The Birth of an Angel

TW: Miscarriage, medical trauma/gore

I wasn’t ready for Rhett’s birth. How could I be, when it had only been sixteen weeks?

It was like my body was rejecting him, but in doing so, my body was rejecting me. How could my body, supposedly the perfect house for my baby, betray me?

When he was born, the midwife handed him to me in a white towel covered in stars and moons. He moved his arm and gasped. He wasn’t developed enough to open his eyes.

And then he left us. It was less than a minute. It was the most important minute of my life. A minute I often replay again and again. The minute my son was alive and all he knew was love.

The Monday before, I started bleeding, the blood clumping into table tennis ball sized clots. I called my doctor, who advised me to go to emergency. So, my husband and I got in the car and fifteen minutes later were seated, and waiting. And waiting. And waiting. An hour and a half passed before we decided instead to go to the private hospital. To be seen there was $250 but we would get seen and that was the important part.

I told the woman at the front desk, “I’m fifteen weeks pregnant and I’m bleeding and clotting.”

“Wait,” she told me, holding up a hand to silence me.

She left me there, waiting uncertainly.

She resurfaced a few minutes later. “I just spoke to the doctor, that’s too much for us, you’ll have to go to the other hospital.” I couldn’t fathom it; their imaging department was not twenty metres away. There were no doctors that could scan my abdomen and tell me if my baby was alive or not?

“We just came from there; we waited one and a half hours.”

“Sorry,” she said, not meaning it.

We went home. I wasn’t in pain. My GP would later tell me I’m “just a bleeder.” That some women still bleed during their pregnancies. I thought it odd but I’d heard of it before. Some women still get a period during their nine months and still give birth to a healthy baby. It seemed that would unfortunately and annoyingly be the case. Pregnancy is meant to give you nine months of no bleeding. I was just one of the lucky ones.

Fast forward to Thursday. I had been bleeding and clotting all week but now the pain was beginning. I’m the opposite of a hypochondriac. No one likes hospitals but I would do anything to avoid one. I had only gone on Monday because my GP told me to. Sitting on the toilet, blood pouring out of me, unable to speak, full body shakes, my husband was able to convince me in minutes. I couldn’t speak, he gave me no choice.

I still had to wait another two hours in ED before a nurse gave me a strong pain killer. It did the job but I was still yet to see a gynecologist or obstetrician, someone who know what they were talking about. A nurse took my blood and a urine sample. We waited another hour in the waiting room. People around us were getting restless and leaving, we’ve waited four hours, we’ve waited six hours some muttered, leaving in a huff out the front door.

I hadn’t eaten since around lunch time and by midnight, as I tried to doze on my husband’s shoulder, I began to shake. My blood sugar was probably just low but the fact I had epilepsy had my husband leaping to his feet to tell the nurse on duty. The threat of an imminent seizure was probably the only thing that got me seen. How embarrassing for the hospital if a patient that has been waiting hours for results, then had a grand mal seizure in the waiting room. Just another thing that made me lucky.

A nurse helped me into a wheelchair and into the assessment room where I had sat two hours prior getting my blood taken and a canula inserted that they never needed.

An emergency doctor came in half an hour later. “Have you had any scans?” He asked.

I was confused by his question. “Yes, three, I’m fifteen weeks along.”

“It could be ectopic,” he said, with clearly no idea what the hell he was talking about.

“I’m fifteen weeks. You’re telling me it’s gone back up the tube?”

He shrugged in answer. My anger grew.

He did an ultrasound scan with a portable machine. “The obstetrician said I should do one.”

As I lay there, feeling the cold jelly on my abdomen, waiting to be told my baby had a heartbeat, two minutes felt like an hour. I couldn’t see the screen so had to move my head subtly around him to take a peek. I saw my baby. I mouthed to my husband. Not moving. Tears welled in his eyes. It was happening.

“There’s a heartbeat,” the doctor said, nonchalant. “Baby’s fine, you’re right to go home.”

Driving home at two am, the pain having subsided, our baby okay, I still felt uneasy. No one could give me any answers, it seemed. And no obstetricians apparently available to see me.

My pain was at a two and three all the next day. I called in sick to work. Nine pm rolled around and the pain started again. My husband prepared a heat pack and I tossed and turned in bed for five hours, gripping it like a life preserver, waiting for the pain to subside. Eventually I fell asleep.

Saturday brought a few hours of pain, sitting at a three. I texted a friend. Did you have any pain during your pregnancy? Not really, was her reply. She came over to see me with a bunch of flowers and a block of chocolate, anyway.

After she had sat with me for two hours, the awful pain returned. I couldn’t speak, shaking again, the pain nothing like I’d experienced, simultaneously different and somehow worse than it had been two days previously. We were back in the car, going back to ED.

As the pain marginally subsided, I was ready to pretend the pain was worse. Ready to make it seem like if I didn’t get help, I was going to die. Turns out I didn’t have to. It got worse again. My husband helped me into a wheelchair and the nurses ushered me straight through to a bed. I overheard a woman tell a nurse in the waiting room that she thought she had broken her knuckle. I wished I had only broken a knuckle.

