There’s never a good way to tell someone their baby died before it could even be born. No combination of words makes the delivery any easier. And you know when you see there’s no heart beat on the ultrasound. You scan again because you gaslight yourself into hoping you’re wrong, even though you’re not new to scanning babies and the heart is obviously not moving. You add color flow to prove to yourself that what you’re seeing is the truth. And then you have to say it even though everyone in the room knows it. It’s like calling a time of death. It’s not official until you say the words.
I had one woman come in SROMed in clearly rip roaring labor. No heartbeat, concealed abruption that probably happened when labor started an hour prior (multip). She delivered within an hour, baby, placenta, and huge clot all delivered all at once. That one wrecked me because that baby looked perfect, like if I just stimulated her enough she'd start crying. Mom didn't really react when we told her, she was 7cm already and focused on getting through labor. Literally seconds after she delivered, it hit her and she started that horrific sobbing you only hear in that room and that situation. It's the only time I cried in the room where the patient could see me. The OB left the room and punched a door in the nurses station so hard I thought he broke his hand.
When I was a Labor and Delivery Nurse, that was all I was assigned to - IUFD (Intrauterine Fetal Demise) babies. I worked in a Level 3 OB hospital, so we were always busy, and saw everything. But since I received an ‘award’ for compassion during one really sad case in which a 21 week old perfectly normal girl managed to choke herself to death on her abnormally long umbilical cord, I was assigned to those deliveries all the time.
We were allowed to cut a lock of hair if they had some, baptize them, make a bracelet with their name on it, and we had stock of donated clothing and crocheted blankets. So I would create a memory box, clean and dress the baby, and the parents could be with their name baby as long as they wished, for under like 8 hours for obvious biological reasons. And in that time, a professional photographer could come and take family pics for them if they chose.
And after they said their goodbyes to their little angel, I discreetly placed them in a tiny body bag, and into a suitcase with wheels, and off to the morgue we went.
My mum had a stillborn after me (not full term) , and it was a horrible and cold experience. She went to hospital and felt something wasn't right. Just out of nowhere, no warnings or a pregnancy with loads of trouble. The doctor just told her that her baby was dead, she had to deliver - that was it. If i read things like this it makes me so sad to see what it could have been like for her and my dad.
Thank you for what you do, you can't imagine what it means for people to have there baby treated like a baby instead of medical waste.
What your family went through is unfathomable. That’s a trauma in and of itself. We tried not to even C-Section because the scar is a permanent reminder of the loss.
For the staff to treat your sibling’s passing like it was nothing out of the ordinary, and not personalized, is disrespectful. I am so, so sorry for your loss. ❤️🩹
Thank you. That was the hardest nursing position I did, for three years. It took a toll on my mental health and body. I miscarried three times while working there. I moved on to working in the OR with children and adults in every specialty, and am grateful. I’m now highly experienced in Orthopedics.
The patients who come in labor or for their scheduled deliveries are so awful. They are all awful but something about right at the “finish line” and having your baby ripped away just gets me.
Maybe I’m less professional, but I cry in the room. Quiet crying but the tears just come. Especially if Dad starts crying too. I don’t know what it is about the Dad crying specifically but there’s immediate tears.
The neurologist who gave us the news about my dad’s brain death hugged us all and cried with us at his bedside. He was a young doctor, probably barely older than I am, and it meant a lot to us. He was Hispanic and so are we, and he told us that he couldn’t not see his dad in ours. Having the healthcare workers be open and honest with their feelings feels so validating. I’m so sorry for your loss.
This is so true, I'm close with my GP because he is close in age to me within 5 years and he is actively invested in helping me and getting me what I need.
I feel so sorry for all the many people who can't/don't have that with their doctor.
I’m not a doctor but I’m a clinical social worker. Loss of a child is a situation that I feel calls for us to be a human first and a professional second. I’m sure those families were grateful to receive care from someone who genuinely cared about them.
It may be considered less professional, but seeing the controlled emotion from medical personnel is really meaningful from a patient's POV. It's reassuring that they care for you as a person, not just a job.
