The Circle

An update and words I have never shared before that mean the world to me as did my first pregnancy. This is for you little one.

Image by Evie Shaffer/Unsplash

I can feel a circle completing. One that started three years ago to the day. Losing my first pregnancy set me on a long, arduous path to where I find myself now — just days away from the chance to transfer our only embryo. I say ‘chance’ because having got the furthest ever towards a transfer (I have four cancelled ones behind me) I may stumble at two final hurdles; a lining that may have reduced and an embryo that might not survive the thaw.

These are slim possibilities but I appreciate they can happen because I’ve been in the tiny disappointing statistic so many times now. I swim in hope, realism, magic and logic. I ebb and flow between what I know to be true and what truth I can try to un-know.

Although I have written extensively about my conception journey I have never before shared in full what I wrote in the aftermath of my first miscarriage — the beginning of it all, the fork in the proverbial road. Now I find myself completing the circle it started I wanted to honour that baby and the woman I was by sharing the reality of that time. This was before I knew I had diminished ovarian reserve, raised killer cells, that I would miscarry again and fail multiple rounds of IVF. An innocent time in the grand scheme of things.

Reading back I have been shocked by the depth of the fault lines, the trauma I endured feeling like it was okay because it would only be the once — that it would all be fine the next time.

Well, it’s the next time after the next time after the next countless times. But here is my truth fresh as the days it came to pass.

Jade x

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Suddenly

Having been lucky enough to conceive within the first month of trying for a baby, my miscarriage began as suddenly as I had fallen pregnant. 

At a gestation of 8 weeks, whilst at work as a midwife, I was confronted by the vibrancy of claret blood against white tissue, dripping onto pale porcelain. As my clinical knowledge kicked in, hope diminished as rapidly as the blue plus sign had appeared, two months earlier. 

Thankfully, due to early pandemic shielding I was working from an office alone, answering a patient phone line. In a rising panic, I called Joe and told him what was happening. Although he had no option but to defer to my greater knowledge, he gently urged me to remember that the bleed I’d had a month before, had shown a normal scan. But I knew this was different.

Unlike most women experiencing bleeding in early pregnancy, I was within a building that had ultrasound machines, and the contacts to get a scan straight away.

There aren’t many perks to being an NHS midwife, but in a time of reproductive crisis, a transvaginal probe with a colleague on the other end of it, is one of them.

I deliberated the need for this violation, and with no pain or heavy bleeding continuing, I decided against creating any further distressing memories where I would need to continue to work. 

Then did just that. 

I knew no amount of resting up at home would stop this process, if it was, in fact starting. In between patient calls, I contacted my local unit and was given the next available non-perk appointment, in four days time. Ominously, over the next ten hours I spoke with three women going through exactly the same thing as me, despite the phone line only being for women to use past 20 weeks. I was receiving the universal message loud and clear. I arranged their scans and wished them well, in a way I never had before.

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The Long Weekend of Limbo

The experience of what so many women endure, waiting days for an early pregnancy scan, was an emotional strain I was under prepared for. 

I woke up the next morning and immediately sensed that, like a sad bouncy castle left out in the garden over night, my breasts had deflated as I slept. 

It set the tone for the next few days as I became obsessed, searching for evidence to prove one way or the other what was happening, as my body was not declaring it either way. It was like being on an emotional see-saw. Thoughts of it all being okay and motherhood rose me into the air, but as soon as I reached the top of that positivity, a dose of reality brought me crashing back down to earth. My browsing history was a mixture of statistical research papers and Mumsnet threads. I was caught between my profession and my panic.

In an attempt to distract me, Joe took us on a country drive. This was just as the first UK lockdown was easing. We hadn’t left our home town together on a day out for over two months. It was strange to be out doing ‘normal things’, made even stranger when I found myself plagued by thoughts of our possibly un-developing baby, along for the ride. 

The rest of the weekend was a blur of anxiety, angry outbursts and tears. I agonised for hours, before calling in sick for the two shifts I was meant to be working.

I was in a strange mindset that, if I was going to miscarry soon, I’d need a few weeks off work to recover, so I should work until I knew for certain – that I’d feel a fraud if I took time off, and it turned out to be fine.

The guilt of being off sick when you work for the NHS deserves its own research paper. Looking back now, I can’t believe I thought about it longer than even a few seconds. I could of miscarried at any moment and was living in pregnancy purgatory, going to work as a midwife would have been of no benefit to me, least of all the pregnant women, who trusted me to make decisions from a place of focus and clarity. 

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An Awful Mistake to Make

The day of my scan finally arrived. I was once again alone, Joe not permitted to come with me due to the pandemic. 

