Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to season three of the Miscarriage Rebellion. A season where we look back at a decade of impact, a decade of showing up and making a difference for those going through the devastation of losing their baby during pregnancy.
Speaker: Prior to Pink Elephants, there was a lack of voice, there was a lack of any noise, there was a profound silence that surrounded the experience of miscarriage. And there was little to no support specific to the needs of miscarriage, early pregnancy loss, pregnancy after loss. I'm really excited to have with me today two very special people who've made a huge difference in Pink Elephants and who we are today. They are the people that really helped us to build the beginnings of peer support at Pink Elephants. So I have Terry Diamond with me and I have Maggie MacDonald.
Speaker: Terry really helped us in those early days when we decided we wanted to provide this one-on-one connection, but we weren't quite sure what that looked like. I didn't even know it was called peer support at the time. I just knew that that's what women needed.
Speaker: And Maggie was one of our very first peer support companions. Both have stayed involved with the organization over the last decade. Both have been champions of making a difference and ensuring that no one goes through this journey alone.
Speaker: Both have actually already been on the podcast before. So if you want to go back and listen to the lived experiences, we will link to that in the show notes. and But today we're going to talk about what it was like to build Pink Elephant's peer support program and the growth of that program and where we're at with it now. um I might actually start with you, Terry, if that's all right. It feels quite natural.
Speaker: Yeah. Thank you. um So with Pink Elephant's, we first had that coffee. ma Max Brenner, Bondi. Brenner. Yeah. Was it about 11, 10, 11 years ago? 10, think that one was. Literally very beginning. 10 years now. And I think that was our first conversation around for me really acknowledging just how little support there was specifically dedicated to miscarriage. um I'd worked at Red Nose who were sitting in kids at the time and they had really focused a lot on stillbirth, neonatal death, SIDS, SUDI and a little bit of miscarriage support but I think there was such, I was so passionate about finding a place um in the support community that really just spoke to miscarriage and I think that's what you and Gabby came with. And when I met with the two of you and heard your story and how the two of you were so integral to each other in terms of the support that you provided each other, reflected back on my story and the lack of peer support that I had. And then the professional knowledge that I had now brought into the space.
Speaker: I was so excited and so passionate about building a peer support training program. Mm-hmm. for you guys and just cannot actually believe all these years later just how extensive that has now become and how much access people have had to the experience of having peer support. Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, Gabby and I didn't even know that it was called peer support. We were just two women trying to start an organisation, trying to provide support. Gabby was my peer support. And like in hindsight, I can clearly see that now. She was the one that guided me in my depths of grief and my pregnancy after all of anxiety with Johnny. but We didn't know that was a label, but we knew we wanted to connect people. But we did know that we wanted to do everything with Pink Elephants with a really deep integrity and a place of listening. We'd already held focus groups before we reached out to you. And those focus groups had told us that, yes, they really wanted a connection to someone else. who just got it because there is a knowing in this space, particularly I think when miscarriage is something that isn't talked about with your friend circles.
Speaker: It might be a little bit more now, but 10 years ago it really wasn't. There was no common discourse. There was no language around the experience. It was still something that was seen as a secret private women's business that you just got on with. And so it was really important to us that whilst we knew we wanted to provide connections, we knew that this organisation had a legacy and could go on for years and make a huge impact. So we had to connect with someone like yourself who could help us build that programme from the ground up with a really strong foundation, which has led us to where we are now.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you guys came to me, I then leaned on another colleague of mine who I'd worked with for years. um And we had run training programs before. And we really looked at the essence of what we needed to I guess, train people and teach people. And the biggest thing for me was always about education.
Speaker: ensuring that the people we were training were putting in place self-care strategies for themselves and ensuring that people were at the right place in their journey to be able to become um peer supporters and to take part in the training, really aware we didn't want to re-trigger anyone and that when they these people peer supporters were going out to support the people in the community who were in the throes of their their grief and losing their pregnancies, that they themselves were a little bit further away from their story so that they could be the right support to the, I guess, newly bereaved or the people who were in the trenches at the time, you know, of them providing support. So we built what I'd like to think was a really robust. Yes. Training program. um
Speaker: I know that we wanted to do some psychoeducational stuff within the program where we really looked at grief, um the types of grief, disenfranchised grief, which really categorized for us what miscarriage was.
