088 - Rosie | miscarriage, pregnancy after loss, acupuncture, homebirth, doula, hypnobirthing, spinning babies, physiological birth

Do you want to take us back to the very beginning then and talk a little bit about your journey into motherhood?

Yeah, of course.

So...

When I first met James, we were very open from when we first met each other that we both wanted to start a family.

It was something that we talked quite a lot about.

And I think I've been broody for as long as I've known James.

But we decided to wait until we got married, which was in June 2024.

And then after we got married, we were like, wait, should we go? But actually we had such a fun summer of people of like really good friends' weddings and like going away.

And we were like, maybe we just hold off until the end of the summer.

We then started trying at the end of August and fortunately happened first time for us, which was amazing and really straightforward to begin with.

And then really sadly, we went for our first scan and it was a private scan and they couldn't find a heartbeat.

And it was kind of complex because they also said there might be two, but they couldn't confirm because... one had grown a lot more than the other and they thought the other one was maybe a growth or something and they said if there were two then it's likely that they would be too small for a heartbeat to even show so it was sort of it was quite confusing and a lot to process but as soon as they said we can't find a heartbeat the silence was just like horrific and my whole body just started like grieving then I just burst into tears and I just I just knew that it wasn't good news and then and then we had this sort of horrible like two weeks of more scans to confirm or not because we had to wait to see if they would grow or not and then so we ended up being told like three times we had three different scans that there were no heartbeats and I think James sort of he like I had the embodied feeling that it wasn't right and that we'd lost the pregnancy.

But I think James was still like... slightly held out hope until the last scan where they were like no they're definitely they haven't grown and there's still no heartbeat and yeah it was just it was just really horrible and we both like grieved in different ways but it really I think after that sort of joyful naivety of finding out so quickly that we were pregnant then like the world sort of crashing down around us and it just was yeah I found it really hard and then And then we had sort of three months of trying to conceive after that, but also grieving.

And I just had this feeling of wanting to make up lost time and sort of, yeah and catching up really quickly with where we would have been and the desire suddenly like i don't think we realized how much we really wanted a baby until that happened and so then yeah it was it was really hard those i mean fortunately only took us three months but it really felt like such a long time and each time i got my period it was just this like huge grief and I think it really gave me so much more empathy than I would have had otherwise to people's fertility struggles and how painful it is each month and the sort of consuming nature of it and yeah and then I didn't think I was ovulating actually we were still trying but I was sort of like my period came back and it was like a bit all over the place sometimes it was early sometimes it was late I didn't have the usual ovulation symptoms so yeah and anyway and then my period was late And I didn't think anything of it.

And then about five days had been, and I suddenly felt kind of high as we were walking around the park.

And I was like, I feel really dizzy and this is kind of weird.

And then got back and I was like, And then I just got hysterical giggles and it sounds kind of whack, but I was like, I just feel like I've got this light inside of me and like the potential of the universe is inside.

This is literally what I said to James.

And he was like, okay.

I was like, I think I'm pregnant.

Like I just, I, and I went immediately to do a pregnancy test and I was, and I then had a acupuncture session straight after.

So my wonderful acupuncture, Claire was like the first person who kind of knew outside of James and I.

But yeah, it was so joyful that moment.

And then it quickly like it's funny how as you know, like how quickly anxiety comes when you've had pregnancy loss before.

And I think those first weeks were just like riddled with anxiety, a very sort of physical like fight or flight sort of.