What it's really like to experience the loss of a baby

It's hard to imagine a greater pain than losing a child. Maybe that's why we shy away from the subject, even though miscarriage is a common experience people go through. For parents who endure it, it can be hard to know who to turn to for support. One woman who felt the lack of resources available to people who had experienced baby loss is Anjulie.

Anjulie, 38, and her husband James experienced three losses in three years. The first loss was a missed miscarriage in November 2018, the second was a miscarriage at home in April 2019, and the third was a neo-natal death in March 2020.

In the UK it’s estimated that 1 in 5 pregnancies end in miscarriage and that there are 250,000 miscarriages every year. Anjulie and her husband first started trying for a baby when she was 32, and in October 2018 they found out they were expecting their first child. A month later, they found out that they had had a missed miscarriage. The baby was seven weeks old.

“We were heading up north to see family and I wanted to tell them about the pregnancy, but James wanted us to wait until we’d had a scan, so we booked in for a private scan before going,” Anjulie says.

I was trying not to get carried away because I knew there was a 12 week rule for a reason, but as soon as you’re pregnant everything becomes focused on that. I knew miscarriage was common, but you always hope and think that it won’t happen to you.”

It was at this scan that they were told there was no heartbeat. The news came as a shock to Anjulie, who although she had prepared herself for the possibility since her symptoms had reduced, she still had hope. “I felt so stupid for thinking I was pregnant and not knowing I had miscarried,” she says.

I felt really sad because it had taken us about nine months to get pregnant and I didn’t really know what to do next.”

The next day they went to an appointment with the NHS to get the news confirmed, this was the start of a few bad experiences with the NHS that Anjulie experienced. “The response from the doctors made me feel like it wasn’t a big deal, but it was a big deal to me,” she says.

I wasn’t given any information on how to deal with it and it was all just treated very medically.”

Anjulie and James didn’t tell anyone about their first loss until a few weeks later. Christmas was coming up, so they wanted family to know that things were going to be feeling differently for them that year. “My sister in law asked me how I was on boxing day and I just burst into tears, that’s when I realised, I wasn’t okay,” Anjulie says.

She sent me a book by Zoe Clark-Coates called Never Saying Goodbye and I couldn’t believe how much it resonated with me. I remember feeling embarrassed because I thought that type of book wasn’t for me and that I didn’t belong in the baby loss space, but it helped me feel like I wasn’t alone.”

Two days after the first miscarriage Anjulie went back to work and focused on trying to get pregnant again. Two months later in February 2019 they found out they were expecting again. She got through 11 weeks of pregnancy before miscarrying at home in April of the same year. “I was bleeding quite heavily, and we went for a scan on Mother’s Day, but was told that although the bleeding wasn’t that common, there was nothing to worry about,” she says.

The scare was traumatic for Anjulie so she decided to take the Monday off work. The bleeding escalated. “That’s when I knew I was miscarrying,” she recalls.

I was in the bathroom and there was blood everywhere, but I still had some hope. I felt something pass and my gut instinct was to reach into the toilet bowl. I felt something, that I can only describe like a chicken breast and I just knew.”

She called James and asked him to come home. He found her in the bath tub, blood everywhere. By this point Anjulie was starting to wonder whether something was wrong, but the NHS wouldn’t investigate anything until they had had three consecutive losses.

Since then, they have found out that Anjulie does require help and medication when she’s pregnant. “It’s a major regret that I just trusted them, maybe those first two pregnancies would have ended differently had I investigated,” she says.

Anjulie fell pregnant for a third time in November 2019. This time around started in a similar way to the previous pregnancy and at around the 10 week mark, the bleeding started again. The bleeding and the pain got so bad that Anjulie remembers telling a friend that she couldn’t see this baby reaching full term.

“I was wearing high grade sanitary towels that I didn’t even wear during my normal period and I was having to take spare underwear to work,” she says. Then one day after finishing up an important task at work, she went to the bathroom and found herself soaked in blood. She was so shaken that she left the office and put herself on bedrest, “I just wanted to have three days with no bleeding and if I achieved that then I would go back to work,” she says.

During this time Anjulie was making multiple trips to the hospital but kept getting told that everything was fine. She decided she’d had enough and booked in for a private scan. It was at this appointment that everything changed. “I remember the look of fear on the sonographers face, she told me there was no fluid around the baby and that I needed to go into hospital. We left straight away no questions asked,” she says.

After speaking to the hospital Anjulie decided to have one last night at home before going in the next day. “I remember looking in the mirror and apologising because I knew that this was going to be another baby that I wouldn’t be able to bring home,” she recalls.

When at the hospital they were told that there was no fluid around the baby and that her waters had broken prematurely. Anjulie was 19 weeks pregnant at this point. “I said to the doctor: ‘forgive me can I ask a stupid question? If we can do brain surgery and heart transplants isn’t there a way we can get more fluid in there?’,” she says. They were told it wasn’t possible and this is something that infuriated Anjulie as she wonders whether it’s just another area of women’s health that’s underfunded.