With no sign of what we term in obstetrics, a ‘complete miscarriage’, I was sat socially distanced in a ward, I had worked on as a student midwife. I contemplated the paradox of something missing needing to be complete, listening to the sound of the bell for breastfeeding help — the room fragranced by the smell of toast, drifting through from the postnatal ward next door. 

The sonographer took her time, her silence confirming more than her eventual words of ‘I’m sorry but there’s nothing there’. The screen would not be turned towards me this time. 

Somewhere between the flickering heartbeat I’d seen a month prior and that moment —  you had left us. I asked if she knew when this had happened, which of course she could not determine, but to me it felt a lot like when you find out you’ve been cheated on. I immediately wanted to know how long I had been living a lie. How long, exactly, had I been duped by my body and the hormones still tricking me into nurturing your presence? I grappled with the terms of your existence, now only defined by the fact that you would not. Another paradox.

In that instant, the distance between you and I was suddenly no longer a linear calendar countdown to a Christmas week birth. In early pregnancy loss, one light year may as well be a thousand, for just like the furthest stars in the night sky, my pregnancy no longer existed but had continued to shine through my skin, thicker hair and the curves of going up a cup size. 

Suddenly, I found myself thinking about the two new bras I’d just bought in Marks & Spencer, as well as a floaty summer dress in a size bigger than normal. I had envisaged in the shop mirror, how it would fall against my burgeoning body in a few months time. I reasoned it would probably still look okay, in a non-pregnant capacity. ‘Oversized dresses are in’ — I thought, as I fixated on the cartoon alphabet letters, stuck around the top of the wall in the scan room. The sonographer asked if I wanted to avoid the waiting room and go somewhere more private with my empty uterus. ‘No, it’s fine, I’m a midwife’, I replied.

Next, I saw the nurse to discuss what would happen to ensure my miscarriage completed. The choices were to wait for mother nature to finish up her prerogative or elect to be medically managed in the next few days. I knew I wanted the drugs, purely to gain some sense of control.

She came into the room, sat down, looked at my file and exclaimed – ‘Well, everything looks fine!’. After a relief filled millisecond, within which, I thought it perfectly possible the sonographer had made a mistake, I explained — much to her horror — that, unfortunately she was looking at my scan from a month ago.

Maybe I should of felt more outrage at such an unprofessional mistake, but I knew how she would feel. To be the nurse who told the miscarrying midwife her pregnancy was fine, would be a professional regret carried home with her later that day.

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‘Being Okay’: My New Occupation

Two days later, it was bittersweet to experience the power of my body obliging me with a textbook medical management of miscarriage. My grief, however would follow no such formula. 

I recall in the immediate aftermath, a sense of being dumped back into a body and identity I didn’t want anymore, like a time traveller suddenly dragged through dimensions, further and further away from the future they must reach. 

I explained to friends the absurdity of having spent thirty-five years happily being ‘me’ but now, after just two months of pregnancy, my identity was lost in a fog. I ached for the overwhelming peace I’d felt in that precious pregnant time with you  — because even in the midst of a global pandemic, nothing else mattered. All of life’s stressors had suddenly slipped over me like silk. That level of peace is addictive. I have a photo that captures that time, my new marker of joy, perfectly. Me in a bikini in the garden, Joe resting his hand on my belly — our smiles wide in the sun for our secret sunshine. I don’t look at it often.

I had a month off of work, then returned to the exact office I was in that day. The only place to escape for a few minutes to compose myself, if I was upset, was the same toilet. It became an undeniable fact, that the absolute worst career to have whilst experiencing pregnancy loss is midwifery. Nothing fit me comfortably anymore. I started therapy after two months, where I was able to unpick my automatic coping mechanism; tracing it right back to the moment I refused help and care from the sonographer — based upon being a midwife. 

I thought it was my job to be ‘okay’.

Unwittingly, I laid the foundations, right then of how I would approach my loss over the rest of 2020. Coupled with the feeling of it being my professional duty to cope, I had vivid memories of other women’s loss, that I experienced with them as their midwife. I had over a decade of other people’s grief ready to diminish and invalidate my own. 

The opposite was also hard to escape. I’d spent my entire adult life completely immersed in the exclusive club of motherhood. I was acutely aware of all that I had missed out on – in full technicolour. I was left with a sense of being the supportive pace setter for others in their marathon to motherhood, considering the possibility of never crossing that finish line myself.

There were times in the aftermath of losing you that I wished I’d never been pregnant, the weight of possibility was so heavy. I would take the paper evidence of your existence from my bedside drawer and look at it a lot.

‘Single intrauterine pregnancy, fetal heart activity seen’. 

Then, one day I read something fascinating in the book ‘The Making Of You’. The author Katharina Vestre detailed how the DNA of a baby can remain within the mother forever.

A amazing fact that gave a strange comfort to me that you had, in a small unexpected way, stayed with me after all.

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