PUSH!!!

Chapter 3 - Julie

Julie

“But I didn’t get to say hello”

Julie was a stranger to me and me to her. We had lived in the same town most of our lives and, unsurprisingly, our paths have never crossed. Nonetheless, she welcomed me into her home as if we were old friends.

Julie had responded to an advert I had placed on a social networking site. Her response was brief and to the point ‘I have had six children, four are alive and one is a severe haemophiliac.’

I hadn’t counted on writing the stories of people who had lost children; I had always thought it such a taboo subject.

What would I say to her, how easy was it for her to talk about, what if I upset her, what if I couldn’t write her story?

I was nervous, I expected Julie to look different somehow. It is hard to explain but I thought she would look sad or depressed but she greeted me with a smile and a spring in her step. I breathed an inward sigh of relief as we sat at her table with a coffee and immediately relaxed into each other’s company.

In 1988, it was not socially acceptable to be young and pregnant, but add unmarried into the mix and you were literally asking for disapproving women to tut at you as you walked down the street.

Julie was nineteen and life was good. She had just bought her first motorbike and had moved in with her partner of two years.

Having a family was far from her mind, she was enjoying life and she was on the pill so they had no need to worry about babies, or so she thought.

“They never could get my pills right.” She laughed. “I had to trade my motorbike in for a pushchair when I found out I was pregnant, I was gutted.”

But Julie was to find out just how unacceptable her situation was when she was admitted into hospital with severe bleeding four months into her pregnancy.

Julie was terrified at the thought of losing her first baby and her fear was compounded when she lost a large clot on the way to the hospital. Convinced it was her baby, Julie felt hopeless as she handed the clot to the doctors just before she was ushered into a room for a series of internal examinations.

“It was a Friday” Julie explained. “I remember this because they told me I would have to wait until Monday for a scan as everything was closed.”

Another sign of the times I suppose.

She was young, frightened, bleeding and had potentially lost her baby and she felt completely alone.  Everyone, including her partner, seemed to lack any sort of compassion or empathy.

The ward offered no comfort. She was approached by a midwife who dutifully told her that she would have to keep her curtain pulled across as her age was offending some of the other women on the ward. She would also be addressed as ‘Mrs’ for the benefit of the other women.

She was horrified at the prospect of staying on the ward for the whole weekend, but what choice did she have? She needed to find out what was happening with her baby.

Monday could not have come soon enough for Julie as she was taken anxiously for her scan. It all seemed so clinical and unsympathetic as the sonographer checked her baby. Compared to today, the equipment was simple but still showed the heartbeat going strong, Julie was ecstatic. She was told to go home and rest and, although they couldn’t be sure, they believed that clot may have been the miscarriage of a twin.

The experience was unforgettable, but for all the wrong reasons. She came away from the hospital feeling like an outcast, feeling as though she could have lost her baby and no-one would have cared except her.