No one really knows why a miscarriage happens. Even perfectly healthy young women with no discernible health problems are not immune to it.
I know this, because it happened to me. Doctors can give you all the statistics to show why you should not be too concerned when it happens to you, but it's a different ball game altogether when that incredible sense of loss and guilt hit you like a ton of bricks as you're going through it.
We had just come back from our honeymoon, and we were back to the usual routine of work and home. But our lives got punctuated with the unexpected news that we were pregnant. We found out about it early - it was the first month.
My doctor advised us to settle in and just be happy, as there was not much we had to do at that stage.
And since the days were early, I listened. I was secretly pleased that I was spared the usual signs of morning sickness and bloatedness that pregnant women say comes with the territory, especially in the first trimester. Nothing about the lack of pregnancy symptoms struck me as out of the ordinary.
Then came the spotting and cramps - which scared the wits out of me. The spotting started first. We were out having dinner with friends, when I became aware of it during a visit to the ladies. Although I did not know much about what happens to a woman's body when she is pregnant, I was worried enough to pay a visit to the A&E department in KK Women's & Children's hospital.
That's when I became acutely aware of my lack of knowledge about being pregnant and suffering miscarriages. The attending doctor did not, and could not, explain what he thought was happening, and I could not stop fretting. He only sent me back home with an MC and instructions to rest.
When I revisited him again at his clinic two weeks after going through the worst, I realised that he could not have offered me much in the way of comfort, or even advice, as I was already showing signs of miscarriage.
One of the deepest impressions about this episode was the fact that I did not have enough information about what a miscarriage is to know what my body was going through. Frantic searches on the Internet did not help much, and made me all the more convinced that I would inevitably suffer a miscarriage - which in turn led me to worry a whole lot more. Worse, I thought that my actions were somehow directly responsible for losing my pregnancy.
I found myself wondering if things would be different if I had declined the invitation to dinner that night, or if only I had refrained from washing my bathroom with bleach (because I believed that certain chemicals can be harmful to a developing foetus).
And nothing prepared me for the feelings of helplessness, guilt and the emotional roller-coaster I went through (also due to the my wildly fluctuating hormones).
But if I had known more facts about miscarriages before it happened to me, maybe I would not have been so hard on myself.
So in this new series, we have articles written by Dr Fong Yoke Fai, to give you a comprehensive overview of what a miscarriage is, and to understand how to minimise its occurrence when you eventually get pregnant.
