Miscarriage is a series of rooms
I lose a friend and a baby, and search for meaning
Content warning: pregnancy loss
I read something on Instagram that says motherhood is a series of rooms. When you’re in one that’s difficult, you can’t wait to leave. But one day, when your child is older, you’ll wish you were back in that room, rocking them to sleep, just for an hour.
For the last few months, I’ve also started to think of miscarriage as a series of rooms. The EPU, where I went eight times; the bathroom, where there is a surprising amount of blood; the day treatment centre; the operating theatre; the waiting room at the hospital, where I must have spent almost 40 hours.
Then, of course, there are the rooms in my mind. The time and date and room I imagine I was in when I lost my baby without knowing it. The room in my future where am I holding her. (I hate to think of the embryo as a her, but I can’t help it). The room in my mind where I collect all of my thoughts and feelings about what happened and can’t seem to bring them together into a coherent form. This page, here, now.
At the start of the summer, my friend died. I find out in the morning before leaving for the airport to go on holiday with my family in France. A few days later, I find out I’m pregnant. It’s a hit of happiness amidst the grief.
My friend, S, had two miscarriages the year my father died. She asked me a few months ago if I’d have another baby. Now I can’t tell her the answer.
I write a shitty poem for her funeral and manage to read it out loud. I am six weeks pregnant, reading that poem, around the time I miscarry without knowing. It’s not helpful to wonder what I was doing when the miscarriage happened. Because it is entirely possible I was reading that shitty poem.
The sentiment behind the poem is that in a way, she’ll live on in her words, whenever we read them. Two months after she’s gone, I open up her manuscript on motherhood that I always keep on my desktop. I search for ‘miscarriage’ and find the section I want. I read the story of what happened to her again, from a new perspective. She said the bleeding lasted almost as long as the potential life had, and I feel her hand reach out to me in the darkness.
I need you now, I think, but I don’t know where you’ve gone.
The bleeding starts the week before my 12-week scan, but the embryo had stopped developing at six weeks. They call this a missed miscarriage. At first, I choose expectant management. This means you just wait for things to happen on their own. At first I was expecting, now I am expectant.
I spend a lot of time in the bathroom. People don't talk about how much blood there is because it's not a nice thing to talk about. But there is so much blood. I read online that other people are surprised by it too. Hundreds of thousands of years of humanity and still we are surprised.
While I am waiting for things to happen, I google everything I can think of. I realise, despite having several friends who have miscarried, that I know nothing.
There is a tool online to calculate your chance of a subsequent pregnancy being successful. In some ways it’s comforting, in other ways I think it’s very stupid. Statistics aren’t always helpful, someone writes. Because the chances of you having another miscarriage is either 100% or 0%.
There, I think. We are singular and alone in our shared experience.
I have a dream that I am sitting in a room talking to S. In the dream I know she is ill and is going to die. But also in the dream, I’m aware that she’s already dead, and we are speaking to each other through a small portal in the universe. I talk to her hurriedly, trying to get as much out of her as I can.
I ask her if she’s figured out the meaning of life now that she is dead. I try not to wake up before she tells me the answer.
Sometimes I think about the fact that her miscarriages were so significant in her life they were mentioned in her eulogy.
The expectant management doesn’t work, and so I opt for an MVA with local anaesthetic. The nurse asks me how high my pain threshold is. I tell her I have no idea. She asks me how I found labour. I tell her I lasted 10 hours with no pain relief but I wouldn’t want to repeat the experience. She tells me I’ll be fine.
The procedure takes place in the same room I have been scanned five times since this began. They give me misoprostol before they vacuum out my uterus. While we wait two hours for the drugs to work, T and I chat and look at our phones. We are talking about music we hear that reminds us of other songs. I say our doorbell always reminds me of the Home Alone soundtrack. He says the opening bars of Coffee & TV by Blur reminds him of the Grange Hill theme tune.
I watch YouTube videos about autumn wardrobe changeovers and I am shivering with cold because of the drugs. I wish I could get it over with now. But I also really don’t want to go back into that room.
S was someone with many skills. She wrote, played the drums, had an incredible singing voice, ran marathons, learnt French. In the last piece of writing she wrote that was read aloud at her funeral, she said those were just the things she did. It was the people around her that gave her life meaning.
Of course the whole point of life is connection, and I think about this on dog walks and when I listen to podcasts, and when I wake up in the middle of the night. I play Sunshine on Leith on a loop and I think about her.
