I HAD A MISCARRIAGE THIS WEEK : AND THIS IS WHY I’M TALKING ABOUT IT

I am the pregnancy whisperer of the small town I live in. I have been for the last 4 years. What the hell do I mean? You see, I run a Hot Yoga studio and pregnant women are advised to stay away from the heat during pregnancy.

So when someone, albeit if they come to my yoga studio, becomes pregnant I am the first to know. And when I say first I am often in the know before they tell their parents. I get these calls a lot. And I often find out about their miscarriages as well, again often when no one else knows the pain they’re in. We live in a town where people come to procreate. To have families. To have children. 

I’ve had the call of an excited pregnant woman announcing their pause of membership on days where I’ve been injecting, on days where I feel like a total failure and even on days we’ve found out another round of IVF has failed. 

I’m never upset or sad at the woman who is calling with her happy news…it just highlights the fact we’re still not there. 

It was slow. It was quiet at first. It wasn’t obvious. It was heartbreaking. It was painful. It was awful. It happened.

If this is triggering please don’t read. If you want to know what my experience was then know there will be some graphic details. 

I was spotting from early on. Everything we read said this was ‘normal’ and that ‘many women spot’ in early pregnancy. My spotting when it first started was brown, thick, light and not like a period. 

It stayed like this for over a week. I had a blood test with high HCG levels and everything looked great. I was officially pregnant. Spotting still but all the tests said everything was okay. So I tried not to worry. I had 3 whole days. 3 days to be pregnant. 3 days to be grateful. 3 days to believe all the heartache and worry of IVF might be over. 

After day 3 my brown spotting got heavier and turned from brown to red. Looking down on the stark white tissue with the bright red blood I felt my heart drop, my eyes close and the tears flood. I screamed. I yelled. I held onto the side of the toilet for support and kept crying.

My wife was quiet. I knew something was wrong.

It was a Saturday morning and we wouldn’t be able to get a new blood test until Monday with results on Tuesday. I now had to wait 4 days to confirm the nightmare I was trying to ignore…that I was having a miscarriage. 

My bleeding quickly increased with large blood clots passing. I was having mild cramps but nothing too intense. Nothing EVEN CLOSE to the pain I feel with my endometriosis. The weekend was horrific. It dragged. It was slow. It was constantly going to the toilet to check, to wipe, to analyse, the prayer that nothing would be on the tissue…there always was red on the tissue. 

We told our family. We told the clinic. I struggled to look at my phone, to reply to messages to speak to anyone. I was in and out of sleep trying to not feel what was happening. 

By Monday the cramps had intensified. We went to the clinic for the blood test and reality struck that this wasn’t a fluke. The blood test confirmed that my HCG levels had massively dropped and the pregnancy was gone. I stopped taking my progesterone and oestrogen tablets and my body began to really release what was inside me.