The first baby

Back in september 2009 me and Ashley found out we were expecting. A pregnancy test, followed by countless others, confirmed it. We were having a baby. I was about 3 weeks when i found out, so very early. 

We were beyond excited. We told close friends and family. I told my work. There was something in the water it seemed, as i was the 4th lady to become pregnant at my work within a couple of months. I told the other 3, and we all shared our pregnancy excitement. It was nice having others to chat to about it, who knew how i was feeling. They were a few weeks ahead of me.

Around about 6/7 weeks, i started to feel different. The only way i can describe it is that i stopped 'feeling' pregnant. I hadn't had any major pregnancy symptoms really, but i had experienced nausea in the evenings, and my boobs were quite sore. This all disappeared. 

I began to work myself up. I began to google. I stumbled across a statistic that told me 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. I thought of the three other girls, all of which had had their 12 week scans and knew all was well. Was i going to be that 1 in 4?

I grew more and more anxious as the weeks went by.

 Everyone around me reassured me that i was being silly, that i shouldn't get myself so worked up. The weeks dragged by but the closer it got to my 12 week scan, the more i started to think they were right. Maybe it was all in my head, and maybe my baby was growing perfectly well. I always think the worst, and this was a perfect example. 

A week before my 12 week scan i went to stay with a friend. She was having a night in and there were a few of us there. She had bought the baby a little present. A little plaque that said "Twinkle twinkle little star". I could have burst with happiness and excitement when i opened it. We all chatted excitedly about the baby, was it a boy or girl, who would it look like, what would we call it. For the first time in what seemed like forever, all of my anxieties about my pregnancy went away, and i allowed myself to believe it was all going to be ok  I was elated, over the moon. I imagined my little bean kicking away inside of me. It was perfect. 

The next day was Sunday 9th December. 

I usually worked an early shift on a Sunday, but i had swapped with a colleague so that i could go up to see my friend the night before and not have to come in early the next day. So my shift began at 2pm. Off i went to work. Ashley had a night in with his sister and his dad. Everything was as it should be. 

At around 6pm, i went to the toilet. And saw blood. A lot of blood. So much. 

I froze. I didn't know what to do. I just stared at it in absolute disbelief. This wasn't happening. 

I ran out and rang Ashley. I could barely speak through the tears. Couldn't bring myself to tell him what was happening. When i did, he told me he was coming to pick me up. I stumbled across the car park to the other side of my workplace, to tell the shift leader what had happened. I went to get my bag and coat, and Ashley arrived. This had probably taken no more then about 5 minutes to happen, but it felt like hours. 

I got back home and went straight into the bathroom. I could hear my sister in law asking if i were ok, and Ashley's muffled voice explaining what was happening. I knew he was trying to stay hopeful, trying to believe that maybe it wasn't what i knew it was. 

He rang NHS direct, who said there wasn't much that could be done. They said there wasn't much point going to the hospital. I didn't listen, i said i wanted to go. 

The journey was a blur. I rang my friend, one of the three girls from work who was pregnant, to tell her what had happened. Of course she said all the right things. She reassured me, she told me it might be nothing. I hoped she was right, but i knew she wasn't. 

We got the hospital and sat in the a&e waiting room. I felt so numb. I was back and forth to the toilet. I couldn't believe what was happening. Eventually we were seen. The nurse gently explained that they would need to have a look and see if my cervix was open. 

I was a mess. A hysterical mess. Ashley desperately tried to calm me down. I lay back and let her do what needed to be done. I was incredibly tense and just couldn't relax myself, so it hurt. She said my cervix was closed. Next she asked to do a blood test. Then she sent us home. We had an appointment with the Early Pregnancy Unit for a scan 9.30 am the next morning. Monday 10th December. My sister's birthday.

After the longest night of our lives, we arrived back at the hospital. We made our way into the EPU. We made ourselves known to reception, and we sat and waited. I looked around at all of the other people, wondering whether anyone else was in the same situation as we were in. I felt sick. We were called in. 

I was scanned. First an ultrasound. They couldn't see anything and explained they would need to do an internal scan. Like the night before, i was worked up and tense, and i tried to calm myself and take deep breaths. The room went quiet.

And then we were told what i already knew. We had lost our baby. My body had failed.

They told us the baby was only measuring about 6-8 weeks, not the nearly 12 weeks it should be. I had had a missed miscarriage. My body had deceived me, it had carried on pretending it was growing our baby. For the last few weeks it had led me to believe i was carrying a living developing baby, when really i was carrying a dead one. My baby had died inside of me. 

I will never be able to put into words how it felt. The emptiness, the sheer overwhelming devastation, the frustration and unfairness of it all. I felt like the crying would never stop. Nothing would ever go back to how it was. I would never recover from this. So absorbed in my own grief that i ashamedly overlooked Ashley in all of this. He hugged me and we cried, we cried so much, but at the time i wasn't able to give him any comfort. I was drowning. I buried and lost in a sea of despair and heart break. 

We were spoken to by a midwife who went through the motions of telling us how sorry she was for our loss. She was lovely. She told us what our options were, and we decided we would go home and wait for nature to take its course. And off we went. 

Of course it wasn't as simple as that. I ended up going into A&E on the Thursday in excruciating pain and being kept in until Saturday, to have an ERPC. Evacuation of Retained Products of Conception. That's what my pregnancy, my baby, was classed as. A retained product of conception. 

I hated my body. I hated what it had done to me, to us. To our baby. I felt so alone. I felt like a failure. Nothing was fair. What had i done to deserve this?


It will forever remain the most indescribably traumatic and devastating thing i have ever gone through. We have ever gone through. 

Though it was only for 6-8 weeks, my baby was alive. Though it was a tiny blob of cells, inconspicuous and invisible to all except a few, my baby existed. We might not have ever been destined to meet, but i was a mum to be for those few weeks.