Tomorrow, my calendar tells me, I will be 10 weeks pregnant. At 10 weeks, your baby looks like a baby on a scan. He has arms and legs, fingers and toes, eyes and ears. He’s the size of a strawberry and growing eyebrows. Eyebrows! Was a child ever more mine?

But, at 1:45pm today, a midwife named Carmen told Nick and me that our baby had no heartbeat. He had no heartbeat, despite me crying at seeing his heartbeat on an ultrasound only 2 weeks ago. I remember her name was Carmen because her name badge was the only thing I could look at in the room as she spoke to me. I stared at it. I never wanted to forget the person who was with us in this moment.

Carmen told me my baby will never be here. He won’t arrive 2 weeks early, crashing my birthday, like we’ve been joking about. He isn’t going to make me pee 6 times a night at Glastonbury, like we’ve been swapping voicenotes about. He isn’t going to make my toddler an adorable big brother just in time for Christmas, like I’ve imagined.

I didn’t cry when she told me. I didn’t cry at 1:45pm today.

I cried at 1pm today, in the carpark of Sainsbury’s, where we’d been told to park by the hospital. I fell to my knees and howled when my beautiful friends messaged me to say sorry for my loss. I hadn’t believed I had a loss yet, I hadn’t heard the words. I was on my way to hear the words.

I cried 4 days ago, when we’d booked an emergency private scan because I “had a strange feeling”. The lady who did our private scan said she couldn’t see the baby we’d seen only 2 weeks earlier. She measured a foetal pole and told me it didn’t look good. She didn’t say the words.

From 10am on Saturday to 1:45 on Wednesday 25^th May, I have not known how to feel because I have not known what’s going on in my body because nobody wanted to say the words.

I cried when I had to attend my toddler’s nursery Family Fun Day straight after the scan on Saturday and had to quietly ask the staff to stop talking about “the baby” in front of him. I had to say the words, even though I wasn’t sure they were the right words.

We have the words now. Our baby was not to be. My body doesn’t want to let go of the pregnancy though, so I have to help it out. A “medically assisted miscarriage” is how they said it. It’s painful. It’s scarring. It feels like a choice. A question that only had one answer. A road that only goes one way.

I have always believed passionately that baby loss needs to be talked about openly, that you should announce your pregnancy as soon as you feel excited about it and early enough that people can help you in that exhausting first trimester. I am CERTAIN that not announcing until after the safety of the 12-week scan is more for other people’s comfort in case it goes wrong, than your own. I have fought for open conversations online, at work and with my own family.

But here I am now. I don’t know how to tell people. I have deleted my WhatsApp from my phone so I no longer have to see the people I love telling me I have a dead baby. I cannot say the words.

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**if you would like to message me, I promise I will appreciate it when I’m ready to read it. I may not reply (but that’s usual for me hey?). If you would like to pass this on to other friends of ours, I’d appreciate it. I’d started to tell people as it came up in conversation so some people know I was expecting and some will be surprised to hear my ancient womb managed it again.

If you have already messaged me, thank you and I love you. If you can offer support to Nick, please do, because he will make himself ill before he admits how devastated he is. You’ll need to coax it out of him because he’s spent 39 years bottling his emotions up and he doesn’t know what else to do.