Last year, I found out I was having an ectopic after a coil went wrong. After a shock, and lots of really unsympathetic medical staff delaying treatment and swinging between "there's a cystic area - you're fine" to finding out it was an ectopic, was hard. The pain, injection and chemo side effects, the pregnancy hormones staying for months, being told until my HCG was 0 I could rupture and die, starting a new job - it was a lot.
But then it worsened. I thought the first round of excruciating pain and hemorrhaging, passing a sac was awful but ultimately the process was over. Then my HCG levels kept rising, they were always high weirdly. Slowly they evened out. And I think at about 11 weeks (maybe more), at work, I hemorrhaged again through tights, pants etc. I felt at the point of passing out. I barely made it home. Alone on the bathroom floor, I passed a fetus. With it in one hand I called the EPU in shock and they told me to dispose of it and make an appointment if I kept bleeding. All I could say it's a human, with tiny dots for eyes. I sat with it for a long while. I screamed, the pain was unbearable still as more tissue/placenta came out and I flushed it down the toilet in panic, I didn't know what to do. I cried, threw up. Kept this to myself. Weeks later I was told that I had an ectopic and an inuterine pregnancy, which they'd missed. They'd overlooked me without so much as an apology. It's a visceral lonely pain that I do mental gymnastics to keep going. Lately, when I get my period, it triggers the images like PTSD. I've looked at images to find one that looked like the baby I passed to face it. People around were barely supportive. But one friend bought me a memorial and we laid it on the beach near where she lives. All of this goes unspoken about. I've talked to women who've put it in the fridge, did the same as me, some who put it in a box and buried it with their partner. It's traumatizing and I hope I can find a way to make my guilt seem less as time moves. There's so many scared women, silenced without help. It's unfair.