I'm so sorry for your loss, ATM, and for you too, OneTrauma.
I lost my first PG at 20 weeks 2 years ago.
I am going to give an unvarnished account of what happened as it helped me to read other's posts on here before I went to mentally prepare myself. Feel free to skip if you don't want to know details.
I think hospitals vary in how sensitive/knowledgeable they are about second tri losses, and I think I was unfortunately somewhere pretty clueless, so some of my experience was down to that.
I had to go back in 2 days after the first lot of tablets. I was due in at 10am but had to ring first to check there was a bed and there wasn't one available so they said they would call back when they had one. Unfortunately a bed did not become available until 7pm at night, so DH and I had a very very long day waiting at home dreading what was to come. I got there at 8pm, they gave me vaginal pesseries to start things off at 9:30. I found them putting them in quite painful. They also gave me the post mortem consent forms to fill in at this time and I really should have said I didn't want to do it at that time, but I didn't want to make a fuss so I carried on. I found the form quite hard- it was about 8 pages long and went into a lot of detail about what organs/tissue etc could be taken and how it could be retained etc. It is not pleasant to fill in.
After the pessaries nothing seemed to happen for a couple of hours, DH and I were alone in a private room, not on a ward. Then I got mild contractions for a couple of hours and then a few stronger ones. I had paracetamol but didn't need anything else before I delivered the baby. No-one had been back to the room since the pesseries at this point so we had to ring the buzzer for the nurse to come. I was advised not to see it as it has been dead for a couple of weeks and so had started to decay quite badly. I am grateful that the nurse suggested this to me as I would have found that quite distressing.
I did not deliver the placenta which apparently is much more common in these sort of cases than later deliveries, so it might be a possibility. A couple of docs had a go at manually pulling it out which was a bit grim but not painful, just mortifying. After this they gave up and took me to theatre for an ERPC. When I woke up I was tired but relieved it was all over. I had mild bleeding for a couple of weeks afterwards, possibly the ERPC got a lot of stuff out. AF returned after 5 weeks.
It took about 8 weeks for the PM results to come back (well, I think the hospital got them back in 4 and then made an appointment for me to see the consultant to be given them. I then had various tests at their suggestion based on the PM findings.
I did not have a funeral for the baby, the hospital suggested they just took it away and dealed with it. I find that difficult now and wonder if it would have been better to have a funeral, but of course there is no way of telling.
One thing that really helped me was someone on a thread the night before I went in saying to me 'you are in shock, and you have to make a lot of decisions, accept that the decisions you make will be the best you can do at the time and don't torture yourself afterwards with re-thinking everything. I have held onto this.
for you x