Another month wasted

I started my period last night – so that’s another month of nothing. Another month of futile hoping and trying. Another month to wait before another chance.

I cried again last night, even through I thought I’d feel less hopeless this month – for all my rationalisation and talk of silver linings, I was still hoping with my whole heart, still holding on for one more day to pass without my period starting, just enough to make it worth a pregnancy test. Just maybe it would be positive.

I was just deluding myself. I feel utterly barren.

I really, really need to get out of this habit of counting the days and weeks and months as if they’re wasted. It’s just so hard *not* to see them as wasted when I feel like all I want is to be pregnant again. It’s the purpose of my life, much as I might try to find purpose in other things – everything else feels like marking time.

And time feels like it’s slipping away. I know I’m still only 29 and it’s only been four months since my miscarriage, but most of the time I just can’t envisage ever having any good news again, ever being able to actually announce that we’re having a baby. I just feel like all I’m having is blood. Blood and blood and blood and never a baby. I’m so sick of bleeding – I just feel like I never want to bleed again.

But of course I have to do this, have to come to terms with my cycle and all the traumatic memories and feelings it brings, because it’s the only thing that can maybe bring me a baby one day. My cycle is back to being fairly regular (normal for me, anyway) which is a good thing. I wish I could muster up any genuine feeling of pleasure about that.

So off we go again. Another month. In the meantime I guess I have few days of being able to enjoy a glass of wine – I’m not a huge drinker but not being able to have a glass used to feel like a big sacrifice when I was pregnant. What I wouldn’t give to have to say no to a drink tonight.

I asked my husband today if he really, truly, from the bottom of his heard didn’t wish he’d married someone else, someone who could give him a baby easily and quickly and with none of this heartache. He said he didn’t feel that way at all – that it could happen to anyone and that it wasn’t my fault. I’ve asked him that so many times but I believed him a bit more tonight. I know he loves me and won’t leave me, and doesn’t blame me. I just need to find a way to stop blaming myself.

Silver linings

I’ve been thinking over the last few days about some of the positive things I’ve been able to take from my experiences over the last few months, both of my miscarriage itself and also of the disappointment of my hopes and plans for the rest of this year. None of these things make it better, but they give me a different perspective sometimes.

The best thing is the hardest to explain. I feel like I’ve got a bit more back in touch with myself – my twenties have been a whirlwind of fun and good times and happiness and I’ve been swept up in that sometimes, forgetting to look inwards. I have spent a lot of time thinking about myself and my life since January, and where it’s heading now that having a family may not be as straightforward as I’d always assumed. I feel like I have got a clearer idea of where I am heading as a person and what I want, rather than just surfing on the wave of life. 

I’ve also remembered that I’m living my life for ME and my real family and friends, and not for other people. One of the things I was most looking forward to about being pregnant the first time was posting the 12 week scan photo on Facebook – of course my feelings about having a baby ran much deeper than that, but being excited about announcing it to all and sundry over social media was definitely a big element of it. When we lost the baby, the fact that everyone plasters their good news all over social media made everything ten times worse – Facebook seemed like a sea of baby photos and status updates, and it made me feel doubly bereft and like a failure. 

I left Facebook about a month ago now to escape, and I feel much better – I’m not inundated with everyone else’s baby news, and also, more broadly, I’m getting out of the habit of needing to announce everything I do to people I barely know. Thinking about telling my friends and family if we do get pregnant again of course makes me feel happy and excited, but now I’m excited just about telling the people I really love and see regularly. No one else really matters. And more broadly in my life in general, I’m remembering that I do things for me and not for the interest of people I haven’t seen for ten years. 

The last big silver lining is about motherhood itself. I’m not scared any more! Not at all. Not of getting saggy and covered in stretch marks; not of putting my career and social life second; and mostly not of the pain of childbirth, which had been scaring me profoundly. I just want my baby in my arms, healthy and whole and happy, and smiling or crying or both at once. I’ll go through anything for that. Maybe of all my silver linings that perspective, that level of simple appreciation, is the biggest gift. 

I’m halfway through my pregnant colleague’s last day

It’s my colleague’s last day today before her maternity leave starts. I found out that we’d lost our baby just after she announced to everyone that she was pregnant, and the awfulness of that has been intensified by her sadness and worry over the fact that they’ve seen on the scans that her baby has a cleft palate. There have been times when I wanted to shake her and tell her not to be so stupid – a cleft palate is nothing major nowadays and she still had a lovely healthy baby inside her! Alive and well and just with a tiny fixable problem. What wouldn’t I do for that? Doesn’t she know what a gift it is? 

