There's been a lot of chat in the news today about the findings of a new piece of research by Imperial College London about the link between miscarriage and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
It's been both encouraging and heartbreaking to read the many comments and responses to the published pieces that have been shared on the Tommy's Facebook page today. Heartbreaking for obvious reasons, but encouraging to see that I am not alone.
I have written a lot on this blog about our experience of miscarriage and I have written more still in my own personal journal, where on the whole my thoughts and feelings are a lot more raw.
Less than a month ago I wrote this:
Also feel worried a lot of the time that I really have a mental health problem that needs addressed. I think PTSD... I have a fairly constant fear that I am dying and that another bad thing is waiting around the corner.
In my last blogpost I wrote about the work God has been doing in me and the healing that He has brought to my heart and mind. I think that it is only really since I started seeking healing through prayer that I have been able to see and articulate what was and is going on in my head and heart. And so much of it is affirmed in this research.
So, I am writing this blogpost to add my voice and our experience to the discussion and to stand alongside the call for better aftercare for women who experience pregnancy loss.
I have struggled so much with a feeling that I should have been doing better, and with a perception that others would think I should have moved on. I could see other women who had experienced miscarriage who seemed to be doing better, which added to my fears at my lack of ability to move forward. I spent many months feeling stuck, struggling to sleep and waking up feeling unrested when I did, feeling a tightness in my chest, feeling like only bad things lay ahead of us, desperate to be pregnant again, resentful of anyone who was pregnant, feeling like a failure, feeling guilty that my body hadn't been able to carry the pregnancy. I would be and sometimes still can be struck, without warning, with an overwhelming and debilitating sadness. And all the while I have felt that I shouldn't be feeling any of it. That it wasn't legitimate.
My experience with the NHS throughout has been varied. My initial contact from the EPU felt very abrupt and harsh with the midwife suggesting I just wait it out and see if the pregnancy passed, as well as being told that I didn't need to bring my husband for the scan because we wouldn't see anything anyway. Then having to wait in a little corner of a windowless corridor for our scan, unable to settle for the pain in my abdomen, as a stream of heavily pregnant women passed through the corridor.
The midwife who performed the scan was very compassionate and couldn't have been more thorough or kind.
The GP I saw the following week was overly positive and focussed on us getting pregnant again, with no room for me to be sad about the pregnancy we had just lost.
I've had GP appointment after GP appointment to try and address the continuing chaos in my body related to the PCOS symptoms that have gone wild since the miscarriage.
Only one GP in the whole practice seemed to understand that fertility wasn't the whole picture. He left the practice in the summer.
I found myself in tears as a doctor told me that there wasn't really anything they could do for me, I felt I was being left with constant bleeding and untreatable mental health problems. They said that there was nothing they could give me to alleviate the bleeding because it would muddy-the-water of the blood tests they insisted on, birth control was not considered to be an option either because it was inconsistent with our want to become parents, and because of my mum's history they said it could mean I was at an increased risk of breast cancer - not helpful to my already huge fear that I was dying! (This advice has since been contradicted) And because we were not contracepting, they wouldn't recommend prescribing anything to help my mood either.
At no point have I been offered any sort of talking therapy.
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