Trigger Warning - miscarriage
*this article originally appeared on the Tommy's blog*
Back in April I suffered a traumatic miscarriage. Well, aren’t they always traumatic? But the trauma of my already traumatic experience was compounded by the lack of empathy, care and advice I received from the hospital where I rushed to on Easter Monday. It was our first baby. We’d spent the past year umming and ahhing about when we wanted to have kids. But Covid changed all that. We thought “what are we waiting for?” and were so excited when we fell pregnant straight away. Sadly, I miscarried at 12+3 although the hospital suspected that the baby had stopped growing around 5 or 6 weeks. The day the spotting began my bump had even popped out more as though to reassure me.
What followed, aside from the awful experience in the hospital, was me naively navigating three weeks of unimaginable physical pain and bleeding, followed by a small break of four days and then a wonderful two week menstrual cycle, which left me with a slightly irrational (or completely understandable) fear of bleeding in public for a few months and the need to protect myself at all times with a sanitary pad. But once the physical pain has subsided, you are left with the mental and emotional pain. As a wellbeing practitioner I tapped into the tools that I use on a daily basis - Reiki, meditation, tarot and journaling. I joined all the online forums to try and get information and make sense of what had happened. I spoke to countless other women and read countless other stories in these forums that had a similar theme - no support from the medical professionals, and having been made to feel like they and their babies didn’t matter.