3 years, 5 embryos, 3 pregnancies, 1 baby
What I wish I didn't know about miscarriage and am thrilled to finally know about motherhood 💕
Did you know that miscarriage is very common? Or that there are different kinds of miscarriage you can have?
Your pregnancy can seem to be progressing normally until your first scan. This is what happened to us, in autumn 2021.
It was six months after my dad had died, suddenly, and our pregnancy had seemed like a consolation.
Life goes on. The circle of life. One in, one out to the nightclub of existence. Etc, etc.
After the simple excitement of the positive test, everything seemed fine. Textbook, even. Sore boobs and ‘morning sickness’ that lasted all day. Actually, I was horrified by how ill I felt, and scared it would last the whole nine months, but I was bolstered too, by the joy I had felt on discovering I was pregnant.
I have always wanted and not wanted to be a mother. Sometimes I assumed it would happen, and could almost picture it, but mostly I pictured a life where it did not. I was more interested in reading and writing and travel. None of the things I enjoyed seemed compatible with raising babies.
Until I met my partner, and we moved in together. He really wanted kids, and I started to picture it too: having a family. As we created a peaceful home I could actually see him helping out sufficiently that the idea seemed less oppressive.
Five years after we got together, we were pregnant. And I was delighted. In a simple, uncomplicated way, in spite of decades of fear and ambivalence.
That's a good sign, I thought.
And so, our much-wanted pregnancy progressed. And I was afraid of the things I knew to be afraid of - that the baby wouldn't develop normally, or that the embryo would burrow into the wrong place.
But mostly, I assumed we would have a baby in 9 months. I googled nursery ideas and our due date logged itself into my brain. April 4th 2022. Our baby would be a Cancer!
I ate McDonald's and sucked on ginger sweets, and doubled my napping regimen, often to escape the constant nausea.
We conceived via IVF, and so were offered a viability scan around 7 weeks.
“I’m worried it's ectopic,” I told the sonographer as I climbed onto the hospital bed at the fertility clinic.
My partner held my hand as we waited for more information. My pants were scrunched up in his pocket, my trainers waiting neatly underneath the bed. All these details seem charged with hope now.
He squeezed my hand, as we stared at the monitor, waiting for our burgeoning pregnancy to display onscreen.
“Here's your baby's heartbeat,” the sonographer said, and relief dropped through me. “The embryo is in the right place.”
She smiled and I don't remember what happened next, but I know we didn't get to enjoy the moment for long - because the sonographer kept talking, and her words were littered with details I didn't understand.
“This is the fetal pole…” she said, pointing out something difficult to decipher for the inexperienced.
“It's measuring a little smaller than I'd like,” she said, and it's hard not to load this moment with doom because I know now, how that first pregnancy unfolded.
But at the time, we were still hopeful.
The measurement fit with a gestational age of around five weeks, we were told, and we were supposed to be past seven. But sometimes the dates were slightly wrong, and it was possible that things could still be absolutely fine.
“The embryo is so tiny at this point it’s difficult to measure,” she said, after I was dressed, and my partner and I hovered near the door.
We would return for another scan in a week or two.
“Stay hopeful!” she said, firmly.
And so we did. Sure, we had to work on it, but we followed orders. We stayed hopeful.
I knew very little about miscarriage then. I had yet to learn the term ‘missed miscarriage’. When a pregnancy ends but the body doesn't register it. When you discover things aren't ok via ultrasound.
As usual, anxiety led me to the internet.
fetal pole measuring small
I typed.
And:
small fetal pole, with heartbeat
I saw the words 'missed miscarriage' for the first time, but they were not yet to do with me and so I skipped over them.
I learned that the heartbeat was a very positive marker. Once the heartbeat had been picked up, miscarriage rates diminished significantly.
Besides I still felt pregnant. I still had symptoms. The nausea was unbearable and I spent most of my time in bed, feeling sorry for myself for not being able to tolerate 'morning sickness' (newsflash: it was hyperemesis gravidarum, but I didn't know that yet, and that's another post.)
Trawling forums I saw the words again: missed miscarriage. When the pregnancy fails without any external signs of this failure. No cramping. No blood. You discovered the end of your pregnancy when no heartbeat was deciphered at your next scan.
We stayed hopeful. We had seen a heartbeat. And the sonographer had not seemed worried. I could still hear her words, as we left, the precise cadence of them.
Upbeat and confident. Decisive.and informed.
Stay hopeful.
We went to my best friend's wedding, where I got a reprieve from ‘morning sickness' for the day. I was delighted and made the most of it. I was so new to TTC (trying to conceive) that I didn't know that the sudden disappearance of pregnancy symptoms could be anything but a gift.
