Today is the start of Baby Loss Awareness Week 2019. A week to remember babies who were lost in pregnancy, during birth or soon afterwards. I wanted to write something in honour of little Sprout whom we lost in August. Sprout was only on the brink of being – a seven-week-old embryo whose heart had…
The WRISK project is a collaboration between the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas) and Heather Trickey at the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. They are aiming to draw on women’s experiences to understand and improve the development and communication of risk messages in pregnancy. They asked me to blog about my experience of…
Oaklan came on the 5th October. He’s almost eleven weeks now and things are slowly starting to feel a little easier. I’m still pretty tired – and I’m writing this with him feeding on my lap – so please excuse any typos, half-formed ideas or clumsy phrasing. I wanted to get down some thoughts about…
Disrupting the balance I’m pretty good at managing my mental health. I know what helps, what doesn’t and how to recognise when I need to take better care of myself or ask for extra support. But early pregnancy disrupted this balance. I’m nearly 17 weeks now and finally ready to write about the first trimester….
Pregnant and taking Sertraline I’m 17 weeks pregnant and still taking the SSRI antidepressant Sertraline. I thought I was pretty firm in that decision. An attempt to stop taking it last year ended badly. But we had to try, if only to help us work out where we sat in the endless risk/benefit balancing act. But…
Recovering from eating problems Over the last year, I’ve been facing up to eating problems that have dogged me my entire life. This became particularly important as we tried (and for a long time failed) to conceive. It was really hard going but I got my cycle back and my hormones balanced – by the…
A toxic mix I had some very low periods and dark thoughts during the first trimester of pregnancy. The myth of pregnancy as a calm, exciting and enjoyable time is still pervasive – but there were times when I felt unable to take pleasure in anything, distant from Al and scared I wouldn’t be able…
Pills panic Sitting down at my desk this morning, I opened Twitter for my usual pre work browse. My eye was caught by this tweet, which linked to an article by the BBC ‘Antidepressants ‘could be risk to unborn babies”. Of course, I clicked straight through. My recurrent depression and uneven support and information from…