Ok, so today’s blog post is going to be a bit different. In fact, it’s essentially written for two different audiences.

For everyone who is here for the usual sewing jazz, I’m going to tell you all about this lovely (if I do say so myself) interpretation of the Deer and Doe Myosotis Dress.

But I’m also writing this post for a different audience. One that is not on my usual radar.

I’ve decided to write this post about my recent miscarriage in the hope of reaching the audience of people desperately googling “8 weeks pregnant no heartbeat” over and over again, seeking more information, more hope, more idea about what is about to happen to them.

Not usual subject-matter for a sewing blog, I know, but this blog is the only platform I have.

I have had the unfortunate experience of suffering two early pregnancy losses in the last six months and, having recently spent endless hours searching for information and experiences on the process of a miscarriage, I feel certain that it is supportive and useful for more women to speak about their experiences.

So here it is.

Clothing and emotions

I sewed this Deer and Doe Myosotis Dress while miscarrying a desperately wanted pregnancy.

This garment is inextricably linked to that moment in my life.

For me, this Myosotis Dress actually represents moving away from the darkest moments of a deeply unpleasant experience.

Nonetheless, I get that this is just a sewing blog and that discussion of miscarriage (and an ectopic pregnancy) is probably not why most of you are here.

So, to that end, I’m going to keep this post clearly divided.

The headings will tell you whether it’s a ‘regular’ blog post section about sewing this Deer and Doe Myosotis dress or whether it’s going into the nitty gritty of early pregnancy loss.

So, if you’re here for sewing, just skip the headings about the miscarriage.

And vice versa.

OK, if you’re still here after that intro, thanks for joining me on this journey.

Let’s start with sewing

I’m going to start where I feel vastly more comfortable.

My new Deer and Doe Myosotis Dress.

This me-made dress was inspired by a RTW garment. It seemed hackable from the Deer and Doe Myosotis, the Chalk and Notch Fringe Dress, from the wrap-option of the Anni building block patterns by Named Clothing and the big 4 also had some good options. The new Hannah Dress by By Hand London could also work.

As I was obsessing over pattern options, I saw this viscose-blend with a golden-toned lurex thread running through it over at the Pretty Mercerie. It has an incredible texture to it, looking almost like a double-gauze from a distance.

I knew that it was definitely “the one” fabric-wise!

I decided that since I needed to hack a pattern in some way in any event, I should stick to pattern I already owned, rather than buy a new one just to modify. So that limited my options to the Anni Building Block wrap dress or the Deer and Doe Myosotis.

I’d just about settled on the latter and was thinking about how to hack it into a wrap bodice when I had a sudden revelation.

I don’t actually love wrap dresses!!

Also, despite there being about twenty photos of the dress on the Sezane website, they didn’t even include one photo of the back view. Moreover, it has an elastic waist. Again, not a huge fan!!

All of which led me to realize that, in obsessing with the idea of recreating the dress, I’d forgotten that the joy of being a sewist is that I can actually improve the dress for my personal tastes!

I’m not limited by the simple act of recreation!

Which lead me to arrive at the Deer and Doe Myosotis as my pattern of choice!

I love a good shirt front bodice much more than a wrap dress and the Myosotis Dress already included most of the other design elements which attracted me to the RTW model.

Deer and Doe Myosotis Dress

This is the second-time I have sewn the Myosotis Dress – you can check out the first one here.

This version of the Myosotis Dress is a size 40, the same size as my previous linen version. Keep in mind the the Myosotis dress is designed to be very oversized. My body measurements would place me in a size 44, but I prefer to size down for this pattern.

For my preferences, even this size 40 has a plenty oversized vibe and I wouldn’t want it any more so.

In terms of hacking to pay homage to the RTW dress inspiration, the first thing I’ve done is lengthen the Myosotis dress. This dress consists of the length of the longest size of the skirt of View B, with the ruffle designed for view A added to the bottom.

The other obvious hack is the sleeves. To achieve this, I’ve simply lengthened the sleeve and then slashed and spread the sleeve piece to the maximum width I had available in view of the narrow-ish width of my fabric. Then I’ve created an elastic channel to gather at the wrist.

