“I’m so sorry there’s no heartbeat.”
6 words… 6 little words and there was no going back.
Shock… Horror… Disappointment… Disbelief… Devastation.
It was the 12 week scan and my partner and I had been feeling hopeful. I was slightly apprehensive about the health checks to make sure the baby was healthy and no abnormalities but more hopeful than anxious. My partner wasn’t concerned in the slightest, he really believed everything would turn out just like we wanted it to. If only…
We went for a scan at 9 weeks and there it was, the happiest, healthiest, strongest little heartbeat. We were elated. Everything looked perfect and the relief, the pure joy and the excitement was indescribable. So when I heard those 6 words my brain wanted to argue “No that cannot be. That’s not what’s meant to happen. This cannot be the way the story ends.”
With no warning signs and still experiencing strong pregnancy symptoms it was hard to process that I’d experienced a missed miscarriage. I’d read a lot about miscarriage over those 10 weeks and from the CBT training I’d done, I knew the percentages and being high risk already at 37 with M.E and heredity high blood pressure I had accepted these things can happen… Or at least I thought I had.
What followed was a blur of nurses, the registrar, the consultant and waiting in between… Lots of waiting. Walking out those hospital doors everything was different. Had it really only been 3 hours since we had walked in with a spring in our step full of happiness and excitement?!
I’ve done lots of specialised training on grief, infertility and baby loss so I thought I knew what to expect. As a very pragmatic person I thought I knew what would come next. I wasn’t prepared for the hormones, the body changes and the grief.
Grief… Such a small word for such an all consuming experience. The devastation, hopelessness and heartbreak was more than I could ever have imagined. The physiological sense of loss, that part of me was missing, that part of me was gone forever. The emotional pain and emptiness. The psychological battle between denial and reality. The uncontrollable tears. The lack of motivation and enjoyment in doing anything. The insomnia.
Experiencing shared grief is a double edged sword. Having someone share that pain, share that loss and know how you feel was really comforting. Words were often not needed because we just understood. Sometimes there aren’t any words there is just a depth of pain and the only thing that can make the moment more bearable is having the person you love wrap their arms around you and hold you. Also true is how challenging it is when you are grieving in different ways, at different times. A chasm opens up and you can feel so distant from each other, so alone. Patience and compassion can be hard to find when you are grieving and yet to support each other you need to dig deeper until you do.
As a CBT Psychotherapist practicing what I preach was harder than I would have liked but then the whole experience was harder than I would have liked. I read a post a week afterwards which I really resonated with:
“I miss me.
The old me.
The happy me.
The bright me.
The smiling me.
The laughing me.
The gone me.”
Reading this gave me permission to accept the reality of how I was feeling. It gave me permission to grieve whilst acknowledging I didn’t want to be grieving, I wanted my happy life back. What also helped was a post I read that said (I’m paraphrasing): when your heart breaks into tiny pieces it heals one tiny piece at a time. That really helped me to accept the grieving process would take time but eventually the wound would heal and although it would always be there it wouldn’t cause me the same depth of pain.