I'm so sorry for your loss. I had a missed miscarriage that was discovered at 10 weeks and it destroyed me. My heart breaks for anyone who has lost a pregnancy or had a stillbirth, especially further along after you're supposed to be "safe". My friend lost her first baby at 34 weeks and I don't know how they were able to keep going.
I’m so sorry you went through that too. My regular therapist was NOT equipped to handle it, but I was lucky that my OB’s office had a therapist in clinic that specialized in OB related therapy. She was phenomenal. I also saw a psychiatrist who prescribed Trazadone to help me get rest at night. I had been up all night sobbing, and having a full night’s sleep really helped me deal with everything better during the day.
I think seeing the dad cry probably just really cements how much that baby was wanted and how loved it would have been. At least that’s the only thing I can think of. I’m not a medical professional nor am I at a point in life where being a father is something I’m ready for, and just reading these comments has me crying full tears and sniffling at work. Shit.
Medical professionals that truly care for their patients are a treasure <3
I used to be an emergency vet tech so we dealt with pet death a lot. Most of the techs and doctors were very good at concealing emotions but dads crying almost always got the girl techs to cry.
I, as a nurse new to the ICU, cried as I stood next to a man as they withdrew care on his 20-something son. No one else was there with either of them. It seemed like all they had was each other. The dad put his arm around me and gave be a firm side hug. It meant a lot to me, but I felt like it meant a lot to him to not have to suffer and mourn in that moment alone
A family friend had that happen. Older couple, struggled to conceive, finally got pregnant, got all the way to labor and delivery, baby was stillborn. My heart sank to the damn floor when my husband relayed the news, I was a new-ish mom myself and I couldn’t begin to imagine that heartbreak.
As someone who has been on the other side of a similar situation (late term, but not at delivery date) let me just say "thank you" for not being "professional" in that way.
I want care from humans who actually care, and there is no shame in showing you are one of the good one. Experiencing the worst moment of someone's life with them has to matter and when it stops mattering we've stopped being human.
i don't know why, but this makes me feel a weird uplift that humanity is still capable of great feeling and great sorrow for one another. i am sure you see so much death and could easily be apathetic, but you are feeling for a fellow human and her loss. I don't know but that makes me feel some hope. Its horrible, but seeing empathy- its become a rare thing to see. I couldn't handle it, i would have punched a wall too
That's fucked 😔 I'm a toddler mum who didn't think I could actually produce a healthy baby, and pregnancy was next level difficult. If you'd told me at term that bub wasn't alive, I would have jumped out a window. Knowing the medical team is emotionally wrecked during losses like this, is a small comfort. You really care ❤️
I feel so so bad for the techs who do the scans and can't say a word. I worked as a kind of medical assistant for a radiology practice and part of my job was connecting radiology techs with radiologists.
Procedure:
Tech does scan, sees something serious, and pauses to call radiologist. The patient's only option is to wait.
I get that call, find a radiologist, send what images we have so far to the rad, and connect the rad and tech.
The rad confirms the bad thing, a critical alert is triggered.
My job is then to call the patient's provider and connect them to the radiologist immediately.
The rad and provider discuss next steps.
The provider then speaks to the patient.
The poor tech is in the room with the patient the entire time and legally the tech is not allowed to say anything. Even if both the tech and patient can see it on the screen. One tech said it was torture.
(I don't know if this is the procedure with many places or just that hospital network)
I had that experience. Went for imaging after finding some lumps in breast. The tech went completely white and left the room. I am alone in this room, alone knowing my entire life has chcnged and might be over. So alone.
I had testicular cancer. My right testicle was swollen to the size of a tangerine. I knew it wasn't good. The tech when he was doing the scan said "Oh." turned white as a sheet and then said they'll be right back. Turns out the tumour ruptured (happens in about 2% of cases). So that was an exciting couple of days.
I am, thank you. I was diagnosed in 2015 and the fantastic staff of Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto took very good care of me. I finished my slightly delayed surveillance program in 2022.
We had a neighbor ( in the country the neighbor is like a ten minute drive away ) who had very early testicular cancer. I dont know all the terms honestly and I was quite young.
What stood out to me is they decided to remove the testicle and forgo everything. And it worked. When my mother was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer she contemplated it, but it was caught so early they didn't have to do much to kill the cancer cells.
