Hi all
I wanted to share my experience from this week, partly because I think the more we talk about miscarriage generally the better, and partly because selfishly it will be cathartic for me to write it all down.
I’m 36 next month and decided to start TTC last year. It took 7 months which was a bit longer than I thought (first thing in a theme for me about lack of education on women’s health - why aren’t we taught that this is a completely normal time frame?). When I got the positive I did not feel how I thought I would. I had a massive panic and wobble, thought I’d made a terrible mistake. Was in a right state for a couple of weeks, but was swiftly diagnosed with perinatal depression by my friend’s mother who is a perinatal psychologist. I have a history of depression but had only ever heard of postnatal depression - another bit of learning for me. I had to fight a bit to get an urgent Gp appt but had a lovely dr who popped me on citalopram and over the following weeks felt much better.
I had an easy pregnancy, barely any symptoms which was brilliant and was finally getting my head round things and starting to look forward to being a mum when, at 10+1 I began to bleed. I’d just come back from a 5k run in morning so thought maybe I’d just bruised my cervix or something. It was light bleeding only when I wiped really but thick, shades of red with clots. Called EPU but they said they couldn’t do anything but book a scan for next week. So I just got on with things. The following two days the bleeding came and went but was never heavy so to be honest, I didn’t really stress too much. I’m quite pragmatic anyway.
Then last night, I woke up at 1am to mild cramps. I thought maybe it was wind but after few hours tossing and turning, I knew it wasn’t. I got up and when I went to the loo had a gush of blood and big clots. I knew then that it was happening.
Over following 3-4 hours I was on toilet every 10 mins passing blood and clots. To be honest the pain was quite mild, so it was all bearable, just really unpleasant. I had multiple cups of tea, hot water bottle and by 6am the bleeding eased off.
i phone EPU a few times during this, my scan with them is still booked for 10th, but other than that they weren’t very helpful to be honest.
ive spent the day on the sofa and now have period like bleeding. It has all happened quite quickly so I suspect it was a MMC from some weeks back but who knows.
Things I’ve learnt so far from this so far/general thoughts:
- we are terrible at educating young women on pregnancy and all it entails, I’ve learnt more from mums net in past few weeks than all my education combined.
- my local maternity services are clearly cripplingly under resourced; I feel very lucky that my experience has been reasonably easy to deal with - thank god because there seems to be sod all support available from health service.
- pregnancy is not the journey I thought it would be so far so staying open minded is key, I think
- I’m incredibly grateful for my body
- every pregnancy and MC is unique, and that makes it doubly hard to navigate. There aren’t really any answers when you’re in the thick of it, but I’m a firm believer the sharing and talking nearly always helps.
anyway, rambling.
thanks for coming to my Ted Talk and love to you all.