When Andrea Byrne had a miscarriage, she received treatment in an area of the hospital that was right next door to the maternity unit. As she and husband Lee tried to come to terms with the loss of their child, they could hear the sound of newborn babies in the room next door.
It is just one of the moments the news presenter has relived on a personal journey to see if support and treatment can be improved for parents who suffer miscarriage for a special ITV documentary
In Miscarriage: The Hidden Loss, she meets other parents who have been affected by losing a baby, and speaks to experts about what can be done to help improve how the devastating experience is dealt with and talked about.
Read more: 'I've miscarried three times since Covid and my husband wasn't allowed with me in hospital'
She explains: "Over the last couple of years, I’ve written a few pieces about my experiences with infertility. It was a long - and often lonely - road for my husband Lee and I to have our daughter, Jemima and I felt compelled to share a little of what we went through to try to help others feel less isolated.
"For me though, of all the things I have personal experience of in terms of fertility, miscarriage is possibly the greatest taboo of them all. It’s a topic that rarely gets spoken about because it entangles all sorts of emotions that many of us find difficult to confront.
"Grief is not something as a society we find it easy to address, and when the grieving is for a new life and the loss of the future you'd both envisaged, it becomes even more awkward."
Andrea feels that the stigma is also fuelled by pregnancy generally not being spoken about until after couples reach the 12-week mark.
"Miscarriage can happen at any point up to 23 weeks of pregnancy, but it’s most common in the first three months," she says. "What this means is that if a couple loses their baby in the first trimester, very few people will have known they were pregnant and in turn very few people will know they are grieving. For so many, miscarriage is a hidden loss.
"For me, it was very much that way. It’s strange to think after so many years trying to start a family and being unable to fall pregnant, I have now been pregnant six times. One of those - luckily for us - resulted in our daughter Jemima; two were miscarriages shortly before 12 weeks of pregnancy; and the others were what’s known as a chemical pregnancy - or a very early failure."
Andrea, who went back to the scan room where her miscarriages were confirmed as part of the documentary, says that issues like the hospital layout were only "part of the problem", and so much more, like the emotional toil were part of the wider problem. She says that in her situation the mental health support, "felt lacking".
Kath Abrahams, Tommy's Pregnancy Charity, told Andrea: "I think there is a myth that miscarriage is just not meant to be, and it is just one of those things. We know it is devastating to people, our estimation across the UK is there are 250,000 miscarriages that happen throughout the year.
"It absolutely isn't just 'one of those things', it is incredibly common, and it can have a really challenging impact on people. We recommend a graded model of miscarriage care, that means people get some form of treatment and care after one miscarriage, and then tests and treatment after two and three."
Andrea says that her way with dealing with it is "talking about it," and during the making of the documentary she met with a couple from south Wales who have set up a charity called Morgan's Wings after they suffered the loss of their baby.
The community group based in Cardiff, aims to help parents cope with the initial and long term aftermath of a miscarriage. Although based in south Wales, they offer online support to anyone who has been affected by miscarriage: dads, mums, grandparents and siblings. They say: "No matter how you have been affected by miscarriage, we are here to help."
Andrea says: "It is grief at the end of the day, and it is particular, unique type of grief, and everyone has a different type of experience. It is the grief that you have lost your baby, but it is also a grief for what you saw as your future.
"My experience of those were totally different. One was much hard physically and I remember that experience vividly and I don't think that will ever leave me. The second one we had didn't seem so bad physically, but that affected me much more emotionally, for some reason."
Andrea and Lee had told very few people about what had happened to them, because the pregnancies had not reached the 12-week mark, so very few people knew about their pregnancy.
"Anyone who goes through it, goes through it in quite a lonely way," says Andrea. "I wanted to use a big of my own experience to make people aware and how that widely different that experience can be, and if we can talk about it, it can make a bit of a different for the better.
"We don't like talking about death, we don't like talking about grief anyway, all these things are taboo in society anyway. Whether it’s something you want to talk about, or something you’d rather keep private, one thing remains true - everyone needs a certain level of support to be available to help them through."
Miscarriage: The Hidden Loss will be broadcast on Thursday, October 6 at 9pm on ITV Cymru Wales. You can catch up afterwards here .
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