Carol from https://carolterapia.com inspired the courage I needed to publish this story which I started writing a few days after losing my baby. I’ve never felt more vulnerable than right now, but I’m going to do it. I’m going to tell you my story.
Informative fact: 6 babies die in Spain every day due to perinatal death.
June 11th, 2019. Today is a gray one even though the sun is shining. In my head a phrase that I would have never thought I’d hear: it stopped living. It had a name, a father and a mother who already loved it, and a lot of plans that will never be carried out. My body still thought I was pregnant, it hadn’t noticed that life which stopped beating. Science has had to tell my body, through pills. They give me a medicine that will explain to my body what it has to do now with the lifeless embryo, and they move me to a room where I can be alone without sitting in the waiting room, since I’m crying .
I don’t know when I started to cry and I feel I can’t stop. The nurses look at me with a sad face, offer me their empathy, some words of comfort, one of them brings me a glass of sparkling water and a chocolate bar. She asks me if I need anything else and I just need a hug. And she gives me one. I grab her as if my life depended on it. My partner is on his way. When he arrives he wears the biggest and most forced smile in the world and I know he is doing it for me. He hugs me and I cry. “We will try again.” But one thing doesn’t negate the other, and that is the fact that I had our baby in my womb and at some point it stopped living. And it hurts. And now I must get used to life without my baby, after almost three months thinking about what life would be like with my baby.
The worst comes later. The pills have not had the desired effect and the doctor and a nurse perform a scraping without anesthesia. I bleed so much that I end up fainting, and they have to give me an IV to recover. When I return home it has been more than 5 hours and I realize that throughout the day I have only eaten a gross chocolate croissant at the subway station on my way, and I was coming so they could tell me everything was fine. My mother calls me to ask what happened, because since this morning I’m not answering her messages. I can only manage to say “I lost it.” We cry together for my baby, her first grandkid.
And what to all effects is the “childbirth” is still coming, I have to go through it at home, contractions included. No one warned me of the pain I was going to have to face alone.
I draw some conclusions: this too shall pass. It isn’t the first time life throws me an emotional obstacle and I will overcome it. But not today, so I confine myself in a cave of self-pity. Another conclusion is that my hell is nothing compared to the one I hear that thousands of women have lived in a similar situation in Spain. I still haven’t told you that I live in Germany. Berlin, the capital of techno, has had more empathy with me in 12 hours than with my counterpart in Spain in decades.
In Spain, the lack of empathy with a woman suffering a miscarriage falls under what we call obstetric violence. From leaving the woman alone in a room suffering contractions to expel her lifeless baby, phrases like “come on, this is nothing”, disrespect and warnings of what not to do… and so many more. According to the WHO and other organizations, an average 10-15% of women who knew they were pregnant have suffered a miscarriage, so surely you know someone who has been through it and you may not even know it. Or maybe it’s you (if this is the case, a big hug for you, my dear friend).
However, I am so grateful for how kind the nurses have been with me, that after two days I bring them a small gift. But this should be the norm and not the exception. For a whole month my gynecologist keeps me in the utmost disinformation about having made a very important decision that was up to me as a patient: deciding what to do. In the state of shock I was in after having learned that the embryo was not alive, she put two pills in my hand and gave me a glass of water. I trusted her and I shouldn’t have. They were abortive pills, but at no point did she informe me about the pills or their side effects. She offered me no other possibilities. She stole my right to decide what to do with my body. After a month of weekly checkups and bleeding, she tells me she doesn’t know what to do. And I cannot believe it. When I get home I fall apart, and my man in his utmost frustration tells me never to see this “doctor” again.
I feel I have no choice but to go to the hospital, because the gynecologist’s incompetence goes beyond what I can bear as an emotional and vulnerable human being. I re-tell everything. I re-live everything. I cry again. In the hospital I am attended by a young, very kind and empathetic gynecologist who offers me the possibility of a curettage. At this point it is the second week of July. I had the curettage a few days before my 34th birthday. My GP recommended me to go to therapy, I chose to do emotional therapy at home with essential oils. Honestly, I don’t know what would have become of me without them.
The day I get my first period in August, I celebrate with my friends.
The last conclusion I reach is that I must talk about it, because no one told me, and I have to do something about it. From my pain, a desire to help other women in similar situations is born. I begin to document myself, and the more I read, the more I understand that all this begins much earlier: it begins with education. I decide to become a specialist in the menstrual cycle, I want to help women at all times of their cycle: from even before starting the first menstruation to life after menopause. But above all I want to help women so they don’t have to go through this.
Since then I have worked very hard developing an exclusive program in which I teach all types of women not only to integrate essential oils in their day to day but also to regulate the menstrual cycle for life. I want to hold your hand while we walk this path together in which your migraines, acne and other discomforts of menstrual origin will be reduced, you will learn to enhance your natural fertility if you are looking to get pregnant (including support during pregnancy), and together we will build foundations for a healthy and happy menopause.
You can contact me no matter when you are in your life or cycle, to join this virtual family that is ever growing. I refuse to see other women go through what I went through alone, and learn from need instead of learning to prevent and help the body follow its natural course at every moment of life. I had the good fortune of already having EOs well integrated in my lifestyle and I had the necessary resources to support my body physically and emotionally to overcome this trauma.
You can contact me here if you feel this resonates with you. If you need to reflect, here are some links that helped me during my acceptance and grieving process:
This is the beauty of a true story, much like mine. It comforted me that someone talked about it so openly and with photographs (texts are in Spanish).
Here you can learn how common it is and that you shouldn’t feel guilty or ashamed. Miscarriages also happen to celebrities. Even Michelle Obama has openly spoken about her miscarriage. Read her’s and other’s stories here.
Some wonderful support groups:
What to Expect miscarriage support
Before I finish: when I told my man that I was going to talk about this on the blog, he told me that he understands and supports me fully. I could not be more grateful for the partner I’m walking this path with.
