Medically managed miscarriage

Until this week I’d never heard of a medically managed miscarriage.

Now I’m having one.

I thought that miscarriage was an absolute. A discovery of blood and a no question result. Gone.

Turns out, it’s not always like that.

I went to A&E on Tuesday night after a small bleed. It’s fine, I told myself. The internet says this is quite normal. Nothing to worry about. I repeated this over and over again in the Uber to the hospital, as I lay on the floor of the waiting room, convinced that lying down might work against gravity and save the pregnancy.

‘It’s either a miscarriage or it isn’t’ said the triage nurse, a good looking and extremely rude man. ‘We can’t do anything about it. Come back tomorrow for a scan.’

We went home and I scoured Mumsnet for stories of women who had the same thing and ended up with healthy babies. There are lots of people who’ve had that happen.

I am not one of them.

The next morning we waited at the Early Pregnancy Unit at UCLH, staffed by some of the kindest and most supportive people I’ve ever met in my life.

A doctor, who looked like he could be in the cast of Grey’s Anatomy, scanned my abdomen. Couldn’t see anything. Used the vaginal probe —which is basically a dildo.

I lay on the couch counting the ceiling tiles, squeezing my husband’s hand and begging the universe to let it be all right.

After what felt like an hour but was actually only 30 ceiling tiles, he paused. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you’ he said.

The pregnancy stopped developing some time ago. At 6 weeks and 1 day.

No baby.

Immediately I start explaining to the doctor that this is probably a mercy because the baby would probably have had severe problems, that it’s better this way, that it’s nature’s kindness.

He knows all of this.

He is a doctor.

I am a rent-a-gob journalist who has read too much Mumsnet. But he lets me go on and on talking about all the reasons that this is a good thing and that I am fine.

I ask him what our options are. He gently suggests that we finish the internal exam before we do anything else.

I get dressed. We talk about the options (wait for miscarriage to happen, take pills to encourage it along, have surgery). I pick pills, which everyone agrees is the most suitable option.

They send me for a blood test. I put headphones in and close my eyes because I’m phobic of needles. I put my music on shuffle and as she sticks the needle into my arm Bad Blood comes on. I laugh.

Then I go outside to un-tell everyone I’ve told.

Most people wait until after the 12 week scan to tell people that they’re pregnant. I didn’t. I was too excited, and as an erstwhile boozer and smoker it was patently fucking obvious that I was knocked up.

Same copy and paste message to one member of each friendship group, miscarriage, please let the others know. Shit message, but how else are you supposed to phrase it?

When you tell people that you’ve had a miscarriage (or in my case what is sometimes known as a ‘missed miscarriage — nice blamey phrasing there, which to be fair the doctors said they don’t use) it’s like you’ve joined a club.

Women told me that they had too — people I’d never spoken to about anything that personal. It’s like I’m in a club now. Not one I wanted to join, but one filled with brave, kind, supportive women.

I’ve been knocked for six by how kind people are. Messages, emails, phone calls, personal stories, stories of their friends and family who had the same thing and went on to have happy, healthy families.

I find their kindness uncomfortable. I feel like I don’t deserve it.

In the privacy of my own head I say things that I would never in a million years say to another woman. I call myself stupid for not realising. I taunt myself for thinking I was getting a bump when actually I was just holding my stomach differently or getting fatter.

I tell myself I’m an idiot for being sick after the pregnancy stopped developing, even though the hormones are still in my body. I pummel myself with these words. I know it’s not my fault. I don’t feel guilty. I feel stupid.

I feel like a Tudor queen who kidded herself she was pregnant to avoid the Tower. One of the Marys — the one married to Philip — kept saying she was pregnant for something like two years. It was treason to suggest otherwise so everyone just pretended that gestating a future king took longer. She wasn’t pregnant. I’m pretty sure she had some kind of growth, and then she died.*

This is stuff I vaguely remember from A Level history. Please don’t correct me. I am not in the mood.

500 years later it’s still possible to spend 4 weeks walking around telling people that you’re pregnant, shopping for maternity clothes and picking out breast pumps. When actually you’re not. You’re carrying a little tiny smudge which once had the potential to be a person, but for whatever reason isn’t going to be.

I don’t know how someone who has had a miscarriage is supposed to act. At the moment I’m sitting on my bed in my pants and a t shirt, waiting for the bleeding to start (if it does start — sometimes the medical managed miscarriage doesn’t happen and then you need surgery) writing because I don’t know what else to do. This is all I know how to do.

It’s been years since I wrote anything for free (shopping lists and Whatsapps excluded) but I can’t face the idea of pitching this as a story and then having it edited. I’m scared to go back to work because I think there’s a good chance I’ll cry if anyone tells me that I’ve used the wrong version of discrete.

There’s an awards ceremony that I’d like to go to tonight, but do people who are in the middle of a miscarriage go to parties?

I’ve been asked about doing a TV debate tomorrow, which is my life blood (and a decent chunk of my income stream) but do people who are having a miscarriage go on TV to row with Piers Morgan?

I realised earlier that I’d been picking fights on Twitter and panicked that I shouldn’t be doing that, like it make me seem like I didn’t care about what was happening to my body.

Last night I drank wine and tried to enjoy smoking a cigarette because those are the things that I loved doing before I got pregnant, the things that made me feel like me. They don’t make me feel like me anymore.

I’m not sure that I will be that version of me again. I think maybe something like this changes you. In the words of Taylor Swift, I’d like to be my old self again, but I’m still trying to find it.

Thank you so much to the amazing staff at UCLH early pregnancy unit — who could not have been kinder. The triage nurse who sought me out for a hug. The doctor who saw me at 5 weeks and remembered me. The doctor who delivered the news with such kindness and love. I am so unspeakably grateful to them for making a hideous situation a little better.

Most of all I am grateful that I live in a country where I have free access to reproductive health care. My miscarriage cost me the price of four Uber trips and an £11 prescription charge.

There are places in the world where it would have cost me thousands of pounds, and where I might have been denied the medication I need to remove the pregnancy tissue from my body.

I have not written about my (wonderful) husband’s feelings of reactions here because that’s not my story to tell.