The Nurse Keith Show · Keith Carlson, RN, BSN, NC-BC

Inspiring Light, Hope, and Resilience After Pregnancy Loss

December 6, 2024·56 min·5 clips

Rachelle Dumas lost a baby in the bathroom during her own gender reveal party, realizing something was terribly wrong.

The center is grief. Rachelle Dumas talks about pregnancy loss as something that happens inside a clinical system, where timing, wording, and cutoffs can either soften the day or make it worse. After a 15-week loss, she remembers being asked in the emergency department how she knew she had been pregnant. It is a brutal question to hear in that moment. The host reacts with shock and sits with how strange a 20-week cutoff can feel when someone is already scared and grieving. That line on the calendar is not abstract for the guest. Because she was under it, she says she could not go to the maternity emergency setting for care. The episode keeps coming back to compassion as a real nursing skill. It talks through the unease clinicians may feel around what to say, what to ask, and how far to step into someone else's loss. The guest brings up hard, practical questions too: breast milk, possible donation, and whether offering those choices helps or hurts. Nurses are people too, and she leaves room for fatigue, personal history, or shock behind a bad response. But the hurt still counts. The episode holds both truths: clinicians are human, and patients need gentleness when everything has cracked open. The host listens closely, names the barriers Rachelle faced, and asks how A Light After Nine began. Nine losses eventually become advocacy, shaped by pain, rest, and hope.

As heard by us

A hard conversation about pregnancy loss and the care that should meet it.

Pregnancy loss sits at the center here, along with the strain of trying to get care after it and the damage that rigid hospital rules can do in an already brutal moment.

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Why you'd press play

You want a compassionate, unflinching look at pregnancy loss, the misconceptions around it, and the care patients run into.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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