Easey Peasey!

Tips for sewing the Myosotis Dress

Given that this was my second time sewing the Myosotis Dress and that my first version of the dress still fits me well, this was a pretty straight forward sewing project for me.

I also have huge respect for the fact that the sleeve cap of the Myosotis Dress is very well drafted. Seriously, it fits just perfectly.

I know that this is a simple thing that we should expect from all sewing patterns. But, let’s face it, in my experience this doesn’t always happen!

My only hopelessly-obvious sewing tip to share today (that, evidently, wasn’t actually obvious to me until I failed to do it) is that, when you attach a gathered piece of fabric to one which is not gathered, ensure that you sew it so that it is the gathered piece which is at the top when it goes through the sewing machine.

This gives you greater control over how the gathered piece is being attached. You can do some last minute evening out of gathers as you feed them under your needle. Plus, you can see the basting stitches you used to gather and ensure that you sew on the right side of them – so that they end up in you seam allowance, rather than visible on the right side of your dress.

Sewing as healing

Alright, time to leave my comfort zone. If you’re not interested in reading about early pregnancy and its loss, feel free to head off now. No hard feelings 🙂 I’ll never even know!

This dress means more to me than simply a dress.

I sewed this dress during the very looooong process of suffering a miscarriage.

But, before we even get to that, what about a quick chat about sewing during early pregnancy in general?

Based on both this recent failed pregnancy and my previous successful pregnancy, the first trimester of pregnancy is simply not a time of creative inspiration for me.

Rather, the exhaustion, the insomnia, the nausea all seem to combine to sap every ounce of creative juice out of my body.

I know that it’s only sewing, but it really is a very disconcerting experience.

Something about which I usually have a limitless supply of enthusiasm, suddenly leaves me feeling empty, uninspired. It feels like losing a part of myself.

Perhaps, that’s the point. The hormones preparing our bodies for losing ourselves to another human being for a while.

But, anyway, I sewed this Myosotis dress while stuck at home taking a couple of doses of misoprostol to try to force my body to actually miscarry the now-empty sac inside of me. And, during that process, for the first time in months, the desire to actually sew something returned to me.

I looked at my sewing machine and it made me smile. After an absence of several months, ideas of things to sew, which, in normal times, arrive to me by the dozens, started to creep back into my mind.

In short, in the process of sewing this Myosotis dress I felt as though I was returning to myself. There was a moment when it felt like a fog was lifting and I could see clearly again.

As I saw my near-finished Myosotis Dress hanging in the corner of my bedroom next to my sewing machine, I felt that I was me again.

And I felt that at least I was still capable of making something. And that there was, once again, this little sewing corner of my life which could bring me both a sense of joy and a sense of being in control.

The latter being all the more important at a time when my body was making abundantly clear to me that I have no control whatsoever.

Telling the story of early pregnancy

Another thing that I have recently become convinced of is that the social norms that insist that we are supposed to keep a pregnancy under wraps during the first trimester are entirely unhelpful.

For whoever they are designed to protect, it doesn’t seem to me that they have women’s interests at heart.

In my view, the veil of secrecy concerning the early stages of a pregnancy seem closely connected to the social values of shame which we continue to associate with women and their bodies. Shame at the fact of being pregnant (after all, that means, shock horror, that a woman is actually having sex!). Shame at all the wonder and mess of what it is that women’s bodies can actually do. Shame that comes in the event that your body doesn’t do what it supposed to do and the pregnancy doesn’t continue.

Whilst every woman should, of course, feel entirely free to keep her pregnancy under wraps until the moment that she feels comfortable to reveal it, I found the social expectation to keep my pregnancy secret in the first trimester to be a burden.

At a time when additional burdens were the last thing I needed.

For me, personally, during my previous successful pregnancy, the first trimester was undoubtedly the most difficult part of pregnancy. The exhaustion. The constant illness. The incapacity to concentrate. The fact that any unusual smell left me liable to vomiting. Insomnia. Pregnancy gingivitis (perhaps my winner for weird pregnancy symptom I never knew existed!)

And that’s in a normal healthy pregnancy!

