r/StillbirthSupport

I received my daughter's post mortem today.

Some of you know my story, and some may not. I birthed my darling IVF daughter 41wks sleeping. Today I had her post mortem meeting. It was hard, I cried the whole time. Now, staring at this bit of paper that tells me what happened to my baby, has opened up so much blame...so much more pain, I am devastated, knowing if I would've just accepted to be induced at 40wks, my baby girl would be here, with me, exactly 3 months old, instead of being in a permanent resting place way before her time. She lost her life, because I wanted to hold on longer and give her a chance to come when she was ready, I didn't want to force her into the world, because quite simply there were no signs of anything being wrong to have to do this. So yes, I declined induction, and now 3 months later I find out why she was born sleeping, and this is why..... Diffuse villous immaturity and fetal vascular malperfusion. With a hyper coiled umbilical cord. I asked the question, we all ask, if I delivered her at 40wks, could this have been avoided, my consultant simply said "yes". 😭😭 I am utterly shattered, all over again.

I have my 41wk sleeping daughter's postmortem meeting on Wednesday. I am terrified. I am broken. I am everything in between that I cannot put into words. I'll be 12wks PP tomorrow, and it honestly feels like it happened yesterday. Can anyone give me some insight as to what to expect? Just so I can be more prepared, I didn't think to ask my bereavement midwife when we spoke on Saturday.

I lost my daughter Giada in May at 38 weeks to a true knot in the umbilical cord. I had a low-risk, uneventful pregnancy until I woke up one day and didn’t feel her move. She was my first baby.
Since then, my best friend had her daughter a few weeks ago, my sister in law is due with her daughter any day now, and my sister is having her daughter at the end of August.
I guess I’m writing this to ask- how am I supposed to survive this? I’ve been seeing a therapist who specializes in baby loss, and my husband is super supportive, but I feel so hopeless and miss my baby so much, every second of every day.
I can’t reach out for support to any of the women closest to me because they are all pregnant/new moms to baby girls and I am so angry and jealous that their daughters are healthy and alive and mine is dead. I’ve barely even spoken to all three of them the past few months. I can’t even bear to be around my own sister. I hate feeling this way.
I feel so hopeless that I will never have a living child, and that I will feel sad and depressed for the rest of my life.
What do I do?

Hi everyone. I went through a stillbirth and I have so many questions for my OB but I feel like she’s being a bit cold. I saw her a week after my stillbirth which I didn’t ask anything still being in shock and just yesterday at a 7 week follow up she seemed to brush everything off and rush the appointments as if she didn’t want me to ask questions. There are a few questions I forgot to ask her and now they are saying she is unavailable for appointments and she won’t even give me a call back. Is there anything I can do? Has anyone gone through something similar? It’s eating me up that I don’t have answers and she seems to not want to give me answers.

Almost 5 months out from the loss of my boy at 38 weeks.

I am having an increase of dreams connected to the loss. Usually there is some kinds of difficulty- for example trying to tell someone about the loss or show them photos but for some reason I can’t explain properly or the photos aren’t of my baby. Or I see a baby in a basinet about to fall out and I can’t get there in time to catch them..
Last night, it was a dream about a friend’s baby and I asked if I could hold him, she kept saying no and I was so devastated as I just wanted to hold a baby who was alive and warm. I woke up physically crying.

I am just confused why this is happening now. I’ve gone quit a while without dreams and nightmares and now all of a sudden they are frequent. We are TTC again so I guess it could be guilt.. idk!

Has this happened to anyone else?

I don't know exactly where to begin, but I think I just need to tell someone about my niece. 💔🎀

I am an aunt who lost her niece before I ever got the chance to meet her alive.

She was my first niece. My daughter's first cousin. And she would have been the first little girl in that role for both of us.

She was supposed to be here. She was supposed to open her eyes, take her first breath, be held, spoiled, loved, and grow up surrounded by her family.

She was stillborn at 39 weeks on August 7th.

And I don't think people always understand how deeply an aunt can grieve a baby she never got the chance to know.

