Thursday 13th December, Nathan had gone to work, he’ll be home after lunch to take me to my appointment. I met the girls for breakfast after I dropped Londyn at school. It was nice but I was panicking that I’d lose track of time so I kept clock watching, we spoke about the appointment and I’d told them I was going to use it as a way to get an early listen to the heartbeat (this was not true but I didn’t want people to know how scared I was so I played it down) we ate, we laughed, we chatted – I was blissfully unaware that this was the last time I’d meet them feeling happy.
Finally Nathan came to get me and we headed off for our appointment, I was worrying about the time, Londyn had her school choir performance at 7 and we had stuff to do in Taunton, luckily we got there in time to do it before our appointment. I ate again so that if there was anything wrong they couldn’t operate and remove the baby, it’s something I’ve done before every pregnancy related appointment since I had the ectopic.
You see when they scanned me and saw the baby was ectopic they rushed to me to take me to theatre, they would have removed my baby, my tube and because of the way the baby was positioned my ovary! But I had eaten so they couldn’t do the surgery straight away which gave me time to ask questions and make sure they hadn’t made a mistake and it meant they had to discuss other options to remove the pregnancy (options that meant I got to keep everything except my baby, options I wouldn’t have even known about otherwise) I sit here writing this and suddenly it sounds stupid, I’ve always done this to protect my babies but I’d never thought about if they had to operate to save my baby!
We arrived at the hospital and sat in the waiting room, nervous and unsettled but joking with eachother and doing that thing where you make up back stories for all the other people around you.
They finally called us in, we sat and discussed the options to maintain good mental health, talked about at what stage we would do my birthing plan and what help was available to help maintain my mental health. She asked how I thought it was going and if I’d felt any movement yet, so I told her I thought that I had felt fluttering a while back but to be honest I didn’t feel right, I didn’t quite feel pregnant anymore. With that they offered for us to have an early listen to put my mind at rest, I went into a side room and lay on the bed, she started searching for the heartbeat, we heard something but it quickly stopped then we heard a thudd like the baby had kicked against the Doppler, she couldn’t pin the baby down so she said I could have a scan because although she thought she’d heard something she wanted to be sure and set my mind at rest.
We went into another room, Nathan had Paisley in his arms, they said it was fine she could stay. Paisley started to winge so we tried to distract her. “Look” we said, “look at the telly, Boris is on the telly” and then she said it……………….
……I’m sorry, it’s bad news today, there’s no heartbeat…………(those words will ring in my head forever!) I smiled at her, I couldn’t believe what I had heard and then it felt like all the blood had drained from my body, I was freezing cold my heart was pounding and I couldn’t breathe,………”can you check again?” I eventually asked tears streaming. She called another lady in for a second opinion, Nathan took Paisley out and the mental health consultant looked after her, he came back in and we dissolved into tears……….
What was we going to tell Londyn, how could this have happened? Why? What did I do wrong? What didn’t I do right? What were we going to tell Londyn? How would we tell her? How would we cope?
We went back into the first room and they talked us through what would happen next but to be honest with you, I can’t remember any of it it was a long drive home.
The scan photo is the one from that day.
Nayely Adelpha Foundation 