My name is Rachel and I unfortunately have experienced the devastation of baby loss and miscarriage twice.
My most recent experience was while holidaying in Bulgaria in September this year (2023). I was just under two months along and had only just discovered I was pregnant before I went away. On the third day of my holiday, I had experiencing cramping and felt generally unwell. Recognising it as symptoms of an intra uterine infection, which I had experienced before, I was taken to a hospital over an hour away where a doctor simply told me my baby was dead. I was confused as to how he could base this off an ultrasound, I was too early for it to show yet, but I struggled to get answers with no interpreter.
I was then taken to a room where I believed I was being given pain relief, only to wake up to the remnants of an abortion carried out without my consent. The days after I was kept in under observation as results showed I did have an intrauterine infection, only being discharged for my flight home. I was frightened, grieving and struggling to process what had happened to me, with nobody able to explain.
My first loss was earlier this year, in February, when I was admitted with labour like cramping, but also bleeding. Again, the cause was an intrauterine infection, which then developed into sepsis. The infection became too severe causing my waters to break resulting in the death of my baby girl Esme at 18+3.
I then had to deal with the physical and emotional ordeal of having to give birth to my baby who was no longer with us. I still think every day of the quiet dark room I had to birth in, surrounded by the sounds of life coming into the world all around me – knowing I’d never see my daughter take her first breath.
I left the hospital feeling broken, fragile and aching from grief. I held in my hands a little white box filled with keepsakes to remember my daughter, to stand for all the memories I’ll never get to make. I walked out of a hospital where I saw parents taking their babies home and expectant mums rubbing the bellies excitedly as they went in. I stood there with empty arms longing for my baby, praying none of those parents would experience what I did, but questioning, “why us?”
My partner went home that day and hid every sign of hope we had planted in the house. The pram, the cot, the babygrows, and maternity clothes, all tucked away in the attic. Erasing all traces of our naivety that we would be welcoming our little girl home one day.
I didn’t get a maternity leave; we were a few weeks away. Yet I still had to have the medical appointments after, still needed time off to sort funeral arrangements and more crucially needed time off to grieve and seek emotional support for what happened.
You lose a lot when you lose a baby. Your identity, your trust in your body, your sense of belonging in the world. You lose hope, your faith and optimism. I lost friendships, as people drifted away or stopped talking to me like they used to. I stopped being called ‘funny’, ‘kind’ or ‘smart’, and instead became ‘the strong one’. The strongest person they ever knew… ‘most tragic’ is what they mean. I struggled with those breakdowns of communication in the early days, and knew I needed to find support.
I went to my first support group two days after my loss, I got my first counselling appointment two weeks after. I threw myself down every avenue of support I could find to try and pull myself through the devastation baby loss causes. I was comforted to be surrounded by parents who knew and understood what we were going through. There were no platitudes no “it’s one of those things”, “they’re in a better place” or “it wasn’t meant to be.” Instead, I was with people who knew what happened was and is awful and shouldn’t happen to anybody. Who understood that when you grieve a loved one you are comforted by memories, while we are tormented by the ones we have.
On the 28th of February we said goodbye to our daughter, a small white coffin decorated with yellow flowers. There were no eulogies, no prayers. Instead, we sat and wondered what memories would we have had. We’ll never know what her laugh will sound like, whether she had her dad’s eyes or her mom’s nose, whether she’d be as mischievous as her big brother. No, instead we’ll mourn the life she should have had, and always wonder what could have been.
I volunteer now as a parent speaker, to try and help hospitals give better care to parents who go through the heartbreak of baby loss. I hope I can try to spend my life doing anything I can to help prevent baby loss, or at least give better support for when it happens. I want to give my babies a legacy – as they are, and always will be, with me.