Intro music written, performed, and recorded by John Bright. You can find more of his original compositions on his YouTube channel here.
CN: MISCARRIAGE, ECTOPIC PREGNANCIES
I remember that there was a specific time early on in my wife's pregnancy when I was really starting to think about miscarriages. And I knew I had to write something down, record something, or have some decent conversations about them because I needed to get my thoughts out and process them. Gemma, my wife, was only seven weeks. So it was a topic right at the front of our minds. But it was the first time I'd had to engage with it. And I had all kinds of statistics, observations, and things I was thinking about that I needed to express. So I started writing.
But what I didn't anticipate was that two days after I started typing, we would have our first big miscarriage scare of the pregnancy. And some of those profound observations I pulled out on Monday evening were made redundant by the 48-hour emotional roller coaster we rode over Wednesday and Thursday night. It was a surreal experience and one I wasn't prepared for. And I don't think Gemma was ready for it either. It took me personally a while to make sense of it.
To give you some context, right on the six-week mark, Gemma went from unbridled abundant joy to some of the most violent 'morning sickness' you will ever see. I put those sarcastic quotation marks around that term because she was sick 24 hours a day. It’s like a bloke came up with that name or something. After a week of the unceasing illness, she started getting more abnormal symptoms. Specifically, the sharp pain in her abdomen wasn't regular cramping, and it was beginning to overwhelm her.
Nervously she contacted our midwives, who instructed her to get immediately to ED, as they were worried that these were signs of ectopic pregnancy. Now ectopic pregnancy, for anyone unfamiliar like me at the time, is when the foetus is formed outside the uterus. Obviously, this is not a viable pregnancy. An hour later, she was lying on a hospital bed, getting the first three ultrasounds for the night from the brilliant staff at Waikato Hospital. I can't say enough about how good they've been all the time we've been up there.
The first two doctors couldn't locate the foetus as it wasn't their speciality. Worryingly, though, it did appear to be fluid in the general region, which usually indicates blood. We both stared at the impossibly vague ultrasound screen, unsure of what we were looking at. We both anxiously tried to read the stone-faced doctors as they puzzlingly moved the wand around. Every repeated circuit felt like it must have been the worst possible news and every hesitation or slight eyebrow raise implied that they were about to give us a grim conclusion. The doctors told us that they couldn't conclude anything and then we would need an ultrasound specialist to investigate.
After another couple of hours and more rounds of questioning, Gems was put on the move to get a transvaginal scan. I waited nervously in the short-stay room, reading my phone and mentally diagnosing the other people there. That's an overdose. That might be an ectopic pregnancy too. This more comprehensive scan found that it was a foetus in utero and everything was going to be okay. For the moment, anyway. They told us that bleeding was something that 30% of women experienced, and it shouldn't be a problem. It was a false alarm. We were in the clear.
The pain wasn't subsiding, however, so a surgeon popped in to see us, and he bought them a diagnosis of appendicitis, which is not exactly what you want to hear at 1 am. But after lots more testing and going back and forth the next day, doctors cancelled the surgery they had booked the night before. Tests were starting to normalise, and the pain was going away. So they decided that it wasn't worth the risk to the foetus. Gemma was discharged after 36 hours, and we left with confusion and relief.
Sitting at home a couple of days later, I was still riddled with the same dread I had always had about becoming a father. I had no idea how on earth I could cope with parenthood, and I just continually visualised a resentment-laced failure in my future. I didn't know what it took to be a father. All I knew was that whatever it took, I sure didn't have. What was surprising about their week was just how much nausea and emotional fatigue changed me as it washed over me. For the first time, the idea of that baby not making it was something that I genuinely feared, and it became something that I couldn't stop thinking about. I already felt that I was feeling this way before the drama of the week, but I had no idea how intense that feeling could be. Whatever chill that might have been still lingering in the back of my head a few days before had been definitively defeated. If before it was, I don't know, three out of 10 anxiety levels had skyrocketed to about 13.