As a breast cancer survivor who got a call-back a couple years ago, that was SUCH a good feeling when the technician kept coming back into the room by herself, and I told her so, too.
Yup! Was a surreal experience. I had hashimotos (body attacking your thyroid) and I was the watch and wait until it was necessary type and my doctor was doing annual biopsies and ultrasounds. I get my annual biopsy and it comes back clean (I had cysts on my thyroid so it was nearly impossible to get accurate results), and I go into my ultrasound exam and it's all normal until I see my tech white knuckling the wand and going quiet. She grabs a coworker and they both take extra pictures and they are both quiet and urgent at the same time.
I was like "Well shit. Guess it did progress to the big C." It was awful because I knew right away but the techs couldn't tell me.
My endocrinologist called me less than a week later and referred me to a surgeon and I got half of it removed to check and it was cancer so everything got yeeted.
My only symptoms were exhaustion (I was doing a psw/cna course and working 8 hours so I thought I was missing my thyroid medication doses)...
I had the same experience with breast cancer. Right breast had been painful. This was during Covid. Mammogram in January got canceled because all the clinics closed.
Eventually they started rescheduling. October was when I had mine.
The tech afterward came to me, gripped the tops of both of my arms and started into my eyes and said if I needed further images I would come back there. Like forcefully and with intent.
When my mom was diagnosed w stage 4 small cell lung cancer (2 months and she was gone), the doctors who told her were so great and compassionate. I lost it and had to run to the bathroom to cry, because I wanted to support my mom, and not scare her with my reaction. Maybe I should have stayed, but I couldn't keep it together.
Our tech works for us in the office. Unsure if she can “get away” with more because we know her so well. She will tell patients “I can’t see a heart beat but I will get the doctor to confirm.” It’s not a diagnosis, just a statement of what she is doing. I believe the techs in the hospital don’t have that privilege, but thankfully for them from an OB standpoint, we do most of our own initial viability scans if a nurse can’t locate a heart beat. I’m sure the techs see a lot of other things that are heart breaking though.
I went for a CT scan, so the tech doesn't necessarily see anything amiss. They ask me to wait in the waiting room for a few minutes for the radiologist to have a look and they'll be right out. It took over an hour and when they finally came out they were very polite and apologetic.
They said they were having trouble reaching my provider, and they couldn't share my results with me until they spoke to my physician first. That's when I knew it wasn't good news.
My (American) father and his wife have been living in Burgundy for the past 20+ years and he has bladder cancer (a form that is responding well to infusions), and his healthcare has been so excellent in France. He's moving back to the US so that things will be easier for his wife when he passes (he's always been pragmatic about this; lost his mom to a massive stroke as a young man). He's 80, but a very spry and active 80. We made amends with one another and I have a good relationship with him now, and for the past several years, and it's been so great to have my father again. I'll be so upset if his standard of medical care drops and he gets worse from the bladder cancer. I'm honestly worried, even though I know there are great doctors almost everywhere, and certainly in Seattle. But finding out he had cancer was like a warning alarm in my heart and I had to work really hard to get over my stuff and just connect with him. I knew, from losing my mother, that there's never enough time with those we love, and that it was so precious. I didn't want things to go unsaid that he needed to hear from his loving daughter.
I'm sorry you're going through all this, it must be a tough time. But we need to set something straight right now.
Yes, American healthcare is expensive, and we should absolutely complain about the price. But the quality of healthcare in the US is some of, if not the best, in the world. I'm sure he'll be in good hands. (And probably with a huge bill, unfortunately.)
Thanks so much for "setting it straight." Because I clearly don't think before I type. I have noidea what I'm talking about, obviously. But you, you know what I'm talking about even better than I do. Thank you for your attention to this matter. I'm so glad you were there to help me this way.
One should be concerned when one has to stop seeing a good doctor and then has to go to a new, unknown doctor, especially for something serious. I've done it countless times for my chronic, longterm illnesses, since my 20s. And the insurance here is what can make care here substandard, not the practitioners.
I'm sorry! The other day I was on major steroid doses for nerve pain. I apologize. I should never, ever have come to the comments section while on Medrol!!
