Cork woman shares the trauma of miscarriage in moving story

WHAT I most clearly is the mask clamped over my mouth. I had worn it only for short interludes before and felt like I was suffocating.

I tried to steady my breathing, to quell the panic emanating from the pit of my stomach and threatening to rise up through my body, but every exhale accentuated the feel of the mask.

I zeroed in on tiny marks on the light yellow walls and averted my gaze from the visibly pregnant woman who had been wheeled in, in agony with what appeared to be a broken foot. I froze at the swish of a door opening and closing again. The book stayed in my bag. I don’t know why I thought I’d be able to read it.

The corridor fell deathly silent. A few of us were seated apart, yellow hazard signs sellotaped to the chairs between us.

The triage nurse at Cork University Maternity Hospital was kind and reassuring. She took my vitals and told me bleeding was quite common. Often, it was nothing to worry about. She would send me up for a scan anyway.

I wanted to believe her. But deep down I knew.

I texted my husband. He was in a park nearby with our three-year-old, this being the time of Covid, waiting for my call. I lost track of how long I’d been there. My thoughts kept turning to Jossy.

******

My experience already was a world away from what Jossy’s must have been. She was our son’s ‘ayah’ (nanny) when we lived in Kenya. He loved her and she loved him.

I was running a school and hoping to find an ayah for five-month-old Flynn. Jossy happened to be available.

She was warm and open and quick to laugh. Our older daughters, from my husband Peter’s previous marriage, enjoyed having her around.

I was far away from my mum and closest friends and it was comforting to have Jossy there. She helped keep man-sized baboons from raiding the kitchen and told me babies never pooped in their sleep and always slept when it rained. I didn’t know if this was true of all babies, but it was true of Flynn.

It was hard to hand my little baby over to someone else but he was safe with Jossy. She stayed with us even when we moved house multiple times, and despite knowing that we would eventually leave Kenya for Ireland.

Jossy had three children of her own to and we would have understood if she had wanted to secure employment elsewhere. But she didn’t.

On Flynn’s second birthday, Jossy made his favourite chapatis. Soon after, she didn’t arrive for work. It wasn’t like her.

Peter found out she had been diagnosed with malaria. She sent the odd text to him over the next few days, including a photo of herself hooked up to an IV bag, her hair shorn like a young boy’s, without the braided wig she usually wore. She ed on a message for the girls and Flynn and went home to rest. Her sister was taking care of her.

However, on a Thursday morning, Jossy’s condition suddenly worsened and a neighbour took her to a rural hospital. She was now in the right place, she said, and starting to feel better.

But I couldn’t shake off a persistent feeling of dread or the sight of her umbrella. I had given Jossy a black and white striped umbrella and, come rain or shine, she hardly went anywhere without it. But the day before she fell ill, she had left it behind and it was still hanging on the hook on the back of the kitchen door.

It reminded me of the last time I saw my grandfather. He always wore a trilby hat and one early summer evening when I was 12, while Mum was bathing my little brother upstairs, he called out his goodbyes from the foot of the stairs and slipped out the front door. When I poked my head around the corner of the dining room, into the hallway, I saw his hat was still perched on the table. He had never done that before and the thought lingered in my mind all evening. He ed away later that night.

We buried him in Thurles with my grandmother and his hat.

******

I was at work when the call came that Jossy had ed away. I standing up, shocked and appalled, as if the act of standing up could help it sink in any better.

The girls told me later on that they knew Josy had gone as soon as they saw me. I don’t know how to tell Flynn. He was only two. I had explained to him a few times that Jossy was sick and would be back with him soon.

That night, after the usual bedtime routine, we read The Gruffalo together and I told him Jossy got very sick and the doctors couldn’t give her any medicine and she had gone away to Heaven, near the Moon, where Grandpa lives.

For nights after, when the Moon rose, he went outside, waved, and called goodnight to Jossy.

I found out from Jossy’s sister that our beloved nanny had died from an ectopic pregnancy? Kenya has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, largely due to poor healthcare.

“Her last words,” her sister said, “were ‘Bye Flynn’.” I don’t know what to do with this and I feel myself coming undone. My throat is too tight to speak. It doesn’t feel right to burden Jossy’s sister with my grief.

******

Here in a hospital bed in Cork, my throat is tight again. Whatever the doctors say to me, no matter how imperfect Ireland’s strained healthcare system is, I know that no-one is going to tell me that I have malaria.

I wish the outcome with Jossy could have been different for her. I wish so many things.

Someone calls my name and takes me into the ultrasound room. The jelly is cold, the room sterile and well-equipped. My heart is pounding in my chest and I am afraid to look at the monitor.

“There’s one and there’s two,” the nurse says, her eyes studying the screen.

I turn my head. “There’s two of them?” I say.

“Yes,” she nods. Identical twins.

But they are measuring too small. I will have to come back in a week for another check, but I may lose them before then.

I tumble outside, desperate to remove my mask. Peter says we will get through this, whether it’s two babies or not.

I sit on a bench and call my best friend. I cry as soon as she answers. I can’t speak to my mum yet so I text her instead.

“There’s two of them, Mum. But they’re not growing. I have to go back in a week but there’s a chance I’ll miscarry x.”

I have to compose myself before I see Flynn. He will want to tell me about his adventures in the park. Then we will go home and tell the girls.

We are all in limbo for three days, waiting, hoping and wondering, and then it happens in the bathroom. I am pregnant and then I am not.

My days start with a hard cry in the shower as the water cascades over my body, and the hum of the electric shower head makes it hard for the children to hear me. I feel empty and bereft but normality has to resume.

Erin is finishing primary school and I have agreed to host a celebratory barbecue. Sometimes, I am there, in the conversation, laughing, and then I catch myself, ing what has happened and I drift out of it. It is like being in a parallel universe.

The moment I shared my experience with others, I quickly learnt that either they had lost a pregnancy, too, or their sister or friend had.

Someone always knew someone else who had. I had ed the ranks of something I did not want to and, in truth, did not know existed to the extent that it does.

But there was some solace in that. The Miscarriage Association of Ireland reports that a fifth of pregnancies in Ireland ends in miscarriage.

The experience may be very personal and individual, depending on so many other things and also on what happens afterwards, but it is more common than you think it is when it is happening to you.

******

We moved to Ireland with Jossy’s umbrella. It is certainly the right place to have an umbrella, but none of us could ever use it. It is stored in a suitcase full of Flynn’s baby things.

I am one of the lucky ones. I have my children, and they have me, and my story did not end with my miscarriage. Tadhg came along the following year.