Hi everybody, I hope this post finds you well! My week has been long and tiring, work has been stressful and full on due to understaffing and a mountain of work to get through! Been rushing around like a blue-arsed fly! I've managed to start running again properly this week which I think has helped my low moments in my mood as I have been feeling a bit up and down. I'm on CD23 and still haven't seen any ewcm although I have seen some changes in my cf I'm not convinced anything significant is happening so I'm pretty frustrated and anxious. I've been on sertraline 50mg for around 3 weeks now so the drug will be truly in my system, I think it is taking the edge off most days but now I'm unable to reach climax! Apparently it's a fairly common side effect but that doesn't take away the frustration!
For the last couple of weeks I've been posting Rob's point of view on the loss of our Little Bean, I hope it has given an insight on how the father has to deal with more than the mother in some respects as he loses a child and has to care for the grieving mother. In this post I'll go back to my point of view again, I had just gone through surgery to remove Bean's gestational sac and was about to start my new job in Cambridge the following Monday.
I did think should I start a new job after going through so much trauma but I really didn't want my new employer to think badly of me instantly by delaying my start date. I had recovered from surgery very well in the weekend afterwards and I was keen to start a fresh and put the horrible-ness behind me. The role was based in a hospital within the Histology department, from my understanding I would be collecting fresh organs from theatre and dissecting them to be stored in the Tissue Bank primary collaborated for research purposes. In reality I couldn't be further from the truth, it's true I was to collect fresh specimens from theatre but the rest of the job role was quite a shock to me. I was a glorified cleaner, cleaning the blood and gore from the safety cabinets in the laboratory where cut up took place. I did stock takes of the lab equipment, I scanned and copied documents, i couriered bloods from one part of the hospital to the other. Don't get me wrong, all of these roles help keep a lab ticking over but I was shocked at the relatively slow pace and how the restricted the job was. After working in a very busy lab for five years previously as a lab technician cleaning up blood and guts was a big step in the wrong direction. This was reflected in my pay packet as well, I'd lost 10k per annum. I know some of you might think well how come you didn't know that job role before you started? How come you didn't realise after seeing what salary you were being offered? And yes I agree I should have realised, I did expect a different job, less responsibility to what I was used to but not so little as that, I was amazed and within a few weeks I knew it wasn't the job for me. I was grossly overqualified and I had taken it to ensure pay would be coming in when we moved house.
My mental health dwindled sharply, I had moved away from my support network in my previous job which was extremely important to me, I was in a new neighbourhood that I didn't know, in a house I didn't really have any attachment to and that needed a lot of work doing to it and was in a job I detested which I found demeaning and boring. I think anyone in my position not even taking into account a miscarriage would have felt similar. I became very depressed throughout the month of January, I felt my soul had died, I wasn't me anymore. I was only a shell of a person with dead eyes merely surviving the days. I often wept on my way into work and during work hours. Our days were long with long breaks so it was hard not to get absorbed into my own thoughts and only think of Bean and what I had lost. I read book after book in the Histology tea room to escape my own sad existence, no one knew anything of my struggles or the loss I had suffered until one day I couldn't take it anymore, I was so upset one morning I couldn't contain it. I confessed to my managers what I had been through tears streaming down my face. They were very supportive and let me have some time to gather myself, it was a great relief to me to get it out in the open. My managers suggested ringing the Care First advice number which I think is specifically for NHS staff to seek advice on anything really, financial, housing, family, dealing with loss etc. I rang straight away and told my story, choking up throughout, the lady however wasn't what I expected, although she was sympathetic to my situation she denied me counselling for my loss. She declared my feelings were all grief related and there was nothing she could offer me. I put the phone down feeling disappointed and let down, I was obviously crying out for help and I was refused. She may have been right, maybe at that point it was grief flowing through my veins and not depression but I still don't understand how I couldn't be helped through my grief. If I had been offered help at that time maybe I wouldn't have spiralled into depression like I did.
I hadn't been myself for over 2 months and my feelings of isolation, grief and darkness suffocated me. I can only describe my depression as looking through a pin prick at the world, everything in my vision apart from that pin prick of life was completely black. I could physically feel the darkness envelop me, I was exhausted by it all, I was almost at rock bottom. My cycles were nonexistent I was still waiting for my first period after surgery 8weeks on, I had abandoned any sort of intimacy with my husband, sex terrified me. Sex lead to babies, babies lead to loss, loss lead to darkness. I was losing confidence and respect in myself, I stopped looking after myself as I should have done, I just could not function. I had nothing of Bean's and I desperately needed to hold him in some way, Rob got in touch with Warwick early pregnancy unit where we had our first scan and asked if they could post the picture over to us. They were happy to do so which was lovely and I was able to hold my little Bean and look at him again.
