World Mental Health Day & Baby Loss Awareness Week 2018
- HIGHCROFT WRITING
- Oct 12, 2018
- 8 min read
Trigger Warning: Aligned with World Mental Health Day 2018 and Baby Loss Awareness Week, the piece gives a personal description of early miscarriage and its subsequent impact on mental health. Please consider your personal well being and safety before continuing further.
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I was on a night out when I had my first heavy blood loss. I confided in a friend that my bleeding was so heavy I was changing super plus tampons every ten minutes and still leaking. I had always had heavy periods, so super-plus was my thing, but never every ten minutes and still leaking. I wanted her to give me the heads up if it started to show through my outfit.
In the dark nightclub, with music blazing and people bouncing off each other in drunken walks from dance floor to bar, she asked if it could be a miscarriage. It hit me in the stomach, but I didn't think so. I was using 'protection', but at that point I couldn't take the pill due to a 'dicky ticker' and they always remind you that condoms aren't 100% effective. I was on a night out for a friends birthday though, and I didn't want to worry over an unlikely scenario. How times change...
By the Monday, I went to see the doctor in my lunch break. He had me do a test. He explained a lot of things, but the only thing I really remember is the phrase 'I'm afraid I can't tell you if you were pregnant, I can just tell you that you're not now'. It stuck with me. The way he said it. Blasé. You could see he'd thought I probably had been, but these things happen... Based on my estimated last period dates (I never kept the tightest watch because I always had the same pains about a week in advance - a warning it was coming) he said that if I had been pregnant, due to the early nature and the amount of blood loss, there would be no requirement to do anything about it unless I started with any other scary symptoms.
At the time I told only the friend who'd suggested it. Over the years a select few, and everyone, myself included, chose to focus on the 'it wasn't a real pregnancy, so it wasn't a real loss'. The relationship I was in wasn't the most secure at that time, so I told myself that, whatever it was, it was for the best. I turned my back and moved forward - but when people asked if I wanted children in the future, I would now say ''If I can have them...'
Roll on a few years and I was married to said boyfriend. It was a summer wedding and on that following new years eve, full of festive spirits, we decided to try for a baby. That's when you know there's still something sitting back there in the dark, because, even full of giggling champagne, I still finished with '... If I can'. He already had a child from a previous relationship, so we ‘knew’ he could.
In the following year, a week before his birthday, I start with another heavy bleed. There I was, trying to look professional in the middle of an important meeting, answering directed questions, when the sudden cramps and blood loss sent shivers down my spine and bile to my stomach.
I had been under a lot of stress at work and my periods had been the last thing on my mind, but I knew it was an early loss rather than a late one. I carried on and completed the meeting and then left the building. I gave myself 5 minutes to cry in the car on the way home, pulled myself together again, and told myself that it was what it was. I told myself that you don't tell your husband that you have miscarried in the week before his birthday - especially when you’ve booked a weekend away and last time he’d focused on ‘you don't even know if you were really pregnant'.
As it was, the only people I told were my line manager and a Human resources representative as, at the end of another meeting a few days later, they asked if something was wrong. They knew the case I was working on was stressful, but I seemed particularly down...
Not normally one to discuss my private life at work, it fell out of my mouth before I could stop myself. In hindsight, I'd just needed to acknowledge it. To make it real and not just something in my head.
The following year, laughing and joking at a wedding, I started with another heavy bleed. I headed to the bathroom and became privately emotional. I told my husband this time but, after ten minute private tears, I was soon back in the party like only drunk had happened. It didn’t feel like my place to negatively impact on her special day.
We'd started ‘investigations' to see ‘what was wrong’ with me. The first few tests had come back fine, but this last bleed felt like one too many. At a birthday party at the end of the month, because everyone kept asking when we were going to start trying for a baby, I made the declaration that we had been trying but that I was giving up. No more trying for a baby. No more emotions through the wringer.
Even though my alcohol loosened lips were telling people this personal detail, the number of people who knew about my 'heavy bleeds' could be measured on one hand. It might seem strange, but it was because of friends who'd had losses. It didn't feel right to talk about something that wasn't ‘a proper miscarriage’, not like they'd had... I believed that. I felt like it was dishonouring their loss in someway to cry over a lesser one.
I stopped trying and, like everyone frustratingly and sometimes patronisingly tells you, a couple of months later I woke with my iPad pinging that my period was due that day. The forgotten fertility tracker from when we'd been trying. I'd had no grumbly groin weeks notice so I got up and went to the supermarket, leaving Husband in bed. I did a test in the supermarket toilets.
