Just when you think it’s all over…

Where I was in the story

I’m aware that I haven’t written much about miscarriage and infertility here in this space for quite some time now, but that’s purely because it felt like our story was finished, and there’s been nothing more to say…

It’s been four years since I was last found myself pregnant back in the spring of 2019, and since then we’ve tried to conceive again, been through fertility specialists, weighed up all our options (limited!), and finally made our peace with having no more kids.

So try to imagine our utter shock and surprise at discovering that I was pregnant again, while we were holidaying in Spain with some of our extended family over the Easter break.

To be honest, I initially just put my delayed cycle down to changes caused by early perimenopausal symptoms rather than pregnancy. A few days late? No big deal, I thought. I’d been here plenty of times before…

In fact, I was so sure that the delay wasn’t caused by pregnancy that I put off doing a test until the following week, once we’d got home from Spain. And even then, I only really took a test just to just rule out the possibility of pregnancy so that I could enjoy a few drinks on my birthday the following weekend.

At almost 43 years of age, and following 4 years of unexplained infertility, I honestly never imagined that I would ever see a little plus sign on a pregnancy test again. But sure enough, there it was, when I finally checked on Easter Monday, as clear as it could be.

Even so, I didn’t quite believe it… Perhaps it was an old test producing a faulty result? I mean, who knows how long the kit had been sitting around my bathroom cupboard for. In the end, it took buying three more tests (all different brands), a hospital urine sample, and an early pregnancy scan before I could fully accept this new reality.

Needless to say, a baby wasn’t something we were still trying to conceive, planning for, or expecting to be a part of our story in 2023.

Somewhere over the past 4 years I had learned to let go of all hope for continuing to grow our family. I’d mourned not only the loss of previous pregnancies, but also the future children I knew I’d now never have. And I was actually okay with it all.

In fact, I was in a really good place. Over the last 12-18 months in particular, I’d felt a growing sense of ease & acceptance with my life and family, as it is, rather than as I’d always imagined it would be, I’d even come to the point of appreciating some of the extra freedoms that having only one child can offer.

So I can hardly convey in words the utter confusion of emotions I felt to suddenly be confronted by the fact that our story wasn’t quite over just yet, after all. It required a huge mental shift and emotional adjustment from us both…

An unexpected plot twist

One of the main reasons that it felt like such a major plot twist was because right after my last loss (in May 2019) I actually prayed that I wouldn’t ever get pregnant again, unless it was going to be viable and go full term.

I don’t mean to sound too pessimistic or faithless, but after undergoing so much trauma and loss already, I had long since stopped hoping and praying for a miracle pregnancy. That was something I just didn’t really believe was within our grasp anymore.

So when no further pregnancies ever followed after my third loss, that at least felt like a kind of answer to pray or small kindness of God.

It may not have been what we actually wanted at that time, but deep down I also trusted that this was the best outcome for us now - we’d already weathered so much disappointment and we all just wanted to be able to heal and finally move on.

So we made a decision to close the final chapter on that story, and began to focus our attention towards new and different things…

But now, here we were again, suddenly facing this unexpected plot twist, and wondering why, after all this time?

Being pregnant again

Finding myself unexpectedly pregnant again after all that time, felt both miraculous and terrifying, in equal measure.

Terrifying because there was simply no getting away from the fact that this pregnancy was really high risk, due to both my advanced maternal age (now over 40), as well as a history of unexplained and unresolved recurrent loss.

But miraculous too. How did this happen, when we weren’t even trying? Even against all of those statistical odds that we had stacked against us?

So even though I knew that our chances of having a good outcome this time around were very poor on paper, a small part of me still wondered if this was the miracle we’d long waited for. And I just couldn’t help hoping that God might do the impossible for us this time.

But all that said, we certainly weren’t prepared to leave it to God, chance, or fate either, and so we made sure we’d left no practical stone unturned this time either.

Since this was almost certainly going to be my last shot at a pregnancy, we literally tried everything that medicine could offer to us, in the hope that something might just prove to be the difference between a life and another loss.

Under the care of my consultant, I started on a new, more intense combination of drugs, supplements and hormones than I had ever tried before: high dose folic acid, low dose aspirin, omega 3, vitamin B & D supplements, twice daily progesterone pessaries, and also daily shots of heparin to help reduce the risk of clotting too.

Basically, if there was any evidence of a slightly improved pregnancy outcome after recurrent loss, we tried it in the hope of being finally able to re-write this chapter of our story.

Pregnancy after loss

As any parent who has been through loss will tell you, pregnancy after loss is extremely difficult to navigate and an incredibly anxious time.

There really is no option to ‘just relax’ and ‘trust it will be okay’ (the advice that almost everyone offers!). Loss strips away any of that naivety, replacing it with the knowledge that this is simply not how pregnancy always goes. The worst things can in life can and do happen, and no one is exempt.

And since that innocence has already been taken away, no dose of positive thinking, no pregnancy milestone you can reach, can ever take all of the anxiety away.

Still, after our first reassurance scan at 6.5 weeks, we shared our news with some of our close family and friends, even as we continued to wrestle daily within that tension of hoping for the best, but also bracing ourselves for the worst.

There’s this somewhat outdated idea that still lingers that couples shouldn’t share their pregnancy news with anyone until after 12 weeks, just in case something goes wrong.

I think this is loosely based on the notion that most losses happen in the first trimester, and also because this is usually when most couples have their first scan. But this logic has never made much sense to me. Dealing with loss at any stage makes you painfully aware that there simply is no safe point in pregnancy. What’s more, 12 weeks is a very subjective timescale (especially if you’ve already had earlier scans), and medically speaking ‘early loss’ is actually considered as anything up to 24 weeks.