Speaker: um We looked at lots of self-control. care strategies um and then we did some training exercises giving the peer support trainees some scenarios that they may come across and also just reinforcing for them that the role of a peer supporter was not to fix it. You know peer supporters are not counsellors. You don't need to feel that you have this enormous responsibility but that if they were themselves feeling um I guess compromised in the support that they were providing, they would then have an understanding of what was complex and where they could take that so that they were looking after themselves. Just recognising that peer support is just about validation,
Speaker: listening, connecting, and giving the person who's having the miscarriages in the depths of their grief a place and a space that was not their friends, not their families, where they didn't need to feel burdensome in telling their story, to just have somebody say, hear get you, i understand you, and from the depths of that shared lived experience, there's nothing quite like it, I don't think, in the support community. No, there really isn't. And want to acknowledge how much of that, what you built in those early days still exist in training for our peer support companions. Now, we still give the grief literacy and how empowering things like grief literacy is, even for peer support companions who may have gone through their journeys and no one's actually explained to them. actually your grieving style might lean more towards instrumental, mine. That's how come pink elephants exist, right? And I know we can move between the two, but I think there was also a really unforeseen added benefit for the peer support companions themselves to process what had happened to them by giving support to others. And I know that we've got a poster coming out at an upcoming conference that will demonstrate that as well, but I do think that's really...
Speaker: Worth calling out that everything that you put in place then still really stands now and it's part of the values of the program and I can't see it changing. you love that. That makes me so happy. And we did it. You know, creating the program was such um a thorough and um complex experience. It took us a long time to write that initial training program. We we really wanted something that was going to stand up. um And that incorporated the research, you know, where we were at in terms of how important peer support was. But really we're quite passionate about training the peer supporters in a way that they did not feel overwhelmed, that they feel felt held and competent, you know, developed with delivering in a couple of days some competency training as well so that, know,
Speaker: when they were taking their first course, it was done from a place where they felt that they were able to provide the support that the person on the other end of the line was seeking. So I'm so happy it's held up. It it really, really has. i think that's a really nice segue as well, Maggie, to talk to you because Maggie was one of our first peer support companions in that first group of training. You're still very much involved with the organisation now.
Speaker: What was it like for you becoming a peer support companion? I think for me, I'm just listening to to Terry speak and I'm right back in that room. And in that first training, it was just, it was a very powerful, um I guess, experience for me. um I think in that training, it was probably the first time that I had vocalised what I was feeling to a group of um women who got it, who understood, um and in a space where I felt safe and I felt supported. um And it was like a full circle moment for me, really. It still is now. um i felt that I was where I needed to be um and I was being supported and that um i think for the first time I felt like, you know, all of this this grief and everything that came with
Speaker: you know my pregnancy losses um was leading to this moment it really was a moment for me of like this is where i need to be and the purpose of what i had gone through and we're never going to discount it and say yes it was meant to be and all those you know kind of things we tell tell ourselves um but it was definitely a moment of like okay something good can actually come out of all of this pain And that has been something that I've carried with me all along um through um all of the kind of iterations of support that we've done over the years. um And it's something that, you know, it was ah it was empowering.
Speaker: was something that made me feel like, you know, I can actually... you know, live past this, you know, and I think that that's that's ah a lot of um our peer support companions, we we do speak about this and it is absolutely something that has helped us with our own healing process and it still does now.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. like and Yeah, absolutely still hear that now from the existing peer support companions, the unexpected benefits of how they get the option to process what's happened to them as well. What were some of those early conversations like with women that you held space for?