I made it almost all the way through our little mini party for her today before I lost it. Even though I was standing right next to her, I looked at my feet and bit my lip, and coped with all the laughing and smiling and joking about how late her first baby was, and how she’s so huge that our boss has been wondering if he should keep clean towels and warm water on permanent standby. I even made it through all the good wishes for her to have a lovely maternity leave with her growing family. I was feeling lost and a bit poleaxed, but I thought I was doing OK.

It was the present we’d bought her that opened the floodgates – I hadn’t seen what had been bought with all our contributions. It was a lovely Cath Kidston bag with a built in little changing mat. I just looked at it and imagined her little baby lying on it, and her carrying it around filled with baby things. My eyes swam and my chin wobbled. Luckily my colleague who knows my whole saga saw that I was losing it and got me out. 

All I could think about as I sat in the corner office sobbing my eyes out was all the things people would have said if I’d been six months pregnant now, like I should be. All the jokes that would have been made. “There’s something in the water in this office…” “You’re going to bankrupt us with all the baby presents we have to buy!” “Anyone else want to tell us anything?” 

It would have been fun. Me and my bump and a little kicking baby inside would have glowed with happiness that it would be us soon. 

As it is, it’s just me, sitting back at my desk, feeling empty and barren and wishing it could have been me too. It should have been me too. 

Would dealing with a miscarriage be easier if I already had a child?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether my miscarriage would have been easier to bear if I already had a child. The obvious answer is no – the grief at a lost part of myself, a lost member of my family, a lost opportunity for life would be just as strong, just as hard to get past. I would still be grieving for the child I’ll never get to know, and I might still feel that my family was incomplete and that I wanted to give the child I’d had previously a brother or sister.

The physical trauma would still be just as disturbing too. Having to deal with the loss of a pregnancy is so visceral, so frightening and alien and unyielding, that no circumstances would make that easy to bear – even mothers losing an unwanted pregnancy still have that reality to live through.

But if you told me, right now, that I could just have one healthy baby and then no chance for another one – even if you got out your crystal ball and said that I’d had a terrible traumatic birth and couldn’t have any more children – I would say YES! Where do I sign up? Right now, the uncertainty of whether I will ever have a successful pregnancy, whether I’ll ever hold my own baby in my arms, is so dreadful that having one child would feel like such a blessing.

I was so afraid of childbirth before – afraid of the pain and the unknown and the indignity. Now I don’t care! I really don’t care what happens to me. Nothing will seem an effort if my own little baby – my own, healthy little happy thing – is with me.

In some ways, it’s not the miscarriage itself that would be easier – nothing can make that anything other than the hardest thing you hope ever to do. It’s the moving on, picking myself up, and looking to the future that I think would be a little easier. If that future already involved three, I’d feel like the luckiest girl in the world.

Increased fertility after miscarriage – an old wives tale?

In my previous post I talked about the frustration and stress and uncertainty of trying again after a miscarriage. One of the things that makes this worse is the old wives tale that suggests that your body ‘knows how to be pregnant’ and so conception should be quicker second time round. I have heard this from a few different people, and it definitely made it worse when it didn’t magically happen for us the first month of trying again.

I thought I’d do a bit of research into the suggestion and see whether there’s any truth in it. Most of the more reliable websites seem reluctant to say more than ‘some evidence suggests’ and ‘some studies show’ that miscarriage could increase fertility – many don’t even mention the possibility at all, and I am inclined to think that Baby Centre’s conclusion is sensible (http://community.babycenter.com/post/a26307987/helpful_ttc_info):

After a miscarriage it’s difficult to determine what a ‘normal’ conception time frame is. Some women will get their period 28 days after their loss and some won’t get it back for 8 weeks[…]. Once your period returns you fall back under the standard conception time frame (in other words, already experiencing a pregnancy doesn’t give you a ‘headstart’). There is a lot of misinformation about being ‘more fertile’ after a miscarriage. There is simply no scientific evidence to back that up. In fact, after a miscarriage (especially after 8 weeks) your body will need time to recover and get back to normal. Many women do not ovulate for a few months. It’s totally normal to take 6-12 months to conceive after a miscarriage no matter how fertile you are.

