Hi everyone
My name is Michelle and I’m 33 years old.
While I can’t fault my local hospital when I’m actually inside its 4 walls, the aftercare has been fairly non-existent each time which makes me all the more grateful that I found this website. Everyone here has asked (or answered) the same questions that have been running around in my mind so I don’t feel quite so alone.
I had my first miscarriage in May 2005. I got as far as the 13-week scan, at which the lady just blurted out “unless you’ve got your dates wrong I don’t think this is going to be good news for youâ€â€¦ My local hospital told me that they wouldn’t do anything immediately if I wasn’t bleeding (which I wasn’t) so they sent me home again. Two days later I started bleeding. Nothing heavy at first, but by the evening I was getting contraction-like pains and passing lots of blood so I got rushed in to A&E and ended up having surgery the very next day.
I had a second MC in December 2005. That happened a week before xmas (and the day before my birthday - what a great present, huh!). I was nearly 8 weeks this time. The Early Pregnancy unit at the hospital was great. The lady offered to scan me every week from 6 weeks to put my mind at rest. They’d found a heartbeat on the two previous visits so I was beginning to get confident that it would work out and then when it didn’t it was a real shocker… The worst bit was waiting to go into hospital for the ERPC and still getting morning sicknes…
Pregnancy number 3 (the EP) was in January this year. I wasn’t expecting to be pregnant and was quite shocked at first but not shocked in the slightest when the spotting started at 5.5 weeks. It’s almost like I’ve come to expect it now. Because of my past history my doc sent me straight to hospital and I kept getting weird twinges on my left side but it wasn’t anything major so I just assumed it was normal. As it was a Friday afternoon they took some blood and said the Early Pregnancy unit would be in touch on the Monday for a scan appointment. In the early hours of Monday morning I woke up with a pain that I’ve never ever felt so bad before so I crawled out of bed and, once again, lovely husband took me to hospital (it’s amazing how quiet A&E is at 4.30 am on a Monday morning!). They kept me in for a couple of hours and did a scan but couldn’t see anything. So they took more blood, gave me some painkillers and told me to go back Wednesday morning for (yet) another scan. So that’s what I did. Lady doing the scan said she couldn’t see anything and thought that I had miscarried again but took more blood (I felt like a pincushion by now!) and said she would talk to the consultant. I went to work that day for nothing more than to amuse myself rather than sitting on the sofa doing nothing and worrying. Got a call about 3 pm from Early Pregnancy unit saying I had to go to hospital immediately because the hormone levels hadn’t dropped and they thought it was an EP so I got the train home (had the sense to pack a bag because I just knew something big was coming!) and went straight to hospital. I spent 6 hours waiting in A&E that night for the consultant to come talk to me and at 10 pm I threw a tantrum and told them that if they weren’t going to do anything I was going home. At that point they put me in a bed on A&E, told me I couldn’t go home because they wanted to monitor me and had to be nil by mouth, but that they didn’t have any beds on the Gynae ward so I had to spend the night sleeping in A&E! Moved to the Gynae ward at 9 am the next morning - the pain had come back worse and I was literally begging them to give me painkillers every couple of hours! I think I finally went down to surgery about 4 pm that day - they did the laparoscopy and found the left tube was about to rupture so they had to remove that too. Since then I’ve been very up and down. The first couple of weeks I was very practical and thought I was coping well but almost every week since then I’ve had at least one day when I get annoyed/upset and wonder what on earth is going on with my body.
I am looking forward to the day (hopefully in the not too distant future) when I feel ready to start trying again.