To think miscarriage advice is total toss

[Hey1256]

So when you have a miscarriage the first thing they 'assume' is it's nothing you've done wrong.

How do they know? They've not even asked if I have been drinking alcohol, taken drugs or anything.

There's so much bollocks around about not drinking more than two cups of coffee a day, no late or soft cheese, no hot baths, Saunas,

If this stuff really prevents miscarriage then why the hell when I have one has no one bothered to ask me if I have been sticking to these rules or warning me to do that if there's a next time I'm aware of how to prevent it.

In which case, if there 'nothing I could have done' probably should just drink as much coffee as I want next time. What's the point of a miserable pregnancy if these things actually don't contribute to miscarriage and there's 'nothing I could have done - just genetics'

It's all BS, I think doctors talk rubbish just to spare women's feelings. We either can prevent miscarriage or we can't so why bother have all this bullshit pregnancy rules.

Some friends just completely ignored the fact I had lost the baby

My DH husbands family have done just that. Not all but some of them.

Recently went to a DH family function and the mean didn't say a thing everyone just brushed it under and smiled along ally afternoon. I understand they assume I don't want to talk about it but I never said that and I feel they don't say anything because it makes it easier for Them. To which I find slightly annoying especially when this is 'family'. I wouldn't expect a friend or associate to say anything but do expect a family member no matter how hard it is for them.

Because the time when that info/advice about safe activities during pregnancy would be useful is at the start of a pregnancy and while TTC. And it’s all already available, easily. Either online from reputable sites like the NHS one, or in advice you’re given by your doctor. Reiterating it when someone has miscarried is just cruel imo, as nobody can know what caused the MC (unless you are far along enough and have had enough losses for the fetus to be sent for testing) anyway and it is likely to negatively impact the grieving process adding a layer of ‘oh god, I had that third cup of coffee that day before I knew I was pregnant, what if it was that?’

All you can do is ensure you are up to date with current recommendations and guidance, so that if you fall pregnant again you continue to behave in a way that is most likely to support a healthy pregnancy. But it’s so sad that even if you do everything ‘right’ there’s still so much that could go wrong that’s completely out of your hands.

I really got a lot from a booked called Expecting Better by Oster, she goes into all of the advice given to pregnant women and analyses the actual evidence and lets you come up with your own conclusions around what risk you’re okay with. A lot of NHS advice plays it very safe for example around things like pâté, hot tubs, alcohol and so forth, but if you have the time and inclination to read her book it is very empowering and certainly made me feel like I had the knowledge I needed to make informed choices around pregnancy risks (I mention it as you’ve said if there’s a next time you might just throw the advice out of the window).

Some women do everything ‘wrong’ and have healthy babies, and some do everything ‘right’ and suffer an awful loss, just as some of the women who don’t heed precautions also lose their babies and some pregnancies where mothers have stuck to the advice by the letter have healthy babies. All you can know is on a population level what behaviours are more likely to lead to loss rather than a healthy pregnancy but there will always be outliers.

I’m so sorry for your loss. But I am thankful doctors don’t grill women who’ve just lost their babies on whether they used a sauna or ate soft cheese. It’d just be unspeakably cruel.

If there is anything which has a high chance of causing miscarriage, then it would have been used in times gone by as a form of self abortion.

These things are extremely rare and tend to involve great discomfort on behalf of the mother, so it's unlikely you will have done them anyway. But as said, most of the guidance is about avoiding harm to a healthy foetus, not preventing miscarriage. It's like cot death prevention advice and many other types of advice - it's there to reduce a risk from 0.002% to 0.001% or something like that - even if you get it all wrong, there is still a high chance that your baby will be OK. And unfortunately if something is going to go wrong because your baby has some kind of chromosomal abnormality, there is nothing that you can do or avoid which will magically correct those chromosomes and make them healthy. Possibly in the future there will be, but not for now.

