A tweet to make my heart stop

***Trigger warning: Brace yourself if you have had a miscarriage!  You may not want to read this one.***



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/oYUqvY

I 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.