For me, the first trimester of pregnancy is genuinely the most ill and unwell that I have ever felt. Yet we are socially expected to go about our ordinary everyday lives as though nothing has changed. We are not allowed to simply say to people “cut me a little slack if possible, there is an objective, medically-based reason why I feel entirely incapable of properly functioning”.

Now, the oft-touted ‘reason’ that we are not supposed to talk about our pregnancies in the first trimester is to ostensibly protect us from the pain of having to inform people if the pregnancy fails.

As many pregnancies eventually do.

Being now on the other side of a failed pregnancy, I find this rationale to be utter bullshit.

At least for me.

A failed pregnancy is utterly painful and full of heartache. Not telling people about it doesn’t protect you from any of that pain and heartache. But it does deprive you of potential access to a support network. From hearing other voices say “that happened to me too and I know how much what you’re going through utterly sucks”.

When I found out I was miscarrying, I felt relieved for maybe, half a day, that I hadn’t told many people. Then that relief faded quickly and I settled in to face a traumatic experience that I felt obliged to keep secret.

Whilst everyone should be able to make choices appropriate for them, the social expectation of silence around early pregnancy and its loss, made me feel invalidated.

It made me feel as though my pain was not real. That I wasn’t going through anything difficult.

How could I try to explain to people what was wrong with me when I wasn’t even allowed to let people know I was pregnant. Let alone, that I was pregnant but was in a long drawn-out process of losing the pregnancy.

For me, going through an immense physical and emotional journey in socially-imposed silence made me feel as though “what is happening to me doesn’t really matter”.

So, first things first, tell people you’re pregnancy whenever the f&@k you want.

Do what works for you.

A miscarriage totally sucks regardless of whether you go through it in silence or whether people know what’s happening to you.

If the culture of silence around early pregnancy doesn’t work for you and you feel better when you are able to have people acknowledge what you’re going through, just tell people!

F&@k the culture of shame.

My miscarriage story

Well I guess it’s time to leave this Myosotis Dress far behind.

Before continuing any further, I want to be very clear that I have no medical background whatsoever. This post is designed to tell the personal emotional of my own miscarriage. Any medical information is incidental and based on my own lay understanding of what happened to me. Nothing here should be treated as medical information and you should consult your health care professional if you are seeking medical information.First, by way of background to this story, in August 2019 I suffered an ectopic pregnancy. That’s the one where the pregnancy lodges itself somewhere other than the uterus and starts growing. It’s most commonly in the fallopian tube, which is where it was for me.

One day, out of nowhere, I felt a weird heaviness in my belly. I thought I’d eaten my lunch too fast and continued with my day. A couple of hours later, not even knowing that I was pregnant, I suddenly started experiencing severe abdominal pain which felt exactly like labour. I was in a museum with my son and I looked down and saw blood dripping out of me.

An ectopic pregnancy had ruptured, caused internal bleeding and leading to an emergency surgery, in which my left fallopian tube had to be removed.

That entire experience all took place within less than 24 hours.

The focus of this story isn’t really my earlier ectopic pregnancy. It does provide relevant context, however, because, after suffering an ectopic pregnancy, there is a significantly increased risk of suffering future ectopic pregnancies. It’s also more difficult to get pregnant with only one tube.

All of this is to explain that, from the moment I found out I was pregnant again in October 2019, only a few months after the ectopic, I was already experiencing significant fear that it could be another ectopic.

The previous ectopic pregnancy was also why I was lucky enough to be scheduled to have an early ultrasound at 8 weeks (in the Netherlands, where I live, it is normal to have the first scan around 9-11 weeks).

So I had just over 3 weeks of anxious waiting to make sure that it wasn’t another ectopic pregnancy. And while I therefore approached my pregnancy after the ectopic with a more cautious optimism than I once would have, I still really believed it was all going to work out.

I was calculating the timing of my maternity leave. Seeing how much annual leave I had to supplement it. I re-planned our budget to accommodate new child care costs. I was planning a maternity capsule wardrobe to sew (forgetting, initially, how the first trimester saps my will to sew). I was going through what baby gear we had kept from our son. I was imagining what it was going to be like to tell our families about the pregnancy over Christmas. Of what it would be like to watch my 4 year-old fall in love with his baby brother or sister.