Speaker: Just, yeah, i remember I remember the training and I remember doing role play that you were just talking about and we were we were like, okay, we can do this. And it was, you know, we were groundbreaking because we never it hadn't been done before. And so it was, you know, like I felt very supported and I felt like, okay, I can actually do this with the training that we had. um But then, you know, that first phone call you make and you just, you don't know how is this going to go? And I think the the main thing that I just kept reminding myself was like Terry was saying, we're not here to fix this because you can't fix it. All you can do is to hold space for the person that you're speaking to and for, you know. And and most of the time it was listening and letting, you know,
Speaker: them speak and letting them share and letting them, you know, kind of, well, not say download, but just have someone to listen to um those things that I remember I couldn't say out loud to anyone when I went through my losses because I felt embarrassed. I felt silly. i felt all of those things, you know, like we now say a loss is a loss is a loss, but, you know, you do feel when you're in a space where There are different types of prenancy pregnancy loss. you know With early pregnancy loss, we can often feel like when our loss is not big enough to really be feeling these feelings.
Speaker: um And i also remember just learning about the different types of grief and learning about in our training about complicated grief. And mine had actually become complicated grief because I didn't have the support that I needed straight after. I didn't even know there was someone like Terry who did you know support. I was like, what?
Speaker: This is amazing. But in that sense, you know you kind of realise that you know if we were offering that support at an earlier stage... and making it normal and taking away all that stigma, we wouldn't have, you know, we could limit the the complicated grief that follows from not having that intervention or that support early on, which is the big thing for me, because, you know, you feel so invalidated that you just internalise everything, and then six months, 12 months down the line, you're like, I should be okay.
Speaker: But you're not because there was not that support when you needed it. So that was something that really helped me as well in my own journey because I realised that that is what I had been dealing with and that there was nothing, I'm not going crazy. It's just because the support wasn't there when I needed it Yeah, and we see that. We see that from studies in the UK. Professor Tom Bourne studied women who had ectopic pregnancy loss and a fifth were still symptomatic of PTSD nine months after their loss experience. And for me, it's obvious. It's so clear that if we actually get better at providing early intervention support to validate the way that we're feeling so that women are not isolated in shame, stigma and internalising all of these emotions, We can help them to process this in a healthy, grieving way. And it is natural to grieve the loss of your baby. Validate that.
Speaker: And we can hopefully reduce these outcomes. I think it also links really nicely back to something that I want you to touch on and explain a little bit more. What is disenfranchised grief? So I think the essence of disenfranchised grief is where the person who's experienced it doesn't feel like they have permission to have that type of grief because it is not validated by anybody else. So if somebody's dog dies and you say to someone, I'm really sad my dog died, that person can relate. They might have known the dog, met the dog. um Imagine what it's like if they lost a dog and, you know, I'm so sorry. And they can understand that you're upset. Somebody who's sick, somebody who's old. But when it comes to pregnancy loss, it's so quiet. It's so silent.
Speaker: It's so personal. And as i think something that Maggie said resonated, you know, especially early pregnancy loss where you're expected to kind of just get up and move on from it. And you don't feel that if you actually shared the impact of what that had on you, that somebody would not think that you were crazy. that you were grieving the loss of a pregnancy that was, it was so early, or you can try again, or it's that one in four, or, you know, that actually losing that that pregnancy was for you, losing that baby, and it actually had a huge impact on your life. But it's disenfranchised because there is nobody enfranchising the grief and giving you permission to experience and to feel it. yeah um And so that's why i think having peer support, I know that after one of my losses, I connected with the counsel with the professional counsellor and as part of her meeting her, she shared with me that she had had an experience of loss. I did not even want to hear about anything else. I just wanted her to talk to me about what she had been through So that I knew that I was sitting with someone who knew what I was feeling because to some extent I believe that she had experienced some of those feelings too. You know, just having that sense, that that connection, that peer connection and then having somebody say to you, I get it. i I can only imagine what this is like and not trying to platitude over the experience um that you're having and enfranchising your grief and understanding that this is a very normal reaction you're having to something really bad that's happened and that that is okay you know it's okay to have that
Speaker: I think that's really important. And I feel like it's just something that, again, is still not talked about enough about the experience of miscarriage. I know that we've shifted and things have moved and we'll look back in a minute about that. But we really still do not know what to say to people so that we're not invalidating their experience. It's still one of our most downloaded resources as well. Use your words to try and find out because we know that people do want to say the right thing because there's more of an awareness now that there's wrong things, but they're still not sure. I think it'd be really powerful because I know that what happens with this podcast is women that are in the trenches right now share it with their loved ones. yeah So if you've got those loved ones listening, what should they be doing in terms of showing up for the person that's going through loss and what should they be saying?