Now the notion that someone with a pregnant wife would be scared of miscarriages hardly seems noteworthy. Embarrassingly, though, in my case, this newfound, intense fear was a massive surprise to me. I don't like to admit this, but miscarriages are something that I did not think would be a huge deal. I just felt they would be something we would have a high probability of encountering. And we would inevitably move on relatively quickly. Now, if you think this is a monstrous opinion, I can't argue with you. Hindsight has made me ashamed of many things in my life. I have multiple mental health conditions that are chronic, dysthymia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, the two most affecting, I suppose. And they bring with them a lot of shame and guilt, at the best of times, over minor things. But I think my shame and guilt over these feelings were somewhat earned. I don't believe so there'smuch that's embarrassed me more than having this cavalier attitude towards the possibility of people going through a miscarriage.
There are reasons I felt like this. Unsurprisingly, most of them are steeped in male privilege and ignorance. I predominantly viewed miscarriage through a very myopic lens because it felt like a sensible defence strategy. It's easy to think of miscarriage as something purely mechanical when you are removed from its reality. Most miscarriages occur because something is wrong with DNA and the pregnancy. And subsequently, once it notices this aberration, the mother's body rapidly rejects what it was just pumping endless energy into fostering. It's entirely out of our hands. And it just sounds so rational when you put it in those terms.
I suppose more pessimistically or cynically; I've also always had a sort of perverse notion that a miscarriage would be inevitable. Unfortunately, numerous women in our orbit have gone through miscarriages, multiple miscarriages. I've never spoken to any of them about their struggles because even if I wanted to, which I didn't, I would have no idea how to approach them. Because I tend to...how do we delicately...put this because I watch to prepare for the worst, that small sample size has always been representative of imagined data that doesn't have any basis in reality.
Now, it would be ego soothing to say that I was only concerned with strategically protecting our emotions. Unfortunately, for my sense of self-worth, that isn't true. I wouldn't be honest if I didn't admit that part of me also imagined that a miscarriage would have allowed me to avoid facing my fatherhood fears a little bit longer. The simple fact that I would have got more time to be free of parental obligations was a silver lining that I was not even slightly guilty of holding. And I don't like this part of my older self. This part of me willfully chose not to consider the pain, the trauma, the heartache, and just the physical agony of a miscarriage and how that would affect the person I love more than anything. This part of me is so intentionally ignorant that it can equate not speaking about miscarriages as proof that they are universal and just not that big a deal. But there's no point in pretending that this part of me didn't exist.
I can truthfully say that the moment my wife became pregnant, that part of me withered away. And I'm proud of that. But it's still hard to know that it took my wife to get pregnant for that version of me to pack up and leave. He stayed there because of entrenched entitlement. I was 35 years old. There's no excuse for that part of me to have hung around that long.
Initially, when Gems had that first positive pregnancy test, it was the potential impact on her that made me realise what a twat I had been. She's an optimist by nature, and her optimism is her most important tool in facing adversity. She drives forward, preparing for the best, fully confident that she can cope with adversity if it goes awry. And I don't doubt she would have managed if the worst happened because that's her skill. But having seen what that little blueberry in her belly meant to her, I knew that it would be a steep mountain than she could have ever imagined before that we could have ever imagined before. She would have been so hurt. And the sudden visualisation of her hurting like that was like being hit with a cricket bat.
What shocked me that week, though, was that I was no longer just fearing for her well-being. I finally feared losing the opportunity of being scared of my impending fatherhood more than the imminent fatherhood itself, which was wild. Somewhere in the seven weeks leading up to that moment, I'd become attached to the sub-one centimetre-long reptile taking up residence in Gemma's uterus, and that's a lot quicker than I had anticipated that transformation taking. Part of me was nervous that it would never take place at all. On the one hand, I was pleased because that was a sign of growth. But on the other, I had the daunting prospect of 33 more weeks of pregnancy to go in the best-case scenario. There are many years left before my anxiety intensifies, and hopefully, it'll boost me for the rest of my life. This is an overwhelming realisation, though.
