Agony of losing the baby you are expecting: A Mother’s Day tribute

As Kenyans celebrate Mother’s Day today, many are the women who will be looking back to a time when motherhood came so close yet so far.

PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • As Kenyans celebrate Mother’s Day today, many are the women who will be looking back to a time when motherhood came so close yet so far.
  • We spoke to four such women who, with profound bravery amid deep grief, opened up their hearts.

The toddler’s arm that could respond as Trizah Kimani swung it while praying... suddenly became stiff.  And the seven-day-old boy grew eerily cold and pale.

That is when Mrs Kimani believed the doctor’s word that Noel, her third-born child whom she had carried for 39 long weeks in her womb, was truly dead.

In that room reserved for deceased infants at the Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH), thoughts raced through her mind.

She transferred the three-kilogramme boy’s body from her bosom where she had placed him as she asked God to restore his life. She now laid the body on a slab.

“I told God, ‘You’ll walk me through this, because I don’t know where to start,’” she recalls.

Today’s Mother’s Day will fall on the third year since Mrs Kimani lost her son to what doctors called a tracheoesophageal fistula, a deformity characterised by the merging of the channels for air and food.

She had gone to Fatima Maternity Hospital in Rongai hoping to leave with a bundle of joy as she had done two times before.

But unlike the previous pregnancies, this one would lead her to KNH and she would eventually return home empty-handed.

As Kenyans join citizens of numerous other countries in celebrating Mother’s Day today, Mrs Kimani, 35, will be among the many Kenyan women looking back at a time when motherhood came too close yet too far.

Lifestyle spoke to three other mothers who have had such experiences. In the interviews, tears were shed. Handkerchiefs got married to palms. Awkward pauses abounded. And the name of God was invoked many times.

 ***

Grace Tuukuo, a 27-year-old woman who hails from Narok county, said it was the first time she was talking about her loss in public.

“There are people who will be very surprised to know that I lost a child,” she said.

And since October 2015 when her eight-month pregnancy terminated with all her hopes of having a brother to her daughter, she has not contemplated having another baby with her husband.

“Any time I think of having a baby, I always see myself going through the same,” said Ms Tuukuo, a Ngong-based businesswoman dealing in real estate.

She had carried the boy in her womb for eight months. The warning shot, it appears, came in the seventh month of her pregnancy when she was hospitalised suffering from high blood pressure but was later discharged.

Then one Monday, she woke up feeling some discomfort in her tummy. She went to St Mary’s Hospital, Lang’ata, where she had been receiving prenatal care.

One test showed that the baby’s heart had stopped. But after a scan, she was told the heartbeat had been detected, and so she was allowed to go home.

From left: Business women Grace Tuukuo and Trizah Kimani. PHOTOS| FRANCIS NDERITU

But the pain kept increasing each passing moment. She could not sleep as pain kept gnawing at her midsection.

She would return to the hospital that Thursday where a scan confirmed that the baby in her womb was dead.

She screamed when the test results were disclosed.

“Apparently, the baby had died the same Monday. I had been carrying a dead baby for all those days,” she said. “The doctor told me that even my smell had changed because the baby had even started decomposing.”

She was induced to go into labour to remove the foetus.

And she detested every moment her body suffered the pinching, searing pangs of induced labour.

“It is better when you go through pain and you’re waiting for something. But in this case, why was I going through all this pain from 5pm to the following day and at the back of my mind I was not even waiting for a baby? You know that after all you are going to get a dead baby,” she lamented.

When induced labour bore no fruit, surgery had to be done. With the foetus out of her womb, the doctor insisted that she had to look at the boy.

“He had started growing some whitish things,” she recalled, and one could hear phlegm clogging her voice box as she fumbled for words to describe that moment.

From the theatre, she was taken to a maternity ward. Seeing other women with their children made her depressed to the level that she started talking to herself. She asked to be discharged as soon as possible.

Back home, her daughter who is now eight years old wanted to know where the baby was.

