This Week

This week is Baby Loss Awareness Week as well as World Mental Health Day. It’s time we break the taboos around these subjects, so I have decided to ‘go public’ about my own experiences of both these things.
Rewind to autumn 1994. My husband and I had been married for three years and decided that we would try for a baby. To my utter delight, I found out that I was pregnant almost straightaway. I remembered my Mum saying, “Your Dad only needed to leave his trousers at the end of the bed and I got pregnant!” I figured it must be the same for us.
What a wonderful Christmas we had, dreaming of becoming a family and starting to share our news. Life couldn’t have been better. How quickly this changed in the new year.
In January 1995, life suddenly became very bad. At 12 weeks pregnant, I had a miscarriage. The miscarriage was handled very badly by the hospital. I can still see the doctor showing me the scan and saying, “This is where the baby should be” to which I asked, “Why isn’t there a baby there?” And he just replied, “I don’t know.” I later found out by reading a leaflet handed to me on the ward, that it was a blighted ovum, where no embryo is formed.
If this wasn’t bad enough, the miscarriage triggered an acute episode of mental illness, and I was admitted to a psychiatric ward for 5 days. Please don’t ask me to describe in detail the events that followed but, as a direct result of mental health stigma and discrimination, I found myself unemployed for a period of 6 months. I don’t even have the right adjectives to describe this awful time in my life. It left me feeling covered with shame and entirely hopeless.
At that time, my lovely, wise Dad told me to “play the hand you’ve been dealt”. I had been dealt a rough hand, but very slowly, with the help of my husband and faithful friends, I began to play the cards that I had in my hand. Earlier this year, I was sharing my story with friends. One faithful friend told me that God has now dealt me a new hand, and she’s right.
The only good thing that came out of that terrible time in 1995 was that I was catapulted into the system. I received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and started medication, which kept me well for 27 years. At the start of 2021 I very gradually started reducing my meds by 10% each week. Along with the support of my husband and a small group of faithful friends, I finally completely stopped taking medication in March 2022 and I am still well today.
Allow me to leave you with this message: miscarriages are very common. Don’t bear the pain in silence; share your story with others who can relate to your experience. My Mum had 2 miscarriages before my sister and I were born and our own daughter had a miscarriage before the birth of our perfect grandson earlier this year. And taking medication for a mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of any more than taking medication for a physical condition.
Have a great day 😊