Learning to live with grief

After two devastating losses, Amy Pinnick, 37, is determined to help others

- BESS BROWNING

Sitting on the hospital bed, my bottom lip began to tremble as I watched the expression on the doctor’s face changing and he started to speak. ‘The fetus has stopped developing,’ he said softly. ‘I’m so sorry.’ I’d been 12 weeks gone when I turned up at the hospital for my scan that day – at least I’d thought I was. I’d spent three months imagining myself as a mum, showing off my smiling baby. But it turned out my baby had died weeks earlier, and I’d been walking around with a huge smile on my face, announcing the news to friends and family, oblivious.

When you first see your positive pregnancy test, its silent announcement brings a cacophony of emotions. And that mix of excitement and anxiety was exactly how I’d felt when I discovered my husband and I were expecting in February 2010. We were living in Israel, where my husband was born and where I now called home and had only been trying for a couple of months after marrying the previous year. It felt like our entwined future was being cemented with the child we’d always wanted.

I’d suffered breathlessness and felt swollen and sick in the weeks after we found out I was pregnant. ‘Something doesn’t feel quite right,’ I’d groaned to my husband. But doctors said it was normal, so I’d put it down to morning sickness and started telling friends and family, dreaming of what life would be like as a family of three.

But after that horrific can in May 2010, I had to take a tablet to bring on contractions and then endure a traumatic procedure to have my baby removed. I was utterly bereft and found the ordeal difficult to talk about for months.