Don't reassure me

Right before I had my d&c the registrar who going to perform it came to talk to me. As you may remember from the post below she told me that the hospital lab was unlikely to do genetic testing on the pregnancy tissue. Because I must have looked upset at this and because she was not offering me what I wanted she tried to comfort me by saying "I know this is very frustrating" (talk about minimising language, try 'devastating') "but 60 to 65% of people in your situation go on to have a baby."

This pissed me off at the time, although I was familiar with these statistics, . After the registrar had left the cubicle, I turned to my mother who was with me and said "how can she think telling someone they have a 60% chance of having a baby is reassuring." It wasn't until I came across this article today, that I realised why it made me so angry. The writer, who suffered three consecutive miscarriages, says:

Yes, there may be some validity to these statistics. Yet, too often doctors seem to use them as an excuse to not help women. When this happens, the underlying message comes across as that the doctors believe that we should find comfort in these statistics and therefore not worry about the fact that we've lost a baby because in all likelihood we won't lose another one. We should not seek treatment for miscarriages because statistics suggest we won't have another one.

For starters, by being recurrent miscarriers, we've often already fallen out of statistical favor. When statistics suggested we shouldn't be in this position in the first place, statistics start to lose their power. After all, if I can be that 1 in 100 women that has three miscarriages in a row, why should I feel comfort that I'll be one of those 6 out of 10 (hardly an overwhelmingly reassuring number) that will carry to term without treatment?

But more importantly, the reason I hate these statistics so much is that they are used to justify an exceedingly cavalier attitude toward miscarriage. Doctors and researchers seem to want us to view pregnancy as a roll of the dice. And it doesn't bother them to just shrug off a failed roll and have us pick up the dice again. We are required to go through a certain number of failed rolls before we can get any help. Yes, even with if we keep rolling the dice, even if they're flawed, we might roll the right number eventually. But for me, each time I get pregnant, that is a child to me. It is not dice.

Most women cannot lose a child with the same nonchalance as we can pick up dice and roll again. Each failed roll represents a little person who will never call us Mommy. It takes great emotional strength to pick up those dice and try again. Each time involves a period of grieving and deep scarring to the heart, sometimes never to heal.

Yes, yes, yes. That is how I felt. The registrar was telling me the hospital lab didn't think it was worth doing testing, which admittedly is expensive, because the results would not change the management of the next pregnancy. In other words, because no explanation has been found for my miscarriages most clinical guidelines say I should not be offered any treatment for my next pregnancy. This is regardless of whether it was found that this latest pregnancy was not caused by a chromosomal abnormality and therefore was not just 'bad luck'. And I shouldn't mind this because its more likely than not that my next pregnancy will work out.

Given the huge emotional and spiritual impact each pregnancy loss has had on me, L and the people who care about us - the days when I could do nothing but sleep, the debilitating depression - shouldn't the medical profession be doing everything it possibly can to try and stop me from losing another pregnancy?