What’s the point?

The NHS advice is to register with your local midwife as soon as you have a positive pregnancy test. When I was pregnant with my daughter I very reluctantly registered in the early weeks, making a point in the registration form of explaining that I had experienced two pregnancy losses and felt very anxious and nervous about this one. Days later the words ‘CONGRATULATIONS’ boomed into my inbox in an email from the midwife who was going to register my pregnancy.  

Twice before I had registered with a midwife and, at the point that both those pregnancies were lost, I found out that the end of your pregnancy signals the end of any support from your midwife. Plunged into completely unmapped grief and a physical experience like no other, you are completely untethered from any sort of care pathway. If you are ‘lucky’ your midwife will make sure your pregnancy is unregistered so that you don’t receive any upsetting appointment reminders. And that’s about it.  

Pressing cancel

And so I find myself in the present, approaching the six week mark, and as yet unregistered. Because in the mind of a woman who has miscarried three times one question pervades; what’s the point?  

So far I have completed the online registration form twice but at the point I should submit, instead I press cancel.  

In a similar act of hesitation, I have extensively researched where I can get an early pregnancy scan. Logic would dictate that I should book into the shiny new baby scan shop on our local high street, but with the very real threat that it will be bad news I can’t bring myself to submit to it so close to home.  

Scared shitless

You see when a miscarriage feels more likely than a baby you can’t help but anticipate it. And so I imagine myself in the coming weeks and how unbearable it would be to walk past the place where I receive the bad news.  

Instead I’ve booked somewhere half an hour away. It’s a scan aimed at people like me, those who have experienced three or miscarriages, and so I’m hopeful that whatever the outcome they will have the experience and sensitivity to be gentle and understand that not everyone who goes for an early scan does so because they just can’t wait for the first NHS scan. Some of us do it because we’re scared shitless.