“That’s the moment you don’t even know what to say,” she said.

There were also the prying eyes of neighbours. And relatives and all.

“I went and locked myself up,” she said. She later travelled to her ancestral home in Narok before she later returned to Ngong.

  ***

 Mrs Kimani, after that devastating loss at KNH, also wanted to go home as soon as she could. Her husband Peter Kimani cleared the hospital at the earliest opportunity.

“We were asked if we wanted to take the body. We were living in a rented place. Where would we inter the remains? My other children had not seen the baby. Taking to them a dead infant could be more painful. My husband came and we agreed that now that the boy was dead, taking him home would cause more pain, arranging the burial and such things,” she recalled.

They went home, alright, but there was one big problem: The many items they had bought for the son they were expecting.

“I told my husband not to remove the baby stuff from the car. I didn’t want to see them,” she said.

But later, after getting over the setback, especially after attending a retreat at the Vincentian Prayer House in Lavington, she took the baby’s items, some that had been brought during a baby shower, and packaged them in plastic bags.

They were eight bags in total and she placed a note under each of them that said, “Waiting for your return.”

And sure enough, on December 22, 2016, she gave birth to a healthy boy whom she called Noel like the one she had lost — making it a family of three children.

Mrs Kimani, who is a businesswoman-cum-gospel singer using the stage name Trizah Overcomer, has released a Kikuyu song Kimwonei (See) where she details her journey with the pregnancy after the loss.

***

Shinel Wanja discovered she could be losing her sanity after a miscarriage when she found herself stopping on Nairobi streets to stare at pregnant women.

“I would stop, look at pregnant women and would be like, ‘Oh God, please don’t allow them to go through what I went through,’” she said, adding that sometimes she could be shocked at the sight of an expectant woman.

The pregnancy she lost was to be her firstborn with her husband Timothy Makamu.

At the 32nd week of the pregnancy, a check established that the baby in her womb was not breathing.

She was induced and endured the pain up to the point of delivery.

“The worst bit is getting out of hospital without the baby. People have been seeing you pregnant — neighbours, people in church, your family — they know that you guys are expecting. And you come out of hospital and you have to go around telling everyone, ‘Oh, we’ve lost a baby,’” she said.

Up to six months after the May 2015 miscarriage, there were people who would enquire about the whereabouts of her “baby”.

She said it was one of her most unpalatable experiences. She has come to detest a line people use: “Maybe the child wasn’t yours”.

“You have carried this baby for eight months or nine months. It’s really painful,” said Ms Wanja, a public relations practitioner.

Even the “sorries” she received when she told the uninformed that she lost the baby, she said, have not always been comforting as some appear as if they are blaming the mother.

“There are those who think maybe you’re not very careful,” she said.

After that setback, and having recovered from the near-maniacal poses in Nairobi streets, Ms Wanja is expectant again, hoping to have her first child.

She told Lifestyle on Wednesday that her delivery is due in two weeks.

“It will go well now,” she said, reassuredly.

 

***

 

The spotting that Mrs Rhoda Keng’ara had experienced in her early months of pregnancy were an ominous sign.

It started around February 2011, just four weeks after she conceived and was on course to delivering her second born with her husband James Keng’ara.

She rushed to hospital, was given medication and was good to go. The spotting would recur when the pregnancy was at 12 weeks and again when it was at 25 weeks. The one on the 25th week was more alarming.

“I began spotting while at work. At this time, my husband had just landed a job in Maasai Mara so he was not around. After work, I went home then picked my hospital card and went to the hospital, thinking I was just going and coming back as it was the norm,” she said.

While at the hospital queue, she had a leakage of amniotic fluid and the doctor recommended that she be admitted immediately.

“I was in the hospital from  June 3 to June 30, 2011 when I went into labour.  The doctors intended that I stay there for some days at least to get to 32 weeks but it wasn’t the case. The boy came at 29 weeks,” she said.

The baby was taken to the new born unit, where he was put under intensive care. He later contracted jaundice.

