Downstairs, my two children are using their recently acquired language skills to fight over possession of a toy fire truck.
I am upstairs, hovering above the toilet seat, aiming the white padded tab of a pregnancy test and hoping that it is positive.
The weeks pass slowly until I am lying on a bed with a full bladder while a sonographer squirts cold gel on to my stomach. My partner and I watch the screen as she circles an empty black hole surrounded by grey static for several long minutes without saying a word.
It is immediately obvious that something is very wrong.
My uterus is empty when it should contain the beginnings of a baby. Further appointments are scheduled for the following days. We leave the clinic and walk together in silence, unclear how much, if any, hope to hold on to. We find a place to sit and take out our phones. Within the hour, we are AI expert in the medical language of miscarriage.
We speak authoritatively about gestational sacs and yolk sacs – words neither of us had heard of before that day despite partaking in two previous pregnancies together.
Whatever hope we had evaporates the more we learn.
The next few days pass at a distance. I go to work. I take a couple of days pre-planned leave to travel to Tipperary to visit family. I hope I don’t start to inconveniently bleed anywhere. I bring an old towel and thick pads with me in case I do. When the kids are in bed, I sit outside in silence and watch the birds sweep and pick at each other.
Sinéad Hussey: ‘We treat miscarriages as a blip or something that’s easily forgotten’
It’s a swimming, queasy feeling, carrying a pregnancy that you know is not viable. I feel sentimental about my bloated, hormonal body refusing to let go of the empty sac it thinks is a baby. My uterus, harmless and loyal, trying its best, the last to know.
I still feel so pregnant – because I am.
This time however, the days spent wading through bog, with the invisible hand of exhaustion on the back of my neck pushing me down towards the ground, must be endured for nothing.
I lie down on the couch and close my eyes. When I wake up, it’s over an hour later and my body has become a toy monster truck’s terrain, my son navigating its hot pink wheels through the mountain range of my blanketed legs. My daughter sees me open my eyes and immediately pushes a book forcefully towards my face. “Read it.” she states simply, the words slipping around the soother in her mouth. My partner, sitting a short distance away, raises his hand. I signal a thumbs up by way of response.
Mostly, I am furious, not sad.
And not at the injustice of this happening to me. I know the statistics (more than one in five pregnancies end in miscarriage) and of all the miscarriages to get, this is by far the luckiest (I have two! healthy! children!).
But I am still angry at the time that has been wasted by such futile incubation. My head is a balance sheet weighing up a number of complex considerations and my age is chief among them. The trajectory and timing of my career, follows closely behind in second.
Even the word ‘miscarriage’ seems to suggest the mother is somehow at fault
We attend our final appointment and I take the prescribed medication, triggering the anxious wait for bleeding to begin. My hands shake every time I use the bathroom, the terms “pregnancy tissue” and “foetal matter” to the forefront of my mind. The first drop of blood appears in the toilet bowl, before arriving like syrup. It does nothing to calm my nerves.
I debate whether or not to tell work.
I pride myself on never taking sick days. And miscarriage, in particular, is characteristic of the silent violence surrounding so much of women’s healthcare. I have never heard it referenced in a workplace environment, and have absorbed that omission as a cue to hide its occurrence. In the end, I have no choice but to tell them. They are remarkably understanding. With 14,000 Irish pregnancies ending this way every year, it occurs to me that this is not an exceptional event. In fact, it is terribly mundane. A common personal tragedy, being quietly experienced by thousands of women and their partners every year.
The Government’s recognition of this fact with the Pregnancy Loss Bill is welcome, although I await the detail regarding the treatment of different stages of pregnancy – there is a world of difference between losing a baby at eight weeks and 21 weeks. Miscarriage is a serious medical event happening in a woman’s body at any stage, often with more serious and far-reaching emotional consequences for both partners.
It’s a long overdue acknowledgment of that hidden suffering and a chance to bring it to light.