by Kiandra Valentine

Created on: May 14, 2007   Last Updated: May 17, 2007

My experience will always be a part of me. It has contributed to who I am today. I often get asked if I want to know if it were a boy or a girl. To me, what I saw in the bed pan after having to deliver a 20 week 'non-viable' fetus was not a baby. The contractions screaming through my lower back, the nausea, the faintness my cries of pain were all labour, but the result definitely was not a baby.

My baby had been the one kicking. The moving being on the ultrasound screen at 12 weeks. That was our little one whom we started to dream about and imagine what it would become. Not the lifeless, bloody object that had come from my body in the tiny, stark, pale blue labour room on the labour ward with the sounds of other women crying out in exhaustion and pain soon followed by the cry of a newborn entering this world. My husband and I alone in that room with all of these sounds around us. We were together, but so alone and so empty.

I do believe that you ever forget and every loss no matter how many weeks hurts. Not a simple hurt, but an ache deep within at your core permanently altered forever. You start to wish that you had never told anyone you were pregnant because now you have to tell them that you are not. Friends too scared to talk, too scared to ask questions, too scared of 'saying something wrong'. So scared that they don't call at all. We returned home from hospital so empty, but somehow so much closer to each other.

Where were my cards, chocolates, flowers and well wishes? I had just been through labour. I had endured pain. I wanted to tell everyone what I had been through. I wanted to share every detail from the first moment I had been lying on the table and the ultrasound technician said that she would be back in a moment with a doctor. That moment that the doctor had looked at the ultrasound and turned to me to say 'I'm sorry but......'. The overwhelming cloak of misery that enveloped me at that moment. The uncontrollable howl. That was me in front of strangers crying, crying. At that point I wanted to be alone. I felt shame and fear that everyone would be so disappointed. I cried and cried feeling turned inside out like I had gone deep into my mind and body, at that point forever changed. And as I was alone, some time had passed and I then started to notice things again. The clock on the wall, people walking past the door and strangely enough, I knew that whatever was in front of me I would be sad and hurt and it was going to be hard, but I knew that I was going to be okay.

As life goes on. You feel like you have this little secret that you can't talk about for fear of upsetting people. Those that you do talk to do seem to 'say the wrong thing'. Doctors give you the stats on how many pregnancies do not make full term. Your Nana says that it was meant to be and that 'you wouldn't have wanted it to have been born with deformities or something'. My mother-in-law tells me that she cries over our lost baby, her grandchild. I tell her that I don't. I cry for me! I cry for us! For what we went through. For what my body and my mind went through. The only people who do seem to understand are those who have been through a similar experience.

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