Hi everyone,
I wanted to share my experience as miscarriage feels so alienating as it is and a lack of knowledge of what's to come when you've had a missed miscarriage can be awful. I'm hoping what I share my add comfort to someone else's experience.
I found out on Monday that I'd had a missed miscarriage (we knew for about a week beforehand, but this confirmed it). At 8 weeks I had a fetal pole of 4.9mm and no hb which was the same as the week prior.
I initially chose to take the medication to induce miscarriage and chose to do this as an inpatient. I took 6 oral tablets in total and not much happened. I passed a few clots and had some pain, but it wasn't enough for the doctors to believe it had been successful. After around 10 hours of walking around and feeling frustrated, I was discharged with the nurse promising to find out about the possibility of an MVA for me.
Yesterday morning I had a call confirming that I could have the MVA today. When I got to the hospital today, the nurse went through all my details and got me to sign the consent form. As discovered on Monday, I have a bicornuate uterus, so the nurse decided to speak to the consultant prior to continuing treatment.
When the consultant came into the room about 30 minutes later, I lost hope. She stated that the pregnancy may be too small to be picked up in an MVA and encouraged me to wait 2 weeks to see if I passed it naturally. I broke down completely and told her I'd already had weeks of hell with this and did not desire two more weeks. She tried to get me to wait another week, but I again argued it and thank god I did. She agrees to give me more medication and if this dilated my cervix then she would give the MVA a go.
Luckily, it did dilate and she started the MVA about 1 hour 30 minutes later. I did not have local anaesthetic which shocked me and I had taken ibuprofen and paracetamol myself which I was asked to bring with me. I was offered gas and air to use when required. Quite horribly, but luckily a large part of the fetus had already come loose due to the medication, so she just pulled that out at the beginning. She then used the speculum to open me up and used various tubes to twist and then suction the tissue out. I'll be honest, this did really hurt at points especially when she turned the tubes, but it was manageable with the gas and air. I did have mild cramping when she finished, but not nearly as much as they told me to expect, but I wonder if this was because the fetus was so small even to start with and only one side of my uterus had really expanded. At the end I burst into tears due to overwhelm and relief in equal measure. They were so lovely and made sure I was okay before leaving.
They allowed me to clean my belly from where they scanned me and clean the blood then they got me to sit up slowly and stand up when I felt ready. I was out and having a coffee within minutes!
The actual procedure itself only took about 10 minutes, but I did have to wait an hour after just to make sure everything was okay. I'm having fairly heavy bleeding now and some on and off cramping, but overall I would choose the MVA again if I needed it!