Intro - Take 1 to missed miscarriage

Dr. Shafiqa Nasir shares her personal experience of pregnancy loss and the challenges she faced. She discusses her ectopic pregnancy and the delay in receiving medical help. She also talks about her miscarriage and the lack of support she received from others. Dr. Nasir emphasizes the importance of allowing oneself time to grieve and seek professional help. Welcome everyone to Mama Mindset, it's the podcast where we explore the various aspects of perinatal mental health. And welcome to my very first episode of the podcast, I'm Dr. Shafiqa Nasir and I'm thrilled to have you today with me in this inaugural episode. I want to open up and share a bit about me, this of who I am, what I do and why I'm on this journey, why I'm doing what I'm doing now. So a little bit of background about me, I'm a GP, I'm a doctor, I'm a GP and I've worked in the UK for the last 12 years. I lived in the UK for 17 years, so I studied and then did my training, all my GP training and now I'm a GP. So it's over 17 years now that I've been here and before that I was, I'm from Malaysia so that's where I'm originally from and I grew up there and then so my whole adult life I've been in the UK and you know, to the place I call home now. So a little bit about my past motherhood, unfortunately for me it wasn't easy, it wasn't smooth sailing as we say, it's not straightforward and because of my high achieving, I want to achieve everything, I want to do this, you know, finish my training. So my family, I started my family a little bit later in life and my first pregnancy, it wasn't planned, it was really early on in our relationship with my husband and also it was unplanned, you know, but we were accepting it, we were very happy, we were very excited and we were like, you know, looking forward to it but unfortunately in the first, after the first week of finding out, you know, if I can go through a bit about my experience with my first pregnancy, you know, I had an ectopic pregnancy, it was undiagnosed or I didn't know about it, I had some aches and pains but yeah, if it's an ectopic pregnancy, you will get severe one-sided pain and sometimes you can get bleeding but if it's ruptured, means that it's gone like, way like, beyond like, you can't really, what do you call it, you can't really do much about it, other than, you know, operation to get, to remove the tube because the tube is ruptured, so you can't use that tube anymore, so you have to, in 10 minutes, it should stop the pregnancy as well and so in my case, it was hard because it was, I had the ruptured ectopic where I was bleeding like, there was a lot of bleeding and it didn't help because I had bleeding disorder, so any small cut for me, I will bleed for, in glimpse, bleed for a long time, so I didn't know this, so basically on that day, it was COVID, it was like, really severe COVID at that time and everything was on lockdown or maybe I guess after that, it's not like the, that it was like, the first at the beginning, so it's like, middle of it but everything is still locked down, you know, no hospital visitors and so I was just on my own with everything but when it happened, it was, so just basically go through this, I went to toilet to open my bowels but also these are the symptoms of ectopic pregnancy, this is what I'm trying to tell you as well, that when you go to toilet, you feel like you need to go to toilet a lot, like it's diarrhea but the pain was immense, intense, I can remember when I went to the toilet, it was so severe pain because of the increase intra-abdominal pressure, so increase in the pressure in your abdomen because you're, you know, pooing but the pain wasn't huge, I was sweating, I was climbing because the pain was more intense than it felt like when you had like a severe diarrhea and vomiting, like gastroenteritis, like where your stomach is in knots, so it was severe pain, I felt like I was gonna pass out but I still managed to go to sleep and I had the shoulder tip pain, so this is another symptom of severe like fractured ectopic because there's a referred pain from your diaphragm, so my diaphragm, the blood is pushing up to the diaphragm, so it's giving the shooting pain, sorry, referred pain to my shoulder, so shoulder tip pain is another symptom which is a very important thing and I felt so annoyed, I felt like I was having to curl up in like a ball because like the pain was so severe, but I just told myself, oh it's just a trap then, because of the, I didn't want to, I felt like in denial, I kind of know what it is because you know, if anyone's had a pain, you're a pregnant woman, you know it's ectopic pregnancy until proven otherwise, so I knew it, so it wasn't that I didn't know, but I was just in denial, so there was a delay, there was lots of, you know, I couldn't even stand by that point, a few hours later, I was in the toilet, I was in the bathtub, so I was in the bathtub, I can't, couldn't even stand and then my husband called the paramedic and they didn't take it seriously or they were super busy and there was no call, nobody came after an hour or plus, then I called my gynae friend, you know, he's a GP now, but he was an ex-gynae, but he said, this is ectopic, you do know