It's difficult to know what to write at times like these. This week has been a tough one. I won’t sugar-coat it. There’s been so much in the press about how ante-natal care might be affected by the pandemic and my anxiety has reached new heights. It's been surreal feeling my nebulous worries harden into concrete, COVID-19-shaped fears. Will I still be able to have my baby in hospital? What if the NHS is swamped? What if I get ill? What if Dan gets ill? Will I have to give birth on my own?
We're a way off my due date yet, so for the most part these are unknowable, unanswerable questions and a lot of my energy this week has gone into trying not to dwell too long on them. Even so, there's no getting away from the baseline fear here: that my baby might die.
I'm sorry to put it so baldly, but there it is. Not exactly the kind of thing you can casually drop into conversation on Zoom or Houseparty, hey?
This isn't a new fear. It's been there since I first took a pregnancy test back in November. It would still be thrumming in the background without the assistance of coronavirus. The difference is it now feels more difficult to dismiss this fear as simply hypothetical, based on our past experience not our current reality. It feels like our odds of bringing home a baby safely just took an almighty blow.
I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. There are a lot of us out there grappling with fertility and pregnancy questions and fears in the face of this pandemic. And I’m afraid I don’t have anything approaching comforting or wise to say right now. So I’m very grateful to public health doctor @c_ni_bhuachalla who offered to write a guest post for me setting out some facts and answers to key questions around COVID-19 relating to miscarriage, fertility treatment and pregnancy. (Link in bio). Reliable information is the best tool we have right now. Apart from that, all I can think to say is that if things feels hard right now, it’s because they *are* hard. ❤️✨ .
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#pregnantinapandemic #pregnancyafterloss #recurrentmiscarriage #ttcafterloss #ihadamiscarriage #PAL #pregnancyanxiety #babyloss
Flowers for anyone and everyone who is dreading tomorrow. 💐✨ For those who thought they would be mothers by now. For those whose motherhood, as most people understand it, was all too brief. For those who are not pregnant but want to be. For those who don’t have anyone to buy flowers for - or to be bought flowers by. I tend to give myself a free pass for tomorrow. I won’t be online and I will do whatever I feel like (within the bounds of social distancing, of course). But please know I am thinking of you if it is a hard day, for whatever reason. I have also written a piece for @tommys about Mother’s Day after miscarriage, as part of a raft of resources they’ve put together for tomorrow. Head over to their page or stories for the link to it (and lots of other brilliant things from people who get it). Look after yourselves. ❤️
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#miscarriagesupport #recurrentmiscarriage
#alternativemothersday #pregnancyloss #togetherforchange #ihadamiscarriage #infertilitysucks #ttcafterloss #thisismymotherhood #motherlove❤️
✨24 weeks ✨ So on Saturday we hit a major milestone - but it’s been an eventful week to say the least. Quite apart from covid-19 anxiety and the fact it looks like I’ll be settling in for 12 weeks of social isolation, which takes us practically to our due date, on Saturday a van drove into the back of our car while I was driving us to a family dinner. We are all absolutely fine and it was a very minor accident. But it was frightening nonetheless. A moment of pure, blind panic. All I could think of was: is the baby OK? It was a jolting reminder - literally - of how fragile this all is. And, frankly, it is exactly the kind of confirmation I do not need, as someone whose default mode is fear that relaxing ‘too much’ in this pregnancy is bound to spell disaster.
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We carried on to dinner, while I half-formed plans to go to triage on the way home. It was only as I started to feel the stowaway kicking away as we ate that my mind began to unclench. The kicks continued as I drove us home again (get straight back on the horse and all that 😬) and then as I lay in bed with a cup of tea - some of the hardest, most insistent kicks I’ve felt so far.
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As Dan put it, after a ‘conversation’ with the bump: ‘What’s that? You’re doing an impression of mummy’s driving...?’ And we laughed. And I cried. And we really are all absolutely fine.
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#pregnancyafterloss #pregnancyafterlosssupport #pregnancyaftermiscarriage #24weekspregnant #PAL #ihadamiscarriage #lifeafterloss #pregnancyunplugged #thisismymotherhood #whatnottoexpect
