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A tricky subject…
Today I’m coming clean. It’s time to use the word often whispered in public, or even not spoken at all: miscarriage.
In the last post I shared some information about first trimester pregnancy. It was open and lucid and overflowing with joy about the upcoming gifts. And then, the very common, and almost disturbingly taboo subject of miscarriage, well… it happened.
This is a post I have waited more than a month to write because I don’t wish to judge those who choose not to discuss this. It is private, extremely private. Though one thing kept popping into my mind over the past few weeks. This information needs to be shared.
FIrst of all, let’s get the stats out of the way. Somewhere between 25% and 33% of pregnancies end in miscarriage (yep, that’s one in every three or four), and that’s just the ones we know about. Many go unreported. And although this is fairly common knowledge, when I awoke at five in the morning to cramps and light bleeding nobody seemed to be able to give me much information. We went to the emergency department at the local hospital and my partner and I were left in a room to let it run it’s course with very little support or assistance. In fact I have since found out we were lucky it was quiet or it could all have gone down in the waiting room.
There’s absolutely no blame here for the hospital, they are completely within their rights to put me in the order that triage dictates. I was at minimal risk of complication and there is absolutely nothing they could do except let it happen naturally. There’s no stopping something like this, your body is in control.
This does not however help the person, in this case me, who is experiencing the miscarriage. I was left in a room with a lot of misunderstanding and a massive lack of knowledge.
So that’s why I’m tackling the taboo and have decided to share some information for those who need it, hoping to help others. I’ve made a personal decision to talk about it as openly as I could muster, to help increase understanding around this subject.
Here are the things I did not know before that might have helped
1. There was quite a lot of pain, very much like contractions normally felt during delivery. I guess this makes sense if you think that the body is essentially doing the same thing.
2. There was quite a lot of bleeding, however this was not enough to confirm the miscarriage. After 6 hours at the hospital early Saturday morning and several heavy bouts of blood loss, no confirmation of the miscarriage could be given until an ultrasound was carried out on Monday morning.
3. Your emotional well being in an emergency room is pretty much up to you. If you are concerned that you are experiencing miscarriage and considering going to the hospital take someone strong and reassuring with you to help you get through it because the staff there are busy taking care of everyone’s body with very little time to act as psychologists or social workers.
4. I was extremely tired for about a week following and need a lot of rest and recuperation. It is worth getting some help from family and friends.
5. A great tip if you have told people about your pregnancy and don’t know how to tell them it’s no longer, is to ask a friend to let people know. I asked someone at work and a close friend at home to spread the word and it really helped a lot.
Most of all, this experience taught me to respect my body as a system that inherently knows what it needs to do. There was something wrong and despite all my best efforts, the pregnancy was not viable, not able to continue. As sad as that may be, in the long run it is undoubtedly the best thing for both the unborn baby and for us.
I hope that with love and with understanding people can experience this difficult process with greater knowledge and less shame. It is a perfectly natural thing, just ask anyone that has lived a long time and they will confirm it. Those oldies really know what’s going on. And as with most things that are hard to swallow, life somehow goes on regardless.
Once I started to talk about it, I was amazed at how many others had suffered in silence. I hope this post goes some small way towards keeping this conversation going, it’s an important one for women and men to have just in case we or someone we love might experience it.
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