Pregnancy After Loss
Being pregnant with a Rainbow baby after loosing a baby was not a thing I did well.
Rhianna was in medical terms a silent late miscarriage. To me, and her daddy she was a stillbirth and our daughter and she was Baba’s sister he never physically saw her or held her but she was and is his sister. Although there will never legally be a record of Rhianna she is with us all.
But the problem with loosing Rhianna was that is was ‘silent’ I had no warning. Nothing seemed different there was no pain.
No clue what so ever.
So being pregnant with Boo was hell.
I couldn’t tell if he was ok or not. I had no warning signs to go on from Rhianna and no memory of a healthy pregnancy as Rhianna’s had erased all the happy memories of Baba’s.
I couldn’t remember the feelings that should be there.
It was hell and I spent most of the nine months crying, stressed or on the phone to the midwife.
And having told no one I had no one to ask for some help or advice (that was my decision, I was preparing for the worse I didn’t want to have to tell people if it went wrong)
We brought a heartbeat monitor for Boo and I had to take aspirin every day they became my comfort blankets. I listened to Boo morning, before picking Baba up from school and before falling asleep at night. One night was spent awake all night crying as the monitor wasn’t working. I then went and brought another just to find out it was the batteries. It was totally irrational but the only thing I could control.
I can’t be positive that my body will get a baby here as it hasn’t always it has failed and I have and always will feel a failure for my body, my placenta, erupting and Rhianna dying no one else was involved. So imagine knowing that you can’t reliably do something and then go and do it for a whole nine months again – it’s hell.
We would walk into scans and we had a lot of them, I cannot fault the care we had, and I held my breath and looked at Mr L. Who was sat searching for a heartbeat. It wasn’t until he smiled that I could look.
Every scan brought tears before and after. Every one I thought I would get told the worst news and then everyone I walked out relieved.
However by the time I was back home I was worried again.
As so much can change.
I believed that the only thing that was keeping me going was my aspirin everyday and when the consultant said that I had to stop taking it at 36 weeks I cried and cried.
I shouted, I screamed and I convinced myself it would all go wrong. I had a hysterical and irrational phone call to my midwife who managed to get me booked in to see the consultant about an induction but even that didn’t calm me.
From 32 weeks on all I could think was the quicker the baby came the better as I fail at pregnancy and doctors could help better than I could do.
I was attached to Boo from the moment I saw the line on the pregnancy test but I was unhappy from the moment I saw the pregnancy test.
It wasn’t that I was unhappy to be pregnant I was over the moon we had faught so long to get to this point and we were having another baby. I was unhappy because I was scared I would fail again. Scared I wouldn’t know again. And scared that I would always be that person.
I was also scared that if it happened again what Mr L would do, I am not suggesting he would do anything. But he puts his trust in me to look after his children for nine months soley and I had failed and what if I did it again. Would he think bad of me would he and them world start wondering what was wrong with me.
Again completely irrational ideas.
But ones that could never leave. And even walking into the labour ward I still had all the same fears.
Nothing could get rid of them until Boo was born and was in my arms. But even now there are still fears and worries and pregnancy will always be the same.
There is no naivety, no fun, no glow and no exciting preparation.
Pregnancy is now hard, secretive, upsetting, stressful and worrysome and a harsh reminder of the horrible reality we have lived.
There is no joy there and it was a horrible thing to realise.