The learnings from that week were not just personal, though. Because having absorbed all those experiences and emotions, I was left bewildered by just how ass-backward we are when discussing this topic. It's one of the reasons I wanted to start here early on in this series with this topic. I'm aware this is another embarrassingly naive take stemming from someone who likes to act woke but is still cozied up to the patriarchy. But grasping how little we say about a topic that affects so many people legitimately shocked me, and it still amazes me to this day. The conventional wisdom I absorbed from everyone around us was that you meant to wait until 12 weeks before you tell people that you're pregnant. I'm guessing that this prevents you from having to deal with breaking the news to people if you lose the pregnancy during that earlier danger zone. It's kind of like my earlier myopic view of miscarriage itself, and like that, it seems so rational and such a healthy way of approaching this. But I'm very conflicted about this idea today.
As a couple, we eschewed that collective wisdom when telling people around us. There wasn't a lot of thought or justification involved in this decision. If I'm going to be frank, we told our families and some close friends as soon as we found out because it seemed too hard to keep it a secret. We also knew that they'd be excited and that we'd be able to cope if things went south - and they could also manage. And as it turns out, that was unexpectedly one of the best decisions we ever made. We ended up having an accidental support network to share in anything that went wrong and to help keep things positive. Our families helped us through that period, and I am grateful for their help in sharing the emotional load. We felt that if we did end up miscarrying, we would have been leaning on them to help us, and we would do the same if the situations were reversed. Given how we rely on our family so much now with everything in our parenting journey, it seems implausible in hindsight that we would have considered anything different.
Medical professionals understandably want us to change how we perceive the issue of miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies so that women can have better tools to deal with them when they arise. Because miscarrying is a common occurrence (I mean, at our first GP appointment after Gemma got pregnant, I think we were told it was like one in three), it makes sense that we should probably think of more mechanical terms to soften the blow. Additionally, people deal with these kinds of problems in their way. There's no right way to heal, and lots of people prefer undertaking healing and privacy. I respect that. But I also can't shake the feeling that by encouraging people to keep quiet until 12 weeks, we're tacitly trying to keep a lid on the topic altogether. It feels like we are doing what we do with all questions of reproductive health, which is to nudge them to the side so that men aren't uncomfortable.
There is a disconnect, I feel. We want to frame the topic as something natural that can't be helped. But we also discourage people from talking about early pregnancy if they have to deal with the consequences of their pregnancy ending prematurely. Indeed, we can't have it both ways. We can either talk about these things openly and honestly. Or we can normalise silence and all the implications of failure that silence brings about. I don't know what the answers are. And I feel like I'm veering very closely into the realm of mansplaining women's health to women and medical experts. Still, it feels like we're throwing pregnant women under the bus again by normalising superstition and tradition instead of encouraging the building of support networks.
I don't feel like I'm the only one that feels like this. It was only this year that the government put in place provisions allowing people who have gone through a miscarriage to take some time off work as part of bereavement leave. When speaking about why this has taken so long to come into place, Ginny Anderson made some fascinating points to Susie Ferguson on Morning Report earlier in the year. They covered a few things, but this stuff around stigma and people's blase attitude towards miscarriage I thought was exciting.
I don't know. Maybe I'd feel differently if we had told more people and we had to deal with the problem in a more visceral way. I mean, I sure feel different today than I did this time a year and a half ago. But if my experiences have been anything to go by, I just can't imagine how we would have done it alone.
I just wanted to add a little postscript to the show that I actually forgot about until after I'd finished recording. I was talking with Gemma about this whole episode, and she reminded me that when we went to our GP for a follow up a couple of weeks after this incident at the hospital, there were some notes on the chart that we apparently hadn't been made privy to. What the doctors at the hospital suspected (and they have no way of knowing if this is true, they have no way of proving it, we don't know at all if this is what happened, but we thought it was kind of comical, anyway) is that there might have actually been twins in utero, and Ava basically consumed her other twin. We thought that was kind of shocking and surprising and a little bit horrifying. But apparently, this is not an uncommon occurrence in pregnancy, and you just wouldn't really know if it happened unless something went wrong. It's not like they send a memo or something saying, 'oh, by the way, I've consumed my twin'. So that's just an interesting little note I thought I should add to this episode.