My first miscarriage happened just on the 11-week mark in June 2011. It was great timing as I was on a weekend press trip to Frankfurt with my male boss. Yay! He did know I was pregnant, which made it marginally less awkward but no less surreal.

I got off the plane and into the hotel and discovered I was bleeding. The experience being new to me at that time, I was a little concerned and mentioned to my boss that there may be an issue over dinner – an excellent topic of conversation for a Friday night work engagement.

At that point, the bleeding was not accompanied by any pain so I went to bed hoping for the best. The morning came and we had a full itinerary of tourist attractions to visit including a guided tour of the city. Things were starting to get marginally uncomfortable but I soldiered on, trying to ignore the cramps slowly getting worse. They began to intensify as we took a tour with a very pleasant guide up the 200-metre Main Tower, where I was blown about on a particularly windy day whilst being regaled with tales of the buildings on view, including the university, once the setting for Hitler’s experiments with Zyklon B gas. It certainly provided an effective distraction.

After a lunch meeting with our tourism contact in Frankfurt, which involved several furtive trips to the loo to discover that the bleeding was getting worse, I explained to my boss that possibly things weren’t going that well and I may need to return to the hotel to lie down rather than taking a trip down the river on a boat. Walking back, things took a turn for the worse – all I can say is thank god for tights – and once back at the hotel, I collapsed in my room…

Photo from Pixabay