OK. So I should probably expect to be in this for the long haul – no more naive expectation that we’re young and healthy and therefore should be pregnant instantly.

BabyMed has a view that supports the ‘more fertile’ idea a little more:

While doctors say there is a brief period right after a miscarriage occurs that a woman experiences increased fertility, this does not mean that her fertility will be increased for long. Experts report that a woman’s normal fertility level should return within four to six weeks after the miscarriage when ovulation starts and her cycle begins to function as normal again.

Anyone who felt very inclined to actively try again within four weeks of a miscarriage gets top marks for effort from me – I was still bleeding for most of that time let alone being an emotional wreck.

In any case, some research has shown that it’s better to wait even as long as sixth months after a miscarriage – in fact that’s still the World Health Organisation’s recommendation, even though more recent research has shown that it’s best just to go for it straight away (http://www.nhs.uk/news/2010/08August/Pages/conceiving-baby-after-miscarriage.aspx). Physical symptoms and the benefit of dating the pregnancy accurately aside, I’m not sure anyone would be ready emotionally straight away, but also six months seems like a long time in limbo.

I’m now three and a half months down the line from my miscarriage, and in my second month of trying – last month was very difficult and I found it traumatic and upsetting when I wasn’t pregnant straight away. This month I feel much better about it, and think I will cope much better with negative results this time round. Although I can’t say I won’t be upset, I think I will be more philosophical and accept that we really, truly are back to square one.

In some ways I’m glad I haven’t got pregnant again straight away. It would have been hard to separate the two pregnancies in my mind, and I want next time to be a fresh start. It will be better for our next pregnancy if I can see it with hope and optimism, and see our baby as an individual and not as a replacement for the one we lost. Plus, it will be better for our lost baby too – not just swept under the carpet by a quick ‘rerun’, but remembered and grieved for.

Surviving monthly miscarriage anniversaries, and dreading the due date

Today is the three month anniversary of the day we found out we’d lost our baby. I don’t know where these three months have gone – they’ve been a whirlwind of coping, not coping, talking, crying, going on a massive spontaneous holiday, and coping some more.

It’s been particularly strange today, too, because death and remembrance are all over the newspapers after Margaret Thatcher died – again, I am struck by the brevity of my baby’s life and by the enormity of what one person can achieve in a full, fulfilled lifetime. Being loved and loathed, experiencing epic success and epic failure, being iron-strong and then frail and ill – we all experience these things to some degree over the course of a normal lifetime, but that little thing that lived so briefly will never experience them. 

Anniversaries seem only to emphasise the time that I feel I’ve lost. It’s been three months since I was moving in the right direction for having a baby – in the right direction for the future and family I have always wanted since I was very young. Since it happened I’ve been becalmed, waiting for a normal period, and now trying again. Every month that passes seems like a marker of my failure to have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. 

How will I cope with 29 July – our due date? I think if I’m pregnant again by then I’ll be able to handle it quietly and calmly, sad and aching for my loss but positive and hopeful for the future. It’s a delay in conceiving that I dread – if a few more months pass and we’ve been trying for a whole year, punctuated by our loss, and then the baby’s due date rolls round, I don’t know how I’ll approach that day and not feel overwhelmed by hopelessness.

Even worse, the Royal Baby is due in July (I live in England). Seeing him or her born, and knowing that that will be his or her birthday that month every year, and not my baby’s, will be terrible. And the Royal Baby will always be exactly the same age as my baby would have been – I’ll always be reminded, every year, as they get older, that my baby is not getting older.

I don’t know if it’s healthy to think of these milestones. I know I need to grieve properly, but I also need to try not to dwell on dates and facts. I just need to try and heal. 

Carrying my miscarriage is a lonely burden

It seems like I’m the only one that’s so upset about my miscarriage. In fact it sometimes seems like I’m the only one that remembers about it at all.

I know that seems like the meanest thing to say about my husband, and paints him in a really bad light. That couldn’t be further from what I mean. It’s cliched to say he has been my rock – but he has. I couldn’t have got through it without him. From the first day in the hospital, when he phoned my parents to tell them, comforted me, held me and talked to me; to those awful days afterwards when I was showing him sheets of bloodstained toilet paper and clots and he had to take endless days off work just to sit and watch me cry; and right through to now when he is so understanding and sympathetic to my various hang ups and concerns and still has to deal with the nights when I can’t stop weeping. He has gone so far beyond the call of duty, and has been everything I ever hoped for. Marrying him was SO the right move, and I love him even more after what we’ve been through together. I didn’t even know it was possible to love him more.

