Postpartum Care & Pregnancy and Infant Loss
If you work at a company that includes benefits that offer maternity leave, or bereavement leave you should not be using your vacation time for recovery/healing time from your pregnancy or infant loss. Your employer/company should not consider pregnancy loss as a vacation; any time-off taken for healing is bereavement time. Experiencing the loss of your child is not the same as a relaxing week on a beach and should not show up on your pay stub as such. If you are experiencing pregnancy loss as the mother, needing to heal or the partner that needs to support and emotionally needs to heal, talk with your HR department and explain your situation before you send in a time-off request or worse yet, jump right back into work.
The reason I advise against ignoring time to heal mentally and physically before going back to your daily routine is that I made a huge mistake when I birthed our second baby at 9 weeks into our pregnancy. I (like so many people) did not treat myself as postpartum because I did not view my miscarriage as birth. I now know that BIRTH IS BIRTH no matter what trimester.
Regardless of how much bleeding I was still experiencing, how depleted I felt on all levels (emotionally, physically, and spiritually), I did not take care of myself as I did when I birthed our first baby at 41 weeks.
I did not support myself properly for my first birth and yet it was still better than what I did for my second birth by leaps and bounds. I did not fuel my body like I should have with foods to replenish everything my body was loosing, or helping to adjust back to a non-pregnant state.
What I should have done was the following:
Allowed for plenty of rest
Fueled my body with easy to digest foods (soups, stews, congees)
Drinking the appropriate amount of water.
Kept my body warm (sweat pants, sweaters, socks, higher temperatures in the home, etc.)
Fresh air
Due to the emotional roller coaster of the first week, after I birthed Olive (see more details here). Since those experiencing loss are postpartum, they too are susceptible to postpartum mood disorders. I can not stress enough how effective talk-therapy is and how (in my not so humble opinion) everyone can benefit from a good therapy session, but for a family experiencing loss it can be a lifesaver in more than one way in some cases. Find a therapist, counselor, psychologist, etc. that you can talk with. Those closest to us tend to say things that are not helpful and think that they are somehow helping by their well-meaning comments, and sometimes you just need to talk in a safe place.
Birth is birth, no matter what trimester. Take care of yourself, you are now postpartum.