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Trigger Warning: Pregnancy Loss
This is the third and final instalment of our peer supporter’s pregnancy diary. It is a sad ending, but a subject that often doesn’t get spoken about, despite it being a common experience. Our volunteer hopes that sharing their experience may help others to feel less alone.
It’s 17.25pm
I have 2 weeks and 1 day until I can see if you exist.
The ‘early reassurance scan’ today was not at all reassuring. My heart literally went through the floor when the very business like sonographer stated ‘there is no baby.’ ‘You are too early’.
I immediately felt as if I was in the wrong. Stupid me to come too early. I felt like a little girl being told off. Decades of feeling I am consistently in the wrong make this a familiar feeling.
But I wasn’t. They offer scans from 6 weeks. I counted carefully and followed the guidelines, and believed I was 6 weeks.
But if I am, there ‘is no baby’ only a gestational sac, and a yok sac. And a heaviness that descended when I heard those words.
This has happened before. A baby whose heart stopped at 8 weeks. The waiting and waiting and waiting, the multiple scans, the small rooms and faces that say sorry and ultimately a ‘managed miscarriage.’ I masked through it all like a pro, smiling and making the nurses feel at ease. Because God forbid I wasn’t a ‘good patient’.
Is this how a lifetime of being autistic and not knowing it shows up? The buried insults, the ease at which we slip into what we know others need us to be? The swallowing down of our own anger and pain?
And here I am again. Another two week wait. So what do I do with a mind that is designed to attention tunnel on this, and an enforced period of time where I’m supposed to ‘take my mind off it’?
Answers on a postcard please...
2.36am. Two days later.
All the signs are now that you are gone. In the quiet night I think on you, and what never was. I am with you. I say my goodbyes. I wish it were different.
Like a bystander in my own body. Powerless to change this. I watch as you go. I see the sonographer was wrong. I see you, so small and creature like. But undeniably you. I met you, but you were already gone.
Deep sadness envelops me. But also a gratitude that you were here for the time you were. You showed me possible futures I never would have considered. And now the door is open, it may be, it could be, that in another time, it may be our time.
You will always be with me.
A few days later, I come across the Japanese concept of ‘mizuko’ or ‘water baby’. This is what you are to me.
Additional Resources
The following organisations offer information and support for pregnancy loss.
