HEALTH & WELLBEING
What I Learnt Through My NearFatal Ectopic Pregnancy By Lauren Vaknine
We’re renovating our new home at the moment, and as a result we’ve been living at my husband’s parents. And the last place you want to have a miscarriage, it turns out, is in the pristine white china bowl of your mother in law’s toilet. So a week ago I decided to stay at my mums for a night, so I could grieve openly and be afforded the luxury of not having my children barge into the bathroom as a deluge of gunmetal-brown lumps resembling uncooked chicken livers escaped my insides. Because that happened before I left. And I sat on the toilet screaming for my husband to come and take our three-year-old daughter out for five whole minutes before he heard me. Why didn’t he hear me? Lying in my old bed in my childhood bedroom last week, I realised that I’d bitten off all my nail varnish and bitten my nails right down, placing the displaced pieces of white crescent moons and tiny peelings of dried nail polish – like fragments of dried blood – in a tissue on my bedside. Do I usually bite my nails? No. Did it make me feel better? No. Will it bring back the baby? No. What made me do it? I don’t know. It was unconscious. There is no logic to be found in the actions of grief. And there is no making sense of the unwinding of our lives, like a piece of yarn all tight and perfectly bound, that just 48 | Cherubs Magazine
comes undone, as if out of nowhere. What we do intuitively make sense of as soon as it starts to sag and droop in what look like single dregs where it was once a whole, is that it will never look that perfect again. The day after the nail massacre, when I assumed I simply had the task of processing a miscarriage, the scan I was booked in for because my hCG levels were still higher
than was normal for a miscarriage, showed that I hadn’t, in fact, lost my baby. My baby was growing on my left ovary. A rare sort of ectopic pregnancy. The most common kind of ectopic pregnancy is when the baby never makes it through the fallopian tube to the womb, 020 8154 3664