I was so relieved to enjoy delicious food and be able to dance. It had been the toughest year of my life, with COVID and the sudden death of my father, various failed embryo transfers, and the stress of trying to buy a house in the demented Bristol market.
We were ready to have fun, and we were excited for the future. My friends looked so happy, newly married and bright with love, and the venue was romantic and enchanting. We danced and drank fancy alcohol-free drinks and snuck back to our posh hotel room to nap and canoodle.
I was a bridesmaid for the first time since I was a little kid, and it was a wonderful, joyful day where I felt relaxed and happy with how my life was coming together.
From time to time, we reassured each other about the smallness of the fetal pole.
“Once you’ve heard the heartbeat there's a much lower chance of miscarriage,” I reminded him (and myself).
“They told us to stay hopeful,” he reassured me (and himself).
The days passed as slowly as days pass when you wait for news that has the power to derail you, but finally we returned for the follow-up scan. I don't remember what happened exactly.
A different nurse said there had been no more growth. She could no longer detect a heartbeat.
We were sent across the road to the Early Pregnancy Unit. It felt like the saddest place in the world.
“You're here because there's no heartbeat, is that right?” a nurse asked, briskly, and we felt like she had punched us in the throat.
Was that why we were here?
We had only just discovered no heart beat, less than an hour ago. I still thought it might have been a mistake. That the Early Pregnancy Unit had more sensitive technology and they would find the heartbeat that had been previously missed.
It felt like Bad News Scan day at the Early Pregnancy Unit. A couple held each other and cried in the corridor beside the waiting room.
I found a huge blood clot lurking, like the spiky-toothed clown out of It, in the bottom of the toilet.
Even the wall-mounted TV warned of possible horrors, with the reconstructed story of a teenage girl who was raped by a stranger while swimming in the sea.
“I didn’t even know that was something I should be scared about,” I whispered, and my boyfriend looked up, dazed, from scrolling on his phone.
I had fallen into the role of anthropologist-writer, something I default to when suffering is high (it's how I became a writer!). I collected the specific sensory details that would bring this ‘scene’ to life. Witnessing the awfulness of the experience, not yet for myself, but for those around me, for others who might have to go through this.
We walked into another room. Another scan. And were told again that there was no heartbeat. And this time, I sat on my partner’s lap and cried.
“We can’t declare it a miscarriage yet,” the nurse said, sadly. “It’s incredibly important that we are absolutely certain.”
It was brutal. And I cried. And my partner didn’t. And the art on the walls was terrible. And the prospect of waiting to see if our baby really was gone was terrible. And the hope, that maybe, just maybe, their scans were wrong, was terrible.
We were left alone in the room where there had been no heartbeat.
Then sent to be alone together in another room.
And then another nurse came by to offer terrible options to help my body return to unpregnant.
And we were sent away, to wait for another week. And it was terrible.
I went to work, because I had a very new job, and I didn't want to advertise that we were trying to get start a family. I wore thick sanitary towels, as advised. ‘Expectant management' I think they call it. And nothing happened.
There was no hope - we were no longer being told to stay hopeful - and yet I conjured some.
I found scraps of the stuff in the archives of Mumsnet. In the posts of defiant, probably American, women who dismissed their doctors’ pronouncements that their pregnancy was over, and refused the medications or procedures that would bring about miscarriage, and who now swore to cradle healthy newborns in their arms as they typed these posts.
A week later, another scan. And this time, even less evidence of our pregnancy.
Finally, finally, hope left.
(And it was terrible.)
Autumn term was due to begin. My first seminars in my new role, and I had been neither truly pregnant nor actually miscarrying for weeks now. I wanted/needed this to be over, so I opted for the medical procedure. It seemed quickest and cleanest. Plus I enjoyed general anaesthetic. Free drugs, etc. As a sober person, you have to take your highs where you can get them.
I was booked in to have an operation.
38, sober, and more in touch with my emotions than I have ever been before, I discovered that being professionally knocked unconscious was no longer the slightly thrilling experience I had found it to be in my twenties.
Perhaps because of the reason I was going under. Or because I’m no longer in thrall to oblivion.
Or maybe the kindness of nurses is no longer so strikingly comforting to me, since my life is built around kindness.
Whatever the reason, as I was wheeled into the operating room, I experienced the rush of adrenalin not as excitement, but as fear.
Everybody was extremely kind to me, and I began to sob inconsolably as the anesthetist found a vein. I didn't want this to be happening. I didn't want them to remove my pregnancy.
An angel in blue scrubs stroked my shoulder as my body shook with sobs. And then I lost consciousness.
I woke, kind of. Back on the ward, shivering uncontrollably. Somebody covered me with a blanket and then rolled me onto my side and slid something into my bottom. I hope they were an employee of the hospital.