Anjulie then received the news that no mother wants to receive. She was told that she would need to deliver the baby. “I hadn’t thought about labour at this point and being told I had to deliver the baby was a shock. I couldn’t think of anything worse than having to deliver your dead child,” she says.

The doctors wanted to terminate the pregnancy for medical reasons as Anjulie had lost lots of blood and needed a transfusion. “I’m completely pro-choice and women’s rights, but for me personally it’s not something I would ever do. I knew people would offer me sympathy and I wouldn’t want that if I knew that I was the one to end this life,” she says.

Due to her history, Anjulie was having two scans a day, something she grew to hate, “We reached the point where everyone in the room was hoping for the heart beat to stop so that we didn’t have to make that terrible decision.”

At one point Anjulie’s mum made her promise that if it came to it, then Anjulie would make that decision. “I remember going to the bathroom and whispering ‘I’m not going to do it,” she says.

In the end, the decision was taken out of her hands as Anjulie’s cervix started to prepare for delivery. After going through the labour, initially Anjulie didn’t want to see the baby or find out the sex. They decided they would write it down in an envelope and open it in 10 years’ time whether they had gone on to have a family or not.

What they weren’t prepared for however, was that the baby was going to be alive when they were born. “James asked if I wanted to see them as they were alive and I said yes immediately, but I still didn’t want to know the sex, because I had always wanted a girl and I knew that if I had lost a girl, it would be so much worse for me,” she says.

The baby was alive for just over an hour and died in March 2020, just before the covid pandemic lockdown started. The next day is when everything started to sink in for Anjulie and it was then they were told that the baby would need to be registered as they had been born alive. “We were just going to write baby for the name, but it felt cruel to do that, so that’s when we decided to open the blanket and find out the sex of the baby,” she says. They found out the baby was a girl and decided to call her Summer. This was the breaking point for Anjulie.

Just a couple weeks after losing Summer, the country went into lockdown which made dealing with the grief much worse for Anjulie. “Each loss for me got progressively worse. The second miscarriage was horrific, but this third loss was on another level,” she recalls.

Anjulie is an assets manager in London and James is a doctor, so Anjulie was often left alone in the house whilst James was out as a key worker. “I just didn’t know what to do. I thought I was meant to go back to normal but the world wasn’t even normal. This big colossal thing had happened to me and no one really knew,” she says.

Two of the things that helped Anjulie through that time was writing and talking therapy. The writing is what led to her creating her own blog, Mumoirs, where she documented all her “ugly thoughts” about everything she had been through. “It was really cathartic for me and it became my coping mechanism,” she says.

Two friends helped her set up the blog and Anjulie used it as a space to build a community for people who had been through the same thing, “I used to think I was a some angry, bitter, pessimistic, horrible person for having these thoughts, but the blog helped me realise that what I was feeling was actually really normal.”

Mumoirs has gone on to be listed under the recommended reading section on Tommy’s website, a pregnancy charity working to create a space for those who have gone through baby loss. Then in 2022, a picture of Anjulie and Summer was posted by the Princess of Wales whilst she was raising awareness around baby loss awareness week. “The blog brought me a real high, but also a lot of grief as I have lost family and friends over it because they didn’t think I should be talking publicly about this,” she says.

Eventually, Anjulie and James would go on to become pregnant again in March 2022, after a long process of grieving and not knowing whether it was going to happen again for them. This time around was different for Anjulie though.

“I was terrified that the pregnancy wouldn’t last. I remember saying to friends that I wanted to go all in, but my brain kept telling me no,” she says, “I knew that this pregnancy was all or nothing because I was now on medication to help me through, so if it worked then great, but if it didn’t, I didn’t know how I could deal with a loss again.”

Instead, she took every day as it came, putting stickers on a calendar for each day that passed, having scans every two weeks and using an app called Pregnancy after Loss, which contained articles, mental health resources and stories from women who had been through similar things.

Research suggests that 6 out of 10 women who have had three miscarriages will go on to have a baby.

It wasn’t until reaching 32 weeks that Anjulie started to believe this was really happening. “We didn’t decorate the nursery until after she was born because I didn’t want to chance anything, I knew there was still so much that could go wrong,” she says. The first time she felt the baby kick was at 19 weeks, around the same time Summer had passed away.

Five years on since she started trying for a family, three losses and four pregnancies later, Anjulie gave birth to her daughter, Ellissa Summer, on December 9th 2022. A milestone they’ve been longing to reach, after everything they’ve been through. Anjulie is one of the ‘lucky-unlucky ones’.

 “I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to hang in there and that it will all work out,” she says, “When I’m woken in the night, I just hold her and feel so blessed to have this. This is something I really wanted and I’m so grateful to be on this path now.”