Prologue
By now I was all too familiar with the metal taste developing in my mouth. The blood spotting in my pants had started an hour or so earlier though I had tried to ignore it. It wasn’t unusual for me to get blood spotting with having Endometriosis, but I knew the difference by now. An almighty pain tore through my womb, unlike anything I had ever felt before, even with my seven other babies. But this baby was older. Bigger. At nearly ten weeks, my baby had managed to hold on longer than any other. I had begun to secretly hope and believe that my dream was finally coming true. How foolish was I to think everything would be fine this time.The pain was so intense it made me throw up. It was like a knife ripping though my womb. Raw and stabbing. And then the bleeding really started. Heavy and unrelenting, most of the day until, after dinner, as I was sitting on the toilet, unsure if I was going to be sick or have the runs, I felt what I thought was a massive blood clot fall away from me and plop into the toilet. I got up, turned round, and peered into the toilet bowl.
I shouldn’t have. My baby was lying lifeless at the bottom. I knew it wasn’t just a blood clot because I could clearly see the shape of a baby in miniature, its little head, limbs, and dark spots for eyes. Nothing in this world can prepare you for that. That was it for me. I cracked. I didn’t care about the blood running down my legs and the mess on the floor. I just sat against the bath, crying, cradling my baby I’d so carefully scooped up out of the bottom of the toilet bowl. Some people say there is no ‘human baby’ at this point in a pregnancy, but let me tell you, when you are sitting staring closely, tracing every outline, memorising every feature, when you can see that what you are holding in your bloody, shaking hand, when you can see that what your own body has rejected is a baby, in your mind there is no other form it could take. When you see that, when you really look at it, you never forget it. That image of your baby stays with you. Every. Single. Day.
I don’t know how much time passed, but eventually I realised I was now sitting in a cold, congealing pool of blood and needed to clean myself up. Why, I don’t know, but I wrapped my baby in toilet roll before putting it back in the toilet and saying goodbye. Then I got started, cleaning first myself, then the bathroom floor. I phoned Simon, but there was no answer.
“Simon,” I cried down the phone. “Please can you come home early? It’s happened again. I’ve lost the baby, Simon. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to do.
Hopefully you get this.”
He didn’t come home early.
When he did get home from working his night shift the next morning, there was no talking about it. I kept apologising for days, but his response was always the same. It’s okay, it’s not your fault. But that was as far as it went. There was no holding each other and sharing in the loss, letting the tears flow onto each other’s shoulders and consoling each other. Just my frequent apologies and his one-line reply.
In the September, when the pain was beginning to sting a little less, I was again reminded of my body’s repeated failed attempts to give me a baby naturally. I was offered an appointment in Aberdeen for IVF treatment, which I knew all too well I wouldn’t be able to handle. Simon replied, telling them what had happened, and politely declining the offer.
After the miscarriage, and the lack of support from Simon, I began to regret buying the house together. He worked shifts and regularly took overtime, often only letting me know while on the shift already, or just before he went in, that he wouldn’t be home on time, or at all that night. I threw myself into work at the bookies as well and was back and forth back to Inverness to help Mum with Dad whenever I could get across to them. Most of the time, Mum would drive half an hour to come and get me but that meant bringing Dad too. Sometimes he wasn’t able to come out of the house and he couldn’t be left himself in the house anymore.
Simon and I were like ships in the night, and barely saw each other. We’d recently got a little puppy, a blue roan cocker spaniel whom I named Breagha, the Gaelic for beautiful; and she was, and still is. She became my little baby, following me everywhere I went and cuddling up to me on the sofa against my hot water bottle when I was in pain. We were inseparable.
Only a month after we declined the invitation for IVF, Simon told me one of his work colleagues was expecting. “What do you think to maybe giving IVF a shot after all?’ he asked me one night.
I was shocked. We’d just refused the offer from the Aberdeen clinic. I wasn’t in a fit state yet to start thinking of that. In fact, I didn’t think I ever would be fit to think about it. Years of pain, and loss and mental anguish. That was the last straw for me.
I didn’t want my periods, didn’t want endometriosis, didn’t want IVF, didn’t want to be told what to do with my body, didn’t want to be told that unfortunately there wasn’t much else that could be done as it was just ‘one of those things’, or ‘just part of being a woman’. I was sick of being told I was ‘too young to make that sort of decision’. I was done with it all.
“No way!” I told him. “I can’t do it again. I can’t put my body or my mind through that pain again. I’m done trying for a baby. I’m done being told I’m too young to decide about my own body myself. I’m done being everybody else’s puppet.”
He glared at me. It wasn’t a sympathetic stare, nor a questioning look of I’m not sure I understand. It was a glare, pure and simple.
“You are kidding,” he said.
“No, I am not kidding, Simon. I am done. Completely done.”
“What about me?”
“I’m sorry, what? What about you? It’s my body. My decision. And I’m done.”
“Surely you can try those pills again.”
That was it for me. That was the moment I switched off. He hadn’t hit me. He’d been annoyed, but he hadn’t shouted at me. He hadn’t come at me or threatened me. But that moment, standing in the kitchen, was just as bad in my eyes as a smack in the face. It was just as bad as Nick and Michael. In that moment, my body, my feelings, and my whole being were about to be claimed for something I didn’t consent to. I was tired of doctors telling me what to do with my body. I was tired of being pushed in directions I didn’t want to go. My whole life had been a series of where other people and events had decided what way my life would go. But losing my eight baby was my breaking point. It was time to take back some control of my life.
