Second Trimester Anxiety During Pregnancy After Miscarriage
This is Part Two of my series on pregnancy after miscarriage. If you missed it, you can read Part One here .
Pregnancy anxiety after miscarriage doesn’t disappear after one or even two positive scans. Despite having four in the first twelve weeks of my pregnancy, reassurance remained short-lived. The daily worry and hyper vigilance that clouded my first trimester continued throughout the subsequent two, and it was all too easy to slip back into a familiar mindset ruled by fear and anxiety.
The discovery of a ‘miscarriage calculator’ app became an unhealthy daily addiction that I would obsess over in an attempt to ease my pessimism. I’d enter my baby’s gestational age and hope the percentage chance of miscarriage it generated would be lower than the previous day. Granted, this was hardly scientific reassurance, but it’s remarkable how refreshing the page gave me some illusion of control.
By sixteen weeks, my pregnancy had become less theoretical to the outside world, but I remained sceptical, all too aware of the worst-case scenario. A growing list of bodily developments only created new opportunities for doubt. I was negotiating with the fit of my jeans, though I couldn’t discount that my increasingly committed relationship with carbohydrates might be responsible for the expanding situation around my midriff. Enthusiastic digestive activity made it impossible to know whether I was experiencing early pregnancy flutters or internal turbulence induced by a purely beige diet. Could it really be my precious baby growing? How did my body suddenly know what to do this time?
I spent hours standing in front of the mirror like a swollen guinea pig, assessing and caressing my vague bump for evidence. But as much happiness as its elusive shape brought me, I felt unsafe sharing it and instead leaned into polite conversation with friends and strangers, unsure of the purpose of the elastic panels in my trousers. Were they housing a pregnancy or accommodating a woman who had entered her thirties and discovered cake? Different days and different mirrors impacted the conclusion of my studies. Some days I would rejoice at my reflection – I looked pregnant, there was my baby! On other days, my self-saboteur would punish such brazen confidence, as if we’d jinx the outcome by acknowledging it.
Mental Health During Pregnancy: Finding Support
It was around this time that I discovered the Peanut App and started messaging with local women seeking friendship, advice and support from other mothers. For many, navigating the second trimester, the time between appointments expanded into long, unhelpful stretches, leaving ample windows of opportunity to overanalyse.
I shared the extent of my worries in a post on the public forum and was overwhelmed by the number of women who commented back with similar experiences. My inbox quickly filled with direct messages, not only from women who had miscarried, but also from first, second and third-time mothers, who felt generally anxious during their pregnancies and wanted a safe space to connect with people who understood. Many women felt like they needed external help with their mental health, or felt isolated and alone in their experience. Others felt so guilty and disheartened that they’d cancelled social engagements, preferring to stay at home rather than to try to manage their emotions in public.
It’s important to stress that this was not applicable to everyone I spoke to. Many women, for the majority of the time, were happy and excited by the prospect of their little one’s arrival, but I was equally alarmed and comforted by the numbers who did feel like me. I was able to somewhat normalise my reactions and find peace in privacy at a time when announcements felt too dangerous. Regular attempts at household photo shoots to curate, capture and share our news ultimately ended in uncertainty and frustration. Did I even look pregnant? How best to strategically place my partner’s hand? Is the inclusion of a newborn outfit necessary, and does the baby look remotely human in any of our growing collection of early scan photos?
Small for Gestational Age: When Percentiles Start to Matter
Needless to say, I could not wait another four weeks until my next NHS scan to get a fix of relief. And to my surprise and delight, the pregnancy started to feel a little more tangible after a private scan at seventeen weeks revealed our baby’s gender.
The knowledge that I had a little girl growing inside of me made me more attuned to the increasingly persuasive symptoms that strengthened my belief in her existence. Between needing to wee and fart continuously, the pregnancy began to feel real in ways that could no longer be explained away. Be it ligament pains across my abdomen, pressure on my pelvis or insatiable itchiness all over my belly, I took comfort in these otherwise bothersome traits, until my twenty-week anomaly scan presented a new line of concern.
As a petit, vertically challenged woman, it’s hardly surprising that I was carrying a small baby, but a measure of thirteen on the percentile scale and a report that read ‘small for gestational age’ made me question whether I was somehow failing my responsibilities. Should I be investing in artisanal vitamins housed in mottled glass bottles and administered with pipettes like some sort of prenatal cocktail? Had my diet of pitta bread and potatoes stunted the growth of my tiny girl?
This burdensome news had a regressive effect on my newly found confidence, and I quickly returned to second-guessing the movements I had only just begun to enjoy. If she was so small, was I actually feeling her? Or was my imagination proving more productive than my uterus? The next three weeks brought two “emergency” visits to the maternity assessment unit to monitor my reports of reduced fetal movement. I began to feel embarrassed that the midwives recognised me immediately, as I apologetically contacted the unit again, hoping to hear a hint of approval that I was well within my rights to call them. I became concerningly comfortable being hooked up to a monitor, sometimes legs akimbo with a stranger inspecting my vagina.
When Pregnancy After Miscarriage Finally Starts to Feel Real
After another private scan at twenty-six weeks, I had to admit that I was undeniably still pregnant. Walking left me more out of breath than usual, my bump had become difficult to dispute, and people were increasingly confident enough to ask when I was due without risking catastrophic social offence.
For the first time, I began to entertain the possibility that this might actually be happening. Although nervous and still fretting daily, I allowed a cautious optimism to creep in, accompanied by a growing sense of awe that, against all of my expectations, my body seemed to know what it was doing. It felt completely surreal that my girl was growing, and although small, she continued to patiently show me that, regardless of my worrying, not only was she there, but she was rapidly developing and, as far as we could tell, doing well. Somehow, despite all my doubts, we really were doing it.
Of course, the third trimester would bring its own catalogue of worries, including a diagnosis of gestational diabetes, antenatal classes for extensive comparison, and one particularly unfortunate rodent-related incident.
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