Pregnancy after loss

September 2020

Are you excited?

I’ve been asked this a lot and it’s a really difficult question to answer because truthfully no, I’m not excited for the arrival of Little Miss.

But nobody wants to hear that, do they? I mean I’m having a baby I should be so excited. Adam is getting a little sister and I get to be a girl mum, something I didn’t expect to happen!

I haven’t hated being pregnant, don’t get me wrong, this pregnancy has been tougher in terms of sickness but otherwise I haven’t minded being pregnant. I just feel like a vessel carrying precious cargo and even though I can do my best to make sure she gets here safely, I can’t control what might happen after she arrives.

Consultants and midwives have told me she’s doing well but that’s what they said about the boys. It’s hard not to compare, even though it is different circumstances, how will I know if there’s something wrong? Professionals didn’t see Henry’s NEC diagnosis coming so how will I know if she’s the same?

I can hear people saying “The chances of her having NEC are so slim” but Henry shouldn’t have had it, he was over the gestational age and weight for getting it (in terms of percentages of babies who get it after 32 weeks and are over 3lbs 7oz are a lot slimmer), it was bad luck and that was told to us by medical professionals, it shouldn’t have happened. And yet it did.

So, as much as it might make me sound like a Debbie downer, no I’m not excited. I’m bloody scared that something will go wrong and that’s the reality of having a baby after a loss.

I wish, I wish more than anything I could go back to being that naive and happy woman in pregnancy that I was before Henry died. I wish I could unknow what I know, but I can’t.

So whilst sorting through her clothes today I tried to feel excited, I tried to let that happiness creep in. Thoughts of what we can all wear to a family wedding we have coming up made me smile but then I find I catch myself, that wedding isn’t until November, anything could happen in that time.

It’s those thoughts that suck the most because I hate feeling like this. It’s not in my personality to be negative, I really try to be positive.