No heartbeat

Ah - you found me. Thank you.

  Time is a currency, and your spending moments reading this blog gives a sense of value to my thoughts, so whether you stumbled here by accident, or sought me out, or got sent here by the magical whisperings of connections, I welcome and appreciate your company.  

Momentous things happen in just seconds…. the build up and ramifications take much longer, sometimes several life times, but the actual event is usually as fleeting as sneeze. So fast, in fact, that often it just fits into a regular day, and only later surfaces as a momentous occasion that deserves a second look. So I want to revisit some seconds that have shaped my life, and give them the gravity, and words, they deserve.

I hope you can relate to that feeling.   Please be generous with me - I may get messy, or confused.  I may even anger the grammar police.  I may annoy without intending to.  I see those as positives. Anyway, let's see how we go, and if we are compatible.  

"There's no heartbeat."  Her voice was flat, with a hard edge.  It wasn't her fault she had to tell me this news, although I think she resented it, judging from her phone call to the gynaecologist who had sent me to her.  She had turned the monitor away from my view, so I lay on the examination table, a human coffin, willing the tiny odd looking being inside me to come back to life.  It had been the Pregnancy from Hell.  I vomited every day, had to have a slew of blood tests, knew that this foetus did not match all the health markers of  "normal pregnancies" and there was the complication of placenta previa.  In fact, I had been sent to this specialist to have a detailed scan to check for Down syndrome, as I had summarily cancelled the amniocentesis procedure an hour before it was going to be performed.  I longed for this baby with an indescribable ache, so adding any risk of miscarriage or injury scared me.  (By the way, my cancelling a procedure I had been told to do was a huge act of courage on my part.  I usually did what I was told in those days.)

The death of an unborn child is often an unacknowledged trauma.  And when this happened - 20 long years ago- it was not deemed to be worthy of external grief.  Although, as anyone who has been through this sort of ordeal knows, that grief doesn't disappear just because we are not meant to be feeling it.   It, ironically, grows inside you until you are ready to deliver it.  And often that takes longer than 9 months.

The body had to be removed from me the following day.  At 17 weeks, the little being was fully formed, had to be broken into bits before expulsion. And then, an hour or so later, we were sent home to get on with life and deal with the trauma silently and politely.  People dismissed our experience with statistics (one in eight pregnancies is thought to end in miscarriage - usually before the 12 week mark) or with pseudo care ("you can have another one") or even with religious jargon ("It was not in God's plan").  So silence was easier to deal with.  It is a personal loss. 

It took just seconds to hear that the baby had died.  It has taken me years to process.

(It was not my first miscarriage, or my last pregnancy....it is just the place I wanted to start this blog.)

This is our only picture of Bug, taken at 12 weeks, when she was happily tumbling and dancing so much the radiographer didn't think she would stay still long enough for us to have an unfuzzy picture.