If you think about it - there is no need for advice which rules out very harmful things - nobody tells you not to put your baby to sleep in a bath full of water, because this is completely obvious common sense and you know that would have a very high chance of drowning. But people do need to be told not to put babies to sleep on top of fluffy pillows, because most of the time, babies sleeping on pillows will be absolutely fine - but when you look across populations, across hundreds of thousands of babies, more babies die when they are sleeping on pillows than when they sleep on a clear mattress. And so we have this advice because it will save a very small number of babies and we think that is important.

Whether guidance influences your behaviour in pregnancy and parenting is your decision, but it's definitely not as black and white as it sometimes comes across. The majority of tragic outcomes for pregnancies and babies are related to forces outside of our control - we only have a very little control over a minority of them.

Sorry to hear about your miscarriage.

@TwittleBee I was working in pharma when I had my first two miscarriages - I worked in manufacturing development, troubleshooting production processes and designing processes that shouldn't fall over. It did my absolute nut in to think that the NHS was judging it not worth the time or resources - and this was around 2008-2010, it wasn't as desperate as now - to investigate why the babies kept dying. Like I had to go into work every day and try to care that an impurity in our process was trending up by a couple of percent, and did that mean anything? But whether I would successfully carry a baby to term, that wasn't worthy of anyone else's time? I knew more about the state of my bloody car's electrics than I did about my own body, you know?

And then after three miscarriages they tested me and found out I've got a very common chromosomal abnormality. I'm paraphrasing, and some of this was left for me to infer, but their advice was essentially "we think you've got about a 1 in 3 chance of a healthy baby, just keep getting pregnant, because as you've told us you'd be prepared to have an abortion if the baby had a survivable but serious abnormality, it's not worth us offering you IVF." In fact I wish any of them would have had the balls to actually come out and say that to me. As it was I spent about 6 months chasing my tail through various consultations and ended up in the Kafkaesque world of CCG decision making processes before I built up a picture of what the NHS would do for me, i.e. nothing. If someone would have just had the guts to look me in the eye and tell me that at the start - ideally at the start of my first miscarriage, because my mother had recurrent miscarriage as well which of course meant that my chances of having a chromosomal abnormality were a fair bit higher than your average pregnant woman having her first miscarriage. I spent three fucking years of my life - years in my 30s, that I could barely afford to waste if I wanted kids - believing that the NHS had my back and that the process was there for a reason. There is a reason - it's there to save money. And that's fine. But it's like nobody that works in the NHS is willing to say that to you out loud. They think it's a comforting lie to tell you that everything will be fine and trust us and what we're recommending is best for you - and I think there are people that work in the NHS who want to be heroes, who want to see themselves as the good guys and private healthcare as the bad guys, so even if you have the money and even if it would be in your best interests, rather than making use of their position of publicly-funded, trusted experts, they just pooh-pooh all private medicine and leave you on your own to figure out whether it's worth seeking treatment.
I did IVF with PGD and the whole process from filling in the forms to finding out I was pregnant took about 8 weeks and cost 10 grand. If it hadn't worked I would have moved the fuck on with my life. The NHS calculations of cost/benefit don't include a single penny for the misery that you go through, TTC, waiting, miscarrying and grieving. That's fine. But just be upfront. Stop pretending you can be all things to all people. Stop pretending that because you don't have the money to treat me, I should be happy not to be treated. I honestly sometimes felt as if they were waiting for me to give them absolution, to be grateful, to say, you've done enough. They did fuck all. Fucking grateful. I suppose the NHS has still got money for ACL tears though? It's allright, you can spend the next five years miscarrying in order to have children, but if some prick tears their knee ligament playing football, we'll happily spend about 4 grand ensuring their Sunday league career doesn't come to a premature close.

Really sorry for your loss OP

I've been there too, it's rubbish. Others have said pretty much everything already. 20-25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage (and those stats were true before the concept of chemical pregnancies existed. If you count those it will be higher). It's a normal part of life. Before 12 weeks it's almost always because the foetus is not viable.

I think it's partly because people don't talk about miscarriage much that people think it's less common and normal than it is.

I just wanted to pick up on something you said. I honestly believe as somewhere earlier suggested, the soft cheese stuff, partially cooked eggs, not doing spin class etc is rubbish and next pregnancy I will continue such activities because sounds to me like most of this stuff so genetic and out of our hands.