Speaker: Give that to both of you.
Speaker: um I think for me, It's just giving empathy. Showing up, it's not about you. And one of the things that I read and see, I moderate a lot of groups, I spend a lot of time in the space. You know, I'm working in public health, I'm working in a women's hospital, supporting women who are experiencing early pregnancy loss. I do a lot of training for the midwives, the staff, the nursing staff, the theatre staff in what they should say to somebody who might have just had a DNC or come in through EPAS, experiencing early pregnancy loss. Just a lot of that, I'm sorry, I'm you know i'm here for
Speaker: I'm sorry for your loss. It's so simple. I'm sorry for your loss. Absolutely. sitting with the person and seeing where they want to take that. they're crying, handing a tissue, not having a voice, it'll all be okay. you don't you know That sense of being able to sit in in the space, you don't have to fix it. But in terms of what can you do if you're a family or a friend or a family... What i get a real sense of is that the person experiencing the loss, the grief, don't want somebody to say to them, let me know if there's anything I can do for you. They don't want to be having to make any more decisions or reaching out when they themselves are so vulnerable. But the support is a text message. I've just dropped a meal at your door. or um here's a $30 Uber Eats voucher, order yourself something for dinner tonight, you don't have to cook, or dropping off a bunch of flowers, or just the doing, the holding, the you know but drop off a bath bomb, anything that the person doesn't have to come and reach out for support, that you are delivering that beautiful love and unconditional support without them having to identify what they need, because I think when you've just lost a baby, when you've had a miscarriage, You're just identifying what you have to do by putting a foot in front of the the other the next day. You know you want support, but you don't actually know what that is. know what that is
Speaker: Yeah, I totally agree with that as well. And that I think that you know the the just the basic, I am sorry for your loss. you You don't need to be trying to fix the situation because you can't. There's nothing you can do about it. And it's just the you know being comfortable enough to say, I am sorry for your loss, which is what you would do for anyone else that is going through a loss. like it's It's not different. This is a loss. you know So I think um we are still very uncomfortable with grief. As a society, we just, you know, we try and move forward, but it's the reality of it. um and And like Terry said, you know, like that, you know, kind of question, what can I do for you is absolutely, it's basically just, you know, sending the message and saying, I am thinking of you. You do not need to respond.
Speaker: I'm just letting you know, because I find like that's another thing. It's an extra thing. Like we're just trying to put one foot in front of the other um to then feel like you've got to respond to all those messages back. That's a very simple thing. um And, you know, kind of I've also, you know, one thing that I found was, you know, enabling or like empowering your partner to be the one that answers text messages on your behalf because it actually takes it out of your hands and the emotional, it takes the emotion out of it as well and and and put, ah like not a barrier, but put a little protection around you not to have to be, you know, like answering all those things back. And I think the other thing is also, you know knowing, know,
Speaker: I guess that this person is really hurting and that, you know, you need to be maybe a little bit mindful around, um I guess, for me, the the the one thing that kept coming up in the peer support was, you know, going to events and things like that. This is the main thing, you know, and then having this... having this plan in place and instead of just going in blind always set up a strategy and it was just this is what you're going to do this is what you say and often even typing those responses out in your phone or having your partner have them ready so that you don't have to think about them in the moment you just have them ready to go and and I find that's something that family members can also do and can have ready to i guess support the person going through the loss yeah and i think when you're talking about responses you're bringing up situations like when you're at a family barbecue and so and so's uncle says to you so when are you going to start having a family then alllthough how about you two you must be ready for a baby soon and yeah you've just lost a baby yeah like
Speaker: finding the words to wrap around that in the moment. And I want to firstly state that they should not be asking, commenting on a woman and a partner's fertility, full stop. We need to stop those conversations. But sadly, they still happen. So you're right. Some of the advice that comes from some of our peer support companions is having a thought before you go to these things. If you are going to attend, like have your wing person with you who can jump in for you and say different things at different points i also think there needs to be more permission slips around things like baby showers christenings i remember attending a baby shower i was newly pregnant i just had another loss and it was my best friends and i felt like i had to show up i spent most of it hiding in the toilet crying because i just wasn't ready to disclose to anyone that i was pregnant again and terrified
Speaker: And I was being really confronted by the fact that my friend's baby had carried on She was about to have her baby and I'd lost a baby at around the same time in our first trimester together. And I shouldn't have gone. But back in like, this would have been 2016. Back then, you you no one gave me a permission slip and said, don't go. yeah I went. Yeah.
