Thirteen Months Later

This might be difficult to read, especially if you don’t like needles.

My little girl was only eleven months old when I had my first miscarriage (May 2016: see my previous post). She wasn’t used to being with anyone except me or my husband, so, the day after I came home from hospital and thirty-six hours after my emergency surgery, I went back to being a full time parent.

It’s very easy to say now what a big mistake that was, and it definitely had a major negative impact on my recovery. But even with the wisdom of hindsight, I can’t honestly say that there was an alternative. K’s grandparents tried to look after her. She adores them and always has, but at eleven months she couldn’t spend more than about an hour with them without becoming hysterical with fear, just because she was used to being with Mummy or Daddy.

In September that year I had a chemical pregnancy, which is a miscarriage before six weeks. Many people who have chemical pregnancies never know that they were pregnant. For me, this was significant mostly because it enabled me to begin to talk about my first miscarriage. I told very few people at first, mostly because I couldn’t talk about it without crying. In February 2017 I had another chemical pregnancy. Since K was coming up to two, it’s around this time that people started to cheerfully ask whether we’d thought about having another child. After the first couple of times, when I was struck dumb, I began to share my story.

Our house had been on the market for several months. We finally found a buyer and, a few weeks later, we found a wonderful house just round the corner from my parents. It’s very common in Scotland to have a few weeks between houses. We had four weeks between moving out of our old house and moving into the new one. We stayed with my parents for half the time, and for a fortnight in the middle we went on holiday and left our cat with them.

I knew that my period was late because of the stress of moving. But my husband persuaded me to do a test to put my mind at rest, because we were about to go abroad for a fortnight. A year and a day after we found out that Gracie Wren had died, I had a positive pregnancy test.

We had a lovely holiday. As soon as we got back I saw my GP, who arranged a scan for me on my fortieth birthday.

Having been through a miscarriage the year before, I found it impossible to relax during this pregnancy. I had pretty strong symptoms, which definitely helped, but I was also completely exhausted, all the time. It was impossible to tell how much of the exhaustion was pregnancy related and how much was moving house related, how much was caused by stress and how much was just normal, toddler-parenting tiredness.

But it was also a time of quiet joy. After all the grief the year before, it felt like a redemption, that we were moving into our dream house and had a new baby on the way.

My husband was really excited that I was having a scan on my birthday. He said that it was going to be great because we would see the baby’s heartbeat and it would set my mind at rest, and it was going to be a wonderful birthday present.

The scan took place in the room where we found out that Gracie Wren had died.

I was diagnosed with fibroids and a retro tilted womb during my pregnancy with K, but neither was an issue and they didn’t affect any of the scans (and I had a lot of scans). My first scan with K was at five and a half weeks, because I had been bleeding heavily. We saw a strong heartbeat that day. This time, it was four and a half weeks since my positive test, which meant that I was at least eight weeks pregnant. But the midwife had a lot of trouble finding the sac and couldn’t find a heartbeat at all. She said that I couldn’t be more than four weeks, but we knew that definitely wasn’t right. So she scheduled a scan with the consultant gynaecologist for eight days later. And my mind wasn’t put at rest at all. I’ve felt ever since that I didn’t get a proper fortieth birthday. K turned two, two days later.

Six days after that, on June 21st, we saw the lovely gynaecologist who delivered K. Everyone who knows him respects and values him and he is such a caring doctor. And he had to tell us that I was carrying twins, but because he couldn’t find any heartbeats although I must be at least nine weeks, he didn’t know whether it was a viable pregnancy. He said he would see me in a week’s time, but that he wouldn’t be surprised if I had a miscarriage before he could see me again.

I don’t have words for all the emotions I took away from that appointment. Twins! We always wanted twins! But possibly not viable. But twins! The next few days were some of the longest I ever remember.

I started spotting on the Saturday, but spotting on its own doesn’t indicate anything sinister. On the Monday evening, once K was asleep, I went to bed early, because I was so tired I could hardly stand up. I lay in bed praying for our twins. Suddenly I felt a gentle “pop”, deep inside, followed instantly by a flood of blood. I knew that was it.