On the day that my ultrasound finally came around, I entered the doctor’s office armed with 4 pages of questions to ask about what would happen next.

And in those questions I had prepared myself for two scenarios: a normal regular pregnancy and what if it was another ectopic.

The possibility of a ‘normal’ run-of-the-mill miscarriage simply hadn’t entered my calculations.

The first thing you learn if you find yourself in the unenviable position of madly googling things like “am I having a miscarriage” is how common it is. It is the outcome of 15-20% pregnancies when you’re in the latter half of your 30s, like myself.

But that damn culture of silence meant that, until this happened to me and I started to open up to people, no friend had ever told me about having had a miscarriage. Despite knowing the statistics, the silence about it, in my view, contributes to treating this common outcome as invisible, to be silently endured.

None of which helped me as I was going through it.

So silent was it to me that I hadn’t even considered the risk of having a plain old miscarriage when I went into that doctor’s office. It’s hard to anticipate things that we pretend aren’t happening.

Well, during that appointment, I had about one seconds’ relief after 3 weeks of anxiety. The pregnancy was in my uterus after all !

It was NOT ectopic.

But the doctor immediately warned me to “wait”.

She listened. Move the wand around. Listened some more.

There was a tiny embryo inside that gestational sac. But there was no heartbeat.

There should have been.

What followed next was a horrible week of waiting.

Maybe my dates were off and I was simply not as far along as expected. In which case it could be normal to not yet have a heartbeat and there was still a chance that all would be fine.

I knew my dates weren’t off, but I clung desperately to this possibility.

That week was, for me, actually the hardest part of my entire miscarriage experience.

The moment the doctor told me that she thought it was more likely than not that my pregnancy was not viable, I desperately hoped she was wrong. I read dozens of stories online. Of women with always regular cycles suddenly ovulating exceptionally late, leading to date miscalculations. Of faulty ultrasound equipment not detecting heartbeats. Of human error in the giving of ultrasounds (I somehow desperately hoped that the doctor I had seen was actually incompetent!).

I also read through the clinical guidelines for the reliable diagnosis of miscarriage in every health care system I could get my hands on. I knew all kinds of things I never thought I would need to know. The maximum size an embryo can reach without a heartbeat before being conclusively diagnosed as a miscarriage with 0% risk of misdiagnosis. The size an empty gestational sac should be before the miscarriage is conclusively diagnosed.

The moment the doctor told me she thought the pregnancy might not be viable, I felt deep down that she was right. I suddenly noticed a few things that were different between this first trimester and that of my previous successful pregnancy.

I remembered how the first time around I suddenly couldn’t stand cups of tea.

And now I thought with disdain about how my tea habit had continued unabated this pregnancy.

From that point onwards, I felt like every cup of tea I drank was mocking me. “You idiot, how could you have thought you were having a real baby when you could still drink tea???”.

Feeling stupid for so foolishly and easily believing that this would be a “real” pregnancy characterised much of my experience of miscarriage.

That week was, emotionally, one of the toughest of my life. I only took one day off of work, when I simply couldn’t drag myself out of bed. Even that very morning after the doctor first told me my pregnancy was probably not viable, I went straight from the hospital to work.

I didn’t speak to anyone at work that entire day.

I just couldn’t.

But I didn’t feel like I could not go to work either. Because nothing was wrong ‘yet’.

Even though when anyone asked me to do something at work I just wanted to scream at the top of my lungs “leave me the f@%k alone I’m carrying a dead baby”. 

“Dead baby. Dead baby. Dead baby”

A constant refrain. An infinity loop in my mind.

But I still didn’t feel that I could take any time off while I was waiting.

Little did I know how long the wait would ultimately turn out to be.

Having suffered both an ectopic pregnancy and a miscarriage, although the former is more medically serious, being potentially life threatening and requiring emergency surgical intervention, in my case, the long drawn out process of the miscarriage was significantly more difficult for me than the ectopic pregnancy.

After one week, the follow up ultrasound concluded that, in addition to there being no heartbeat, the embryo that had been there the previous week had disappeared. It was now just an empty gestational sac.

