Losing a Child in the Limelight


The dark screen loomed above me as I craned my neck to see. Searching for any sign of movement or flicker of life, I was answered only with stillness and quiet. My lungs slowly filled, trying to stop the tears from escaping the corners of my eyes, as I breathed through the awkwardness of being exposed in every possible way. The ultrasound technician looked down on me with both gentleness and the steely resolve of someone who has had to deliver bad news far too often. “I’m sorry, there doesn’t seem to be a heartbeat.” And just like that, I had lost my second child in a matter of months. 

The nature of a soap opera can be a grueling one. With a continuous narrative, the cast and crew work year-round producing over two hundred episodes annually. In a single day, a show may film up to four episodes while ideally getting it all in only one take. Meanwhile, it is being broadcasted to millions of homes worldwide. They say if you can handle this format, you can handle anything. And I believe it because I had just come off of an eight month-long baby loss storyline that felt like I had run a marathon. 

At the time, I had never experienced a pregnancy before. I was grateful for the artistic challenge and threw myself into the story with everything I had, researching placental abruption, stillbirth, and pregnancy loss. I knew people in my own life that had gone through the trauma of losing a child and I wanted to do them justice. It had to be honest. It had to be real. But what it entailed was months and months of grief on-camera that slowly started to seep into my life off-camera. While I walked away from that storyline with my first Daytime Emmy nomination, it left a psychological mark that was difficult for me to recover from…if only I knew what cruel irony lay ahead. 

As a woman, I never imagined having a child to be a difficult feat. From a young age we are told how easy it is to get pregnant, even with a condom, while on birth control, and pulling out—don’t forget about the pre-cum! I took the responsibility of it seriously and had been so careful for so many years of my life. I never thought that when I actually wanted it to happen, it wouldn’t. 

When my fiancé and I found out I was pregnant, we were simultaneously overjoyed and terrified. These would be our first steps together on the journey of parenthood. Immediately my shopping carts became full of baby books and my browser tabs full of information from bassinets to doulas to red light baby dream machines. The following weeks became a flurry of doctor’s appointments, blood work, and ultrasounds, all squeezed around my busy filming schedule. It was only until the progesterone results that everything began to unravel. 

I lost her at ten weeks. 

My dream of welcoming our baby into the world was slowly becoming more of a lucid nightmare. The doctor recommended an in-office D&C (dilation and curettage) so I wouldn’t have to experience the worst of it on set. “You’ll be drugged so you won’t feel much, if anything, slight cramping.” Unfortunately, like most things when it comes to women’s health, that was not true. As drugged as I may have been, something went awry. I felt it all. And I remembered everything. The image of myself desperately trying crawl away from the pain as the nurses tried to coax me back down to the edge of the table, my nonsensical pleadings, and the ever-echoing noise of that damned exam table paper. 

After I took time to heal emotionally and physically, I was determined to try again. I was told the chances of us experiencing another pregnancy loss were slim to none, but sadly our second attempt unraveled into sorrow and heartache as well. We lost him at 8 weeks. And all the while, I was filming. 



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