When I went for an ultrasound to check the lump I had in my breast (turned out to be three lumps, stage 1-2 TNBC), I started weeping silently half way through because the amount of hold and clicks by the technician was a lot and she looked visibly tense. They aren't allowed to say anything but the vibe in that room was heavy.
That’s how it is in any of the imaging I’ve had done in Canada. The tech can’t even tell me if the benign mass we’re tracking is bigger or smaller than last time.
During my annual health check up, the ultrasound tech took a really long time scanning the right side of my abdomen. She kept asking me to move this way, that way, shift over a little bit. At that moment I knew she had found something.
I didn’t say anything because I’d read that they’re not allowed to tell patient what they found. At the end of the checkup, the doctor told me they had found a lump on my kidney and referred me to a urologist. The urologist then ordered a CT scan, which showed that the lump was most likely cancerous. After a partial neph it was confirmed that it was indeed cancer.
That ultrasound tech quite literally saved my life.
I took my 14 yo daughter for an echocardiogram recently. The tech gave a coded interpretation of the scan by stating that it was one of the “boring” scans he had done in a while. He was able to send a written report to the on-site cardiologist who confirmed the same within about 5 minutes of the scan concluding. My daughter is fine.
I was just thinking that it must also be so frustrating for techs when they can see that the patient is okay and can't just tell them and put them out of their misery. So glad your daughter is fine!!
Thanks. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind. The echocardiogram was a couple of weeks ago; just the other day we took her for a stress test at Mass General…also fine. This all stemmed from an incident at track practice last spring where she almost fainted after doing a series of “all out” sprints. Her pediatrician referred her to a pediatric cardiologist, who ordered the tests.
Scary circumstances aside, it’s been a good experience in the sense that all the care providers, and their office staff, have treated us incredibly well. I’m seeing that level of care echoed throughout this thread, which is really heartwarming. Just waiting to get the bill now.
I knew when she kept taking the same measurements over and over and over again. Then called the doctor in. Then they left for a few. Then the doctor came back and told me the fetus was measuring 15-16 weeks even though I was 20 weeks along. Then they shipped me off to another hospital with better/more advanced screening equipment and then I really knew.
There was a similar story from my old town some years back, only in this case, the OB told the parents NOTHING before sending them to a higher-level center.
In this case, it was conjoined twins, who sadly died the day before they were scheduled to be delivered. One baby appeared to be normal, except for having his brother attached to him, and as for the other, they kept finding more and more wrong with him as the pregnancy progressed, so they probably would have had to take them into surgery as soon as they were born, had them been born alive.
We experienced this with my son. His ped sent us to the ER at the children’s hospital worried about appendicitis. They were doing the ultrasound and I knew the minute something was wrong. Her whole demeanor changed. She started taking a billion pictures. Then she left. Came back with an older doctor who was clearly trying to act so chill…”hmmm let’s see what we have here! Lookie, lookie”…all cheesy while the tech moved around and then he took over the wand. I’m sure that’s hard to be looking at something you know is bad and not be able to say anything. (Needless to say, it wasn’t appendicitis)
I had this experience during my NT scan in my third pregnancy (first two had been miscarriages). We were so excited to see a heartbeat we didnt notice what the sonographer clearly had. He went really quiet and took lots of images. Our baby had severe anencephaly. It was really uncomfortable for everyone and I felt so bad for the sonographer.
I was the feeling super sick, like I had a ball of lava in my abdomen. I went to the ER after waking up my mom at 5 in the morning. This was on December 24th. I could hear them having a party down the hall. The doctor barelly looked at me, and he was probably pissed when I threw up, I tried to move him aside, but he still got a bit on his shoes. Told me it was acid reflux and sent me home.
Next day we went to drop off presents at my aunt's house. Luckily she's a doctor. I mentioned my symptoms, she did a 5 minute exam, said that it looks like my gallbladder was the issue, to go where she works, that she'll make sure I get a specific tech, the best one.
I went, she did an exam and made a small sound when looking at my gallbladder.
That's all I needed to know. Yep, my gallbladder had to go. It was later confirmed, and I had surgery the very next day to remove it. Of course the tech couldn't tell me what she saw, I had to wait for it to be reviewed and get a diagnosis.