Have I laboured the metaphor of rooms enough? In my mind, I return again and again to the hospital. After the MVA procedure, the doctor says she is sorry. ‘I hope we meet again in happier times.’ The expression feels war-like, and I appreciate the gravitas.
But I see her only a few weeks later and the times are not happy. I have retained tissue from the surgery. The chances were 1 in 1,000, the doctor says, though she can't be sure on the numbers.
This is my seventh visit to the EPU, and I’ve come to know the cast of characters. The straight-talking consultant whose directness I appreciate; the medical student who wears a beret and stares up towards my cervix; the surprisingly handsome anaesthetist (why are anaesthetists always so good-looking?).
Animal Hospital plays on the television and pregnant women sit all around me. Some are here for reassurance scans, others for anti-sickness medication. We are all lumped together, whether we are losing a pregnancy or not. A crying woman sits next to me and I say nothing. Half an hour later, I am back in the waiting room and I am crying, too.
I flushed the embryo down the toilet, and yet I am told that some tissue can be incredibly adherent. Over two months’ later, it has calcified in my uterus. Another dose of misoprostol does nothing to shift it. I start to wonder if it is something to do with my mind: I so badly wanted it to be real and now it won’t let go. But if that were true, this never would have happened in the first place. I make myself mad with these thoughts.
When I go home, I look at my daughter anew: how did you get here? How did you sneak through all the ways our bodies betray us? I always felt she was a miracle, but now the fragility of that miracle is alarming.
I keep thinking about my friend who pulled her car over to the side of the road when I told her. That’s true love, I think.
But the moment of crisis soon passes. It is often easy to feel as though you are in the room on your own.
When my brother calls me after it first happens, he talks about everything we don’t understand about the universe, the infinite galaxies and unknown mechanisms beyond us. It feels like the right thing to talk about. It wasn’t just that my embryo stopped developing. The universe has betrayed me in a way I will never understand.
When I’m back at work, I send my friend a voice note singing a Taylor Swift lyric: I cry a lot but I am so productive. Some days I can do it with a broken heart, but on others I find that I cannot.
At the point where I should have been having my 20-week scan, I am having surgery again. This time, I’m under general anaesthesia for the whole operation. I wake up two hours later from a blissful sleep. At first I think I’m at home, and am about to ask the doctors surrounding me who let them in.
They tell me what they uncovered about my anatomy when they were operating. But everything was a success. They keep apologising for what has happened. It makes me feel less ashamed for the way my body has clung on so tightly to something that was viable so briefly.
I have spent the whole of autumn trying to have a successful miscarriage, instead of blooming into a body swollen with possibility.
I make some of my deadlines, while others I watch slip away from me. Projects I should have worked on, people I should have seen, holidays I should have had. I spend a lot of time looking at my phone.
I also spend a lot of money buying things online that I don’t need. I cook soups in an attempt to nourish myself. I watch The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and eat a 20-minute butterbean stew. It is so good, that for a moment I forget what's happened. I'm just a girl eating her beans while the mormons on TV order a 40oz soda with sugar-free raspberry syrup and coconut cream from a place called Swig in Utah.
When I hesitate about writing this, I think about the hours I spent on Reddit forums reading other women’s experiences. I think about how helpful they were and how much I relied on them when I was met with such a gulf of information.
I think about how lucky I am that I already have a child, and how much worse it could’ve been. ‘In any scenario in life someone has it worse,’ a commenter on Reddit writes. ‘This is not the grief olympics.’
There are times in your life when you need the kindness and stories of strangers, I am starting to realise.
In motherhood, the idea of rooms is sort of heartbreaking. One day, my daughter won’t want to sit in my lap and drink her milk and let me squeeze her toes. What’s the name of that room and how do I get back in?
But in miscarriage and grief, maybe it can be helpful. There are places I don’t want to go again, that I want to slam the door on. But some days, when I’m feeling particularly sad or particularly brave, I’d like to go in and meet again what I’ve lost. There can be something cosy about that room and the grip it had on my heart.
When you’re lost in your real or imagined dark room, scrambling for the door handle, you can make a promise to yourself about hope. I will sit down in a room with my friend again. I will find motherhood joyful and easy again. I will return to the hospital, to the sound of silence as the cold jelly is pressed against my full bladder and I will hold my breath, and wait, and wish, again.
During this time, my colleague gives us all some advice in a meeting. I write it down on my notepad and think about it often afterwards. ‘Do the thing that only you can do,’ he says.
It’s helpful to me on days I feel lost.
So here I am, on my laptop, doing it.