Double bill:Just say "I'm sorry" and A four years old birth story

I meant to write this post on the 14th of October, my daughter's 4th birthday and then another one on the 20th of October, just five years after I discovered I had lost my first baby, but since my computer was away to be fixed I had to wait until now. And those two posts will just become one. It was probably meant to be this way, because the stories of those two posts are strictly related.

I'll then start from the one I wanted to write on the 20th.

During the summer 2008 me and my (then) fiancé decided we would start “trying for a baby”, we thought it was a bit early but as we were both convinced that for personal reasons it would take a while, we decided that starting sooner was better. Mind you, we found out we were pregnant after the first attempt! We started calling the baby Lenticchia (Lentil).We were over the moon, we (and probably especially me) couldn't wait to tell family and friends, so when I was just 6 weeks pregnant we had already spilled the beans to our families, to most of our friends and to my work mates. I knew that 1 in 3 pregnancies end in miscarriage, but I thought this couldn't happen to me. At 6 and 9 weeks I had some light bleeding, but two scans showed that baby was fine and his/her heart was beating happily.

I felt amazing even if I had morning sickness (or rather most-of-the-day-sickness!), I felt beautiful, happy and I walked always thinking that I wasn't alone, constantly talking (not out loud) to my baby.

I was working in Renfrew at the time and the travel (bus, then train, then bus again) would make me really sick (sometimes I just had to run to the toilet when I arrived to school), but still I didn't mind. I was really emotional, and could burst out laughing or crying for no reasons. I was in a completely new and different state of mind.

Then the 12-week scan date arrived, I couldn't wait! The night before the scan I dreamt that the baby had Down syndrome, but I didn't tell Ale when we woke up, because I felt silly. I know now, that I wasn't silly, my body, probably was giving me signs that only my mind could understand, and was passing them on to me in my dreams.

So we happily went for our scan, eager to see how our baby was growing and how big he/she was, and all those things that you might expect from a scan.

When we arrived, the sonographer asked us if we minded if a student was there while she performed the scan. We said we were fine with it, so she came in. She was a lovely looking woman, probably in her late twenties and with a gorgeous big bump! 

So I lay down and the sonographer started rubbing some gel on my bump.

She starts and I can see the baby on the monitor straight away. I notice there is (in my opinion) something wrong, but the sonographer looks happy and she explains to the student what she sees. All I can see is that my baby is not actually moving or wriggling around, but it looks more like he/she just moves when the sonographer pushes with her device on my tummy. Then the sonographer becomes quiet, she tells me she's setting the monitor to show some colours so she can see the heart properly, because she's finding hard to hear and find it. She doesn't speak for a time that seemed very long then, but probably it wasn't more than a minute.

Then she turns to me and just says “I'm sorry. Oh I’m so sorry, I can't hear the baby's heartbeat” then she keeps talking, probably just saying that this officially means there isn't a heartbeat to be detected, and explaining I don’t know what. But my brain has gone, I just stand up, and pull up my trousers, I feel as if I'm moving like a robot. She starts telling me that a midwife will come soon to tell me what happened and to see what I want to do, she keeps telling me that she is really sorry, and I can see she is, but her words sound distant. I can't believe it is happening to me. My eyes are full of tears. Alessandro is there with me, in shock, paralyzed by the news but I just feel as if I am just alone in a big black hole.

One word keeps buzzing in my head: dead, dead, dead.

Then arrived the midwife, she led me and Alessandro to another small room with three chairs and a little coffee table; she told me I had a missed miscarriage (why I didn't know then that something like that could happen?) and she explained us which options we had. I listened and I knew I had to decide, but I so wanted someone to decide for me. I so wanted her to tell me “I think the right thing for you would be A, or B or C”. But she couldn’t, and she didn’t.

We left and we were asked to call them back later that day to let them know what was our choice.

I never felt so empty. There was no more reason to keep caressing and rubbing my bump, there was no life in there, my baby’s heart had apparently stopped a week before; so, why, why I didn’t realize? This thought was adding pain to my sorrow.

Back home, we called our families and gave them the bad news, then we called our closest friends and told them too. All of them were waiting for our news. And all I could say was, “Hi… the scan showed there was no heartbeat. We lost our baby.”

I cried with Ale, and he cried with me. I decided I wanted to have a D&C, the shock was already too big, I didn’t want to see my body miscarrying.

Two days after I went to the hospital and my first baby has been taken away; I’ve never seen him or her, I don’t know how tiny he/she was. I don’t even know why he/she left me. And I will never know.

My mum came to stay with me, and even if at the time I told her she didn’t have to, I am so glad she came. Because she is my mum; because she’s been there before me; because there are some things that only a mum can understand.