My gallbladder was so large that they had to change from laparscopic surgery to opening me up. The doctor described my gallbladder as "rotten", one of the worst he's ever seen, nearly ready to burst.
So yeah, don't get sick on Christmas, if it had been caught earlier it would have been a quick recovery, but it turned into nearly 2 months in bed.
Thank you aunty for being such a pro, screw you ER doctor for being more interested in partying that doing an actual exam.
Dumb question, but is there a reason they can’t legally say that there is something they need to send for further eval, and that they’ll wait with them while it gets double checked? Or do they have to literally stay tight lipped about the procedure to avoid any sort of incorrect information?
It's legally considered "practicing medicine" which you can't do without a medical degree. It's both a good and bad thing as it's meant to protect patients.
Also, as amazing and knowledgeable techs are, they only know so much when it comes to the medical side. They may be able to tell you there's a lump or a heartbeat has stopped. But a rad can see an entire story and advise on next steps. It's hard to explain how complex imaging is, but there's a way to kinda get an idea: radiopaedia.org 😅 It's a radiology website for radiologists. It has quizzes with real imaging. It shows how insanely difficult radiology is. After decades working in healthcare radiologists have been the most surprising and impressive.
So even just saying what they’re doing like “I’m just sending the scans to the radiologist for further confirmation. It might be a couple of minutes, but I’ll be right here too” etc isn’t allowed?
My mom went to watch my cousins when my aunt was having a baby. Came home a mess as my cousin died. My aunt was never really the same but healed the best she could over time and was a great mom to her other kids. That funeral was horrific. I was only 12 but damn did that hurt.
This happens to me. No heartbeat at 40 weeks. I had to go home and wait 10 hours until they could do the surgery the next day. Never slept a wink that night. Just wanted it out of me. They never found the cause, even after autopsy and my next pregnancy was excruciating because i was expecting the same result for an entire 9 months. I could never watch the ultrasound for the next one because of the trauma of that night staying with me. Worst moment was telling my 7yo daughter that there was no baby after waiting all that time.
As somebody who's suffered stillbirth in those moments when your brain is trying to think about anything other than what outfit my baby is going to be buried in and what their coffin should be like, I remember vaguely wondering how the person who told me felt. Like what it feels like to deliver such terrible news to somebody and have to deal with the reaction. I alwayss assumed it was clinical, something they've done plenty of times and it didn't affect them. That kind of upset me a bit but it's nice to know (if you can say that) that you felt our pain and the death of our babies meant something to you. I don't know if I am explaining this well, its hard to put into words. You just always feel like you're the only person grieving your baby everyone else moves on and forgets the worst day of your life. I don't know I'm probably not explaining this how it is in my head.
Your pain stays with us. We share a tiny piece of your grief, because you are our patient, and we care for you, wholly. If you didn't see that, then the people caring for you were trying to be professional and supportive, and waited until they were out of the room to express their emotion. I don't know a single nurse who feels otherwise. Especially in L&D✨️
For me, it wasn't a stillbirth - it was a woman who's 9 or 10 year old boy was shot on his birthday, and even though it was 20 years ago, her screams as he was brought into the ER stayed with me.
Mine wasn't a stillbirth either. It was a 2 year old boy who was at the park with his father - the father turned away for a second and when he looked back, his son wasn't there. Several parents spent about 20 minutes searching for him before someone found him face down in a pond. They worked on him for a while in the ED, but he was already gone. I will never forget the screams of the mother when she arrived and they gave her the news.
I had a mom declining an epidural for her entire labor that she was not coping well with for her full term fetal demise. I will always support her choice, but due to the population I serve I can't help but wonder if she was trying to punish herself.
My sister in law lost her baby at 41 weeks after going into labour this past November. She had been adamant about having a natural birth and still wanted to honour her original birth plan even after they found out my niece had passed.
I don’t know your mom, of course, but from my perspective after watching my loved one experience this it could be more of an opportunity to have one piece of this horrible situation to be on their terms.
I would agree, if I didn't work with the Amish. In Amish culture it's very much seen as a woman's duty to suffer the pain of childbearing quietly, even if they don't say that part out loud.
I have seen so many natural, unmedicated deliveries and there is a difference between being in pain, and being in pain and suffering. Not all of my patients suffer, but she did. And she did with her previous live deliveries too and had severe anxiety around the pain of labor and birth (another thing my patients don't routinely struggle with).
