Content note: this article contains descriptions of baby loss and miscarriage that readers may find upsetting.

Jodie Nicholson, 33, was seven weeks pregnant when she started bleeding at work. “Right away, I knew I had miscarried,” she tells Stylist. “There was too much blood for it to be anything else.” When she rang the IVF clinic, which had helped her become pregnant after trying unsuccessfully for six years, Jodie was told to head to A&E. When she arrived, she was sent to the early pregnancy assessment unit and asked to sit in the waiting room until she could be seen.

“I was petrified,” she says. “By this point, my underwear and super-strength pad were soaked through. It just wasn’t right, and I was certain I had lost the baby I had tried so hard for.”

Taking her seat in the waiting room laden with posters of smiling babies and leaflets about parenting, Jodie became painfully aware of all the pregnant women around her. She recalls one couple discussing in hushed tones their unborn baby’s nursery and the colour scheme and furniture they’d choose. “I could feel my heart rate increasing,” she says. “But I kept sitting, hoping that the wait wouldn’t be long before I was seen.”

Sadly, Jodie’s suspicions about her miscarriage were right. “I felt like the wind had been taken out of me,” she says, remembering the moment the miscarriage was confirmed. A week later, Jodie went back to the early pregnancy assessment unit for a pre-booked appointment to confirm the miscarriage had finished. Once again, she was placed in the general waiting area. This time, there was no grabbing onto hope. Her baby wasn’t alive as all these babies twirled and kicked in their mothers’ stomachs.

“Even knowing I had miscarried, I had been placed in this room,” she says. “I was incredibly angry. Instead of being able to grieve the loss of my baby and a wasted IVF treatment, I was hit with visions of what I could have had, what I wanted so badly.”

“Why I’m campaigning for hospitals to have separate spaces for people experiencing pregnancy complications and loss”