What It’s Like to Be Pregnant After Pregnancy Loss
Author’s note: this story discusses my pregnancy loss in non-graphic detail. Approximately 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. You almost certainly know more than one person who has experienced pregnancy loss, but nobody talks about it. This is my attempt to rectify that in the way that I can. This is my personal experience.
One of the first things I learned about my anxious feelings about pregnancy after pregnancy loss was that it’s so common there’s an acronym. PAL: Pregnancy After Loss. What a misnomer for one of the hardest experiences of my life.
PAL sucks in a weird way, different to the way other sucky things suck. You have, at the same time, a source of great joy you need to emotionally balance with the grief of a previous trauma.
As soon as I found out I was pregnant again, my mental state was thrust onto a knife’s edge between of hope and despair. And I somehow felt guilty about both. On the one hand, why borrow trouble? Everything seems to be going well: be optimistic. Yet the optimism felt false. If I got too excited I felt I’d only have myself to blame if it went wrong again.