Family, friends and workmates have been great then and I have never regretted the fact that I said to everybody that I was pregnant when I was only six weeks. If I hadn’t told them it would have been so much harder to go back to work (I could have never gone back pretending that I was off sick for a flu, when I was just crying constantly) to go out and socialize (I just didn’t feel like going out and have fun, so my friend came often to spend some time with us), to call home.

Still sometimes people would say to me “Don’t worry, there will be other pregnancies,” or “You are not the first one, unfortunately it does happen a lot,” “I’m sure next time everything will go well.” I know they meant no harm, but all I thought was “Can they not just tell me ‘I’m really sorry’ or ‘Mourn if you need’, or anything like that.”

I know there can be other pregnancies after a miscarriage (Betta and Tilda are a very lively proof of it!), but a mum is a mum since the moment she finds out she’s pregnant, and the baby inside becomes her new kid there and then. So even if there will be new pregnancies, this doesn’t mean that she can forget of the baby she really wanted but the left her too early because she will have other kids. Would a mum with three kids say “Oh never mind if I lose one, I’ve got the other two!”? No she wouldn’t. And even if it might seem a very silly comparison, believe me, it isn’t so.

I also knew I wasn’t the first one (and unfortunately not even the last one), but this didn’t and still doesn’t make any difference to me.

And hearing people saying to me “Everything will go well next time,” was just as a stab in the back (involuntary, I know) because when you have a miscarriage you cannot help thinking that there might be something wrong, that your body can’t embark on a new pregnancy and so on.

So next time you meet a woman who had a miscarriage, just offer your shoulder and say “I’m sorry.”

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And here is the second part of my blog, strictly connected to the first one because four moths after my miscarriage I found out I was pregnant again. I was terrified. I wanted  a baby so badly, but I was so scared to “get involved” and have to suffer so much again (I never ever cried as much as I did when I miscarried, I shouted and yelled while crying). This pregnancy went well, but I started to live it happily only after I was 20 weeks pregnant, and still until the minute Betta was born I was scared that something might go wrong.

So here, as per tradition is Betta’s birth story, as I wrote it a few days after her birth. If you ask me to talk about it now, it would be different because every time I tell her birth story, there is something new. So here you have the original one:

ELISABETTA’s birth story

Elisabetta was born on Wednesday 14th of October 2009 at 5.15 am weighing kg 3.150 (a very good size for a wee thing as I am!) after 3 days of labour.

We didn't have the homebirth we had planned and I ended up having an emergency C-Section.

Still, no need to say, it has been worth it and a unique experience.

I started having irregular contractions on Sunday morning, just a few hours before my mother-in-law arrived from Italy. By Sunday night the contractions were getting "stronger, longer, closer"! I went to bed and the contractions kept coming every 7/10 minutes, I thought I could keep going but my MIL said it was high time to call the hospital so we called the midwife who came at 2). The MW who came verified that mine were "real" contractions, but still I wasn't dilating and she felt that the baby's head was not still properly positioned on my cervix, but slightly tilted. So for the following two days a few midwives kept coming to check me, but things were pretty much the same (just 1cm dilated). On Tuesday morning I went to the hospital and I've been given morphine (another thing I regret now!) just to get some sleep as I hadn't been sleeping for more than 48 hours and I was becoming to feel shattered and very tired (not good if I was going to progress in the following hours).

I went back home in the afternoon, and at 10 pm my mother too arrived from Italy, I was so glad about her arrival; just a few minutes after midnight my waters broke! I realized that they weren't the light colour they should have been so  Alessandro and I decided in no time to go to the hospital (we could have always come back home if everything was fine – or at least this is what I thought at the time).

At the hospital they confirmed that there was some meconium in my waters. I was by then only 3 cm dilated (after more than 48 hours) Then the monitoring started and I’ve been put on the drip, but my little one didn't seem to like it, plus the trace showed that the umbilical cord was twisted somewhere (but didn't Know in which part of her body until she was born). It was around 3.30, and I was having the strongest  contractions ever, and the midwife was surprised on how well I was still coping with them only with yoga breathing and gas and air.

At this point the doctor who had already come before to check my trace, told me that I could get an epidural, but that I wasn't progressing because of the baby's head position, and that I would not progress further. At this point all I wanted was not to distress my baby and to make sure she would be born safely, so I gave my consent for an emergency C-Section. I had and epidural and a spinal, which weren't on my plans obviously, but that lead me in a bit more than an hour to have my wonderful baby!

The umbilical cord was twisted around her leg, but apart from that she was fine!

We've had plenty of skin to skin contact as soon as she has been cleaned and she started to breastfed in less than 5 minutes! So, we didn't have the homebirth we wanted, but the experience was so intense, and I feel so proud that still I managed to go through almost three days of labour just with yoga positions and breathing techniques (got tens but I have to say the didn't work for me). I can’t deny that I still feel upset about that C-section because I know that there are quite a few things that I could have done differently and maybe my labour would have progressed in a different way.

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