So it’s not that he isn’t supportive. It’s just that he’s, well, *him*. He’s a very logical, rational and intellectual person. And although he’s one of the most sensitive and non-macho men ever born, he’s still a man! He doesn’t want to dwell on things. He wants to move on, and think about the future, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with difficult feelings every single day. I don’t think he’s repressing it, really – he just doesn’t need to pick the scab all the time.

I seem to need to pick the scab constantly. This means that sometimes I feel like, even though I can share everything with him normally, I need to keep some of my darkest thoughts to myself.

And then there’s my Mum. My Mum is one of the best mums ever – I hope you’re getting the impression that I’m very lucky with my family. But she, too, is supremely practical. She came down to stay with us a couple of days after my miscarriage, and she came to scans with me, talked to endless doctors with me, brought me flowers, made me laugh, took me for a massive retail therapy session, and was everything anyone could ever need.

But now she too is resolutely forward looking. She insists that we’ll be pregnant again soon and is impatient at my worries that we could lose another baby or struggle to conceive again. Maybe she’s right, statistically, and I probably need a dose of optimism. I can handle her no-nonsense attitude in that way.

But what’s impossible to deal with it her conviction that losing this baby was a good thing, because, as the doctors told us, the most likely reason for the miscarriage was some kind of chromosome abnormality which made the pregnancy non-viable. She says things like, “you really wanted rid of that, whatever *it* was”, and talks about the horrible thing that I was growing inside me and how I needed to get it out fast. It wasn’t a baby – it was just a bundle of cells that went really wrong and could never have been a person.

That IS my baby she’s talking about. I know a person couldn’t manage to fully grow from those cells, but there was DNA there that was formed from my husband and me – there was a tiny heart that was beating, however briefly. That was my tiny little baby, that never made it.

I feel angry and so hurt that she talks about him like that. I know she’s trying to help but she gets it so wrong.

We didn’t tell many friends, although those we did tell have been wonderful, and much more prepared to see it from my point of view, as a loss to grieve for. But it’s the people closest to you that you really depend on when something like this happens, and when they can’t quite be what you need it’s lonely. That’s why I relaunched this blog, because it gives me the opportunity to articulate how I feel, fully and freely, without having a chorus of “come on, you need to be more positive”. It’s wonderful how the internet gives you access to a community of people who have been there too, wherever “there” is.

I want to move forward too, and I feel like I’ve been doing that pretty well, all along. But I can’t move forwards by forgetting what’s happened. I need to take it with me. It feels a bit like a scar – I’m glad to be healthy and to have recovered from the wound, but the mark is still there and sometimes I need to look at it, and remember how it got there. In some ways, remembering how I felt then makes me feel more positive because I can see how far I’ve come and how much better I’m doing now. It’s only been three months.

Maybe in the end the problem is that no one else experienced the full horror of what happened. My husband had the emotional trauma, but the combination of the emotional and the physical is something no one could go through but me. However they try to share it, it’s my miscarriage in the end.

 

Grieving for my baby

Grieving for a person who has never been born is one of life’s strangest experiences. You can’t really miss them because you don’t know what their company would have been like, or what your relationship with them would have brought to your life. You don’t even know what they looked like. There’s no funeral to attend, no grave to visit, no gathering of family and friends in remembrance. One of the hardest things to handle, for me, has been the seeming erasure of my baby from life without anyone else even noticing his absence. 

After the ultrasound scan when we learned I’d had a delayed miscarriage, we had to make some terrible decisions about what happened next – I’d decided to have an operation to remove the ‘remaining products of conception’ (see my last post for more on this awful term) and it was scheduled for the Friday.

On Wednesday we went for a walk, just to get out of the house and try to get ourselves together. We went up to the beautiful common in the town where we live – it’s just grass and trees and benches, but it’s one of my favourite places. While we were there I had increasingly strong pain, like severe period pain – it got worse and worse, and when I got home I took some painkillers and collapsed on the bed in agony, waiting for them to work. Suddenly I had an intense, gripping pain, and then the strangest feeling of something descending – I ran to the toilet, my hand clamped to my pants, and managed to sit down just before a huge clot passed. It was the size of my hand and very firm, almost hard. Blood poured out to follow it and then the pain quickly started to ease. Eventually I was able to get up, and I flushed without thinking. I rang the hospital and they said I had passed the sac and so I wouldn’t have to have the operation to clean out my womb anymore. 