Speaker: And I think we looked at that in the peer training, didn't we, actually at what you can say to people to excuse yourselves from public situations that are too much in the moment, too overwhelming. Baby showers, why are you going to a baby shower? newly pregnant after having experienced a loss that would have seen you having a baby shower at the same time as your best friend, you don't have to do that. And I think, you know, if the peer supporters are trained around that and they're like, yes, and then they can pass over that language that permission to the person that they're supporting to look after themselves you know it's like i'll i'll often say to people the worst thing has just happened to you so what are you going to punish yourself extra by doing things that ex exacerbate the grief for your sadness the way you're feeling you're being punished enough right now like you know it's like saying you've got a sunburn and And let's you know go sit out in the sun again. Why don't we just really fry ourselves? And it's the same with grief. you know
Speaker: And I guess where we come back to that disenfranchised is so often it's invisible. Unless there is that permission to say to Uncle at the barbecue, you know we'd love to be pregnant now, we've just lost a baby. And again, if you're able to do that... That brings even more. You know, we've come a long way in 10 years. and Pink Elephants is... I love it. I'm so passionate about the organisation because I get to live through the sharing of the support in the work that I do now all the time. So I see the lived impact of being able to direct people to a website, to your resources, to Facebook support groups, to the um peer support, to...
Speaker: I actually get to do that all the time and if it wasn't there, I can tell you what a hole there would be because the amount of times that I am referring into the service, there would be nothing else in its place that people can go to. So it's just filling this massive, massive of gap that was there that isn't anymore because of Pink Elephants.
Speaker: We are much better, as you alluded to, than we were 10 years ago. We still have a long way to go. And it's having those conversations, I think, you know, like Maggie was saying, and having the peer supporter empower the person who's in the trenches to change the discourse around by feeling like they have permission, because it's validated, to own their grief, the experience they've just had. and to change the narrative of people and the understanding of what it is to have an invisible early pregnancy loss yeah 100 and when you feel like you're strong enough to use your voice to share then being able to share and having the language around it because again we've had no education no discourse around this we don't know what to say how to say it so by us empowering people with that we get to change it for the future right
Speaker: Yeah, and that's been, you know, the way that we speak now, I remember, you know, like not having the words for these things like disenfranchised grief, all these words, you know, like what what are we even talking about? like But, you know, 10 years on, I think we are, we have the language, but like you said, we've still got a long way to go but we do have, we have the language around that now and it's, it's easier for us to talk about it. um You know, we have situations now where, yeah you know, we have peer support, like people that we've we've supported that have become peer support companions, you know, and we've got this kind of full circle moment happening over and over. And, you know, I think that's that's an amazing thing. I'm getting goosebumps, like just talking about it, because I just think, you know, I think thinking back to that training, that first training, and we were starting out and like,
Speaker: where would this go? you know, we knew that there was a purpose behind this always. um But, you know, to kind of look back to where we are now from there, it's it's it's it's quite, you know, it's quite powerful. um And yeah, it's it's an amazing thing to be part of, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I agree. I'm really proud of where it's come. And I think the effort that we put in in the beginning to underpin it with this like really strong foundations and actual training program. We talked about this a little bit off camera as well, Terry, like, why didn't we just say, hey, if you want to be a peer support companion, jump online and chat to people?
