In April of this year, I experienced a ‘missed miscarriage’. I had no signs or symptoms that anything was wrong with my pregnancy (except for high blood pressure, which the nurses didn’t seem overly concerned with at the time).
It was at our 12 week scan that our whole world came crashing down. As soon as our baby showed up on the screen I knew something was wrong, they were far too tiny. I tried to convince myself that maybe they measured wrong and maybe our baby was just younger than we anticipated; maybe the machine was having trouble that day; maybe our baby was laid funny… No.
“Have you had any pains or bleeding?” – that was the question that told me everything I didn’t want to hear. There was no heartbeat. My baby had held onto me for almost a month. They had passed at 8 weeks and 4 days.
We had a couple of appointments after our scan to talk about how the removal of the pregnancy would go – I was to turn up on the Monday, take a tablet and that was it… But we didn’t get to Monday.
That Friday night after our last appointment (sorting out consent, details, etc.) we went home. We got into bed at around 2am-ish and I suddenly began feeling a pain like no other. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my entire life. My husband had to sit there and search how to safely collect the remains at home in case of any emergencies. We had no idea what was to come.
After a while the pain eased and I decided to head off to sleep. The second I closed my eyes, it happened. It was like someone had poured water all over the bottom half of my body. I rushed into the bathroom and as soon as I pulled my pants down I saw them on my sanitary pad… My baby.
We weren’t expecting to see anything like we did, in fact, I was mainly expecting blood clots but I could make out their eyes, hands, feet, head, everything. They fit right into the palm of our hands.
We soon realised the horror wasn’t over when I looked down and blood was just pouring out of me. We rang 111 and they told us to get straight to A&E.
45 minutes I sat there bleeding through my 2 pads, my underwear, my thick joggers, the pad on my chair, and the seat I sat on. We begged them to get someone to see me but they didn’t realise how serious of a condition I was in.
Eventually, I got rushed into cedar ward, a closed ward, so I was left alone and my husband was left panicking in the waiting room. An hour earlier we were stood in our bathroom staring at our baby and now we’d been ripped apart and I was in critical condition.
I felt faint and ended up on a drip. The doctor did a small operation to remove as much tissue as possible (but it didn’t fix the situation). The bleeding slowed that night.
I tried my hardest to stay awake, in fear that if I fell to sleep I wouldn’t wake.
My husband had to drive home and collect our baby’s remains and clean the blood up from almost every surface I’d touched earlier, all alone.
I was discharged the following morning after a scan to confirm the pregnancy was over, another horror I had to face alone.
My husband and I slept all day, exhausted. I awoke around 5pm to another gut wrenching feeling. It had happened again. I went to the toilet and tried to act like it was manageable, I really didn’t want to be away from my husband at this point.
The bleeding began speeding up again and not long after, I found myself back in cedar ward, alone. I will never get the picture out of my head of the amount of blood that came out of me in that hospital bed. It’s too graphic to describe in detail but I was sat in a pool of blood and clots. The doctors operated on me again, twice this time and injected something into my thigh to ease the bleeding.
Thankfully, it worked. But I came so close to not leaving that hospital twice in less than 48 hours. I suffered with awful nightmares and struggled to sleep. Even now, months on, I panic when my period starts. The trauma from the blood loss alone was overwhelming, never mind grieving for our poor baby too.
My husband and I are both 21, university students, childhood sweethearts and have always wanted children. We are now terrified at the thought of me getting pregnant again.
The doctors, nurses and my husband saved my life – if it weren’t for the professionals being fast working and vigilant, I may not have been here to tell this story today. If it weren’t for my husband’s support, the same would apply.