This is what’s known as a missed miscarriage. When there is a problem with the pregnancy but your body doesn’t yet realise it. Those horrible first trimester pregnancy symptoms kept going strong for me. But I knew I was carrying around nothing but an empty sac, even if my body didn’t .

Let me assure you, even worse than the symptoms of the first trimester of pregnancy is when you know you are suffering them for no reason at all.

Your options at this point are basically: (1) wait and let your body catch the f@&k up and miscarry on its own; (2) take medication to try to induce your body to have the miscarriage, with the medication being successful in about 70% of cases; or (3) undergo a D & C to have what remains of the pregnancy surgically removed.

For me, waiting around for it to happen on its own time did not seem like a viable option. I was fixated on the idea that I was carrying around a dead baby which, at some point, was destined to explode out of me in waves of blood and pain. It felt like having to go through life with a time bomb strapped to me.

I was also pretty keen to avoid surgery. I felt like an ectopic pregnancy followed by a miscarriage meant that I was going through a decidedly unlucky streak.

You know, I used to find statistics reassuring. If you had once told me that an ectopic pregnancy occurs in less than 2% of pregnancies, I would have found that statistic to be a relief. Now, having experienced being part of that unlucky minority, I find no solace in statistics. So when the doctor told me that the D & C surgery has a less than 1% risk of perforations, all I can think is “well, that’s pretty similar to the chances of an ectopic. If that could happen to me, why not this complication too?”

Nope, I take no comfort in numbers anymore.

Which is why I decided to try to take the misoprostol to medically start my miscarriage. I wanted to avoid the risks inherent with even a simple surgery. Yet I thought that by taking the medical miscarriage route, I would be regaining some kind of control over my body by choosing when this would happen.

I knew that the misoprostol had only about a 70% success rate but, such is the endless blind optimism of humans, that I still somehow thought it would work for me.

Yeah, humans can be pretty damn stupid.

Medical miscarriage using Misoprostol

Before taking the medication which I hoped would bring these weeks of anxiety to an end and allow my body to let go of the useless remains it seemed determined to retain, I’d read quite a few personal experiences online of taking misoprostol for a miscarriage.

During those strange few weeks in which I was pregnant but not-pregnant, reading about the miscarriage experience of others became something of a compulsion.

Most of the time I found it reassuring to try to understand what would happen to me.

During that time, I read a lot of about what a miscarriage induced by misoprostol would look and feel like if it worked. People described the pain, the passing of recognisable tissue, almost labour-like experiences, level of blood loss expected. Most of the personal experiences I read talked about knowing when the pregnancy tissue had been expelled – a sentiment I found hard to relate to in the abstract. Even if it wasn’t always visible, the experience, for many women, seemed to have a recognisable peak in terms of both pain and blood loss.

I didn’t find much to read about what it’s like when it doesn’t work, which is why I’m writing this post, just to add my personal experience to the ones out there.

Cuz, seriously, f@&k this not talking about shit.

(Yeah, there are a lot of f@&ks in this post. That’s how this subject makes me feel. I’m not going to apologize for it.)

For me, the misprostol caused about a day of bleeding that was about equivalent to the first day of a heavy period, probably slightly less. This was accompanied by cramping that was heavier than what I would get from an ordinary period but the level of pain could still be easily suppressed by ibuprofen. By the second day, the bleeding had already become quite light, the same as towards the end of a normal period.

Throughout, I was passing what appeared like ordinary period-type blood, there were no large clots or anything which seemed out of the ordinary.

I kept googling “how do I know if the misoprostol is working” and didn’t get much in the way of clear answers.

After 48 hours, I took a second dose of misoprostol.

The results were the same as the first.

This time around, after about the third day, there was a small period during which some non-painful mid-sized clots passed (only about the size of a thumb nail).

But it was just enough to give me hope that, well, “maybe it worked after all”. Maybe I just got lucky for once and the process of miscarriage wasn’t that difficult for me.

It was during this time period that I sewed my Deer and Doe Myosotis Dress. As the levels of pregnancy hormone in my body likely started to reduce, I started to feel slightly human again.