It took me hours to realise that this meant I had effectively had a contraction, given birth to my stillborn baby, and then flushed him down the toilet. 

I have found this part of my miscarriage experience the most traumatic and horrifying by far. I don’t know what I wish had happened. Sometimes I wish I had had the operation and kept my baby’s remains, but I’m not sure this would have been at all healthy for me, emotionally. Sometimes I wish he had been cremated at the hospital, but then I hate the idea of him being in with all the other gruesome things that hospitals need to dispose of. Sometimes I think maybe going down the loo, and eventually to the sea, is the best I could have done for him. 

It just seems like such an awful life. He had ten weeks of existence, and then was flushed down the toilet without ever having taken a breath. 

And I felt so empty. I felt so alone and empty, even though it was far too early for me to have felt him kick, or even to have had a bump. I just felt lonely like I never have before. Sometimes that still hits me, the feeling of utter loneliness and emptiness. 

We went to the common again on the one month anniversary, and I thought it would be really hard to go there and remember the last place where I had had him inside me, even though he wasn’t alive any more by then. But it wasn’t hard – instead it was bittersweet, because despite a huge sense of loss, I felt like of all the places on Earth, this was one where I could actually remember him somewhere happy and beautiful. Not a hospital, or an ultrasound room, or even our home where I’d been so unhappy since we lost him. Somewhere lovely and natural and free.

Each time we’ve been up there since it’s been a powerful experience. Just this weekend my husband picked up some of the fresh grass cuttings off the common and sprinkled them into the wind – we didn’t mention it but I knew he was thinking of our baby. It makes me happy that we have associated somewhere so lovely with him, for always.

Losing my baby: dealing with the first day

By the time we went for the ultrasound scan on January 8th, I already knew I’d lost our baby. To explain that certainty, I think I have to go back a bit – it had been a worrying pregnancy all along, although I didn’t fully realise or acknowledge that at the time. 

I bled a little at 6 or 7 weeks – just brown discharge, but a fair bit of it – and I had a tight, painful feeling in my abdomen, so they gave us an early ultrasound at that stage. I cried as soon as I got on the Doctor’s table, convinced that there would be a problem. But then we saw our little tiny baby with his tiny heartbeat flickering like a little fairylight, and I cried again with joy and relief that everything was OK. It was magical to see our baby alive and well, and it set our minds at rest for a while – I remember we went out for a celebratory lunch that day, so happy that everything was OK. The Doctor reassured us that it was normal to bleed a little, and said we owed him a bottle of whiskey for making our Christmas so much happier. 

Things went on peacefully over Christmas. I felt sick but not too badly, and I was tired, but everything seemed normal. When the brown discharge started again between Christmas and New Year, I wondered if it was sex that had caused it, or if it was just the same cause-less bleeding as before. It carried on for a week, and seemed to be getting heavier, but it was still brown. I read all kinds of statistics that once you’ve seen a baby’s heartbeat, it’s 98% likely to be carried to full term, and I tried not to worry.

Then when I came back to work on January 4th I noticed there was some blood there too. I phoned the midwife and she said I should go to A&E. No bleeding is normal, she said. 

I went at 4.30pm on a Friday night, and the ultrasound department had closed for the weekend. They booked me in for Monday or Tuesday, and then did a blood test – my hormone levels were still high, so I was sent home for bed rest. That night, the brown blood really changed to red – it was too much for a panty liner so I started to use a pad. Over the weekend it got heavier and I got increasingly worried, and then on Sunday morning I remember sitting on the settee looking out of the window and just thinking, “I feel really well”. I didn’t feel sick or ‘spaced out’ anymore, like I had been feeling. I think I knew at that point that my hormone levels had dropped.

I don’t ever want to feel again like I felt that Sunday and Monday night waiting for the ultrasound appointment. I guess it must feel like waiting to be executed. It’s possible you’ll get a miraculous last minute reprieve, but just so unlikely. I felt weighted down by dread and horror. In all the months of grief and sadness since then, I’ve never felt as distraught and desperate. 