One evening when she went to the unit during the 9pm visit, she found a doctor trying to resuscitate her son.

“After some minutes the doctor told me, ‘We have tried our best but he couldn’t make it,’” she recalled.

“After one month and two days in the hospital, I left empty-handed. It was a hard time for me and my husband. That’s the time I saw my husband’s tears.”

However, they would have a healthy son a year and three months later, after the setback. The Keng’aras now have three children, two having come after the unfortunate pre-term birth.

***

On Facebook, Mrs Keng’ara is an administrator of a group called “Parents with Angels… in Heaven”.

She approves all posts and all new members. The mothers who spoke with Lifestyle are members of the group.

It is at the group that the mothers find solace by sharing their experiences.

“No one ever understands better than those that have gone through it. No words can explain the pain that we have had to go through,” Mrs Keng’ara says on the introductory message to the group.

She told Lifestyle: “I am in the group to encourage the parents who are still in pain because of this. I have made good friends in that group.”

Through the Facebook group, the mothers have also formed WhatsApp groups through which they exchange ideas. It is through a WhatsApp group that Ms Wanja learnt of Mrs Kimani predicament and called her.

“I talked to her for an hour and a half. That’s how our friendship started,” said Ms Wanja, who stays in Rongai while Mrs Kimani is in Ngong.

 

***

We asked the four mothers to send a Mother’s Day message to whoever may have lost a child before even taking the young one home.

“The pain will not go away but the Lord gives grace to live with it. Hold on to the promises of God that He has good plans for you and that He restores,” said Mrs Keng’ara.

“I know it’s hard, and people think it’s their fault. It wasn’t your fault. Even what we call doctor’s negligence, that was the baby’s purpose. God’s plan was that the baby reaches there. Whichever way God used, he took his property because that was his purpose in this world,” said Mrs Kimani.

 

Ms Tuukuo said: “You are not supposed to be told how to grieve or for how long because grief takes time. But the moment you go through it, you heal completely.”

 

And Ms Wanja concluded: “The Bible says that there is no temptation that has overtaken you except that which is common to man. And no matter what the enemy brings our way, God will, in a way, turn it for our good — no matter how ugly the situation is.”

 

***

Is it in order to buy items for a child before delivery?

Baby showers are a pretty common phenomenon these days, and a good number of them happen even before the mother goes to the labour ward.

With them come goodies: basins for washing the baby, clothes, diapers, soap and whatnot.

Even without baby showers, many mothers will ensure they have bought a few items for the baby in readiness for delivery.

It is a given that such items will haunt the mother in case she loses the baby. So, to buy or not to?

Counsellor Esther Mbau thinks there is no problem planning beforehand.

Picture of an expectant mother. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

“Like the wise man says, failing to plan is planning to fail,” she says. “Delivery is emotionally draining. If you don’t plan for it as well, it drains you even more if you get the child.”

But Prof Halimu Shauri, a sociologist, says no items should be bought before actual birth has happened.

“It’s worse when the child passes on as you will be left with items that will torment you psychologically,” says Prof Shauri, a sociology lecturer at Pwani University.

“I think it’s important to wait till a baby is born and sex confirmed that one now buys clothes and other baby items. You may buy the clothes then the child is smaller or big than the clothes bought or even passes on,” he adds.

In the professor’s view, things like baby showers “are all speculative behaviours”.

“The behaviours are alien to Africa and do not represent our African culture and realities,” he says.

But Ms Mbau, who also trains other counsellors at Amani Counselling Centre, says parents should not fear for the future but should give room for error.

“We also need to know we are in a world where we only control very few things. Some things are beyond our control. We need to be open to the fact that we may plan but it may not come to pass,” she said.

As a matter of fact, Ms Mbau noted, there is no difference between items bought for an unborn child and that who has lived for two or so decades.

“We normally say it doesn’t matter if it was a few weeks. That was still your child and if you’re going through a process of loss and you’re just like a woman who would have lost a 20-year-old child.”

— Elvis Ondeki