I think the fact that I was taking a medicine which had been given to me by a doctor also made me feel as though something was actually happening to me now. That it was OK to stay home from work and that most of my everyday life would have to wait.

About 10 days later, at a follow up appointment, however, it became clear that the misoprostol had not worked. The empty sac was still floating around inside of me, undeterred.

In the experiences of miscarriage I had read about, a common thread which seemed to emerge, with the benefit of a bit of time and distance from the immediate pain and heartache, is that many women were left feeling empowered, in a certain sense, by what there bodies could do. About their body knowing what needed to be done and doing it.

My own experience, in contrast, felt like a failure at every turn.

A failure to have a successful pregnancy.

A failure of my body to recognise that the pregnancy had failed and get rid of it on its own.

A failure to respond to the medication which could help me through that process.

My body simultaneously failed at being pregnant and failed at miscarrying.

And as the exhaustion and anxiety continued – I couldn’t fallen asleep before 2am for about 2 months while all this was going on – my body was also feeling like it was failing me in other ways.

I felt that what little amount of fitness I had been able to regain after my ectopic surgery had left me in the worst physical shape of my adult life disappeared. I was simply unable to cope with the idea of everyday things like going to yoga or going for a run.

There was no sense of awe at the power of my body. I hated my body.

I hated everything.

I hated sewing.

I hated cups of tea.

I hated anyone who wanted to talk to me.

I kept a vivid picture of the ultrasound photo of the embryo in my mind and I hated that damn little blob too. Why couldn’t the stupid baby just be alive like it was supposed to be???? (just in case you’re wondering, they don’t offer to give you the photo to keep when you have a tiny probably dead blob inside of you).

The hidden side of miscarriage

At this point, I then had little choice but to schedule a surgical removal of this stubborn little sac.

The D & C couldn’t be scheduled, however, until three weeks from the date when it was confirmed that the misoprostol didn’t work.

At this stage, it was the pure amount of time involved that was immensely frustrating. It hindered me from being able to put it all behind me and focus on moving on.

I first found out that I was carrying an embryo with no heartbeat that was, most likely, not viable, at 8 weeks of pregnancy. The scheduled date of my D & C was five weeks after that.

Every image of miscarriage I’d previously held started with the idea of bleeding or sudden pain. I had no idea that miscarriage could be a silent event which still takes over your life for weeks and weeks on end – holding you captive both emotionally and physically.

Given that I didn’t even know I was pregnant during the first three weeks, to me it felt as though the process of miscarrying lasted far longer than the pregnancy itself.

I had no idea that I would end up taking more time off work to deal with a miscarriage than I took off work during the entirety of my successful pregnancy (excluding, of course, maternity leave for delivery and the aftermath).

I had no idea that while my insurance covers delivery of a pregnancy at a rate of 100%, medical care for my miscarriage falls under the scope of other specialist care, reimbursed at only an 80% rate. So my miscarriage ending up costing me more in medical bills than my entire first successful pregnancy did.

There was pain. Expense. Emotional distress. Extended medical interventions. Yet, somehow, I’m supposed to just endure it all in silence because we don’t talk about what happens during early pregnancy and its loss.

I live in the Netherlands and was being treated throughout this period by a gynecology specialist practice attached to a large-scale hospital. I don’t want to complain because I do feel lucky to have had easy access to the physical care I needed.

But, at the same time, I felt that there was something of a lack of understanding of the emotional side of a miscarriage. I saw a different doctor for every ultrasound/appointment – so I had no opportunity to develop a relationship of trust with any doctor.

I was never once asked by a doctor about my emotional state or well-being. This only contributed to my feeling that this was supposed to be a purely medical matter. If I was taking it hard emotionally there must be something wrong with me. The only person who ever said “I’m sorry this is happening” was the receptionist who showed me where to find the nurse to pick up my misoprostol.

When reading about other’s experiences online I felt amazed when women who were miscarrying during early pregnancy mentioned being given information about accessible counseling services. How it must have felt to have had the emotional pain acknowledged in that way! My only form of ‘counseling’ was endlessly seeking stories of the experience of others online.

