Just a few weeks after having a miscarriage in April 2020, Reena Gill was back on the job as a nurse in the acute psychiatry ward of a hospital in Victoria, B.C., working 12-hour shifts in full personal protective equipment, just as the pandemic took off in Canada. She had already used several of her sick days and figured being back at work would be a good distraction.
It wasn?t.
Gill was having a hard time focusing. She kept forgetting things and was constantly second-guessing herself. Her hormones were raging, leading to mood swings and sweating under all that PPE. She found herself getting impatient and even angry, which was totally out of character.
Triggers were everywhere, too, from well-meaning colleagues asking about her pregnancy without knowing what had happened, to a patient in her late 60s who carried delusions about being pregnant and needed to be constantly reassured that she?s not. ?I really wasn?t ready to come back to work,? she says. ?I didn?t realize the waves of emotions that were going to come, and I was still healing physically as well.?
About a quarter of pregnancies end in loss, which can lead to a wide range of physical and mental health issues, from mild to severe. People who lose pregnancies often experience pain, bleeding and hormonal changes that can affect their moods. A study published last year in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that a month after an early-pregnancy loss, 29 percent of women experienced PSTD, 24 perce...