I couldn't really tell. Was that a faint line? I did another at home and asked my husband to judge. He didn't know either. I had a meeting that afternoon and I stopped at a corner shop for one with words. It said 'not pregnant'. I apologised to my husband for getting his hopes up and got on with things. I started spotting on the Tuesday but I still hadn't started my period by Wednesday lunch time. I went out and bought some more tests. More 'not sure', so I finished work early and stopped off at a corner shop for the words. I did it when I got home. I sat awkwardly on my living room sofa crying at the words 'pregnant' and '1-2 weeks'. I was still sat there when my husband got home. I booked an appointment with the doctor for the Friday. She did a test and confirmed I was pregnant - but she didn't like the spotting and put me on 'sick leave/bed rest'. It had been over 10 years since I'd had a sick day. I didn't quite know what to do. I phoned my line manager and told her what and why. I would only be 4 weeks pregnant at the most.
I'm no longer religious. I let go of my religion at age 13, but I prayed. To the thing that may or may not exist. I might not be a believer but, if being a good person was any help in the matter, would they just root for me on this one.
The blood losses were sporadic. I felt guilty taking sick leave so took some holiday time. Then I went back to work. With every bleed I went off to the early pregnancy unit to be checked out. I had more scans than my NHS trust could probably afford. I know friends thought I was a drama queen, but what I felt, and they didn't know, was that I desperately didn't want this to be number 4.
My line manager told me that 'whatever happens, you're strong, you'll get through this', but, normally one to be boosted by compliments, it felt cold on me. You see, like I told her, I knew I would... but I didn't want to have to, not this time.
The sporadic bleeding made me scared to go to the toilet. They put me on aspirin, they mentioned gestational diabetes, and I made sure I had the healthiest diet in my history whilst they checked it out. I worried over what was right and to do and what was right to avoid. I had never second guessed myself so much in my life. I tried to be my old self, but it was all an act. Friends and family just saw an older mum's over reaction. I just desperately didn't want to screw things up. The time I felt reduced movements and had to go in to be monitored, I was shrivelling up inside.
I went into labour with a bleed. I'd felt strange just before midnight, 8 days after my due date, and went to the toilet to find blood. I cried inside. I nervously called for my husband from the bathroom. I was absolutely expecting, and preparing myself for, the worst.
Thankfully, 12 hours later, my beautiful daughter was born.
I expected to be able to relax but, with one thing and another, the fear didn't go. I still worried about every little thing... Then there were bigger things to worry about, and, although it took a few months more, after one stressor too many, I was a level of anxious I have never been before.
I still am. Less so than those early days, and sometimes I think that, in a different way, I am actually stronger for it all. In essence though, I am not the person I was before my successful pregnancy. Which sounds the wrong way round, I know, but I know fear now like I never had before. Fear of losing my beautiful, feisty, strong willed, everything.
I questioned posting, more than second guessing myself, because the last thing I would want to do is upset anyone who has lost a child and reads this, feels this, is an insult to them. It was actually in consideration of #worldmentahealthday that I thought I should, because if there is someone out there wanting to grieve an early loss, but feels as though they can’t, please know you are not alone.
Equally, if you’ve experienced this type of loss and you don’t feel the need to acknowledge it, that’s your choice. My message is that you are entitled to feel how YOU feel about it. It is your experience.
At the time, calling it a heavy bleed did make it less of something for me but, unfortunately, it just sat there at the back, in the dark, waiting to attack me at a later date.
Pretending to treat those ‘heavy bleeds’ as unimportant meant I didn't give myself any room to grieve. I didn't honour those three babies. Not one bit. I just carried the sadness with me.
Those three babies. My three babies. I cried the first time I wrote those words, because I'd never called it that before, not even to myself. My three babies.
Hindsight says I should have told people the reason I was so scared. When they went on about how I was worrying over nothing, I should have told them - faced their judgement, and not just closed that bit of myself off. I should have owned that she was my 1 out of 4 and I just so desperately wanted her to stay my 1 out of 4.
I should have allowed myself to grieve them, regardless of what other people thought, or think.
I am the living proof that you have to let people grieve their early losses if that’s important to them because, if they don't, they can end up slowly, over time, shattering into a million tiny pieces that are impossible to put back together.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this piece, please consider whether you would benefit from accessing relevant support.
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