that, don't you? I'm like, no, it still can't be, I was in denial and he said, I'm going to call the hospital right now and make everyone aware that you're coming and get everything ready, which is what he did and you know, in A&E, in recess, they were waiting for me, as soon as I arrived at the ambulance, ambulance taking forever, when they arrived, sorry, going back to the ambulance, when they arrived, my blood pressure was in my boots, so like 80 systolic, which is super low and heart rate was like 110, 120, so I was in a shock, hemorrhagic shock, so I was bleeding or hypovolemic shock, all that kind of shock, so five minutes later, when the ambulance arrived, they came and picked me up, very gingerly dressed to the hospital, which is like 10 minutes away, luckily, there was no traffic, it was like 8 o'clock, but the time I came in, it was like 9 o'clock-ish and I remember like, everyone was rushing, the nurses, the doctors, scanning, cannulas, putting IV fluids and because, you know, I'm a doctor, so they explained to me in medical terms and they said that my body was in a lot of stress and trying to, you know, compensate with the loss of blood, it's like, you know, when there's no electricity and then the generator, so if it's like onset, for example, so the generator as a backup, so my body was using the generator to try and compensate, to try and make me function, I could have collapsed and probably lose too much blood by that point and so they scanned, they couldn't see anything, it was horrible, it was horrendous, I was like, anyway, it was a topic, they had to take me straight to an operation when I was in theatre before midnight, with all the bloods, the platelets, the FFB, the hematology team were aware as well because of my condition, my bleeding disorder and then, you know, it was, I almost lost, lose my life if I wasn't quick or if I was alone, you know, collapsed and I couldn't get to my phone or, you know, some, you know, it was horrible, I was in hospital for a few days and I just want to, the way of me, myself coping with a loss is to just not think about it or forget about it and just move on, which is wrong, I didn't even, I didn't even give myself time to grieve, I just continue, I went back to work the week after, end of the week, so it was Sunday, it was Thursday, I was out of hospital Sunday because I really want to go and then I was back to work the Friday, the weekend after, which was quick, I didn't even give myself time to grieve, to think about it, to relax, to rest, nothing, I just get on with it straight on to the next day until, you know, trying to try again, so maybe three or four months later, I felt pregnant again, I was happy, but yeah, I just waited as normal, there was no pain, there was nothing, the pregnancy symptoms were still there, but it was miscarriage this time, unfortunately, I'm not going into detail with this, but I had to have the operation to remove the pregnancy but yeah, when I had the 12, it was during the 12th scan and she asked like, she asked so many times like how many we saw you, how many saw you, are you sure, because she couldn't find the, you know, she only found the sac, but there was no heartbeat, yeah, remembering this again, it just brings back like those not very nice memories, and then again, similar thing, I just stopped thinking about it, I think, but in my mind, it's always there, just stress that has been unresolved, which is not the way to treat any pregnancy loss, it is hard, it is difficult to get through, at that time, I did feel like I was on my own and like nobody understands, like even my husband, my family, just say all of this, things happen for a reason, this kind of things, and you should just get on with life, or something else that people will say, it's like, it's not just you, it's a common thing, maybe there's good out of it, because you know, maybe there's a problem with the pregnancy, I'm like, that's the wrong thing to say, it's the most horrible thing to say to any mothers who have experienced pregnancy loss, and then, you know, you start to think whether it's our fault, you know, all these things start to play in your mind, and like for me at work, I try to avoid, you know, taking calls related to pregnancy, then I wrote that, this one, one incident, not incident, one, something happened at work, where someone was like, oh, I've got a baby, and you know, and everyone's like, congratulations, it was just behind me, they were just talking behind me, I work in a work, in a call center, so one guy was saying, oh, I've got, this is my baby, and he was talking to someone else, he was just talking to his friends, but yeah, thinking about it again, it just felt like, oh, it's hard, but he was so happy, and I was like crying inside, and I had to leave, because I don't want to continue listening, yeah, but if I, maybe like looking back, if this happened again, I should have, I would have, I've been trying to cope with it by maybe talking to someone professionally, how to deal with the loss, how to, maybe like counseling, how to, you know, challenge that feeling, and try to give myself grace, and grief, time to grieve, time to accept that this happened to me, which I didn't give myself at that time. So,