miscarriage

There is no excuse for carrying out such procedures without a GA or heavy sedation and I think you should sue the hospital. What you had, however, was not a miscarriage, it was a (spontaneous) abortion. It is only termed a miscarriage if it occurs during the last trimester. You therefore need to put this in your complaint to the hospital. Good luck with the legal action.

I know this post was a while ago now but I have just recently had a similar experience. I have had 2 miscarriages, the first was a complete miscarriage at 7 weeks and I passed the clots at home and didn't need much treatment, but the 2nd miscarriage was incomplete(silent) where I should have been 12 weeks but the baby didn't have a heartbeat at my first scan. I started passing clots at home that night and was admitted back into the early pregnancy ward where I passed further clots, had 3 d&c's. Then I went into cervical shock which sounds like what might have happened to the lady above. It was a very scared experience and was resolved with me being out on a drip and given the vacuum treatment where they remove the remainder of of pregnancy. Cervical

Shock is when the clots get stuck in the cervix and the lady loses a lot of blood, symptoms are dizziness,

Nausea, loss of hearing and fainting. If you are in early miscarriage it's important to get yourself to hospital in case this happens.

FYI ZoeRPM. I found your comments upsetting in a couple of posts where you state early miscarriage is classed as abortion, this is not true. Early loss of a baby before 24 weeks is called miscarriage, wherein there is

Different types of miscarriage, after 24 weeks it is called a stillbirth, this is according to British NHS guidelines. Hope this info helps other women who have had similar experiences.

Here is my citation:

ABORTION

The expulsion or removal of an embryo or fetus [sic] from the uterus at a stage of pregnancy when it is incapable of independent survival (i.e. at any time between conception and the 24th week of pregnancy).

Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1998.

I am not disputing there is no such terminology as abortion, however that is when a woman decides to terminate her pregnancy through choice. Which is not the same as when a pregnancy ends early without choice.

. The most important point is why you had these miscarriages and whether they are preventable in the future. For this you need analysis of the foetus and tissue-typing of both yourself and the father. If the two of you share two many alleles on the major histocompatibility complex you'll never carry a pregnancy to full term. Perhaps this should be your starting point, even if you have to pay for the tissue-typing. I fully appreciate the distress that this is causing but unless you get to the root cause of the problem it will just go on happening.

Hi Claire and Zoe,

Sorry I haven't posted sooner and I don't want to cause any more disagreement but from our Patient Leaflet here https://patient.info/health/miscarriage is below quote:

What is a miscarriage?

Miscarriage is the loss of a pregnancy at any time up to the 24th week. A loss after this time is called a stillbirth. At least 8 miscarriages out of 10 actually occur before 13 weeks of pregnancy.

Note: in the past, medical information has sometimes referred to a miscarriage as a spontaneous abortion. This can be upsetting, as in usual language the word abortion is used to mean a procedure to end a pregnancy.

The definition quoted in Zoe's post above is from 1998 and while some of the medical world may term miscarriage "spontaneous abortion" the accepted terminology now is as Claire says, ie miscarriage before 24 weeks and stillbirth after this. Our professional articles define them as such.

I will edit the post above as people who have suffered will not see it as a "silly argument" and hopefully the discussion can get back to advising/experiences rather than going off topic.

Regards,

Alan

Emis Moderator