My emotional rollercoaster
After a normal pregnancy resulting in her daughter, Kayleigh had a molar pregnancy and then a miscarriage.
I don’t know if I’ll ever decide to fall pregnant again or not. I’m full of dread every time I even think about maybe trying again.
The past 2.5 years has been a rollercoaster of emotional highs and almighty lows. Being young and healthy you assume falling pregnant will be a breeze, especially when you’ve already managed to have a perfect little girl. So when my partner and I decided we’d like a little brother or sister for our little girl we never thought we’d end up on the journey we have been on.
After having tests for endometriosis and having a routine ultra sound scan when I was told I was in fact 6 weeks pregnant, we were elated. Going from thinking we may have some issues conceiving again to in fact being told we already had a little miracle cooking was amazing. However, from the moment I was told I was pregnant I knew I was never going to meet my baby, and when I started spotting and cramping 10 days before my 12 week scan whatever anyone said could reassure me.
When I look back now I wish I had demanded an early scan but when my midwife is telling me “some woman sometimes have spotting” and my GP examines me and tells me everything looks fine what else am I supposed to think. But as a woman I knew something wasn’t right and my suspicions were confirmed when the day before my 12 week scan, I was putting the Christmas decorations up with my 3 year old when the cramps hit me like a bus and the bleeding was extremely heavy.
I will never forget that night, being admitted to hospital and told I was having a miscarriage and having to decide whether to have the D&C or go home and wait for it to pass naturally. Everything I had been planning for the past 6 weeks just shattered in minutes. How do I make that kind of decision? I didn’t want to make that decision, I wanted to go home and pray that some kind of miracle would happen and I’d wake up and everything would be ok. Little did I know that wasn’t the end of the problem.
A week after the D&C the doctor’s call to say I’d had a molar pregnancy and I would need to send off urine and blood samples to Charing Cross hospital every two weeks and we wouldn’t be able to try again for 6 months to a year. From that moment on I decided that was it I can’t go through this again and I didn’t want any more children. I lost 2 stone in weight, I was signed off work and I was having regular panic attacks. I’d hit rock bottom, but I felt like I was over reacting because I knew how common miscarriages were. I felt like people were thinking ‘oh come on snap out of it. It happens to hundreds of women every day’ So I kept most of my emotions bottled up until now and decided to write down how I felt as I’m sure every woman who has gone through this has felt the exact same.
On my 25th birthday in 2013 I had the best birthday present ever, a positive pregnancy test!! But once again the feeling of never meeting this baby again was back. I put it down to because of what happened 18 months ago. After already having one miscarriage and being told I didn’t have endometriosis I really thought that the first miscarriage was just one of those things that happened and I was fit and healthy and there was no reason why it would happen again. Until, the day before my dating scan at about 9pm I go to the toilet and I’m spotting again.I cannot describe the feeling I had. Everything just seemed to go black, I felt sick and everything I felt 18 months ago I was feeling all over again. I went to bed telling myself it’ll be fine in the morning.
My father came to pick my little girl up in the morning and wished me luck and with a smile on my face I waved goodbye to them and drove to the hospital. I remember sitting in the ante natal waiting room with all these pregnant woman and their partners looking excited about seeing their little miracle for the first or second time. So once again I go for the ultra sound and I can see on her face that it’s not good. She apologises and says she can only see the remainders of a pregnancy sack but no foetus. I can feel my eyes welling up and I can hardly see her face through the tears anymore. Why me, why again? What didn’t I do right? And then I feel guilty again because some women go through this 10 times before they finally have a successful pregnancy and here I am crying because it’s happened twice. So the nurses wanted to do a pregnancy test just in case it was too early to tell on the scan. So I spend an our drinking cup after cup of water and I just cannot wee for the life of me!! I remember just standing alone in the corridor crying thinking today was not supposed to turn out like this. It was supposed to be a happy day and I could go home and tell my partner how far gone I was and a due date etc. But here I am in a waiting room full of happily pregnant women trying to wee into a cup.
I had a few blood tests over the next couple of days to make sure the pregnancy hormone was decreasing as it should and they confirmed I’d had a miscarriage.
All the emotions I’d finally dealt with over the past 18 months had all come back and I just didn’t want to deal with this anymore and honestly the only thing keeping me going was my daughter and my partner. You start to blame yourself, you feel like you can’t seem to do what a woman should be able to do. I felt like I was letting my partner down because I couldn’t give him another child like I should be able to do.
I decided to go to the doctors to see if there was anything they could do to maybe try and find out if there was a reason I’d had two miscarriages or whether it was just one of those things. But when I was told I would need to have had at least 3 miscarriages before they would do anything I just remember thinking why would you do that to a woman? Going through it once is hell but letting a woman go through it another 2 times before they’ll look into possible problems is in my opinion cruel.
I don’t know if I’ll ever decide to fall pregnant again or not. I’m full of dread every time I even think about maybe trying again. I’d love to give my daughter a sibling and the thought of being only 26 and never having that weird but amazing feeling of a baby growing and moving in your tummy is heart breaking but I suppose never say never.
In April 2013 my partner done an amazing thing and ran the London Marathon for The Miscarriage Association. I cannot describe the pride I had for him that day. The thought of the money he raised to help people like ourselves was amazing. It was an emotional day and probably quite a painful one for him! But I am so very proud of him and everyone else who ran for the charity and truly hope the money has made a difference to people.
Everybody deals with things in different ways and there is no right or wrong way to feel after a miscarriage. But I do feel it is something people should feel like they can speak openly about it. I have found out quite a few people I know have had miscarriages in the past that I never knew about before. As my mother would say, “a problem shared is a problem halved.”
Kayleigh Ellis