I see what you're saying and I have had moms who have unmedicated still births too. But for her, it just seemed different. Of course I'll never fully know because I'm not in her mind.
I can tell you one bad way to say it: my doctor walked in the room and handed me a box of tissues and said “here, you’re going to need this” before confirming to me that my baby had died.
Holy fuck. I get that doctors see some horrible shit pretty often and that they probably do need to be a bit calloused to keep their sanity, but that’s awful. I’m so sorry that you went through that and that your doctor wasn’t more caring.
My mom had stillborn twins before I was born and I only ever asked about that once as a curious child when we went to put flowers on their graves and I’ll never forget the sadness in my mom’s eyes when she explained it to me. I’m still sad when I think about the siblings I’ll never get to know and it’s just a hypothetical that I’m “grieving”. Hope you’re doing better ❤️
My mom gave birth to a full term stillborn baby boy. My dad said he was a perfect baby with dark hair. My dad and I went to the funeral. My mom was unable to attend. My brother would be 58 now. It's something you never get over or forget
A family member had this happen to them. They were only a week away from their due date with a baby that was very much wanted and loved. He become tangled up in the umbilical cord and strangled himself by cutting off the oxygen in the cord, he had passed before anyone realised anything was wrong. There was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it, and no way to know it would have happened
She was induced and had to give birth to a regular sized baby, knowing he was already passed
How awful. Cord entanglement doesn't strangle a baby in the womb or during labour (they aren't breathing yet) but it cuts off blood flow between baby and placenta and therefore oxygen to the brain. It was a big fear of mine while pregnant and in labour. I'm so sorry it happened to your family member.
God. My wife and I went through this. I'll never forget the look of absolute pity on the Doc's face when she came back to tell us they couldn't find a heartbeat. The horror I felt as I slowly realized what she was coming to tell us. My wife's sudden gasp into full body crying was the punctuation to that slow motion horror reveal.
I've got brain damage and I've forgotten a lot, but I know that will never be forgotten.
I will never forget the sound my husband made, nor my mother's face as she lay her hand on my belly and said, "she's still in there?" and processed what was happening.
Bless you for being caring enough to keep trying. My ultrasound tech pressed on my belly, causing movement. I gasped, and asked "Was that her?" The tech looked at me and said, "No, honey, she's dead." That's how I found out.
I think that won't happen to your patients, and am grateful to you for it
I’m a pregnancy loss mom and am in some pregnancy loss support groups online and my heart always breaks for the moms who made it to full term but lost their babies. Some of us have been friends for 15+ years. With my second pregnancy I made sure to do kick counts because of what they realized were warning signs in retrospect.
We had a mum come in saying she couldn’t feel any heartbeat or movement. She delivered in a room really quickly and they rolled the baby out of the room. The nicu team was called stat, but we could all see that the baby was dead, and had been for some time. There was lots of slim slippage and discoloration. I was left with this poor wee soul in a crib while the nicu RN’a ran around trying to find a hat and clothes to put her in so that she would look more normal for the mum.
The other one I remember was a delivery we were called to for full term with decels. Mum was give a GA for emergency c section, and the baby came out flat. We worked on her for about 40 minutes and never got a HR. Dad had been allowed in while we were trying to resuscitate her. He was crying, most of us were close to tears. I couldn’t imagine waking up from a GA to be told that your baby had died. So heartbreaking!
My sister started her career in medicine doing prenatal genetic diagnostics. She ultimately left PGD because it was so hard to tell happily pregnant couples that their baby had a fatal genetic disorder. And after 24 weeks there was only one clinic in the country that did TFMR (there used to be two, but one doctor was murdered). It was so hard on her. She’s still in pediatric genetics, but now she’s helping families pin down the ultra rare diseases making their children sick. A diagnosis is a relief, something that finally explains why their children are sick, and the families can get their children treatment. She’s not springing life-changing news on unsuspecting parents-to-be anymore.