Ultimately though, this wasn’t a principled decision for me. The fact was, whether our final pregnancy outcome was good or bad, I knew we’d need our best people around us. And so armed with all the drugs that we could access, and all the support and prayers of loved ones we could drum up, we embarked on this first trimester journey for the fifth time around.

As much as we were able to, we tried to hold all of it very lightly, not over think it all, not rush too far ahead of ourselves, and just take the pregnancy one day at a time…

Not an easy thing to do though, especially when there’s so many constant reminders of the pregnancy all around you. Every daily pill, every pessary or injection you take, every fortnightly ‘reassurance’ scan, and let’s be honest, every trip to the toilet too, is like living on a knife edge!

But I tried to keep reminding myself to stay present, and to simply be grateful for each day, as that seemed like a good way to stave off the worst of the anxiety about whatever lay ahead. Some days that came more easily than others, but overall we did okay.

‘Cautiously hopeful’

When I reflect back on how we approached those early weeks of pregnancy now, the words I’d use to best describe our feelings about it all was ‘cautiously hopeful’.

Cautious for all of the reasons I’ve already outlined above, and yet also hopeful because deep we still so desperately want to believe that God was still able to work a miracle for us - even after everything we’ve been through.

We chose to ‘hope against all hope’ because ultimately, even despite all of the disappointment we had already known, hope still felt like the better option.

And really, what other choice do any of us have when we face hard things?

During that first trimester, I honestly don’t think we could have done anything better or differently, and for that reason I don’t think I’d change anything at all. I means, I’d change the outcome (of course!) but for our part, I know we stayed as relaxed as we could be, and we gave it our very best shot.

That aside, there were also a few specific reasons why we felt cautiously optimistic or hopeful as well.

Firstly, I had previously asked God to close my womb unless I was going to carry a pregnancy full term - which sort of left us wondering, why now after four long years of infertility? Maybe there was a specific reason why I was pregnant again after all this time? Maybe…

Secondly, the pregnancy due date fell almost exactly seven years to the day after my first miscarriage started - and seven is God’s perfect number. In many historical Bible texts, seven is the number that symbolically communicates a sense of “fullness” or “completeness” - a finishing of the story. Just a strange coincidence of timing? Perhaps, but if I was writing this story for myself (which of course I’m not), I couldn’t think of any better conclusion.

And if I’m totally honest about it, I’ve also just always felt a small nagging sense in my own heart that this story wasn’t quite over yet too. It’s far from a scientific measure, but it was just something I felt in my gut.

So for all of these reasons and more, we felt cautiously hopeful about this pregnancy.

And for about six long weeks, that happy conclusion almost felt within our grasp.

We saw three healthy scans in total - at 6.5 weeks, 7.5 weeks and 8.5 weeks. But sadly our fourth scan at 10.5 weeks confirmed that our little miracle was not to last.

Where we are right now…

It’s utterly devastating to be facing another loss this summer, especially when we already felt like we’d had closure before.

But here we are, with another new layer of grief to contend with. Nothing about this situation feels okay, but having already survived this heartbreak more than once before, I know that we will be in time again…

I don’t have any answers for why this happened, or for why this kind of loss keeps on happening to me. And I probably never will. It’s simply beyond the current realms of science or medicine to know, but it seems that my body just doesn’t carry pregnancies properly for some undiagnosable, and therefore unfixable, reason.

And yet we also already have our son Ben, who actually is our real, living, breathing miracle son, right in the middle of this whole crazy story.

I don’t really like to talk about silver linings in this context, because what kind of positive can you really draw from a much longed for pregnancy ending too soon? But if I was forced to find one in the situation, I suppose that it would be this:

Previously we have always been left wondering ‘What if we managed to get pregnant one more time, and we just tried this… or that…? Could that have made the difference for us?‘

But despite all of the pills, pessaries and needles, I still lost this pregnancy in exactly the same gestational week.

So ‘at least’ we now know for sure that there’s nothing more we can do, and although that feels like a small consolation right now, maybe it’ll prove to be some helpful closure to our story in time.

Reflections on grief

Despite all the hours I’ve spent discussing, reading, researching, writing about, and listening to the experiences of others, there’s still just so many unanswered questions for me.

But here’s some of my latest reflection, from right here in the trenches of grief…

People often say that time is a really great healer, but six years into this journey I can honestly say now that I think this is only true in part.

Of course, the sharpest stabs of pain lessens and the deepest disappointment ebbs away with time, and other people around the griever mostly move on and forget about the gap that’s been left by a loss quite quickly too. But for the one who is actually grieving, that sense of deep longing for things to be different only continues to quietly and persistently nag away…

You don’t really ever ‘get over’ loss, and the gap that loss leaves behind doesn’t shrink and disappear in time. When you lose a baby (or anyone else close to you for that matter) the impact of that loss isn’t just felt in that moment; it continues to reverberate across a whole lifetime of missed moments and memories too.

Truthfully, I don’t actually think that there is such a thing as full healing from grief here on earth anymore, since there’s no real ending or proper closure to loss this side of heaven either.

BUT although I don’t think that grief ever disappears, I do think you can learn to grow around your grief in time.

It can slowly become integrated into your identity and into your story, shaping who you are becoming, and hopefully for the better.

I also don’t think that grief even shrinks or becomes smaller with time either, but I do think that you can be enlarged by the experience.

It can make you more kind, open-hearted, more compassionate to others, and more motivated to work towards change, if you allow it to soften not harden your heart.

So there’s that…