely with that. I hated that feeling, my body was pregnant still but my head and my heart knew the reality.
The day of the procedure arrived. The first thing I asked is whether they would scan again. I somehow was fearful that the sonographer was wrong that it had just been too early, maybe there would be a heartbeat now. In my hours of searching, I had read about instances where a late heartbeat had been discovered, even after doctors or nurses had said the pregnancy wasn’t viable. In my heart of hearts, I knew my hope was a false one, but I held onto it nonetheless. They scanned me again, but there was no change other than they said it looked like the pregnancy was slowly beginning to come away.
The procedure would be completed in a day and I would be out by late afternoon. I was given a gown and surgical socks and allocated a bed. The staff were wonderful, I was treated with kindness and warmth and was well looked after. I remember being wheeled into an operating theatre, looking up at the lights and not much else after that. The next thing I knew I was in a recovery room and then I was back at my family house. That was it. Over.
After a while, I went back to work. My days became structured again and time moved on.
Weeks later however, waves of grief came suddenly and unexpectedly. I thought I had processed the loss. I thought I had coped admirably, put on a brave face, straightened my shoulders and carried on. Well reader, I very firmly had not. There I was in the middle of a random night crying uncontrollably, begging the universe for the baby that I had lost. Then again, the next night. Then again. It occurred to me the mornings following these nights that I might need some further time to process the loss. It had been a bizarre and overwhelmingly sad few months.
I must say, I was fortunate to have a really close circle of family who rallied round me and kept me from falling to pieces. My French friend was amazing too and he also felt the loss really deeply. It was a new experience for us both and neither had the answers.
Pregnancy loss is still something we don’t talk about enough. It is a remarkably difficult experience and impossible to adequately put into words. From the outside, it can look like all is well, but internally the mind and body are in turmoil. This could be happening to anyone we pass going about our day – it could be the someone crying silently in the toilet cubicle beside you or chairing the meeting you are stifling a yawn in or driving the fire-truck, the police car, the airplane.
It still feels like there is a stigma attached to discussing miscarriages/baby loss and even though we as a society are moving to a more open narrative, there is still work to be done to increase awareness, understanding and encouraging open discussion.
Grief is an individual thing; everyone deals with it differently. Working through these things takes time and space, allow yourself both.
Over time I have come to speak about it more and I feel that more and more conversations are happening about pregnancy loss. Talking is helping, helping not just those who experience it but also those who do not. Improving everyone’s understanding can only be beneficial.
If you have or are experiencing pregnancy loss:
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