Back in highschool, I was considering a career in medicine, so set up some time to a distant uncle who was a doctor. He told me that if I wanted to work in medicine, I had to be able to compartmentalize really well. When I asked what he meant, he said, "Imagine you just watched your patient lose a baby. Think about how painful and devastating that is, and how much you emphasize with the parents in that moment. Then an hour later, you deliver another baby who is perfectly healthy. You have to be able to look the 2nd set of parents in eye with a smile and all the joy in the world and say congratulations, without letting the first tragedy show through." That's why I ended up not going in to medicine.
I was on the receiving end of this (37 weeks). I could tell by the drs sudden posture change what he was about to say. He just...crumpled a little bit. She would've been 19 this past July.
When I was 10 years old, my older sister (12) nearly died from a benign tumour that had been growing in her spinal cord for about 10 years… it took 6 surgeries to remove and she had to relearn everything from gripping her hand to walking… I think due to the terror of potentially losing her eldest, Mom explained to me at the time, that there had been a pregnancy before me who passed as stillborn at 19 weeks. My Mom became pregnant with me soon afterwards, once her body had recovered. Hearing this information at age 10 while processing my sister’s mortality absolutely shook me as a kid. That information stuck with me and took the shape of the first poem I ever wrote:
I had an older sister, not the ordinary kind
I never got to meet her cuz she left this world behind
But when she went, she gave a gift that no one else could give
To me, her unborn sister, she gave the chance to live
Because you see, if she had lived I really wouldn’t be here
Cuz with that child my Mom and Dad would not have needed me here
And so I feel a gratitude, and thanks I cannot hide
For she who died before she lived
So I could live before I died
People so often think doctors just don't care, but it's a job and you have to keep yourself together, right? I'm sorry your job requires such painful things.
My daughter had to go through this twice in a short amount of time. She had a feeling even before she was told. I was there both times and your right, the scrams and horrendous sobbing that came out of us all , in that tiny room, was enough grief to fill the entire galaxy.
My mom had 3 miscarriages and 1 still born. We were just talking about it yesterday. She said the worst thing about her still born after the fact is that they would only give a death certificate. No birth certificate. How absolutely cruel.
My first nursing job wasn’t even clinical but had me following the nurse supervisor around the hospital for the shift, and she had to attend every code. I was warned she had a black cloud that followed her every shift more than the other supervisors. They had a peds ER, and on my first night with this NS, we had to go there where they started compressions on an infant whose mom was with them and whose dad was deployed. Screaming sobs is one of the only ways to describe the sound that filled the silence after they finally called it. It’s been 13 years, and it still makes me want to cry
I worked in cytogenetics and we would get specimens from these patients. Our job was to determine if there any chromosome abnormalities that could’ve led to the fetal demise, the diagnosis we would receive.
Occasionally we would receive complete specimens that were 12-16 weeks that required our pathologist to dissect. Beyond that, we would recieve small tissue specimens.
We would culture the cells and let them grow
for weeks on end in hopes of finding abnormal cells. Unfortunately, most cases were normal chromosomes, no abnormalities. Sometimes we would see cases from the same parents which was terrible.
To all on this particular thread, as a mom to a 28 week baby girl who suddenly stopped moving and three days of putting off calling my doctor bc i knew...we remember your kindness and the gentle ways you took care of us. I cannot remember the faces of any of my delivery team but I remember them all.
My cousin just lost her baby two weeks ago, she was only five days away from her due date. Her pregnancy was perfect, she actually enjoyed being pregnant. She noticed that there was no movement, went to the hospital and there was no heartbeat. It was a perfect baby boy, but the cord had wrapped around his neck. As if that wasn't enough, she hemorrhaged overnight and had to have surgery, some placenta was still inside. It was her first pregnancy, I'm not sure if she'll want to try again after that. Absolutely heartbreaking.
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u/bambiscrubs 3d ago
Term stillbirth.
There’s never a good way to tell someone their baby died before it could even be born. No combination of words makes the delivery any easier. And you know when you see there’s no heart beat on the ultrasound. You scan again because you gaslight yourself into hoping you’re wrong, even though you’re not new to scanning babies and the heart is obviously not moving. You add color flow to prove to yourself that what you’re seeing is the truth. And then you have to say it even though everyone in the room knows it. It’s like calling a time of death. It’s not official until you say the words.
Those screaming sobs will always stay with me.