Going to the scan was a relief – I just wanted it to be over one way or another. As I lay on the bed the ultrasound technician spent ages looking at the screen then just said, “I’m afraid I don’t have good news”. I had the weird urge to make it easier for her, and I said “It’s OK, I knew you wouldn’t”. It was the truth, anyway.

The baby was still inside, but there was no heartbeat, and it was far too small for 10 weeks. 

The crying just sort of started, of its own accord, and I somehow got into my clothes and then they shepherded us into the ‘Quiet Room’. I couldn’t help but wonder how many people had been in that Quiet Room before us, that year, that week, that day even, having their lives ripped apart like ours were being. They left us for a while to comfort each other, which was sweet but didn’t work. Nurses brought me glasses of water, and I just sat in disbelief, not really thinking about anything, just trying to continue to exist. 

Eventually the Doctor came and we had to make a set of the worst decisions ever. As I’d had a delayed miscarriage – the baby and sac were still inside – they recommended I have an operation to remove the remaining ‘products of conception’. If I had the operation, did I want to collect the ‘products’ so I could bury them? I thought the two decisions were hideously incongruous – we have to use this industrial description, ‘products of conception’, yet we can talk about burying them as an individual to be mourned. In the end I said yes to the operation and no to collecting the remains – whether this was the right decision is a question for a later post.

I’ll also save for another day the reactions of my husband and family. For now, let’s just say that I was blessed beyond words with the support of my husband that first day.

We went home, hours after arriving at the hospital, no longer pregnant, waiting for the bleeding and pain to start in earnest as we’d been warned they would. I’m not really sure what we did for the rest of that day – talked on the phone to our families and closest friends, sat and tried to relax, tried to eat and drink, tried to keep on going. I’m so glad I’m not in that place any more. 

The bleeding was heavy that night but manageable. It was stabilising to have a definitive answer but dreadful to be carrying my dead baby still. I simultaneously wanted this gruesome thing to get out of me, but also for it never to leave me. I cried until my eyes scratched and my cheeks ached, but I didn’t do a lot of actual thinking. 

One of the worst things was realising that this wasn’t going to be one awful day. Having a miscarriage is a long, arduous process that takes many months to recover from physically. I sometimes think that mental recovery will take the rest of my life. 

Tomorrow’s post: Grieving for my baby 

A new start

I started this blog last summer to try and connect with other women who were ahead of their friends in trying for a baby and who, like me, felt a bit isolated. Back then I was worried about losing my freedom and friendships, and I blogged about vitamins and back pain and exercise. It didn’t take off much, mainly because I didn’t stick at it very long – I got downcast because it took us five months to get pregnant. I know that’s not a lot, but I became focused on that number and the blog slipped to the back of my mind. And then, in October, we found out we were expecting – and I was so happy and so preoccupied that, again, the the blog wasn’t on my list of priorities.

We suffered a miscarriage in January at 10 weeks, and since then the way I feel about, well, everything, has changed.

I’ve got to a place where I feel I really need to write about it, and where I feel like I could have worthwhile things to share with other people in the same situation, instead of just tears. I could have started a new blog but I still think there’s useful stuff in the posts I made before, so please read them if you’re interested in preparing for pregnancy in general. But if, like me, miscarriage fills your thoughts so much more than you ever dreaded it would, then I hope there is something comforting or helpful in my experiences.

I haven’t found a miscarriage blog out there that I really like, that said things in the way I needed them to be said. The whole idea of a ‘miscarriage blog’ is maybe a misnomer, because nobody could possibly blog about it while it was happening – blogs like this have to be in retrospect. So it’s already an awkward concept. But in the whole gamut of emotions that people feel after losing a baby, apparently a compulsion to talk about it is one normal reaction – and that’s exactly how I feel. It’s hard to actually talk to friends and family as they often don’t want the gory details, both physical and emotional. The slight distance that a blog gives is perfect for that.

So, it’s going to be a bit of a traumatic thing to write, I think, but hopefully therapeutic too. I’ll be posting every day for the next week, so follow the story if you want to, whether you’re sitting at home in the dark depths of your grief or whether you feel like the light is there, at the end of the tunnel, but that sometimes you turn a dark corner and lose sight of it.

If you have lost a baby recently, all I can give you is my deepest sympathy, understanding and hopes for a better future.

Tomorrow’s blog: Losing my baby – dealing with the first day