I remember at one of my appointments being unable to properly explain, through my tears, that I wasn’t crying because I had to have a D & C – I had already considered that outcome pretty likely. I was crying because what I found distressing was that I was now expected to just go home and wait until I received a letter which would tell me when my surgery would be scheduled.

That, after weeks and weeks of anxiety and distress at the unknown, I still couldn’t actually leave the doctor’s office knowing when this would finally be over for me. That knowledge was so important to enable me to prepare and to try to put the feeling of being an emotional and physical time bomb behind me.

To try to regain some control.

In short, I felt that I was medically taken care of.

But I felt that the system which ensured that the medical ticks and crosses were duly accounted for had very little concern for what was going through my head at this time.

In some ways I get it. Medically, they’ve done their job when the pregnancy tissue has left my body. What’s going through my mind and my emotional state doesn’t actually impact on ensuring that that happens. But, for me, miscarriage was more than a medical experience and the complete lack of acknowledgement of its emotional aspect left me feeling invisible and inadequate.

And then…

As the case may be, my body eventually got with the programme.

About five days before my D & C was scheduled, I started to bleed more heavily ( I had been lightly bleeding for several weeks by this point, ever since I took the misoprostol).

I experiences some light back pain, although I initially attributed this to having been bent over the dining room table tracing and cutting out a sewing pattern all afternoon.

After about 24 hours of heavy bleeding, there was then suddenly a period of about 3-4 hours where it became very heavy and I was passing large blood clots every twenty minutes or so.

It was only at this point that I understood what I had read about when taking the misoprostol: that you usually just know when it is happening.

The bleeding was much heavier than a normal period, I was soaking up several maxi-pads an hour during those few hours of peak. The clots which came out regularly were closer to golf-ball sized (I know, too much information for some, but just the kind of practical info that some others might want).

Unlike a regular period, there was enough blood that you could feel it leaving your body. Whenever I stood up after being seated, there would be a gushing feeling as gravity did its thing.

It was nothing like a period. And it was nothing like the period-like bleeding I had experienced after taking misoprostol. It was heavier. It was stronger. It was filled with obvious clots of all shapes and sizes. It gushed and flowed.

On the up side, however, I didn’t experience any cramping or pain at all, except for the light back pain at the beginning which was so mild I initially didn’t connect it. I also didn’t experience any of the other negative symptoms I had heard some people mention – like feeling cold or vomitting.

I was actually physically fine as the miscarriage (finally!) was going on.

I felt relieved that I wouldn’t need the D & C after all.

That it was about to be over.

You know what, I actually sewed another dress that afternoon, while this was happening. And, since I wasn’t actually in any pain, sewing turned out to be the perfect companion.

Some distracting details to throw myself into while all this was coming to a head.

After a few hours and a peak period of passing large clots (none of which was recognisable as anything to me), the clots stopped and the blood loss slowed down dramatically to mid-period levels.

I would’t know for sure until a doctor confirmed after the weekend, but I felt like it had happened.

It was finally over.

Sewing for the soul – Myosotis dress and beyond

If you’re just a regular sewing reader and you’ve made it this far, thank-you for listening.

Thank-you for letting me have a voice about an experience in which I felt silenced.

If you’re here because you found this post after googling those horrible terms that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone: missed miscarriage, silent heartbeat, can I have a miscarriage if I still have morning sickness, no heartbeat, any success stories after no heartbeat at 7-8 weeks, am I having a miscarriage, taking misoprostol for a miscarriage, is the misoprostol working, I’m sorry you’re going through this.

It f@&kin’ sucks.

There isn’t much more that I can offer.

Please feel free to punch in the face (I suggest mentally, rather than actually), anyone who tries to comfort you by telling you you will still have a successful pregnancy in the future. Or that at least you’ve had previous successful pregnancies. Or that at least your miscarriage happened early.

For anyone who doesn’t know what to say to someone who is suffering a miscarriage, saying nothing is better than saying any of that. The loss of a pregnancy is a real one which needs to be grieved. And, whilst I’m not denying for a moment that later term pregnancy loss is even more devastating, grief is not a zero sum game.

