Hope's story - our world crashes down

We got to our appointment and sat in the waiting room. We didn’t have to wait long. As I sat there, I prodded my belly. “Wake up!” I thought. I knew things were not good.

We were seen by a young midwife. She fussed around took measurements, felt the position of the baby, and even exclaimed “so you’re having a girl”, which totally confused us as we’d asked not to find out so it hadn't been recorded on our paperwork. But I muttered to her I hadn’t felt the baby move for half an hour or so, and that I was just very keen for her to get the Doppler and find the heartbeat.

So she did, but she couldn’t find it. She said she was inexperienced, so she went and got another midwife. I knew.

It was lovely Barbara, and I’d told Simon how much I liked her, and that I hoped she’d be there for the birth. I was glad to see her walk in, but she looked concerned. She got the Doppler. No heartbeat. Maybe flat batteries, she said. So she got another one. No heartbeat. She asked me to roll on to my side. Then the other side. Still no heartbeat. I knew for sure now, and I was just so sad that Simon was about to know, too.

We went to the doctor’s rooms and I was put up on the bed and an obstetrician wheeled in an ultrasound machine. Once I saw the screen, I had hope; I hadn’t seen her since 20 weeks after all. But she was still, so very still. The picture was fuzzy, so she got another machine.

Another obstetrician came in with her. An officious little woman, whose bedside manner was far too cheery given our shitty circumstances. But the baby was lifeless. I was shaking. The obstetrician told me to stop and held my hand. I looked at Simon, and this is the moment that makes my heart ache the most, the tears were flowing and he looked like he was going to fall over. Fatherhood had just slipped from his grasp.

The obstetrician told Simon to come and stand with me, so he made his way over and held my hand. Then the obstetrician said “I’m so sorry”. Those words were all we needed to hear. The world as we know it ended in that moment.

Hope’s heart stopped, and I think for a brief moment, mine did too. My life was spiralling out of control, and I couldn’t to stop it.

I said to the obstetrician “how are you going to get it out of me?” and she said, “oh there is plenty of time to discuss that”. Like hell there was I thought, I’d been having contractions for four days, it was going to happen fairly shortly, one way or another.

I don’t remember much of what happened next, but we were walked through the waiting room, full of happy pregnant people, and taken for a scan on one of the big machines, just to be really sure. They told us to wait and to take a seat. I wasn’t waiting and I certainly wasn’t taking a fucking seat.

We were taken in straight away. I told Simon “don’t look”. The image on the screen was just too distressing. I will never forget the words I heard next, but the heartless woman doing our ultrasound said “there isn’t much to look at anyway”.

I wanted to know the sex. If my baby was dead, I wanted to know. They looked again but couldn’t tell, as there wasn’t much fluid left. They asked if my waters had broken, and I said “not to my knowledge”. I’d had a few long showers and a bath, so if they had I hadn’t noticed. The nightmare just kept getting worse.

We went back to the room with the officious little obstetrician who then was very calculating about how they were going to go about getting the baby out of me.

“I don’t want this to hurt,” I kept saying. I was assured it wouldn’t. I was told I’d be on a machine to administer my own drugs at five minute intervals and that I wouldn’t need an epidural.

I could stay in, come back in the morning or just wait for labour to start. How the hell could I wait? How cruel of them to even suggest that, to carry my dead baby around any longer than I had to. I understood I needed to deliver her naturally, as this was the best option for me, but I didn’t want to wait.

While I didn’t want to stay in the hospital to have it done straight away, we decided to come back in first thing in the morning. I just wanted to be able to take my baby home one last time, as I knew I wouldn’t bring her home from the hospital after she was born.

Simon made some calls. He called Mum first. He was crying and all he said was: “there’s no heartbeat”. She was coming in. He made the same phone calls to my dad, his parents and my best friend – they were all coming straight in.

Simon probably spent the most tears during these hours. He was a mess. I was in shock I guess, and I kept telling him “it will be ok baby”, totally bewildered.

