I recently wrote a piece as a guest 'author' for Aculife. You can read this piece here . It is about how empathy and emotional awareness are pretty-much non existent in a lot of fertility clinics, and the importance of creating your own emotional outlet while going through this process.
Over the past number of years, I have joined a few support groups, mostly online... for people who are on a similar journey to ours. A lot of the people who post on there mostly write about their losses and when their babies would have been due and how long they have been trying... etc, but recently... the majority of the posts are about their experiences at fertility clinics and how they feel like they are being 'told off' for getting emotional.
I defy any person in this world to go through just one miscarriage... get your positive pregnancy test.... see your baby on the screen... hear your baby's heartbeat..... feel that enormous sense of unconditional love... make those promises to your unborn child that you will do anything to protect them and never let anyone hurt them.... think about names for your baby...... then one day, wake up and you are bleeding and you know what that means... you go to the hospital, but you already know... you can feel it... you know that you will never get the chance to show your baby just how much you love them... you will never get to protect them... you will never even get to meet them. Your baby is dying inside of you and there is nothing you can do about it, but wait, all you can do is wait... wait for your baby to die so that your body can expel the 'contents' of your womb. (Don't you hate clinical terminology that makes your baby sound like the fecal residue of last night's Chinese takeaway...!!!) Then it happens... you lose your baby, a little part of you dies right there and then, you lose part of your soul and you know that things will never be ok again.
Then honestly say that you have no emotional 'baggage' because of it...??? Liar!
It is 'ok' though... if you listen to the fertility 'professionals'.... you've just had a 'spontaneous abortion', sure that's no big deal... right? I hate terminology that makes your journey sound like a list of specifications for an out of date computer. Under 'Children' on my medical files... it reads '0 + 10'. ... Its 'ok' though... only five of those were 'spontaneous abortions', three others were ectopic and of course the two that I had to 'abort' with chemotherapy. It's simple isn't it, its easy to read those words off the screen. They are just words.
I guess it would be so much easier to look at it in terms of 'specifications', that removes all emotional connection... if there are no emotional connections... well then, you can't get hurt.... you just keep updating the software and eventually you might be lucky enough that someone will have updated the 'This is your month' app with the correct bug fixes that means that this truly is your month.
Unfotunately... this is what fertility medicine has become.
What I described above is just one miscarriage... most couples attending fertility clinics have been through a lot more than one miscarriage, but I assure you.... One is more than enough to change your world forever and give you the right to cry whenever you need to or do what ever you need to do to make yourself be able to get through each day. Nobody would tell a parent who has lost a toddler that crying or being emotional about it is not 'normal'......... Who the hell is anyone, especially a medical professional to tell a person who has lost their unborn child that they shouldn't be having such emotional reactions...???
I know I mentioned before that at one appointment... After I got teary-eyed... I was told I was suffering from PMS and was given a prescription for Anti-depressants to help with 'all this weepiness'. Apparently this is quite common. We are made to feel like even less versions of human beings than we already feel we are. Like there really is something wrong with us.
Take a piece of paper.... tear it once.... you can stick it back together, but it will never really be the same......... tear it twice, three times........... tear it ten times. You can keep sticking the pieces back together, but now it nowhere near resembles the piece of paper that you started with.
That piece of paper is the heart of every woman who has lost a child, you can never be the same person after going through something like that, and nobody has the right to tell you how to feel or how to react or what is 'normal'.
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