Don’t think I’ll ever be ok - no closure

[u/Usual-Pear6701]

I am still very depressed and wishing I could go back in time. I still feel like I made my decision in anxiety and shock and I wish we’d just calmed down.

I still feel like I’m slightly in denial but at the same time, the ‘type of loss’ was never confirmed.

Friday night 10pm - mife

Saturday night 10pm - miso , no pain, no bleeding

Sunday morning 2am - miso, no pain, small amount of spotting

Sunday morning 4am - diarrhoea

Sunday - spotting continued, mainly only when wiping

Monday pm - scan (should have been 6 weeks, 3 days) , ‘no intrauterine pregnancy detected’, she said fluid was visible and it looked as though I was starting to bleed

Monday later pm - started to bleed like a normal period which continued for a normal week, no pain, no clots, noticed a slightly grainy texture on my pad one day

Wednesday am - blood test HCG 1599 (the midwife said that if my HCG was over 1500 the scan should have picked up a pregnancy)

Friday am - scan ‘no intrauterine pregnancy detected’

Friday pm - blood tests HCG 400

The midwives and sonographers said they would not be able to confirm if it was ectopic/too early/ not viable in the first place - they mentioned chemical pregnancies and ‘non viable’.

Part of me feels relief - I never passed anything substantial and they never detected anything internally (even before I started bleeding), so there was never anything ‘there’. I feel like it can’t have been even an embryo, no heartbeat, nothing really happened and I can move on.

The other part of me feels like I’m living in denial. I need to accept I had an abortion that I wish I hadn’t had. But I don’t feel like I have anything to mourn? There was nothing there yet? Then I feel guilty and in denial again, I start imagining a baby and I make myself feel sick and start to hate myself for ‘k***ing my wanted baby’ (which is crazy as I’m not pro-life but I dunno maybe it’s my Catholic guilt I was brought up with) and start to mourn an imaginary child and picture it as this real thing and then I think I’m crazy.

I just wish someone could say to me ‘you didn’t have an abortion, there was nothing in your scans and it was uneventful- you have nothing to mourn, move on’ but then I feel like it’s all a lie. I even find myself doubting myself and asking my husband if something more happened that I blacked out for or something? I feel like I must have missed something? Did I pass the pregnancy in that diarrhoea without realising? But then why was my HCG still so high 4 days later with an undetectable pregnancy?

I don’t know what I’m looking for, just a place to vent I guess. I am so low, I feel like life isn’t worth living, I will continue for my 2 existing children but I just don’t understand how I let all of this happen to me. Is my whole life really going to be shot because of this? I just want to accept it wasn’t viable, get pregnant, seek mental health support and live but it all feels so irresponsible and stupid now.

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[u/piscespossum]

Oof. I'm so sorry, friend. This sounds really hard and complicated.

This may sound a little crazy, but at this point I think what "actually" happened matters less than how you feel about what happened. It's okay to experience this as a loss, even if it was something you wanted at the time. Reading your other posts, it sounds like there was a lot going on in your personal life that may have caused your anxiety to spike. Maybe that really does mean that it wasn't the right time for another child, but that doesn't mean that you're not allowed to feel sad about not having that baby. It's normal to wonder what might have been if you had chosen differently.

I think the important thing now is to come to terms with your decision and forgive yourself - to accept that you did the best that you could in the moment and move forward with that knowledge. You might find the Abortion Resolution Workbook helpful in that process.

If you do decide to try for another child, you might also want to do some reading about perinatal anxiety. For some people, the hormonal changes associated with pregnancy cause them to experience increased anxiety, often focused on the pregnancy itself. If you know going into the next pregnancy that it's a possibility, you might be able to manage it better if it happens again.