I have to share this - maybe it will help someone to read this...This week has been on of the most traumatic and difficult week I’ve ever had. This Monday was supposed to be filled with joy. For those of you didn’t know or who hadn’t worked it out My Husband and I were about to announce that I was expecting our third child. Then, quite out of the blue I experienced a small bleed, an immediate trip to the Early Pregnancy Assessment Clinic gave us some bad news. The pregnancy was not continuing and I was having a miscarriage. Please notice I don’t use the words ‘We had Lost our baby’ as I didn’t lose it, I knew exactly where it was. Losing something implies negligence and fault on my part. This was nobody’s fault, very sadly is was nature. I am a great believer that things happen which are out of our control and we have to accept them – its shit, but its life. Please don’t take that as a lack of caring on our part. We were sad, very sad but we did nothing wrong and so we took a quiet weekend to think about the what ifs and the maybes whilst also trying to enjoy the family and the life we have.
For those of you who don’t know – when you miscarry the pregnancy doesn’t disappear. You have choices. You can have medical and/or surgical help or you can wait for your body to miscarry on its own. I chose Surgical. As difficult as some people may find it, I wanted to draw a line under this period of my life and move on. I was given a date, one week on, to go in to the hospital. This week was a long week so I decided to go north and see a friend, have a glass of wine and just be human for a small moment. I did, we drank wine and set the world to rights. It was wonderful, until Friday morning. I woke up with incredible cramps. Mentally and emotionally I was ok – apparently my body was taking control – I have to admit to feeling relieved I wasn’t going to have to go under general. I quietly mentioned this was happening to my friend (she knew I was/had miscarried) We got our boys up and we had a quiet breakfast. Whilst eating breakfast I had the dread that every girl gets once a month (oh crap I’ve bled through my trousers – now everyone will know I am bleeding….down there….god I can’t have that. I mean its supposed to be a secret.) I said nothing – quietly excused myself and went to the bathroom. I returned…but again had to go back to the bathroom. This happened a couple of time before I said I needed to go to the shower – things were bad but I could still manage to sort this out without mentioning that I was bleeding. And Christ, at that point I was more worried about my friend’s towels, I needn’t have been, she wasn’t precious about her towels, in fact she would have had no concern with me telling here what was going on but it was still that unspoken taboo of putting blood from ‘there’ on other people’s stuff. Let alone all over the bath, the bathroom and the carpet. I fought for 45 minutes before finally admitting I needed help. I told my friend and rang the gynaecology ward who said without a second thought that I needed to phone an ambulance. It came and I got taken – now bleeding profusely – to the hospital. They looked after me and I am ok. BUT because I was so taken up with the taboo of menstruation and miscarriage I didn’t say any thing straight away. I panicked about what I was bleeding on and whether I could cover the bleeding up, instead of realising that the quantity of blood I was losing was becoming dangerous.
In the end the doctors had to perform surgery to stop the bleeding. I lost between 1.5l and 2l of blood – put this into perspective. A normal 60kg person has 4.2 -4.8 litres of blood so I lost nearly half of mine! I have thought a lot in the hospital this week. If ANY other part of my body had been bleeding that severely I would not have hesitated to tell my friend to phone an ambulance. I would have gone straight to her and spoken up immediately.
This friend was one of my best friends, with whom I have no issues sharing anything with and still I felt embarrassed and that it was something I had to deal with on my own. This was NO reflection on her. I have also discovered this week that nearly 1 in 5 recognised pregnancies results in miscarriage? Unless you are one of the many poor unfortunate people who have to go through this you probably didn’t. We spend our lives being told to be careful, that every time you sleep with a boy you WILL become pregnant and you WILL have a baby. In fact, we get told this so often that when you don’t or can’t get pregnant or when we do manage to get pregnant but we miscarry we have no way of knowing what to do. It appears to me that all these conversation topics have become taboo, 50 percent of the population is female therefore, 50 percent of the population menstruates and, if they one day want to may start a family they have 15-20 percent chance of having a miscarriage, yet we mustn’t talk about any of the bad stuff, we have to keep it schtum. I understand that some people don’t want to talk about their loss and I respect their decision. But what about the people who do, who need to talk about things and feel that they can’t. How do they deal with it? I think its time people stopped all this taboo about menstruation and miscarriage. I’m fairly certain that for every person reading this who says, "Ew, that's disgusting, too much information! Keep it to yourself!" there will be a woman sitting at home having to deal with this by herself. Maybe I shouldn’t be sharing this, but why not – if I had been attacked with a knife and been taken to the A and E and had an operation to stop the bleeding I am fairly certain nobody would even think gads Mags, why are you sharing that! So maybe I might want to relay my story, blow-by-blow, maybe I don’t want to re-live it in my head, alone. And maybe if I do, someone who, in the future ever finds themselves in the same situation will feel brave enough to shout for help sooner rather than later.
Everyone processes trauma in a different way, and everyone has the right to share as much or as little as they want or feel comfortable to. I respect that, it’s a given, but shared experience is an enormous comfort, even if you're raw with pain. It's a flicker of sunlight through the storm clouds, a little voice that says, "You're in hell, girl. But you will recover." I was and I have been but I will be ok. Life goes on. My beautiful boys smile when they see me and I am ok. But I am not keeping quiet. Why should I? I didn’t do anything I should feel bad about or I should have to hide.