I woke again. Another angel brought me toast with butter and jam and a cup of sugary tea, the most delicious breakfast of my life.
“Everything went perfectly. No problems at all,” she told me.
I was no longer pregnant. And after the dreadful limbo of the last weeks, it was such a relief.
My partner must have been waiting for me somewhere, and he drove me home. To our new house with a garden and a spare bedroom, that we’d moved into in the midst of all this hope and sadness. I prayed that our new place wouldn’t be scarred with the memory of what we had lost.
A year later, as I edited this piece that had sat in my computer for months, I was pregnant again. After experiencing a second missed miscarriage, a few months after the first.
This third time, as I edit, it has been 15 weeks, and we have had three scans. Each time we see a tiny, apparently healthy and normal, embryo, then fetus. We feel exhilarated and delighted as we watch this tiny being wriggle or relax.
But we can’t forget the horror and grief of the bad news scans that came before.
We can’t unknow the sad fact that your pregnancy symptoms can continue while your pregnancy does not.
And so we wait for the 20-week scan with great anxiety.
“You will probably only be able to relax once your baby is in your arms,” one of the sonographers we have come to know well at the fertility clinic told us.
“It took me seven years to get my son,” she shared, with sadness and pride and empathy in her beautiful, gentle, compassionate eyes.
“Your anxiety makes sense, given everything you’ve been through,” she says, and we nod.
And I wish that she wasn’t right.
My uterus is expanding, and I have terrible nausea. Miserable as this last part is, we take it as a positive sign.
When you are pregnant after miscarriage(s), it is hard to enjoy the ride. Every moment of joy or imagining the future feels like a provocation to fate. You find yourself becoming superstitious. As though your happiness is the pride that comes before a fall. You may not dare to talk about the future.
But the chances of miscarriage drop with every week of pregnancy.
And most women who have had one or two miscarriages will go on to have a healthy baby. 60% of women who have recurrent miscarriages (three or more) will go on to have a healthy baby, too.
As the miscarriage odds reassurer tells me every few days when anxiety drives me to check it, we are 99.3% more likely to have a healthy baby than a miscarriage at this juncture.
Anxiety is powerful, but hope is relentless. Neither emotion is entirely in my control. Each arises in response to the ongoing knowns and unknowns of my life. In response to the fact that I am alive.
Right now, editing this, I am pregnant. And our most recent scan showed an apparently healthy developing fetus, chilling in my womb.
And we are so hopeful and we are so anxious, because the future is currently unknown, and yet at the same time, already in process. And there’s very little we can do about it.
I try to let myself enjoy the moments of hope and joy. To not beat myself up for the fear and anxiety. Because it’s all an unavoidable part of the experience.
And as I finally dare to finish this, and post it, I have a sleeping baby on my arms.
He arrived last Monday, and this past week has been indescribably wonderful.
In my thirties I used to Google, Should I have children?
And a couple of time Google really overstepped and actually answered that I shouldn't.
If you are ambivalent about becoming a parent, don't do it, one top-losted article said.
Because it is all-encompassing and there are no returns.
This article haunted me along the way of our quest, from time to time. It made me question what I was doing and whether all the pain was unnecessary.
But the first week of motherhood has been the greatest joy of my life.
To the extent that I find myself wondering, What else have I (and Google) been wrong about?
Some knowledge can only be gained from experience.
And sometimes you just have to take the risk.
Listening to my baby sleep, and remembering how hard it was to get here, I'm so glad that I kept going, in spite of all the suffering.
Maybe these weeks are all the sweeter because of it. Or maybe the suffering was for nothing, and I draw meaning from it because all humans are meaning-makers.
Whatever the truth is, I'm glad hope persisted. That it is the panting, stalking, driving and relentless beast that it is.
Thanks for reading,
Chelsey 💕
Things I read that helped
This wonderful cartoon by Julia Wertz
Guardian long read by Jennie Agg
Chelsey Flood is the author of award-winning novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE. She writes about freedom, addiction, nature and love at Beautiful Hangover, and is also working on a non-fiction book about getting sober and finding out she’s neurodiverse, and a new YA novel.
You can connect with the Autistic community on Twitter. If you have a question, use #ActuallyAutistic or #AskingAutistics (or both). You can also visit The Autism Self Advocacy Network and the Autistic Not Weird Facebook page and website. I also love the book by Rudy Simone 22 Things Your Girlfriend with Aspergers Wants You To Know
Much love and congratulations to you all 💙👶🏼 xxxx
Well there goes my make up! 😅😭 you captured the journey so painfully beautifully. I'm so proud of you and overjoyed for you xxx