Because I loved this little girl like she was my own.

I loved her before she was born. I was so excited for her. I was already making a place for her in my heart.

And what makes this loss even harder is that her father was my brother, and I had just lost him about six weeks before she was born.

Losing my brother was already something I was trying to understand and accept. Then, knowing that his baby girl was still growing inside her mother gave me something to look forward to. After losing him, I felt like this little girl was going to be another piece of my brother that I could love. A little piece of hope after so much heartbreak.

I was looking forward to watching my daughter become a cousin. I was looking forward to watching my children grow up with her. I was looking forward to holding her, loving her, spoiling her, and watching her grow.

I was looking forward to finding out what she would look like, what her personality would be like, what kind of little girl she would become.

I even imagined her favorite color being pink.

Maybe that sounds silly, but when you are waiting for a baby, you start imagining all these little things about them. You make a place for them in your heart before they ever arrive.

And then suddenly, there was no arrival.

She was born at 39 weeks, weighing 8 pounds 10 ounces. A beautiful, fully grown little baby who should have been coming home with her mother.

Instead, we had to say goodbye.

She should have been growing up knowing who her daddy was. She should have been hearing stories about him, seeing pictures of him, and knowing how much he loved her.

And now she will never get to know him, and he will never get to know her.

That thought breaks my heart in a way I don't even know how to explain.

I still struggle with the fact that I will never hear her cry, never feel her little hand around my finger, never watch her smile, never celebrate her birthdays, and never see the woman she would have become.

I keep thinking about everything she never got to experience.

And I think that's one of the hardest parts of grief—the future you imagined disappears too.

I lost my brother, and then about six weeks later, I lost his daughter.

Two people from the same family. Two people I loved. Two losses that I never imagined I would have to carry so close together.

I'm angry. I'm heartbroken. I'm confused. Some moments I'm okay, and then something reminds me of them and it hits me all over again.

But I also don't want her life to be reduced to the words stillborn baby.

She was my niece.

My first niece.

My daughter's first cousin.

My brother's daughter.

She had a family waiting for her.

She was already loved.

And I loved that little girl like she was my own.

She would have been my first niece, and she always will be.

She mattered.

And she will always matter to me.

I'm sharing this because I think I need somewhere to put all of these feelings. Somewhere where people understand that baby loss doesn't only hurt the mother and father. Aunts grieve too. Uncles grieve. Grandparents, cousins, siblings and other family members grieve.

Sometimes we are grieving a baby we never got to bring home, while also grieving the lifetime of memories we will never get to make.

And in my case, I'm grieving a baby who was born only about six weeks after her father died.

I don't know exactly how to heal from this yet.

Maybe talking about her is part of it.

Maybe telling people about her is part of making sure she isn't forgotten.

So, little girl, I hope somehow you know how loved you were.

Your auntie was waiting for you. 💗

You were wanted.

You were loved.

You were my first niece.

You will always be my first niece.

And I will never forget you. 🩷👼🏽

Our baby girl Gabriella died 3 weeks ago because of a UAT (umbilical artery thrombosis) which is a clot in the umbilical cord. She was 22 weeks. This is our third loss, but the first time we know what caused the death. The only clue we had with our first two losses was hypercoiling. Paulie died at 17 weeks and Dominic at 16 weeks. It looks they died due to the same thing but we didn’t know at the time. Because we didn’t know the cause of their deaths, we just treated everything.
So for this pregnancy, I was on blood thinning medication, progesterone, metformin and prednisone as well as approx 20 supplements. I was having IVIG’s and Intralipid infusions. To be doing so much treatment and still have had a stillbirth is unreal - the doctors are in absolute shock. We are doing even more investigations but I have come back negative for every auto immune condition and blood clotting disorder. The only answer I can think that they might discover during the placental pathology is whether I have a placental disease.
Has anyone ever lost a baby due to blood clotting in the cord and gone on to have a living child?
Has anyone been diagnosed with a placental disease and gone on to have a living child?
Desperate for some answers to give me hope x