I’ll start this with a trigger warning, not because I’m going to talk about our dead baby, after all that’s what this page is for, a place where people can feel free to talk openly about their angels without judgement! but because there will be slightly graphic description of a period and some might find that difficult to stomach…….
A year ago today (13-12-18) we went for a routine appointment, we were going to hear our beautiful babys heartbeat for the first time, at least that’s what we thought…. “It’s bad news today, I’m sorry there’s no heartbeat” those words have played over and over in my head every day for the last year.
I’ve been dreading today coming around, how would I cope having to face this day, the day that changed our lives forever, the day when a little bit of us died with our daughter, the I broke my eldest daughters heart.
Now I said I’d be talking periods but for that to make sense I need to talk child birth, I never noticed this with my first two girls, I guess I didn’t really pay much attention to the little details, why would I I had my beautiful babies alive and well that was all that mattered.
When I gave birth to Nayely, 6 days after the news that she had died, she had a very specific smell to her a smell I’ll never forget not least because I get a monthly reminder of that very smell. Newborn babys smell like blood, like period blood! I hadn’t noticed it with the other two girls because they were fully developed, alive and able to be cleaned up. But it’s true, for the first few hours after living babies are born they smell like blood.
This morning I woke up full of anticipation as to how the day would affect me, then my body done one of the cruelest things it’s done since letting my daughter die, early hours of the morning I started lactating, enough to soak my top and then my period arrived, I was greeted this morning with the smell of my dead daughter, exactly one year since finding out that she had died and periods last a week so in 6 days when I have to face her first birthday without her I’ll be smelling exactly the same as I did a year ago when I went through over 9 hours of labour, a loss of 1.5 liters of blood had a panic attack so strong they put a heart monitor on me and drugged me with maximum dose of oromorph, diazipam and a whole load of gas and air just to calm me enough that I could breath. I went through all of that to bring my dead baby into this world and now at the time I need my body to be kind to me – it does this! As if I don’t have enough triggers at this time of year!
I told my psychologist last week that my body hates me, she couldn’t understand why I feel this way but as I sit here now writing this blog about how cruel my body is being at such a painful time of year, I’m having to stop and breath through a pain that I can only describe as feeling like contractions!
I don’t know, maybe my body doesn’t hate me, maybe it is all just a very unfortunate coincidence!? The one thing I do know, I hate my body, I hate it for letting her die.
One year on and my heart still hurts for what we lost. We will never be the same again but I hope for my other children’s sakes that I can learn to live with this pain better.
Pregnancy, Loss, Grief And Beyond…… It’ll always be to be continued as our grief is as never ending as our love.
Nayely Adelpha Foundation 