Speaker: I think it was so important to set this up right from the beginning to empower the peer supporters to feel like they were being able to support people and to ensure that they were at a place in their own story and journey that they were not going to be themselves easily retriggered. Not to say that there wasn't the risk of that happening, but to be far away enough from their own personal story. So, We looked at the criteria to become a peer support. So to either have completed your family or to have, um I think it we said, you know to be at least a year from your last loss experience so that when you were supporting somebody else, you could absolutely be there for them and that you weren't still stuck in the trenches of your own grief. so Having that acknowledgement, you know, that you are your own story, but you need to be okay with your story before you can help others. And I think we really looked at the criteria, you Gabby and I, of who are we going to offer this training to, who are going to be ideal peer supporters, and how we were going to maximise the impact of support.
Speaker: um I think we knew we wanted to roll this out everywhere, but that first one was just so um like integral and special, wasn't it, to handpick the people that um were going to come and do the training. And it was the best weekend ever for me. I think that yeah we had the most incredible time you know being able to really build that training. And I think we tweaked it a little bit afterwards as well based on the things that we had learnt in that training.
Speaker: you know, in that room at the time. um When we wrote the program, we looked at evidence around peer support. We really provided um research and information. We collaborated to actually make sure that the training programs stood the test of time, that it was robust, that we were not just pulling something out of the air and sending people off to do their very best job.
Speaker: that they could and again what came back to me and i'm i'm sure that this has gone through the last however many years eight nine ten years that you've been running it is just how much we wanted to look after the peer support person as well and i think that really for me underpinned the you know the success i guess of your peer support program and i think some of our peer support companions might actually listen to this episode and my absolute only whatsapp group that i like is my peer support companion group it is generally genuinely the most beautiful group of women who not only are offering this support to other people but they're in it together for each other the continuously offering support as an organization now we also have a paid volunteer coordinator we've never had that before we've now got a service delivery manager shout out to sophie and
Speaker: The organisation's grown around this programme and there has been slight iterations of it and changes based on need of what the community needs, but also what the peer support companion needs and how we can scale this. And all those things have been really measured and considered. And you put that in place for us from the beginning. So like, it's been an absolute pleasure to watch this programme grow. And I also think it's a testament to us receiving government funding for this programme. because of the time we took to establish it properly. And even now, it's not like we're supporting thousands of women each week through this program. We're talking like less than a few hundred. And that's because we're taking a slow and measured approach to growing our peer support companions because we want them to feel like a family to each other.
Speaker: They need that support network for each other. But also we want to make sure that there is a governance structure in place for the safety of everyone that's accessing support through Pink Elephants. And that's ah integral to our values of who we are because I don't want anyone to receive misinformation, like someone who's trying to counsel them, who should, like I said, this is not a counselling programme. This is not where we offer things like CBT or anything like that at all. it It is really validation, empathy and connection at the beginning of it. So yeah, it's come on a long way, but arguably from some really strong foundations.
