I've read a million birth stories in my time, but never really a miscarriage story so I thought I'd write one to remember my little lost baby. It's over three months since she was lost at 8 weeks 5 days, and mostly the sting has gone. We miss our tiny little one, but we really believe God only had a short entry in his book for her, he never intended her to last longer than the 56 days she spent in my womb. We still loved her very much, and were honoured to be her parents.
I guess the miscarriage part of her story starts on a Saturday in September at 7 weeks 3 days when I had a little spotting. I was concerned, bleeding in pregnancy is always scary and while I had spotted during Otto's pregnancy it had always been on "period anniversaries" which is a known phenomenon. This didn't coincide with one of those, and I also checked my cervix which seemed quite soft and open compared to when I'd checked it a few days before and found it clamped shut. I really felt that this spotting was bad news, but my brother was staying with us so I soldiered on in full pasted-on smile fashion whilst indulging in some advanced knicker-twitching at every opportunity. The bleeding, such as it was, settled and I began to feel a bit silly for all my panic. We had been to the garden centre with my brother and I had bought some bulbs that should flower at the end of April, which was when the baby was due. I began to think they'd be flowering with me with a big bump or newborn, and I'd laugh to remember that I'd bought them to remember a baby who I thought was going to be lost.
The week that followed involved a bit of dark brownish spotting, more of it if I carried Otto. It was always a bit sporadic though, and a little surprise to me. I had some aches that week too, and began to think that I was starting to be properly pregnant with ligament pains and everything. There was a clue or two that week though - I enjoyed a cup of tea on the Thursday (Tea tastes all wrong to me when I'm pregnant), and in writing a forum post to another lady who was spotting I said "I'm spotting too, but I'm thinking positive for me, and I'll think positive for you too". It was strange to see on the screen as I genuinely thought the spotting wasn't bothering me at all, but clearly my subconscious was in a bit of disagreement.
Friday evening came, 8 weeks 2 days, and as I got ready for bed I noticed a fresh loss of a bit of watery blood and some stringy stuff. As I saw that, I think I really knew the baby was lost. I had a bit of pain too, and pain and bleeding in early pregnancy are not good news. I felt calm but numb - there's nothing anyone can do - and went to bed. I didn't put a pad on that night (I'd only just felt "safe" enough to put my pads away til after the birth), and by the morning my pyjamas were soaked through with that funny thin blood.
Over Saturday, things got heavier. I did a pregnancy test and got a beautiful dark line which made me feel a bit better. We went to a car boot that morning where I popped in and out of the loo and sent my mum text updates on the blood situation - it was still fairly light and watery. I agonised over whether to call the out of hours GP, I did in the end and spoke to a friendly female doctor who was just what I needed. She mostly just listened, explained that bleeding doesn't always mean miscarriage but told me that the hospital doesn't scan at weekends so calling my GP first thing on Monday was the way to get scanned if that was what I wanted. I prefer my pregnancies (and life!) unmedicalised, and was actually a bit relieved to have the scan decision taken out of my hands. By that afternoon, the blood had progressed to fresh bright red blood with clotty bits and pain and I knew afresh that our baby had died. We went to one of our favourite nature reserves that afternoon, and I got to see some little native lizards close up for the first time. Otto liked them too, and it felt like a real gift in the midst of our crumbling dreams to have a lovely afternoon just being our family together.
My main memory of Sunday morning was "Your Song" being played by Steve Wright on Sunday Love Songs, and having a big weep as I realised my baby girl wasn't in the world any longer. We only knew she was a girl by parent intuition - there's no other way of knowing at 8 weeks - but I really feel one of the consoling things about losing her was that our feeling that she was our daughter will never be proved wrong.
We must have gone to church on that Sunday, but I don't remember it. That afternoon we went to a housewarming of a shared house in Oxford - very strange mixing of pleasant graduate-style conversation with repeated changing of clotty sanny pads and a very heavy heart. I looked at the little clotty bits and wondered if they were my baby. I really didn't think miscarriage was any more dramatic than that.
That evening I lay in bed half-watching the Help the Heroes concert. Michael came up after a while, and we snuggled together and felt sad. The pain was getting progressively worse over this time, and once the light was off Mike went off to sleep whilst I found myself attempting to deal with contractions whilst lying down in bed (totally against all my personal philosophies!) with just a hot water bottle for relief. I knew I could have taken painkillers, but Otto was born at home without pain relief, and I wanted to see the miscarriage through without pain relief too, if I could. It felt like something I could do for this baby who I'd never get to mother.
So there I lay, half asleep and in lots of pain. I did debate getting up but I just wanted to be close to my husband, and for my son to stay asleep and I felt that staying put was the best way of achieving both! At about 1am I thought I probably ought to get up and change my pad as the bleeding was pretty heavy. As I sat up and left the bed, I felt something slide out of me. I got to the bedroom door before deciding to wake Michael as I was scared of what I might see.
We went to the bathroom together and I tipped the stuff that had fallen onto the pad into a glass ramekin that I'd used for my pregnancy test the previous day. To my amazement, the "stuff" was a round placenta-y blob about the size of the palm of my hand, and attached to it was my kidney-bean of a baby. It was quite amazing, I had no expectation of actually seeing her but there she was, our tiny girl. I sent Mike to get my "In the Womb" book, and we compared the tiny person in the ramekin to the illustrations in the book. She looked just like a six-week embryo, development wise, but her size was true to her gestation of just over 8 weeks. Seeing her really helped me to realise that she really was not built to last, her development had obviously stopped, and it wasn't just a case of my body shoving out a happy, growing baby. It was a shock to see her, but I was so grateful to be able to see her and thank God for her, our tiny baby. Michael had a plant that needed potting up so we decided to do that, and bury our baby at the same time. We had never planned to name her as we didn't feel someone who died while still a tiny embryo needed anything as formal and worldly as a name, but given that I'd seen her, I wanted to name her. We chose Angharad, a Welsh name I've always loved but never thought I'd be able to use. It means "Greatly Beloved" which is exactly what our baby was.
Otto woke up not long after she was buried, I was still bleeding very heavily, almost postnatal style, and in a lot of pain but we all went back up to bed. I fell asleep quite easily, having my boy and husband snuggled up to me was a great comfort.
It took about another week for the miscarriage to complete, a stubborn bit of pregnancy stuff was hanging around and the amount of bleeding and level of pain were quite hair-raising. It was a terrible week, by the end I had no trousers that weren't bloodstained, and I was exhausted from the blood loss, pain and grief. I ended up with a couple of hospital visits as there was a bit of a concern over infection. The encounter with the gynae ward was horrible, so matter of fact, but the Urgent Gynae clinic the next day helped a lot by just offering kindness and concern. I had a lovely chat with the sonographer - usually she's scanning women who are frightened, and often has to break bad news (the day I was there she'd scanned 12 women, and only two had viable pregnancies), but as I knew my baby had gone I was quite relaxed and just happy to talk to someone about my miscarriage. It was a traumatic time; nothing I'd read reflected the real experience of miscarriage. Books offer "helpful" advice about it being better to be up and about if you can manage it - this to someone who is in labour like pain and has lost what feels like pints of blood.
Still, time has healed a bit and while we miss our baby the agony is not what it was. Sometimes we're sad, but mostly I just feel grateful to have had her in our family just for that short period. Hers was a blissfully easy pregnancy, and I loved carrying her.
Ben Jonson. 1573–1637
1 comment:
Thank you for writing this sweetheart. It is so honest and heart-wrenching. You did great honour to little Angharad.
Huge hugs xxxxx
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