The In-Between of Pregnancy Loss
“I found out I was pregnant, and then 10 days later found out I was miscarrying...”
“My baby is the size of a blueberry by the time I recognise their presence. For 6 weeks and 4 days, they have been busy settling in, now limbs are beginning to bud. We haven’t been trying, but my partner and I feel settled and ready in a way we never have before so we are delighted. Immediately I know two things:
It is too soon to get excited, too much can go wrong this early.
If this little soul can sense my feelings, I only want joy and hope for them.
So I prop up the positive test by my monitor where I can look at it all day long. I call my friends and family. I buy books. I don’t wait to celebrate.
My baby is the size of a raspberry, growing a big ol’ brain in week eight, so I eat fish for every meal to help them out. I fall asleep at 9:30pm, and I dream about our first Christmas as a family of three. I’m a lifelong junk food fiend but my baby craves hardboiled eggs and I’m already proud of them.
My baby is the size of a green olive and week nine has arrived without incident when the bleeding starts. This can be normal, say the books. This could be the end, howls the internet. I call a doctor and decide to believe him when he says it’s probably nothing.
“The world did not separate neatly, and pregnancy loss did not happen in an instant. ”
The blood is pink, then it is brown and gritty like coffee grinds and I believe the doctor still. In three days the blood is red, livid, screaming red and I no longer trust that doctor over my own body. I think at first that this is a miscarriage but the rush of blood, the immediate hollowing or the slow tidal pull back of life within me doesn’t quite happen.
What happens is an out of hours GP tells me that my pregnancy test is negative and the world cracks in two: the incredulous joy of Before Loss, and the bitter despair of After Loss. But then the doctor tells me that the chemicals in my blood are wrong and maybe, well, was I sure this wasn’t a late period?
Everything fractures again, and I wait alone for five hours in A&E for more tests while I wonder if my baby is a hallucination. I have been feeding my period fish, planning its first tiny Halloween costume. It’s horrifying and humiliating in near equal measure until a gynaecologist finally calls me through and tells me the GP was wrong about the not-being-pregnant thing but right about the loss part. My first feeling is relief that I haven’t had a break with reality. I have the horrible clarity of being in the After now. I go home and put away my positive test. I try to avoid the fridge, which bursts at the seams with kippers, salmon, fish fingers, cod fillets.
There are more tests, every other day we drive back out to the hospital. It’s just routine, I think, except the results aren’t as expected. The pregnancy chemicals that should be going down are creeping up and the doctors refer to my pregnancy in the current tense and when I correct them, they correct ME, because I’m not in the After. There is no clean cleaving of the world, only the smeared carnage of an In-Between. Then on a third internal ultrasound they finally find my baby.
My baby is smaller than a grain of rice and they are lodged in my right fallopian tube. My baby will never grow limbs, the fish never reached a nascent brain stem. I have a choice now, surgery or an injection to ‘resolve’ the situation. Except it isn’t a choice because if I don’t do anything (and I don’t want to) then in its attempts to grow, my baby will rupture my organs and I will bleed to death. So I ‘choose’ the injection and I feel guilty because loss isn’t a logical place. In-Between doesn’t have rules or protocols, there is no clear cut moment at which I will pass over into After. Inside me, my baby withers and withers. I bleed every day for weeks and never forget that it is life leaving me. I am neither pregnant nor not-pregnant.
“I bleed every day for weeks and never forget that it is life leaving me. I am neither pregnant nor not-pregnant.”
I curse myself for every flare of stress that could have brought this on, for every cruel word spoken in the heat of the moment, for every unkind thought, because clearly I am too bad a person to be allowed a baby. I am viciously jealous of pregnant women and sensitive about any mention of babies. I can tell no one because I know I’m the problem, and also because no one knows how to handle the In-Between. No one expects it to be a prolonged period of weeks or months of guilt, pain, anger, grief. The world did not separate neatly, and pregnancy loss did not happen in an instant. That we had the unexpected sweetness and hope for such a brief period before spending months in a purgatory seems the cruelest of all outcomes, but my story is not unusual. In truth, though my body is adjusting back to normal and I am no longer berating myself or wracked with guilt over what happened, I’m not sure I’m fully in the After. All I know is that at least in the Before, we celebrated.”
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We are forever grateful to Rebecca for her vulnerability in sharing her experience in this piece and how eloquently she was able to convey this. If you’re struggling with miscarriage, we recommend following @miscarriageassociation, @miscarriage.stories, @kimberlyroutley, @ihadamiscarriage, @the_worstgirlgang_ever and @zoeadelle.