Another baby won’t “fix” the pain of a miscarriage

WHEN you lose a baby you’re forced to heal not just physically, but also emotionally. And often one takes far longer than the other, writes Bianca O’Neill.

A FUNNY thing happens when you tell people you’ve lost a child.

You would think you’d be showered with support and love, perhaps even be inundated with offers of help or a shoulder to cry on — but instead, interactions with friends and loved ones become awkward. They become distant, and often silent.

People with kids stop talking to you about them, as if their child is somehow related to your loss. People without kids tell you that ‘you’ll get pregnant again soon’, as if that will fix it. But just like losing a friend, the addition of a new friend won’t somehow void that loss — and losing a baby can’t be fixed by having a new one.

No matter how early you’ve lost a pregnancy, it was a baby. That’s something I had to learn the hard way — a painful lesson that really messes with your sense of self, as a woman, and a woman who is pro-choice.

For me, having a family (just like the idea of getting married) wasn’t at the top of my priorities. As I used to tell people, I wasn’t against it — it just wasn’t on my life’s bucket list. Travel, career, and being happy as a person just seemed more important. And frankly, I didn’t think I’d be a good mum.

The idea of becoming pregnant terrified me. I’d spent almost 20 years ensuring that never happened. And then, just like that, five years into a happy marriage, we decided we shouldn’t actively protect against it anymore.

The echoes of my easily-pregnant mother rang in my head as I prepared for the worst — an immediate pregnancy before I was 100 per cent ready — but a few months of nothing meant I relaxed and assumed that maybe it wouldn’t happen after all.

In 2013, Gwyneth Paltrow said she nearly died after suffering a miscarriage following the birth of her two children. (Picture: Jason Merritt/Getty)

A year later, after my best friend was in town and we had spent the weekend drinking champagne, I found out I was pregnant.

After initially cursing my drinking choices, I realised that I was happy — even excited. It felt shocking — I had expected to be nervous, scared, overwhelmed. But I just felt calm, and blissfully happy.

Suddenly my entire worldview changed; suddenly I realised our lives were going to be really, really different and I wondered what I had been so worried about for all those years. I made my appointments, and settled in for a few weeks’ worth of waiting until my eight-week scan.

Three days before I made it there, I was on a video shoot in regional Victoria and I felt a huge, stabbing pain in my side. I became faint and lay down in the back of the car while the shoot went on in the background, insisting to my co-workers (who didn’t know I was pregnant) that I was fine.

Almost an hour later, I knew I was most definitely not fine. I asked two girls to drive me to the nearest medical centre, where I immediately passed out.

I don’t remember a huge amount, bar coming in and out of consciousness while the medical centre staff tried to tap a vein (they couldn’t), and then in the ambulance as they tried (again, they couldn’t). But I do remember looking up at the paramedic and asking her if I would lose my baby.

She looked at me kindly (knowing full well what had happened) and said, “I’m sure it’ll all be fine”. I passed out again.

In emergency, I was told I had experienced a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. My entire stomach cavity had filled with blood and I needed to go into surgery immediately. By then my husband had arrived from Melbourne and as I was signing the papers, we looked at each other and cried. We knew we’d lost our little one.

Beyonce described her miscarriage as “the saddest thing I’ve ever been through.” (Picture: Tyler Mitchell)

Three blood transfusions and a scary night post-surgery later, I recovered in the osteo sector of the hospital (thankfully, they had the state of mind not to put me in the OBGYN ward surrounded by pregnant women).

For a while I became so focused on getting better that I really didn’t deal with what had just happened until months later.

Part of it was survival — usually an ectopic pregnancy is discovered at the first scan, when you’re given a drug that stops the pregnancy from advancing any further. But a ruptured ectopic, where the fertilised egg bursts the fallopian tube open and causes an internal rupture, forced me to focus on the ‘getting better physically’ part before I could even think about the ‘getting better emotionally’ part.

Everyone kept calling this a lost ‘pregnancy’, not a lost ‘baby’. And yet, this weird little almond inside of me already felt so loved; so much a part of my life.

I started to think about a termination I had when I was much younger at Uni, when I was still way too young to have a child. I don’t regret it, but I do remember the doctor showing me the tiny spot on the screen, telling me it was a baby. I was so disengaged, I simply nodded as if to say, yes, there it was.

Only now do I realise that she was trying to see if I was making the right decision, if I understood the weight of what was going on. At the time I thought that she was trying to prove that yes, indeedy, there was actually something there, lest they charge me for nothing.

And now, 16 years later, I was so heavily depressed and so intimately connected to something that was exactly the same size and shape as that spot on the screen from all those years ago. Something that I’d never really understood could be a ‘baby’ — until now.

Earlier this week American country music singer Carrie Underwood opened up about the three miscarriages she has suffered recently and the effect they have had on her life. (Picture: Richard Shotwell/AP)

Part of my issue was how people treated me when they found out. Most changed the subject quickly and forcibly with a dismissive ‘you’re fine now, you’ll get pregnant again soon!’ Some didn’t talk to me, instead talking to family around me about someone they knew who had also experienced an ectopic pregnancy — ‘and now they have 243 children!’

Everyone wanted me to get over it and move on. So, I got over it, and moved on. Until I realised that it’s not actually possible. None of my friends or family talked to me about grief — not one of the doctors, or my OBGYN, even addressed it. No one told me it was OK to still be sad, many months later.

And although I’m still sad occasionally, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with me, or any other woman who has miscarried or experienced an ectopic pregnancy. We’re not broken. We aren’t something to be ‘fixed’.

For me, getting pregnant again isn’t going to be some blissful, magical solution to loss or grief. So please stop telling women that ‘they’ll get pregnant again soon’. Some of them may not be ready to try again. Some may have some serious physical hurdles ahead before that’s even a possibility. In saying what you think you’re ‘supposed’ to say all you’re really doing is dismissing their loss as some kind of minimal casualty on their way to the baby endgame.

The body is a mysterious thing — and this baby-growing situation? It’s hit and miss; more than you’d think. Because there is one thing that you learn when you go through something like this: no one talks about their own experience out loud. But they do tell you softly, quietly, as you connect over a shared sorrow behind closed doors.

They all say one thing; that the sadness never goes away, no matter how many children you have afterwards, or beforehand.

I just wish they would say it a little louder.

@biancaoneill_