I lay in a bed, waves of pain overcoming me. Several nurses hovering around me, waiting for a doctor to tell them what to do. My blood pressure was taken, a doctor eventually showed up and scanned my abdomen. “There’s a heartbeat,” he said and I felt a wave of relief.

One of the nurses held my hand while the doctor took my blood and put a canula in my arm, the pain so bad it was as if it was his first day on the job.

My husband held my hand and a nurse held the other. Another wave of pain overtook me and I was yelling and squirming. “Am I going to give birth?” I stared into her eyes as the wave subsided. “Your baby is sitting very low. I’d say so. I’m so sorry.”

The pain was too much for me to cry. I remembered I’d read somewhere that the youngest baby to survive outside of the womb had only made it to twenty weeks gestation. And I assumed it would’ve been somewhere with a much higher quality of care. I was only at sixteen weeks. We didn’t have a hope.

To confirm, the doctor piped up, “Your baby is only sixteen weeks, it’s not going to be viable.” I wanted to punch him. A little compassion would’ve gone a long way, his candor and unhelpfulness almost hurting more than the physical pain.

He okayed the administering of fentanyl. And when that did nothing, morphine. And when that did nothing, another shot of morphine. The nurse that told me I was going to give birth gave me happy gas. “I’ll warn you, last time I had happy gas, I went to the island that Edward and Bella honeymooned at in Twilight.” I laughed, happy there was maybe at least something nice to look forward to. No such luck.

“The delivery team are upstairs doing a delivery, we’re not sure when they’ll be able to come down,” a different nurse said.

At some point, a midwife showed up. She rubbed my leg and ran me through what was happening, this was my first pregnancy. She was being helpful but, in that moment, I hated her because she wasn’t in the pain that I was. She asked if she could take my underwear and it hadn’t occurred to me until then that I’d need to remove them. I pulled them down in a moment of lucidity and she asked if I wanted them. “I’m not that attached to them, no.” And we all laughed.

My husband was holding my hand tightly and rubbing my arm. He felt as helpless as I did.

Shots of stabbing pain, again and again, the drugs doing nothing, I realized these were contractions. After two and a half hours in that bed, I was holding my son in my arms. My helpless, deceased son. My life was irrevocably changed. It was so surreal of a situation, something I wasn’t expecting for at least another five months that I couldn’t cry. I wasn’t feeling. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was the relief that the pain had ended. Before it started again. We weren’t done, I had to pass the placenta. My husband held our baby while I felt fresh new waves of pain. When it eventually left my body, it was torn. I would find out two days later when I lost more than a cup of blood, that I still had retained products of conception. It made me mad that having an ultrasound after giving birth wasn’t part of the procedure after all births. Just another thing lacking in this hospital. I had to go into surgery for a D&C to remove it all, to leave it there would result in infection, and possibly worse.

Laying in the bed, the midwife asked if we wanted a photo of the three of us. I was again holding our son in my arms. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

“You can always delete them,” she said.

I’m now glad I have them. They’re the only family photos we have.

I was wheeled up to the family unit, the place where you’re meant to give birth. A place with a private room, a place without the hubbub and chaos of an emergency unit. Several nurses and midwives would tell me later that that’s not how it’s supposed to go and it’s not okay. One of them spoke to the higher ups, to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I hope they work it out.

I held my son in my arms for two hours. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I floated in and out of consciousness until I decided I should put him in his cold cot, lest I drop him. The machine that keeps cold air filtering up into the cot would keep him from decaying too much, I suppose. The midwife that helped me through the birth came in later saying she would take him out of his bloody towel and dress him nicely. She put him in a knitted blue dress and put booties and a beanie next to him that were too big for his little body. He was smiling, his hand under his jaw not dissimilar to poses I had made in photos, a friend pointed out to me the next day.

The photos we have of him perfectly dressed up; I couldn’t be more grateful for. Our beautiful baby boy that only ever knew love and now peace. Our beautiful August baby that should’ve been a January baby. Our little Leo, who should’ve been a Capricorn.

We got his tiny little body cremated and received a tiny little urn as a result. I bawled when we picked him up. The woman at the crematorium said she knew my pain; she had lost a baby ten days before her due date. How could the universe be so cruel?

I then realized, they say twelve weeks, the end of the first trimester is the “safe” time to tell people you are expecting. I know now, there is no safe time to tell your loved ones. You can tell people at five weeks and have a perfectly healthy baby at forty. You can tell people at thirty weeks and lose your baby the next day. The world is unfair.

The amount of people I have since spoken to that have had a miscarriage is astounding. It is ridiculous that it is a taboo subject, as if because you didn’t know your baby, would never know your baby, their existence somehow means less than that of a living, breathing person.

I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife, a heaven, a God. But I do believe everyone that has lost a child, in utero or not, will see them again. And I look forward to taking my last breath and hearing a voice I have never heard before, call out “Mama!”