My legs were suspended for 4 months – Woman who had 5 strange miscarriages narrates

A young entrepreneur who had five consecutive miscarriages in her young marriage and only got lucky at her sixth attempt at childbirth has explained why she never told anyone whenever she was pregnant.

Vasmine Yehowa Adom Baiden, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Nkunim Groceries, explained that not even her parents were privileged to know.

As she puts it, people had to “see me to see that I am pregnant.’

Sharing her inspiring story with Miriam Osei Agyeman on UnEdited on 3FM, monitored by GhanaWeb, the young entrepreneur said that when everything started with her, she didn’t quite understand it.

In fact, she said, she considered the first miscarriage as something that would be replaced by another successful pregnancy not too long after.

And as she added, a lot of the things that happened to her in the attempt to successfully keep a pregnancy within a spate of two and a half years in her marriage may not make sense to a lot of people today.

From many painful, confusing and near-impossible medical attempts to be able to come to the realisation that in her case, more needed to be done to enable her successfully carry a baby the whole journey through, Yehowa Adom said it took a lot for her to stay sane during the period.

“I got married, went for my honeymoon in 2013… I’d say fortunately for me, I got pregnant I think two weeks after our honeymoon, and then unfortunately again, I had an accident and I had to lose the pregnancy… what happened was that I was pregnant, I was going to work, I had an accident and then I went to the doctor and everything was fine.

“Two days after, I realised I was bleeding, I went back to the hospital, and they realised I had miscarried. I was in my 13th week at the time…

But like her husband, they agreed it was an accident and that God would give them another baby again.

True to their hopes and faith, two months after this, Yehowa Adom said she took seed again.

“This time around, it was good, we had our normal lives, but in the 14th week, I lost it again… I slept and woke up and I was bleeding. I went to the hospital, and I had miscarried…

“So, it was after the second miscarriage that we went to do all the tests, but there was still nothing; no diagnosis,” she stressed.

The young female CEO further stated that these unfortunate occurrences went on until after the fifth pregnancy, when they made some proper breakthrough about all that was happening to her.

“The third one, I was pregnant and it was even showing, so I went to the hospital, everything was fine; the foetus was fine, and then again, I went for a check-up in two weeks… the foetus was checked and there no heartbeat.

“So, I was admitted and then I was given a lot of shots to revive everything. After a day, there was still no [heartbeat] so they had to do a D and C…” she added.

The Nkunim Groceries CEO, Vasmine Yehowa Adom Baiden, further narrated how she managed to deal with all the emotional weight that these miscarriages were having on her.

She added that, for instance, not typically being a person who goes by the way society expects people to be, anytime she was pregnant, not even her parents knew.

As she put it, ‘you’d have to see me to see that I am pregnant.’

“I didn’t really think about society. I was only thinking of my condition and my husband’s reaction, but then we pulled through it ourselves… he was strong, but I was stronger,” she stressed.

But she admitted that she was not only taking all of these lightly, not giving it any thoughts more extreme than a medical challenge.

She told the host of the program that she also got to a point in her life that she started questioning a lot of things, wondering if all of what had been happening to her was not, perhaps, spiritually-inspired.

“So, you see that kind of thing that makes you ask, have I wronged somebody? Is it a spiritual battle? Did I do something wrong? When I was young, did somebody cast a spell on me? And a lot of the thinking, but then again, I made sure that my faith overcame my fear.

“… all the five miscarriages I had happened within two and half years… if I told you that it was ok, then I was lying. It can’t be fine after having three miscarriages; it’s not fine but we will be fine… and I think what really pushed our faith up was after the fifth one; that was what challenged me the most,” she said.

She also recalled how, during her fourth pregnancy, she was never able to hold anything down in her stomach, not even water.

She lost that pregnancy one morning when she entered the bathroom to take a bath.

She also stated that some of the miscarriages happened on her bed, when she would wake up to notice it.

But her parents too were getting increasingly worried.

Yehowa Adom told Miriam Osei Agyeman that one day, she decided to go with their requests that she sees someone for help.

She described what happened when her father took her to Koforidua.

“One thing that happened was that when I was pregnant with my sixth child, I did not even know. One of the days, as normal African parents we have, they said it’s not normal so I should go and see somebody. So, I adhered to my parents. My dad came to pick me, drove all the way to Koforidua to go and see this herbalist who does herbal medicines for people to get pregnant, all this time, my parents were not aware I had been pregnant…

“But looking at the environment and everything the woman was telling me; they had to leave me behind for two weeks, to bath some herbals and so on, I told my mom to take me back home and give me about a week to think through it physically and spiritually and how I would be with this woman for the next two weeks, and she agreed,” she added.

Three days after this incident, she noticed she wasn’t feeling too well and so she said she went to check and noticed she was pregnant.

“… I stood up; there’s a mirror in the bathroom, I looked in the mirror and I said, God, if you say we will have children, and none shall be barren, if I lose this child, there is no God,” she declared her faith.

This sixth pregnant turned out to be her first successful pregnancy, even though she nearly lost that one too.

She also recalled how she had stay in hospital for four months, with her legs suspended the entire time.

“After the theatre, I was wheeled back to the ward, because of the fact that they call it a ‘threatened abortion,’ I had to literally sleep on the bed in a way that the bed was adjusted in a way that instead of my head being up, my head was down, and my legs were up. That was my sleeping position for four months,” she stated.

Today, she has three children but none of them came easy, as she adds that after every pregnancy, her womb had to be closed, so that she does not miscarry it.

AE/OGB