Claudia's story: 'I couldn't stand anyone being nice to me'"When it happens to you, you feel as if you are the only person in the world going through so much pain and suffering, but if you are actually brave enough to talk about it you find so many other people out there, also bottling up pain and suffering... My mum had a miscarriage before she had me, but she has never been able to talk to me about it – not even when it happened to me. I only found out because she told my husband while I was actually in hospital. Since she opened up for that brief moment, it has gone back to being a taboo subject again (and that was 33 years ago). "I had miscarried at the beginning of August last year when I was 10 weeks pregnant. It turned out I had a 'blighted ovum', where the egg just doesn't develop properly. In fact, I'd had few real 'pregnancy symptoms', but I thought that I was just lucky – and if it's your first baby, how are you to know? I started bleeding and was in a lot of pain and after tests by my very helpful GP, I eventually had a scan which showed that the egg had never developed and they decided I'd have to have an operation. They did the operation that same day, and everyone in the hospital was absolutely brilliant. Although by that time I was prepared for the worst, I was totally knocked out by the emotions I felt when they finally told me there was no baby there after all. I think I felt cheated. I wanted there to have been a baby, even if it had died, and the fact that there was nothing - just an empty sac. It left me feeling like a complete failure. For two months I had been walking round thinking that there was a baby inside me (albeit at a very early stage of development) and in fact there had never been anything. "I also couldn't stand anyone being nice to me. I was on the verge of slapping my husband and I can see him now, standing there looking absolutely devastated and feeling rejected. "Afterwards I got over the operation quite quickly but it was ages before I could tell people what had happened without bursting into tears. Time really is a great healer and, although I still feel upset that it happened, I don't feel it so sharply now. I had the support of a wonderful husband, who didn't try to minimise what I was feeling – and who, in fact, was devastated himself. I found the worst thing afterwards was the sense of guilt. I desperately wanted this to have happened for a reason and I found it quite hard to just write it off as 'one of those things' (even though I know that that is what it was). We had been all around Europe by motorbike just after I'd found out I was pregnant and I was convinced that that had caused it, or that I'd brought it on by horse-riding, or that it was just because I was a bad person and not fit to be a mother. "The only thing which made it easier for me was the fact that I managed to get pregnant again very quickly. I know that friends who have taken longer to get pregnant again have found it more difficult. You have to accept that you did have a baby and that that baby no longer exists. Any future babies may ease the pain of losing the first one, but they can never replace it. I am now 26 weeks pregnant with the brother or sister of the baby I lost, and throughout I have felt strongly that this is a DIFFERENT baby – an individual in its own right and not a replacement for or reincarnation of the previous one. "When I first got pregnant again I found it very difficult to get the miscarriage out of my mind, and I feel that this is something medical professionals probably don't take enough notice of, it took until after my 20-week scan before I settled down and enjoyed this pregnancy." |
