Miscarriages, Anxiety, & How the Hockey Community Helped Me Heal

The last thing I remember was the image of my baby on the sonogram as my husband was on the verge of fainting. I was screaming in heartbreak as our doctor told us our baby wasn’t going to make it due to chromosomal complications that were out of our control. Two weeks later, I gave birth to a lifeless baby girl at 21 weeks.

Everything after that point was a blur because I was screaming in a puddle of tears until I was given the green light to leave the hospital. My anxiety and depression were at an all-time high because my husband and I just lost the greatest gift a couple could ever have. I didn’t want to eat, I wasn’t allowed to workout because I was healing from labor, I was essentially a lifeless blob who felt like a shell of herself. My anxiety and depression over our situation and my health consumed me, but that wasn’t where my anxiety started. In fact, it started months prior…

In 2020, my husband and I found out we were pregnant with our first baby while abroad in Germany. Nerves and excitement filled us both. We had no idea what to expect but I had been prepping my mind and body for pregnancy for a couple of months before we started trying. So when I found out we were expecting, the idea of not having this baby was never something that popped in my head.

Being abroad for my husband’s career made doctors appointments tricky because the English is broken and I felt like my questions for the doctors and nurses didn’t always make sense to them. But as long as the baby was safe, I figured it didn’t matter what I asked. Because of COVID, my husband wasn’t allowed inside the doctor’s office with me. That alone made me have tremendous anxiety because we were going through one of life’s greatest gifts and he wasn’t there. Instead, he was in the parking lot lol. 

Our excitement died when I went for an appointment around 10 weeks. After searching the ultrasound screen, the nurse was dead silent. She took a deep breath and told me I had a missed-miscarraige. This meant I miscarried and didn’t know it. I had no symptoms that I lost the baby whatsoever, so the news was a shock. 

I bawled. This was not something I ever thought would happen to me and the fact that my husband wasn’t there made me want to disappear. 

Due to my body not being aware it had lost the baby, they gave me two options to get the baby out. I chose a D&C (Dilation and curettage) because, as sad as it is to say, I wanted this nightmare over with. Instead of taking a pill to induce contractions to naturally pass my baby and what surrounded it, I wanted a medical professional to do it for me while I was under anesthesia. 

The day I went to the hospital to set up my D&C is when my anxiety really sunk in. I was in way over my head at the hospital because of being in a different country.

To shorten a long and painful story, I was at a German hospital for five hours without my husband, fumbling with broken languages, crying at the pain of not understanding anything — and on top of that, my lifeless baby was lying inside of me. I felt like I was screaming and no one was listening to me. 

There came a point where I was crying hard over being so confused that another patient in the waiting room came over and helped me fill out the endless forms I had to sign. She knew both languages and helped where she could. Just having someone there with me at that moment made my anxiety lessen. 

Despite the horrors of COVID, it was not okay that patients had to endure scary procedures and meetings without emotional support. Being alone in a foreign hospital without my husband to lean on was traumatizing. It was also the start of a lengthy battle of anxiety surrounding doctors that I still struggle with today. 

I would go on to have my procedure and heal nicely, but the aftermath of losing a baby and being scarred by a procedure in a foreign country stayed with me. Because of how raw it was, my husband and I didn’t tell many people about our first loss. Looking back, not telling people hindered my progression because I felt alone. Utterly dark and alone. 

I remember I needed to get a handle on my depression when my husband came home from a game and the look on his face said it all. He could tell I had been crying and that I didn’t change my position on the couch since he left four hours before. And he was right. I would sit on our couch and stare out the window without blinking. I felt nothing. (Remember when Big left Carrie Bradshaw at the altar and she did nothing but lay in bed for three days because she felt nothing? That was me but without the Mexican backdrop lol.)

Once we got home to America, I felt like myself again. The weather was better and I got to hug my family. My anxiety went away with a little TLC and American realness. I felt like I could finally face my fears head-on.

Little did we know, we’d go on to get pregnant three months later and lose our second baby five months after that. Being on the other side of darkness, it’s forced me to handle the sadness that surrounded our losses and my fear of doctors appointments. 

Although not every doctor’s appointment was met with bad news, the bad moments outweighed the good ones. Every time I look at a sonogram machine I want to vomit. Even going in for my six-week check-up after our daughter died made me uncomfortable because I was waiting for my OBGYN to tell me I wasn’t healing properly or something equally negative. 

I know I have to find a way to cope because there are multiple doctors appointments in my future and it’s not safe for me mentally to enter those appointments being scared. 

To help me on my anxiety and depression journey, I’ve been reading books that align with my spiritual side, while also getting outside in nature. More than those two things, the community of hockey wives and girlfriends that Breaking the Ice has introduced me to has helped the most. After coming forward with my losses, I’ve connected with women on social media that I’ve never met (in the physical sense) and here they are reaching out and offering resources, virtual hugs, and similar stories. It’s a tremendous feeling knowing how supported I am from women who know what it’s like to be alone, to lose a loved one, to be in a foreign country without loved ones… The strength of these women is what’s helping me through my anxiety, through my depression, and through my fear of the unknown. And for that, I am truly grateful.