Healing from Delayed Grief
- The Laurima Project
- Oct 25, 2019
- 6 min read
Trigger warning: this post deals with grief and pregnancy loss.
October is a difficult month for me with three anniversaries of different losses all occurring within a week of each other. Up until recently, however, I’d only really connected it with two. The third loss I pushed away and didn’t allow myself to think of as something to grieve. Until a couple of weeks ago, I’d even forgotten the time of year that the third loss happened. I was shocked to discover that the day I had spoken about this in therapy, was the exact date that this loss occurred, only thirteen years later. The loss I am talking about is a pregnancy, which would have been my second child.
My husband and I already had a 16-month old son, but we always knew that we wanted more children, so when I suspected I was pregnant again, I was happy and excited. For several days before I took the pregnancy test, I was sure that I was pregnant; I had felt some of the early pregnancy signs just like the last time. It was a happy secret that I carried around with me until I took the test confirming that yes, we were going to have a second child. As well as feeling pleased, we were both a little shell-shocked, because it had happened so quickly and unexpectedly! We also had some anxieties about coping, both practically and financially, with two children. Despite these worries, I couldn’t help but feel excited.
The news of the positive pregnancy test was only just starting to sink in, when I noticed some minor bleeding. At first, I wasn’t too worried because I’d experienced this during my first pregnancy; but as the days went on, the bleeding became more noticeable. I saw my GP and was booked in for an early scan to make sure that everything was okay. Waiting for that scan was the longest week of my life. Every day there was bleeding and every day I willed my baby to be okay.
The scan day arrived, and I remember vividly, sitting in the waiting room with other worried mothers-to-be. One lady started chatting to us and she went in for her scan first. I remember her coming out excitedly, waving a picture of her 7-week-old healthy baby. Then it was my turn.
I can’t remember very clearly what happened during the scan, but I do know that the sonographer told me there was no evidence of a live pregnancy and I’d probably had an early miscarriage, which was very common. As a pregnancy test was still showing positive however, I would need blood tests to confirm this. I remember leaving in a daze, via the same waiting room and feeling so upset, but ashamed to cry because the sonographer and nurses had talked so flippantly about the loss. I had a few tears and then immediately went back to work, all the while crying inside, but not feeling able to show my distress.
The next day I had follow-up blood tests, which showed that the pregnancy hormone was still rising so I needed another scan to find out what was going on. This time it was the dreaded transvaginal scan that is particularly invasive to your body. The nurses prodded and poked and questioned me relentlessly about my symptoms, but they still couldn’t find a pregnancy anywhere. Then, as the probe was moved to the side of my body, I felt a pain and winced, putting my hand where the pain was. This gave the nurse the information she needed to be able to find the pregnancy, developing in my left fallopian tube. It was an ectopic pregnancy where a fertilised egg had implanted itself outside of the womb.
I was devastated and burst into tears. All I could think was, ‘I won’t be able to have any more children’. The nurse reassured me that this probably wasn’t the case. I then had to decide whether to have an injection or surgery to remove the pregnancy. I chose the injection as it seemed less invasive. However, this meant weeks and weeks of blood tests, to ensure that the pregnancy hormone level was reducing. Once the level dropped below 10, the treatment was effectively over; baby no more.
During this whole process, I never really allowed myself to grieve. My husband didn’t ever think of the pregnancy as being a real baby because the loss had happened so early on. However, I was the one who had felt the pregnancy symptoms and carried the hope around in my heart for those few precious weeks. Sadly, once we knew that the worst had happened, I didn’t allow myself to think of it as a real baby either. I brushed the whole episode aside and threw myself into work as a distraction.
Up until last week, I thought I had dealt with this loss, because so many years have passed since it happened. I also thought that talking about the mechanics and trauma of all the tests and treatments had enabled me to work through it. However, when my therapist pushed me to acknowledge my true feelings about the actual baby rather than the situation, I felt a deep grief, deeper than I ever thought possible.
My therapist noticed that whenever I talked about the ectopic pregnancy, I went off on a tangent to other issues that had happened around the same time, probably as a distraction from the pain. In helping me to stay with thinking about the loss, my therapist unlocked a deep grief, which I had never allowed myself to feel before. It might sound silly, but I never knew that I was allowed to think of it as a real baby, because it was such an early loss. For this reason, I also felt that I had no right to grieve. It wasn’t as bad as losing a baby further along in the pregnancy and so it could be easily forgotten and pushed aside, so I told myself.
Following the therapy session, I went home and cried – properly cried – for my lost baby. I was overcome with a desire to have some tangible way to remember the loss and a regret that I had never named the baby, so that there was something to hang my grief onto. I went for a peaceful walk around my local cemetery the next day and spent some time thinking about my baby and connecting with the loss. It felt sad, but at the same time it was healing.
I have since allowed myself to work through some of the true grief surrounding the loss of what would have been my middle child (I went on to have a healthy baby girl two years after the ectopic pregnancy). I identified a lot of guilt about the pregnancy and the wonderings, that often accompany loss, of: what did I do wrong? what could I have done differently? Yet in reality, there was nothing I could have done. The nurse said that my left fallopian tube could have been damaged somehow, which prevented the embryo from reaching the womb, but I will never know for sure. Sometimes ectopic pregnancies happen purely by chance.
I think the fact that an ectopic pregnancy can’t be saved, adds an extra layer of guilt to the grieving process, because you actively have to ‘remove the pregnancy’. This probably played a huge part in preventing me from considering the pregnancy to be a real baby for such a long time afterwards.
I am really glad that my therapist encouraged me to stick with the pain of remembering my lost baby and effectively gave me the permission I needed to grieve properly. I now feel a sense of freedom to be able to think of the loss in my own way. I allowed myself to buy a little teddy, which I can hold when I remember the excitement of planning ahead for this baby and the pain and shock that I felt when I found out that this was not going to happen.
Next year, for the first time ever, I will allow myself to light a candle for the baby I never met, during Baby Loss Awareness Week, which just so happens to fall at the same time of year as I lost my baby. And I will be able to do this without feeling unjustified in my grief, or ashamed of my attachment to such an early pregnancy. My husband will probably never need to grieve the loss in this way, or think of it as a real baby, and that’s okay too. I am just happy to finally allow myself the time and space to grieve properly after thirteen long years.
Further information and support on ectopic pregnancy and baby loss can be found at:
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