Once again, just like the year before, we had to wait over an hour after calling the ambulance for it to arrive. At least K was asleep this time, so my mum stayed with her whilst my husband followed the ambulance. Once again, the journey was interminable and made me feel even more unwell. I kept having flashbacks to losing Gracie Wren, which definitely didn’t help.

I was in a great deal of pain this time, much worse than I ever was with Gracie Wren. One of the ways my body copes with pain is to imagine how much worse it could be. So when the doctor asked me to compare my pain to the worst pain I could imagine, I said five. My husband was able to get me to see that they really wanted me to compare this to the worst pain I’d ever had, so when they came back I was able to say that it was actually ten. After the strong painkillers it went down to nine and a half, but the pain stayed really bad all through that long night.

The doctor on duty wanted to do an internal scan because she couldn’t determine whether or not I needed surgery. For some reason the wand made the already severe pain significantly worse. My husband asked me why I hadn’t cried out, and he said that because I didn’t, they had no idea how painful it was. But if it was a necessary medical procedure, why would it matter that it hurt?

The doctor decided that I didn’t need surgery straight away, but that the consultant might decide to operate in the morning. So I needed to stay nil by mouth. The doctor had managed to get a line into my arm, no mean feat with collapsible veins like mine, and I was on a saline drip.

So now there was nothing to do except wait for the morning. My husband went home and I tried to get some sleep, without much success. Eventually I dozed off.

At about two o’clock in the morning, the drip started to sound an alarm. My vein had collapsed and the line had fallen out. The doctor on duty said that I needed to have a line in place in case I needed surgery in the morning. So she tried to get a large needle into my arm three times, and the three veins she tried all collapsed.

So she called in her superior, who also tried three times, and three more veins collapsed.

The next person to come in introduced herself as a nurse practitioner. By this time I seemed to be watching what was going on from somewhere near the ceiling. I certainly wasn’t capable of pointing out how insane this process was, how much unnecessary pain it was causing. She wasn’t successful either, and neither were her two colleagues on their first or second attempts.

A nurse came in to take my vitals and made a joke about how I had become a challenge and the three nurse practitioners were betting cups of coffee on who would manage to get a large needle into my poor bruised arms.

Eventually, at about four o’clock, one of them succeeded. I think it was the fifteenth attempt but I admit I lost count.

The care I received in the morning was much better than the year before. I saw the consultant more than once: initially for the tests to determine that this time I didn’t need surgery (whereupon the drip that had caused so much pain was cheerfully ripped out), and later in the morning to discuss next steps. Because this was my fourth miscarriage she wanted to carry out further tests over the weeks ahead, and she discussed them before I went home. I was able to ask her what I might expect in terms of bleeding and pain, and she was very helpful.

But unfortunately, my abiding memory of that hospital stay is what happened in the middle of the night.

I was the patient and I was in the worst pain of my life, physically and emotionally, even before they started the needle process. I can see how people might get carried away, especially on a night shift. But I didn’t really need the drip. If I had needed surgery in the morning, they could have put a line in once I was under anaesthetic. I find it hard to understand why it is necessary to keep someone awake for an hour and a half in the middle of the night, sticking large needles into their arms and leaving huge bruises.

Once again, I don’t think anyone was malicious. I have no desire to punish anyone for what I really believe was a mistake. I do believe that the people responsible for my care forgot that I wasn’t just an anonymous case in a hospital bed. I think they forgot to treat me like a living, breathing and suffering person. I think they got so focussed on the challenge of getting a working drip line into my arm that they completely forgot that there was no urgency at all, and that it would have been better for me right then, and for my future peace of mind, if they had let me sleep.

I still dream about needles nearly two years later. I dream the very specific pain of a needle moving round inside my arm searching for a vein. I dream so vividly that I check my arms for bruises when I wake up.

We lost both our twins that night. I bled very heavily for about ten days, and about as heavily as a heavy period for another three and a half weeks. A few weeks later, we agreed to name the twins Thomas, which means Twin, and Perdita, which means Lost Child.