When I read this tweet from @newscientist I think my heart may have stopped:
Are otherwise viable pregnancies being terminated due to miscarriage misdiagnoses? http://bit.ly/oYUqvYI had surgery for my first miscarriage. My first thought on reading that tweet was "Oh God, did I kill my baby?????"
I have felt so guilty about my miscarriages, racking my brains to remember something I may have done wrong. Did I have that night out before of after I conceived? Did I take any medications I should have avoided? Did I drink too much coffee? And now I could add to the list, did I give up on my baby? Did I terminate it?
I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything wrong at all. I'm pretty sure that if I had had a cup of coffee, it wouldn't have changed things anyway. And now having read the full article, I know I wasn't part of the group they are talking about. But I really think the tweet should have been worded more sensitively. The headline of the article was fine, why not just have used that? Miscarriage can be a horribly emotive subject, and I don't think it is too much for people to take a bit of care when discussing it.
For the record, the link is to this article :
Improve miscarriage guidelines to prevent misdiagnosis
This only applies to a small subset women who are diagnosed with miscarriage. They have small gestational sacs that did not appear to contain an embryo and that did not show measurable growth over a 7-10 day period. The size of of the sacs is used as part of a miscarriage diagnosis as small sacs may not show measurable growth over that time period (larger/later ones grow more visibly). How small the cutoff size should be is the subject of the article.
This did not apple to me; my baby was clearly visible on the scans but small (measured about 7 weeks at 10 weeks) not developing with no heart beat. There will be a few women who were at or close this criterion who will have had surgery. I hope they never see this, or at least that they have someone nearby to support them when they do.