I know you're angry, this is an expression of anger and it's probably not what you'd actually do, when the time comes.

The soft cheese and eggs stuff is not rubbish (and pate etc). There is nothing harmful about those foods per se. They do carry a higher risk of giving you food poisoning than fully cooked eggs, cheese and meats. You either get food poisoning or you don't. If you do, you'd know about it. If you don't, as is statistically most likely, then you're fine, no extra risk has accrued. The risk to the foetus is from you experiencing food poisoning.

@Hey1256 Please don't feel its your fault. I speak from some experience (rather than a miscarriage though, we cant get pregnant) and I blamed myself for such a long time. I find it completely cruel that people who abuse their children can have them, people who neglected themselves through their pregnancies, and people who also didn't want their children in the first place. NONE of these feelings helped me, and I've grown to realise that actually, it is JUST one of those things, unfortunate as it is. I hope one day for a miracle, but just remember you did YOUR best for your baby, and one day hopefully you'll have a baby in your arms. Sending you lots of love x x x

OP have you heard of the book Expecting Better by Emily Oster? I think you'd find it a really interesting/validating read.

Toomuch sounds like you have the same issue DH has. We were lucky enough to know about it before we started TTC, and could plan accordingly (essentially for us it means allowing a period of 3-5 years for any conception, rather than being able to plan it down to about 6-18 months as most people can) but it blows my mind the NHS won't test for it if you have family history, until you've had 3 miscarriages AND been through all of their other tests It's not even as though it's an especially expensive test and it's such a common cause of recurrent miscarriages.

But, pretty much by definition, any woman who is worrying about whether she stuck / is sticking precisely to the guidelines, is a woman who does not need to worry about sticking to the guidelines.

Do you see what I mean? Anyone well informed and concerned enough to be worrying about being just this side or that of the guidelines, is someone who is already taking a huge amount of care. The guidelines are very cautious.

I frequently see threads on here about whether one glass of fizz at Christmas is ok and think 'FGS just do what you like. Have a glass of wine if you like. Have a glass every week if you like. You - and all your fellow over-worriers discussing it here are the very opposite of the people who need to be thinking about this. And the people who need to worry about it, the ones on hard drugs and downing a litre of vodka a day, are by definition, not here chatting about it and probably not worrying.'

Then again, I completely understand people choosing to reduce and eliminate risks - albeit teeny tiny risks.

I think it would be very upsetting for most women if the drs asked if they had been drinking etc. What good could it possibly do other than spark anxiety and guilt when it was most likely a non viable pregnancy regardless of what the women did at that stage. A lot of the guidance is about having a healthy baby not to prevent miscarriage.

I had a miscarriage a few years ago. I don't drink, smoke, take drugs etc
I imagine they don't want the woman in question to feel even more guilt than she already does .

I think it's one in every three pregnancies ends in a miscarriage. It's just normal but that doesn't make it hurt any less.
Unfortunately it's still quite taboo and many people do not like to discuss it.

Up to the first 6-9 weeks miscarriage is more statistically common than a continuing pregnancy. I think the NHS does tend to get lost in the statistics of that and loses focus on the individual in front of them - for some women (not most - that’s probably why they need 3 losses/cycle failures if you do ivf to justify the tests) there can be an easily fixable reason for the early losses.

I'm not sure that is true, a continuing pregnancy is still far more likely, but it's still not uncommon. No need to scare people!

I found this oddly reassuring while pregnant
datayze.com/miscarriage-reassurer.php

GrumpyHoonMain

Where are you getting that statistic from?

I'm sorry for your loss @Hey1256
I just had a miscarriage too. My second this year. And I'm angry and frustrated so I know (sort of) how you feel.

Obviously some very sensible advice up top on the reasons behind guidelines etc, but that's for calmer reading next time you're pregnant, and I hope that happens as soon as we'd like for all of us.

