Hellobee

My third miscarriage started shortly before the Christmas holidays in 2015. Two days after I started bleeding, I had a chance at what should have been a shoe-in kind of work opportunity. I was teetering on the edge of a whole lot of emotions, and of course, I bombed that meeting, badly. That’s what finally broke me.

Since getting pregnant the third time I had been dealing with a lot of anxiety. When I was in the clinic trying to sort out what to do about my bleeding, I peeked at my chart on the computer and saw just how obvious that anxiety was — the practitioner’s notes from my previous appointment, just a few days prior, read something like “patient is extremely visibly anxious about pregnancy.”

She and I had discussed anti-anxiety medication at that appointment, but at the time I was still pregnant and she told me that the meds likely wouldn’t kick in until I was about six weeks pregnant — and at that point, I’d probably be feeling less anxious just by virtue of being six weeks pregnant, which was a good point. In the immediate aftermath of that third loss I didn’t want to set foot in the clinic to talk about logistics at all, but I knew I needed help.

So, the ruined opportunity, and my third consecutive miscarriage in six months, eight months of trying to conceive — I spent days beating myself up, mentally. I found myself hyperventilating at work more often than not, choked with fear and panic even when it made no logical sense. And I was angry. Oh, how I was angry. Nothing seemed fair, or right, or good anymore.

I forget exactly what the breakdown was — I know it happened over a lunch break, and Mac Daddy was trying to be supportive but I was infuriated, and after he went back to work I picked up the phone and dialed our community counselling service.

One of the benefits of living in a small town is that I know what services are around. Our hospital offers free community counselling, which was already on my radar, so I was able to book myself in without issue. I was willing to wait until the new year, and the holidays proved to be a bit of a distraction.

I started meeting with my counsellor, every other week at first, to deal with the immediate grief and anxiety surrounding my repeat losses. She helped me forgive myself, to humanize myself for myself and understand the gravity of what I had been going through. She worked with me to help me identify supports, which was vital to regaining my mental health. Even now that I’m pregnant again (successfully so far) I’m still seeing her monthly, to keep my health on track and give myself space to sort out the anxiety that is still rearing its head, albeit far less frequently.

I also took time to create my own rituals for calming myself and acknowledging my own pain. I wrote, I did yoga, and I did a lot of colouring as a way to shut down my brain while keeping my body moving. On the night of the winter solstice in 2015, I lit three ice lanterns I had made earlier that day, in honour of the past, the present, the future; the three babies we had lost; and the hopeful transition between darkness to light.

When I went to see the nurse practitioner around the same time, I did bring up my mental health, and she worked with me to find an anti-anxiety medication that would be safe for pregnancy and breastfeeding in the future. I’m grateful that she took the time to read through various medical abstracts with me, to help determine what would be best for my situation. In the end, I was prescribed 50mg of sertraline — better known as Zoloft — once a day. I’m supposed to be on it for at least a year, to avoid a relapse into uncontrollable anxiety, and because we did the work to make me feel comfortable with being medicated during pregnancy, that hasn’t been a concern for me at all.

For me, mental health after loss has been a bit of a battle, but it’s one that, looking back, I’m proud I began to wage. My counsellor often remarks on how far I’ve come — “can you imagine yourself smiling like that in January?!” — and because I have someone else watching it, it feels more real. I have a neutral party telling me that I’m on the right path, and that feels like a triumph itself.

A few months after that third loss, but before I was pregnant again, I was an interview subject for an article on women dealing with pregnancy and infant loss in an emergency room setting. The interviewer asked what, if anything, could have made my two trips to the ER for miscarriages better. Immediately, I knew the answer — someone in that medical setting showing concern for my mental health and my physical health. She told me that loss, even before anything can be done medically, can be seen as an “emotional emergency” which made a lot of sense to me.

As I said, I knew how to access mental health care on my own, and I still had the will and ability to do so. It was still really hard to do, and I had to do it on my own. I firmly believe that in medical settings and situations where loss is experienced, be it an emergency room, a doctor’s office, what have you, professionals should do some kind of work toward telling women and men what they can do to protect their mental health.

If you accessed mental health care throughout your parenting journey, and you’re willing to share — how easy was it to find what you needed, and did it help?