Celebrities are right to break the cult of silence around miscarriage – I lost my baby at 12 weeks and the shock and pain only gets worse when we don’t talk about it
Journalist Lisa Francesca Nand says that the grief of miscarriage is something we need to acknowledge
We need to talk about about miscarriage.
Celebrities like Katie Price and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’ wife Mara Lane might sometimes be criticised for living their life in the spotlight but Katie and Mara should be applauded for opening up about their recent miscarriages.
It’s a subject we often shy away from, unsure how to deal with the grief of a life lost before it was even born.
This sense of emptiness, when you’ve been carrying a tiny baby around for months and suddenly it’s gone is hard to describe.
With the promise of new life you can’t help but plan and dream; is it a boy or a girl, what will it look like? Time drags as you wait patiently to tell the world but you carry your news like some delicious secret.
But this strange cult of silence we’ve created regarding the first 12 weeks of pregnancy is not always helpful.
We avoid telling people we’re pregnant in case something goes wrong.
Unfortunately this means that when something does go wrong, and with an estimated one in four pregnancies ending in miscarriage this is worryingly common, it can come as a horrible shock.
You then find that as people didn’t know you were pregnant they can’t truly empathise with your loss unless they’ve been through it.
The day before our 12-week scan I began to have low level cramps.
On the cusp of that magical 3-month mark, my husband David and I were looking forward to telling everyone.
However within hours I was having agonising, body-wracking contractions. At A&E they just told me to go home and take some Paracetamol.
I was surprised no-one was trying to do anything to help us and the hospital were not very sympathetic.
The next day, amid the happy couples waving copies of their 12-week scans, our scan confirmed our baby had died.
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We left hospital with a dead baby inside me; confused, bewildered and desperately sad.
All I wanted was my baby back, it was hard to stop visualising its future. Our future.
In films and on TV you often don’t get a sense of how physically shocking a miscarriage can be.
After the furious contractions and eventually ‘passing the pregnancy sac’ it took my body weeks to let go of the pregnancy hormones.
The longevity of it all was exhausting and I was surprised to find little support or information available. As a journalist I went headlong into research try find out why miscarriages happen.
I decided to film my findings in the hope they might help other people.
The resulting film, First Heartbeat, was eventually broadcast on TLC in the UK and multiple Discovery International Channels around the world.
I still get messages from women from countries near and far saying thank you for speaking out, such is the need to know you’re not alone.
There are so many complex emotions with having a miscarriage. I felt exposed, vulnerable, with a misplaced sense of failure.
What are Natural Killer Cells?
- Natural Cells are sub-types of white blood cells which fight infection as part of the body’s defence mechanism
- While all organs have certain Natural Killer cells, the womb having the most and these are supposed to help blood supply and to recognise foreign cells coming into the body from the father
- But, if a mother has a higher number of these cells, or they’re more aggressive than is usual, they may attack rather than protect a pregnancy - causing a miscarriage.
- It is treatable - but there's not yet got enough scientific proof of being effective or safe for it to be offered on the NHS.
Despite this I really wanted to talk and when I opened up I found other people did too.
Sadly I went on to miscarry again and again but after finding treatment for something called Natural Killer Cells, diagnosed by specialist Dr Hassan Shehata, we managed to have our two boys, Sebastian now five and Elliot who’s two.
The grief of miscarriage is something we need to acknowledge. The shock and pain is worse if we feel we can’t talk about it.
The more women like Katie Price and other people in the public eye speak out the more understanding we will have of the potentially huge impact of miscarriage, something that might help make it just that little bit easier if it happens to you.