Miscarriage?

When I found out I was pregnant all I felt was excitement (and a bit nauseous) It was planned, we had just bought out first home and everything seemed to be falling into place with my life plan. Yes I had sort of put a time schedule on my life and when I wanted to have certain things done by. Control freak I know. 
Fast forward 5 weeks into the pregnancy and I started bleeding. It happened when I was at work, on a Friday, I suddently felt really hot and faint and dizzy and I was having sharp pains. I knew that something wasn't right and sure enough when I went to the bathroom I was bleeding. I straight away though that was it, I had lost the baby. It's strange at five weeks everything is so tiny, but for me as soon as I found out I was pregnant, especially as it was planned, I immediately felt like a mum and had started imagining what the baby would be like and how our lives were going to change. It hadn't even occured to me that I would lose it.
Richard picked me up from work and we went to the doctors that afternoon. The bleeding had slowed down by then but I still felt crampy and uncomfortable. The doctor told me that all they could do was see what happened over the weekend and whether I had more bleeding or not. Apparently I couldn't have a scan until six weeks as they probably wouldn't be able to detect a heartbeat until then anyway. He booked me in for blood tests on the Monday and the Wednesday of the next week, apparently if you are pregnant then the pregnancy hormone doubles every 48 hours in the early stages so this would show whether everything was developing as it should.
The bleeding was very light all weekend. I just found myself sitting on the sofa trauling the internet for cases where bleeding hasn't resulted in miscarriage and symptoms of miscarriage. It was horrible, but reading other poor womens accounts of their experiences, on sites like netmums, made me think that I hadn't lost enough blood to have had a full miscarriage and maybe there was still some hope.
I called the early pregnancy unit at my local maternity hospital on Monday for a second opinion and they told me that I needed to have a scan as that was the only way to know for sure what was going on. I then rang my doctor, as they were the only ones who could authorise me having this scan, and he booked one for the Friday and told me in the meantime to go for the bloodtests which I did.

That week was the longest week of my life. Waiting in limbo not knowing whether you are pregnant or not was awful. Every twinge would make me think that was it and it was all over, but I still 'felt' pregnant and Richard said that he had a feeling I still was for some reason which gave me hope.
On Thursday I called the doctors surgery to see if they had the results from the blood tests and they informed me a doctor would have to call me back. When I eventually received the call I was informed (by a rather insensitive male doctor) that my hormone levels had actually decreased in the 48 hours and therefore I did not have a 'viable pregnancy' as he put it. So basically I had lost the baby. He advised me to still attend the scan the following day as I had not lost enough blood for everything to have gone (sorry tmi) and I may have had to have a procedure called dilation and curettage (or D&C) whereby you have to have you cervix dilated and the remaining contents of your uterus from the pregnancy scraped out if your body does not expel it by itself. 

That evening I cried...a lot. And I had a large glass of wine. Richard was very supportive and arranged with work to have the morning off to attend the scan with me. It had to be an Transvaginal scan as it was too early to be able to see anything from an external ultrasound so I told Richard to stay in the waiting room because we weren't actually expecting it to be an uplifting experience, they were only going to tell me what I had already heard the day before. The women that did my scan were lovely, I was just silent through the whole thing, I just felt numb like I wasn't really there and it wasn't actually happening to me. I just stared straight ahead as the image of my uterus etc came up on the little screen until the ultrasound woman told me to take a look. Was she crazy? I wasn't interested in having some anatomy lesson on miscarriage I just wanted everything gone so I could move on, recover and eventually try again. But I did as she instructed. "You see that flickering there?" she asked, I nodded, "Well that's your babies heartbeat." she said. I instantly burst into tears. I was so happy but also so worried and ashamed of myself for having a glass of wine the night before.
This little picture doesn't look like anything but to me it meant so much.

We came out of the scan room where Richard was waiting and he was just as shocked as me. They then explained that we should never have been told that I didn't have a viable pregnancy. Apparently blood tests at the stage of pregnancy I was at are not reliable to tell whether somebody has miscarried or not as once the pregnancy hormone reaches a certain level and peaks it will naturally start to reduce. 
I have to admit I was angry that I doctor was not knowledgable enough to know this, but I was so grateful that everything looked healthy and normal that I didn't see any point in taking this further. I do wonder now whether I should have.

Fast forward to now and Rafe is 11 weeks and 3 days and my healthy baby boy is currently asleep in his swing. I had a completely normal pregnancy with no other complications after that.
I wanted to write this post for anybody who has or is going through the same thing. Persevere and ask for a scan even if you are not offered one, if I hadn't asked for one it probably wouldn't have been arranged so soon. Also bleeding doesn't always result in miscarriage. One of my close friends had heavy bleeding multiple times at the start of her pregnancy but everything was okay and she now has a healthy baby boy two weeks older that Rafe.

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