A blogger who wrote a heartbreaking letter to her unborn baby only to lose it in a miscarriage is getting ready for the Great Manchester Run.
Emily Chriscoli, 24, from Warrington, fell pregnant in September 2014 and was preparing to bring up the child as a single mum when she received the tragic news.
She decided to take on the 10k challenge to raise money for Tommy’s, a charity dedicated to funding research into stillbirth, premature birth and miscarriage.
She told MM: “You get to 12 weeks and you think everything is going to be fine. I didn’t think anything would be wrong.”
However in November last year, at 13 weeks pregnant, Emily was given an emergency scan where doctors discovered the baby’s heart had stopped beating.
“They said basically, your baby’s asleep, it has died overnight,” she said.
“It was obviously still there, I hadn’t miscarried as such.”
Emily was told that the baby probably would not pass on its own because of how far gone she was and that she therefore needed to have a D and C operation to remove it, which she had two days later.
Around six weeks before the tragic incident, Emily had written a post for her blog entitled, ‘Letter to my unborn baby’, something that she wanted to show her child in the future.
The pregnancy was ‘a massive shock’ to the 24-year-old who had been told in March last year that the chances of her having a baby were as little as 1% because her womb was twisted the wrong way.
She told MM: “Most of these things happen in the first 8 weeks and mine would have actually been 14 weeks by the time that I’d actually had the op.
“When I went in for the operation they said to me, ‘what do you want to do with the baby’s body?’ and a lot of people arrange things like funeral proceedings and because I was quite far on they did say I could have a plaque in the baby garden.
“It was all a lovely idea but the option that rang true with me really was that they could pass on the tissue and everything to Tommy’s, the charity that train midwives and study miscarriages to prevent things like that happening.
“Not a lot of people choose that option because obviously it’s such a hard thing to say, ‘yes, take my baby and you can run tests on it.’ But it also meant that they could feedback information to me about what went wrong with the pregnancy.”
Emily then set herself the target of raising £500 for her chosen charity via a JustGiving page and explained she had previously wanted to take on the challenge before falling pregnant.
She chose to do the run in Manchester partly because she has just finished two years at The Manchester School of Acting.
“I’d wanted to do the run for months really before I actually found out I was pregnant,” she said.
“I thought I could turn this into something positive and I could do it for Tommy’s. It just made sense to do it for them.
“Within something ridiculous, like 14 hours, I’d gone over the target. People I didn’t even know were giving, like, £25. It was very moving and I’m really touched by it. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind.”
After making the decision to take on the run, the 24-year-old was given some hopeful news during a check-up at Warrington Hospital.
She said: “When you have a problem with your cervix or your womb getting pregnant can be quite tricky but when you do get pregnant it can fix those problems.
“I was told that my womb is now only tilted – it’s not twisted – so my chances of getting pregnant are pretty much what they should be, even though they are not 100% like most people. So I saw it as a positive thing, for future children, when maybe I’ll be in a happier situation.”
Jane Brewin, Chief Executive of Tommy’s, said: “We’re delighted to have Emily’s support in the Great Manchester Run and she’s done extremely well to raise more than £500 virtually overnight.
“Emily’s donation will help us to fund vital medical research into pregnancy complications that help to save babies’ lives. We wish her the best of luck for the race.”