The fact that other people have it worse, doesn’t actually bring any relief to a person who is grieving. Suggesting that it should simply invalidates a perfectly reasonable form of grief at a time when someone is undergoing an experience which is consistently invalidated through a culture of silence.

And, as for the generic “it wasn’t meant to be”, well, I found that about as helpful as the internet algorithms which kept showing me ads for maternity clothing and newborn products months after I knew my pregnancy was not viable. I mean, seriously, if algorithms can notice that I spent a few weeks googling maternity clothes and baby gear, it should equally be able to realize that I then spent the subsequent month googling everything there is to know about miscarriage.

For me “what you are going through is real and painful and awful and really, really shitty and there’s nothing wrong with you if you just feel like collapsing on the floor and crying” is all that I wanted to hear from those that I confided in.

The only other thing I can offer – and yes, I know I myself am drifting into empty platitude area here – is that it does get better.

There was a point at which my mind stopped conceptualising things as losing a baby and all the possibility that it represented for our family and started to think of it as more of a medical problem to be addressed.

But even then, there would still be days, after I thought everything was back to ‘normal’, when I would feel suddenly floored. Completely overwhelmed. Unable to think about anything but the loss. Snapping from calm to level 100 rage in a nanosecond. When I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a single minute all night long, regardless of how much I desperately needed that sleep more than anything.

But those days become fewer, the normal days become the majority and, slowly, you move back to something of your normal.

The desperation doesn’t last forever.

If you are lucky enough that it is an option for you, both after the miscarriage and my ectopic pregnancy, I found taking a little trip as a family to be comforting. I was less likely to get all caught up in my head while we were having a little mini-adventure together, rather than just being at home.

Most of all, for myself, I found comfort in my sewing this Myosotis Dress. In doing something that gives me a feeling of control. In returning to something that ordinarily brought me a creative experience and joy, which was temporarily taken from me during the process of early pregnancy and pregnancy loss.

The return of my passion for sewing felt like a return to myself.

I have also found it comforting to write this blog post – exploring the issue through the lens of my Myosotis Dress.

In addition to the time actually spent writing it, I have spent the last few weeks reflecting in flashes about what I want to say. I find comfort in rallying against the secrecy and silence which has made me feel alone and invalidated throughout this experience.

A final thing I wanted to add to this mountainous overshare is the following. When reading about the miscarriage experiences of others, I found very often the postscript that the sufferer eventually went on to have a successful pregnancy. I understand how this can seem reassuring, especially to the audience most likely to be seeking out miscarriage stories. But I also feel uncomfortable with the implication that one seeks hope or ‘redemption’ after a miscarriage through a successful pregnancy.

For me, two back-to-back early pregnancy losses have taken a significant mental and physical toll. At the moment, I still need to wait for my cycle to return to normal, which could take 6 weeks or even more. Which means that the entire experience, from being pregnant to miscarrying to my body being theoretically able to conceive again is a really long one – more than 4 months.

And I feel completely and utterly exhausted by it. Wiped out. I don’t feel that I have the strength to risk it happening all over again right now. I don’t feel that I could survive the possibility of losing another one.

So, at this stage, I honestly don’t see my own story eventually ending with the postscript of a future successful pregnancy.

And I wanted to share that in order to send the message that how you recover from and cope with a miscarriage does not depend on whether or not you eventually go on to have a successful pregnancy.

Alright, well this is by far the most difficult and personal blog post I have ever written and I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to bring it to an end. Even as I write this I’m not entirely sure if I will be able to bring myself to publish it.

Nonetheless, I will now draw things to a close, since I hope that by doing so, I will also somehow bring this experience towards something of an end for me.

It feels pretty trivial, in some ways, to finish things with my Deer and Doe Myosotis Dress. But, actually, this really just confirms something that the sewing community has known for a long time.

Making things with your own two hands – be it clothing or something else – is an activity that transcends the finished object itself. It is a process which is comforting, soothing and, in its own way, life-sustaining.

At least for me.

Oh and, finally, a little P.S! If you like to get your blog hits through Bloglovin’, feel free to follow me over there: you can find me here. And you can find me on Instagram here.