I few weeks on and I was looking through all of the information we were given on miscarriage still very much in my dark world when I noticed a small pamphlet advertising Petals, a charity set up in Cambridgeshire specifically to help parents who have suffered miscarriage, still birth or infant death. I resolved to take a step in the right direction and emailed them explaining what had happened to us and asked if for an appointment. I was assigned to Jaqui, a wonderful lady to listened and helped me make sense of what had happened to me. As well as listening she also asked me certain questions to figure out what stage of grief I was at or whether I had slipped into depression. Although this was by no means a diagnostic tool she did find that I could be classed as clinically depressed by the events of the last few months and that I had experienced trauma. She gave me the strength to start thinking about a funeral for Bean, I had been wanting to do something to honour him but wasn't sure what or whether I could handle it.
At the end of February we let off a balloon in Bean's memory with notes attached. It was absolutely heartbreaking, for me it was the equivalent for going into surgery all over again, we were letting him go. To me it almost felt cruel, I felt guilty for letting him go, I felt like a bad mum. But I know we had to do it, it gave us some closure and we saw Bean float towards the coast on his little balloon holding onto our notes of love.
March into April were very much the same as the start of the year, I continued to go down hill in terms of confidence, self worth and mental health. Everything around me was veiled in black, my soul had never returned to me I didn't even know who I was anymore really. My period arrived after over 70 days after surgery, I was both dreading and anxious for it to come, when it finally came the loss became so real all over again. As I'd been spiralling into depression I'd become pretty numb to everything around me and experienced constant pain (I know that sounds contradictory, I mean that the pain was so constant that I was just used to feeling that way and therefore felt numb), so after getting my period it became a spike of pain that I experienced. A stark reminder I was no longer pregnant, Bean was dead, I would never see his face or hear his cry. I tried to see the positive and I think I did a little bit, I was glad in some ways to finally have a period because 70 days was so abnormal and alarming but it only lasted two days and was extremely light. Having a period did not mean we were going to try again though, far from it, there was absolutely no way I was going to try to become pregnant again any time soon. We used condoms from that moment but again we were very naive, expecting to fall pregnant straight away was pure foolishness, not only were my cycles going to carry on being very irregular in the future but we simply weren't having sex enough to even have a chance of becoming pregnant.
April rolled on and I was so sad all of the time I don't know how I carried on. I don't know how Rob coped with me, I just wasn't there, I wasn't in my right mind. I tried to meditate and was starting to use chakra crystals during meditation but I was so consumed it was near impossible for me to clear my mind. I couldn't sleep and when I did drop off I'd wake up throughout the night and early before my alarm went off for work. I became anxious particularly on Sunday evenings knowing that work would start again the next day. At work I saw things inappropriate for someone of my position, I saw containers with bloody fluid labelled products of conception. I saw small cardboard boxes containing foetuses, luckily I didn't look inside. Obviously I saw Bean in all of these situations and I was heartbroken at seeing so many, my morbid curiosity betrayed my grieving mind and I read the paperwork relating to the cardboard coffins - missed miscarriage of twins was one that sticks in my mind. I cried in the specimen room when I read that and scolded myself for reading it in the first place. I knew I would be upset by what I read but I did it anyway. I'm not sure why I did it, I think it was another way of punishing myself and hurting myself.
Then it happened, I hit rock bottom. Towards the end of April 2016 I sat on the floor of the toilets at work my knees tightly curled up into my chest making myself as small as possible. I cried hard into my knees, everything around me was a dark blur through my tears, I clawed at my knees causing my fingers to turn white with the pressure, I gritted my teeth so hard my jaw ached. I threw my head back and smacked it onto the wall behind me and I moaned as a wept. I buried my face into my knees and choked out sobs while pulling at my hair. I wanted to scream my lungs out I wanted to run away as fast as I could and hide away at the same time. I've never felt so awful as I did in that moment I thought that would be my life from then on. When I had no more tears to give I tried to calm my breathing, it was ragged and the sobs kept catching the breath. I emailed Jacqui and told her where I was and what I was doing, she emailed back straight away and said to consider seeing a doctor. I was scared and relieved, relived to hear that I wasn't well from someone else and thinking that I wasn't unjustified. Scared because I'd never been through this before, what would happen now?
Thank you for reading, I hope this explains my feelings well for you to either understand or relate.
Stay strong,
Adele xxx
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