Miscarriage: Let’s talk about it

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

Miscarriage. Here is a word we grow up hearing thrown around every now and again. Perhaps our aunt had a miscarriage when we were kids. Or, maybe, our parents experienced one after we were born. As we grow older we hear of colleagues and friends who were trying to have a baby and “had a miscarriage”. And, every so often, someone in the public eye sheds light on their experience with pregnancy loss.

The general reaction is “u ijja… at least they know they can get pregnant”. But the severity of what these people  - the woman and her partner - are going through is only known to those who really experience the dark reality behind the word.

In my case it was 2016. I was only five weeks pregnant - very early days. Nothing compared to what other women experience when they miscarry later on in their pregnancy.  They would have heard their baby’s heart beat. Some even carried the baby full term. I can’t begin to imagine the heart ache - although I lived it as a child when my mother had still born twins who remain my younger brothers-in-heaven.

And yet, in those few weeks, I had imagined my child’s life. I had dreamed of a future where my husband and I were parents.

So when I bled – that Christmas morning – and when I ended up in hospital and was told that I was probably miscarrying and had to check my hormone levels to know for sure, and when the cramps started and I had to digest the reality – it was not only the loss of a child I was mourning… it was the loss of a life I had imagined unwind in my mind.

I fell into a dark spiral for a couple of days as the hormones inside me resettled. That was when I realised the power of hormones on us women. As they settled, I returned to normal. The darkness lifted. But the sadness lingered.

For weeks and months I could not bear to meet dear friends with their children. I hated feeling that way. But I knew my friends would understand.

Then I started talking about it. And everywhere I went – be it at work with colleagues, or with different circles of friend – there were one or two women who had experienced it.

We spoke about the darkness. We spoke about how lightly the word is used. We spoke about the death of a dream. The guilt triggered by the what-ifs: what if I hadn’t eaten that, carried that, done that…. We spoke about the support of our husbands. Many shared the added emotional pain of waiting in the hospital’s gynae outpatients surrounded by other happily pregnant women.

Back then, in 2016, I had written about my experience in a personal blog that never saw the light of day. This was what I wrote:

MOTHER FOR FIVE WEEKS

When I look back at the experience, it feels both distant and close. I was a mother for five weeks. I felt life inside me. Yes. I did. My body felt different. It felt... full.

Now there are times when I feel the emptiness. Maybe it's because it's relatively still early. It's been a month and a half since the day I bled.

On some level it feels like it's been much longer. I feel healed. But there are times when it comes back.

Now I hope. I hope that I will one day be a mother of a healthy child I can hug and raise. It's scary. But I guess that's normal for every parent. I hope. That's all I can do while I remind myself that I'm just another person in the bigger scheme of things.

I went on to have a child. I feel blessed in that sense. This time during the pregnancy I did not allow myself to think too far ahead, especially since I was in my mid-30s. It was a survival thing.

And even after that I have met women who had a miscarriage – or more than one. Or who lost babies through different circumstances. For some it was their first pregnancy. For some their only pregnancy. For some it happened as they tried to have a second child and it was equally devastating despite the comments of “at least you have one child”.

Because it is devastating. According to the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, globally about 12–15 percent of recognised pregnancies end in miscarriage. Studies show that after a miscarriage 30 – 50 percent of women experience anxiety and 10 –15 percent experience depression, typically lasting up to four months. As outlined by the UK’ s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence, grief following miscarriage is “comparable in nature, intensity, and duration” to grief reactions in people suffering other types of major loss.

Miscarriage.

It is not a word to be taken lightly. Even though each year about 300 women miscarry in Malta and Gozo - that’s 300 broken hearts… 600 when we include the fathers.  

And each woman and man has the right to feel broken.

Unless you experience it it’s difficult to understand how you mourn the loss of someone you never met - someone who was never born and who technically never existed on paper. I felt it at five weeks, let alone later on.

No matter how tiny the embryo was – the loss felt huge – and every year on a specific day in August I still think about it.

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