#28 Pre-eclampsia and Stillbirth During a Pandemic with Alexa Mosberger

In this week’s episode, I talk with Alexa Mosberger about the stillbirth of her daughter, Beatrice, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK.

I am so grateful to Alexa for coming on to the podcast so soon after Beatrice’s death to share her experiences. Losing a baby at any time is a traumatic experience, but the added complexity of lockdown restrictions and loss of face-to-face support from both family and professional organisations makes navigating loss and grief even more difficult.

In the interview, we talk about:

• Alexa’s pregnancy with Beatrice and going into lockdown a week before the rest of the UK (16:10)
• Worries about how the pandemic would affect their maternity care and birth, trying to juggle home schooling and working from home while heavily pregnant (20:10)
• Waking up in the night, realising Beatrice wasn’t moving and going in for a check up (30:36)
• Finding out that Beatrice had died and being diagnosed with pre-eclampsia (34:23)
• Being induced and giving birth to Beatrice (47:20)
• The impact of lockdown and not being able to see her parents (59:47)
• How being in a lockdown bubble delayed the impact of grief and affected her judgement of risk (1:03:48)

In the intro, I talk about the new Consensus Guidelines on the Communication of Unexpected News Via Ultrasound which were released this week. It includes advice for sonographers on how to approach communicating uncertainties and bad news to parents and examples of phrases they could use. If you’d like to read the document, you can find it on the Sands website: https://sands.org.uk/about-sands/media-centre/news/2020/08/explaining-unexpected-baby-scan-news-expectant-parents

If you have any feedback on the show, suggestions for guests or would like to share your story, you can connect with me on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/footprintsonourhearts/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/skyesfootprints) or email alison@footprintsonourhearts.com. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a rating or review on your podcast app!