GUEST BLOG BY LAURA
**Trigger Warning** Missed Miscarriage
Our Little Sparrow – 28th November 2018
Due August 2019
I was so excited when we found out I was pregnant for the first time. I kept doing test after test to ensure our little peanut was still safe and snug, but to also keep reminding me that this was reality! Our little peanut was real and we had made a baby! It was a dream come true.
We found out quite early around 3.5 weeks so kept it quiet, but after a week or two we decided to tell immediate family, purely because the excitement was too much for me to keep from them. They were all so happy for us and I felt so proud of our news.
I came home one evening and had a feeling that something wasn’t quite right, so I headed to the bathroom and could see I had bled a little. I screamed for my partner in a panic thinking the worst! He reassured me and once I was calm, I confided in my older sister, to which she said “oh don’t worry, a bit of blood is normal!.. it’s probably implantation bleeding” I tried to feel convinced but deep down I wasn’t. So the next day I rang the EPU to which they advised me that there was no need to get checked out as a bit of bleeding was normal and if I experienced any bad pain or heavy bleeding to call back.
I got to around 7 weeks and I was still spotting here and there. At this point, I felt so anxious that I had made a few more calls to the unit in which they advised me of the same thing. I kept doing pregnancy tests to reassure myself our little peanut was still there and even at 8 weeks it was still all positive. At this point my family and friends told me to relax, everything was fine and the scan would soon come round and we would feel even more reassured.
Week 10 I went for my first check up to fill out paperwork and started to feel excited that in another two weeks I’d see our baby for the first time on the monitor. Each night I’d softly pat and rub my tummy and say a little night night. Week 12 couldn’t come soon enough! I even started taking pictures of my tummy for bump progress!
So the day came for our first scan. In I went and lay down with my partner next to me…
The sonographer started the scan and I looked away clutching at my partners hand.. there was complete silence while she was moving the control all over my tummy, it was then that I knew that my gut feeling had been right all along! She explained that I could need an internal scan, so she tried that just in case I wasn’t quite 12 weeks.. she did the internal but still there was nothing. An empty womb. She then asked if I had completed a pregnancy test. I felt mortified and so ashamed and embarrassed to have to answer that question! I had tested about 10 or more times on a weekly basis up to 8 weeks and made anxious calls to the EPU.
The tears were flooding and I felt like I was on another planet, everything was fuzzy and confusing. My mind was a blur and I just felt like someone had swept the rug from underneath me. I was taken to a side room with my partner to go through some questions and to be comforted. I remember that I kept reassuring the nurse that all the tests were positive and I couldn’t understand why this had happened to us. I felt so empty and ashamed not to mention feeling like I had let my partner down because our peanut was my responsibility to grow and look after and it all went wrong.
I was told that I’d had a silent miscarriage which occurs quite early on. I’d been bleeding on and off for a while rather than an obvious heavy bleed.
Walking out of the hospital to go home was so strange. I felt so lost and empty. I couldn’t stop apologising for losing our peanut. The tears and sobbing wouldn’t stop and don’t think stopped for a few days. One thing that a few people told me was “oh how many weeks were you? At least you weren’t very far along” to me, hearing those comments didn’t help. It made me feel worse, as though for that small time that we started our pregnancy journey wasn’t important. It becomes part of you from day one right?
My partner was brilliant, he didn’t leave my side and I could see that he was hurting with how much I was hurting. One thing that came out of all of this was our ever more closeness. I didn’t shut him out, I spoke out to him and he listened and he spoke out to me and we held each other and continued to do so. The pain slowly drifts away and you learn to get on with things day to day but it’s something we will never forget.
Since our loss, we have been lucky and fortunate enough to have a baby girl and she is perfect in every way. She’s our little pickle and I shall be forever grateful that we were able to bring her into the world.