In my last MC (at 7 weeks) the hospital said on a Saturday that they couldn't confirm MC until Monday, then called me back on Sunday to fill out forms on what to do with the remains (without a scan confirming an MC), and then also asked me if I'd done anything to cause it. So every person's experience is different, except it seems miscarriages are still treated abysmally on the NHS with few people actually reading or processing the guidelines laid out by the RCOG or other bodies.

This makes for an interesting read www.verywellfamily.com/making-sense-of-miscarriage-statistics-2371721

Ah I see, that statistic takes into account fertilised embryos that fail to implant. So there wouldn’t ever be a positive pregnancy test. That makes sense. I thought the poster above meant that the majority of known, implanted pregnancies end!

Even with that the case, that's not the first 6-9 weeks! From at least four weeks on a continuing pregnancy is far more likely than a miscarriage.

I thought what that poster meant was you are more likely to have a MC between 6-9 weeks than post 9 weeks rather than between 6-9 weeks you are more likely to MC than have a continued pregnancy? If the former, that is true - MCs do happen earlier than later.

Doesnt make it any easier.

And doesnt mean your pregnancy is safe post 1st trimester.

Nor does it mean you are in the clear past 24 weeks (viability) either.

This time round I am not going to feel like I have a baby to take home alive until that baby is home and healthy with me - but even then I guess there are risks of SIDS etc. Urgh, just going to be a constant worry isnt it!

@Hey1256

Not miscarriage related, but some of my delightful in-laws didn't even mention a thing or ask how I was after my mum died, extremely suddenly and prematurely (in her fifties) one Christmas Eve. They also rolled their eyes at my husband when he said we didn't really feel like partying, approx one month after she died. They also looked really uncomfortable and changed the subject when they asked ME where I'd got a piece of jewellery. I explained it was a Christmas gift from my mum, which she had left under the tree, all wrapped up for me before she died. We found them there the day after she died (christmas morning obviously). Seriously, what sort of person doesn't have some sympathy when they hear that story? This was also about one month after she had died. I definitely hadn't been going on about her death at all (fat chance).

So, in brief, some people don't feel able to discuss sad things and some are just unfeeling bastards who would rather avoid feeling awkward themselves than actually support or look after someone who is allegedly part of their family.

I am so sorry for your loss .

But, I think re the doctors, most people do not want to hear "oh did you have an extra cup of coffee that time before you knew you were pregnant? Probably that then". Also, it almost always is a case of genetics / nothing you could've done.

I know when it came to guidelines, I was more concerned about what damage I would do a baby than that I thought I'd cause a miscarriage. Look how many poor children are born with drug dependency or fetal alcohol syndrome. Miscarriage prevention isn't the point of these guidelines, (alcohol, cheese etc), it's preventing damage.

@Celebelly - 20-25 percent of known pregnancies will miscarry up to 12 weeks, but it is estimated that over 80-90 percent of fertilized embryos will miscarry (ie fail to implant) before the mum even knows to test / the hcg never got high enough for a positive test and all you have to show for it is a late period. My IVF consultant thinks this is what happened to me and performed the tests I needed but the NHS doesn’t do this - NHS only considers known / evidenced pregnancies.

With estimates between 1 in 4 to 1 in 3 (implanted) pregnancies ending in loss, not sure how it would make any sense for it to be more likely to MC than continue to have a healthy pregnancy between 6-9 weeks? Surely the 1 in 4 to 1 in 3 stats would be reversed?

Recommend Prof Lesley Regan’s book on miscarriage. V informative.

@GrumpyHoonMain that would be prior 14 days post ovulation then (4 weeks pregnant) as implantation occurs around 7 - 14 days post ovulation? So certainly not between 6 - 9 week pregnant? 6 weeks is when you may see a heartbeat!

When I lost my baby I blamed myself. I questioned everything that I did for months. I beat myself and berated myself and wished I could turn back time and do it differently.

This is a very common feeling for a women who loses a pregnancy.

This is why they go on auto pilot to reassure the woman that it wasn't her fault.

Because the last thing they should be doing is saying
"How many coffees did you drink per day?
5? Oooooh not good"

Because then you are basically using a stick to beat the woman who's currently already bleeding.

That's why.