I haven’t always wanted to be a mum, but a couple of years ago, something clicked: after years of writing about trying to conceive (TTC), pregnancy, and motherhood, I knew I was ready, and the want became a need.
So after 10 years together and officially tying the knot earlier in the year, my partner and I started our TTC journey in March 2024, and in August, we saw that first faint positive line.
I bought a pregnancy journal and started recording everything — every symptom, every emotion, and every little moment. I’d begun to notice magpies — which are common where we live in England — every day while we were TTC, so we nicknamed our little bean “Magpie”.
We saw a heartbeat at a private early scan at six weeks, and by eight weeks, we’d heard that beautiful sound and shared our news with family.
But things took a change at the 12-week scan. As I gripped my partner’s hand, the sonographer said the words no parent-to-be wants to hear: “I’m afraid it’s not good news.”
Our Magpie had stopped growing at eight weeks, just one week after we’d heard the heartbeat. The next 30 minutes were a blur — tears, nurses, reassurances, and ‘next steps’. They handed me an envelope with a photo of the scan, but I couldn’t bring myself to look. I still haven’t.
When we got home, my partner packed away everything that reminded us of our Magpie — ultrasound photos, my journal, even the pumpkins we’d planned to use for an announcement.
A couple of days later, the early pregnancy clinic called to discuss my options.
Because it was a missed miscarriage, I had three choices: medication to help my body process the miscarriage, a D&C, or waiting it out naturally. I wanted to avoid surgery, so I opted for the medication and booked an appointment to collect it the next day. But my body had other plans. I woke up the next day at 3am in excruciating pain. I rushed to the bathroom and saw blood. It was happening. Waves, like contractions, hit me, unlike anything I’d ever felt before.The clinic had told me it would feel like “period cramps”. That was a cruel understatement. By evening, the pain was unbearable. Something wasn’t right, so we made our way to the emergency room.
We got to the emergency room just as another wave hit, so I was writhing in pain, holding onto my partner for dear life.
I noticed other people looking at me in horror, others sardonically muttering under their breaths, ‘Well, I bet she’ll be seen straightaway’.
For hours, we stayed in the emergency room (they gave me strong painkillers to dull the agony) until a room opened up on the women’s ward, a ward also reserved for labor and birth.
The OBGYN wheeled me through the corridors adorned with posters of happy mothers holding their happy babies into my room. The irony.
After another couple of hours, I was advised to have a vaginal ultrasound to ‘check everything had passed’. It hadn’t. The sonographer was brutal — probably because she needed to be, to get the full picture — but I’d had a vaginal ultrasound before, and this was somehow more invasive. She said there was still some ‘tissue’ in my uterus and cervix, that she could either remove it now with a non-sedated D&C, I could take the medication I was supposed to collect before, or I could schedule a full D&C.
By this point, I just wanted the whole experience over, so I asked her to remove what she could, unmedicated, and I’d see if I could pass the rest myself at home.
In spite of all of the pain I’d already felt, this was the most painful part of the whole experience. Not from the procedure itself (which of course, still hurt), but from the heartache. I tried my best to think of what was inside me as a ‘thing’, but it was still our Magpie. The sonographer asked if we wanted to see what she’d removed, and I knew what that meant: the ‘thing’ was there. I just couldn’t do it.
Over the following days, I bled heavily, changing pads every few hours. The physical pain was over, but the emotional pain… I’m still working on that. My first cycle after the loss was longer than usual, an anovulatory cycle (without ovulation), but since then, things have been back to ‘normal’.
We were advised that we could start trying to conceive again straight after the loss, but it would be better to hold off until after my next period, to simplify dating, were we to conceive. Three months on, we haven’t had any luck (yet), but we’re feeling positive about our future family.
It wasn’t until a follow-up call with my OBGYN that I learned the reason for the extreme pain. Tissue in my cervix — retained products of conception (RPOC) — was a rare complication, with the blockage intensifying my pain and delaying the miscarriage process. But thankfully, the sonographer told us there was no lasting damage done to my uterus.
I also found that I’m far from the only woman dealing with this; around 17% of first trimester losses and 40% of second trimester losses can result in RPOC, according to some studies. There’s some strange solace in knowing I’m not alone.
RPOC doesn’t just happen in some cases of miscarriage, either — it can happen after a vaginal birth or a C-section, as I learned from my deep-dive on Google. We all cope in strange ways. While RPOC is described online as “period type pains,” the people I’ve since spoken with said it was more painful than labor.
I hope to know what that feels like, one day.