The pastoral care lady came to speak to us, and she was already talking about funeral arrangements. Funeral arrangements. I was in labour. I was having a baby. I was four days past my due date. Funeral arrangements. This wasn’t real.

We were taken to the pastoral care office and given the option of two rooms to sit in, “the dead baby rooms”. What did it matter? They were just stupid rooms with stupid couches and a stupid fridge and a stupid box of tissues. They were just stupid rooms.

Our family arrived. They all looked as shocked as I felt. My sister walked in and it took me a bit to realise she was there. She’d flown from interstate as a surprise for the birth, pity we couldn’t give her the surprise she was after. I handed her my phone and told her to call three specific friends who I knew would be able to spread our news to most people we knew.

The horrible obstetrician went over the details again, and she was as cheery and bright eyed about it as she was when she first went through it with Simon and I.

My dad was angry. People wanted answers. They were trying to figure out how someone goes from being overdue, in labour and about to give birth to having their baby die inside them. I was in shock, and incredibly confused. Things were moving too quickly for me. Dad also couldn’t believe I had to go home carrying my dead baby. I assured him it was my decision and that if I wanted to stay I could. He also couldn’t understand why a natural birth was the best option. Again, I explained it was for the best.

I asked for Barbara, the midwife, to come back as we were all sick of the attitude of “that” obstetrician. Her eyes were wet and she seemed genuinely saddened for us. She was also far gentler with the way she explained things which we appreciated.

She apologised for not being rostered on the next day. She said if I spent the night in hospital, she’d be there the following day and would come and see us as soon as she could. I felt as if she was almost doing this as a friend, not just a midwife.

Eventually we felt we’d spent enough time in that stupid room. While I sat in there though, I stared constantly at a print hanging on the wall. I had images of angels and the word angel written all over it. I was about to have an angel baby. Fuck.

My friend drove us home from the hospital. Simon or I couldn’t drive. He was obviously still in deep shock, and I could barely reach the steering wheel with my huge protruding belly. My friend, 20 weeks pregnant herself and mum of a two year old boy, didn’t think we’d be able to get in her car, so evident of her motherhood. But we couldn’t really face getting in our car either, with our brand new baby seat proudly fastened in the back. My sister drove our car home.

Something I just kept repeating was “the baby was alive this morning”. I didn’t understand. It was all too much for me to process. You’d think I’d have been sitting there in a well of my own tears, but instead I just sat and stared, I was in utter shock and deep denial, only functioning one second at a time. Looking any further ahead was impossible.

Simon’s parents arrived at our house and his mum’s eyes were stinging red from tears. No one wants to see their child hurt and Simon was hurting so much. She wanted to take his pain away.

No one knew what to do. Cups of tea were made. People were dazed and confused. Calls were made. I was talking of having another baby. It was the only way I could see clear. I was rubbing my belly and thinking about how much I missed her. She died, and a large part of me had died, too. No longer her giant incubator, I was now her giant tomb.

We also both deleted our Face.book profiles. I couldn’t bear ever going back on to face my 200 “friends”. Friends who had been messaging me that morning to ask if the baby had been born yet. There had been such anticipation and excitement and I now felt like such a failure and almost embarrassed for the huge fuss I had made. My one job was to get my baby to this earth alive and I couldn’t. It was too much to take in. So we both hit delete. With that done, all I really wanted to do was go to sleep and not wake up. Ever.

I took the painkillers and sleeping tablet the hospital gave me, and tried to get to sleep. We slumped in to bed, knowing we had the biggest day of our lives ahead of us. Stupidly, we left our phones and they beeped all night with condolence messages. People writing to farewell our baby they’d never met. It wasn’t right. This wasn’t supposed to be our story.

I didn’t sleep. The contractions started again and the drugs weren’t strong enough to mask them. While the contractions during the previous four nights did leave me feeling excited, these contractions left me gutted because of my new reality.