Speaker: I want to look back a little bit now and see some of the changes that you've seen with the discourse around miscarriage and pregnancy loss in general society in the last 10 years and also look forward and think about some of the hopes that you might have for how this might change in the future. might start with you Maggie. It's a big question. It's a big question. I, yeah, I, you know, obviously as like someone who's walked this journey, like I feel like confident and comfortable in, you know, using our words and being, you know, very vocal and kind of open about this, you know, kind of um this this experience and about the support um that I have received through Pink Elephants as like, you know, as as well as being a peer supporter. companion, it has been something that has been very instrumental in my my journey and healing as well. You know, I think the, this is a funny one, in my son, but the first the first big thing for me was that my son was in the SRC in primary school. He's 17 now, but I think he was maybe, i don't know, maybe seven. And he wanted to raise money for pink elephants. I remember this like
Speaker: yesterday and it was a it's a tiny little thing of you know I'm like you know this is amazing I'm not sure how you know this is gonna go at your SRC but you know and then having this child you know be able to speak about miscarriage you know as a as a as a 17 year old and and that's not something that is at all for him something that's not okay to talk about which is to me a small personal thing that is very important you know but um I guess also just the reach that we've we've had, you know, through social media and through everything that we've been doing, just opening that discussion, you know, and, you know, having, having you know, discussions in workplaces and having referrals come back and having... you know Even something small, like my husband you know at work and someone um one of his his um staff members' wife was going through a loss and straight had gone and said, this person's struggling, can you please direct them? you know So you know those things, are like ah it may seem small, but just the the fact that people know that we are there and that we are the, we're where you go to get the support. For me, that's um that's a really, really big step forward.
Speaker: 100%. And I'd argue they're not small. I often get asked what my proudest moments at Pink Elephants yeah are and everyone expects me to say lethal loss, legislation change, policy to change, all that. And yeah, absolutely, incredibly proud of that and it's a massive legacy. But my proudest moments often come in those quiet moments that you talked about when you meet someone who you find out access support through pink elephants and I had no idea at the time because I'm no longer in the support in that way but and that we made that difference that we were the ones that they then felt brave enough to try and conceive again because you know how difficult that is to literally go into another pregnancy you're rolling the dice with your heart you're wondering whether you're going to get another miscarriage or whether you're going to get to keep this baby That's so hard. And then to walk the journey of pregnancy after loss. But we hold their hand the whole way through that. And they feel like they can go through that challenge because they're supported. And I just, like, they they're the wins, right? They're the small one-on-one. That's why we exist. That's why we started. So I think being able to empower your son, your husband to have literacy and language around this so that they're helping other people find that one-on-one support, that's profound. Yeah, oh absolutely. I mean, the...
Speaker: The changes from when I experienced my losses 20 plus years ago, you know, into the next decade and now the decade that we've had the Pink Elephant support, the changes are profound. I think you have so much to be so very proud of, you know, in building this organisation. And really it is that empowering, it's that validation, it's taking something that is so commonplace that happens to, you know, one in four pregnancies, end in miscarriage.
Speaker: There are, you know, a world of women and to go this happens and this is a way that we respond to it and and to have the language, the discourse, the support, to have it backed up with all the resources that we have. I feel like an absolute hero in the work I do because I know that I've got something to refer to people to that's going to provide them with the support, you know, that that I trust, that I respect, that I think is so incredibly um targeted and accurate and, you know, just unbelievable resources. And the future I just see in, you know, my hope is that in 10 years time, we have just continued to evolve so that, you know, where Maggie, I think, said before, it's better, but it's still not perfect where it is, but it's better than it was, you know, 10 years ago and when you were experiencing your losses. that in 10 years time we're having a conversation around the 20th anniversary of pink elephants and reflecting back yet again on how much broader the understanding of pregnancy loss and the importance of support and that validation empathy connect has become in the next decade i see only great positive things coming you know to support women and the losses are getting bigger and bigger the more technology we have the more genetics is improving, ultrasound's improving, the more people are getting to be able to make decisions for their babies, their pregnancies, their children, we are going to see a lot more early pregnancy loss where maybe it's, you know, more people are having a say in the kinds of
Speaker: lives they want their their children and their families to live and so I think we're just going to see pregnancy loss increase you know rather than subside as time goes on. Yeah sadly agree and we've seen that already as well and I think a lot of the termination for medical reasons by the time this podcast comes out we'll have another specialised area on our website specific to that need and we'll also have peer support companions with that lived experience that we can optimally match people to as well because that matters too right but Yes, sadly, it is increasing, but then that just makes us stronger in delivering the change that we want to see to ensure that no one goes through these experiences the way that the three of us did. We didn't get what we deserved or what we needed in our moment of need. yeah
Speaker: But what I'm proud of most is that we're changing that for others. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
