Hellobee

After we were married, Mac Daddy and I knew we wanted to have a child, but weren’t sure when. Our wedding was in September 2012, and I can still clearly remember going for a walk a short while later, deciding that we’d get ourselves onto a rough five-year plan and start trying to conceive in spring of 2013. We had no idea what to expect, but I started tracking my cycles and reading up on pregnancy, hoping things would happen quickly once we got started.

In February 2013, I started feeling incredibly crampy. Having been tracking my cycle for a few months, I knew we had taken a chance earlier that month and that I could be pregnant. It wasn’t a huge deal if I was pregnant sooner than planned — we were both ready, and just waiting for that arbitrary spring date so that we could have what we thought was an ideally-timed baby if all went well. That’s why we weren’t exactly being super-cautious to avoid the risk.

And, it turned out my hunch was right — I was pregnant, we were thrilled, and we had no idea just how lucky we were to be those “we weren’t even trying!” people. My pregnancy was relatively uneventful, save for a few spotting issues, a subchorionic hemorrhage, and some small measurements later on in the third trimester. Labour was a bit of a challenge, but that’s a whole other story I’ll tell soon.

When our daughter, born in November 2013, was about a year and a half old, we decided to try to expand our family with a second child. Given our first experience we were, retrospectively, way too overconfident about our chances. Getting pregnant was easy — staying pregnant wasn’t.

We had fun trying the first cycle, tried again the next, and (I, at least) started to feel frustrated on the third. But we got pregnant that month — and lost it, between four and five weeks along, having known about the pregnancy for a week. I sort of felt like having a miscarriage was paying my dues, in a way. I knew how common it was and although it stung, looking on the bright side meant that it was over with and the next one would be fine. Right?

Two more cycles of trying, the last one being the one where I became fed up, said I wasn’t ‘trying’ anymore, and put my basal body thermometer away — and then we were pregnant again. This one felt like it was going to stick. We all had good feelings about it. We connected. We shared the story of our first loss, and shared our growing joy with a few family members and friends — and then, at six weeks, it was all gone, again.

I decided to book an appointment with our nurse practitioner after my second miscarriage. I wasn’t sure what I was going to ask, or what I even wanted to accomplish — I just wanted to be able to walk out of the clinic feeling more confident, and less like I was drowning in confusion. Two weeks later I went in to see her.

It started out feeling like it was going to be a “we can’t do anything more for you” appointment — and it was, in terms of fertility testing. She reiterated why the clinic takes a stance on pursuing further treatment only if there are three losses. I floundered, a bit, at that point. Not because I was really expecting testing, but because I felt like I was still back at square one — there was no way to be really proactive, no way to force things to work. I knew that going in, but my heart still sank.

We did do a general health workup. She ordered a huge array of bloodwork; everything from thyroid function to glucose levels, and a pap. We knew things were physically normal with my uterus thanks to the zillion ultrasounds I’d had through the losses.

In the meantime, she said, we were free to try again, so we did, and I was pregnant the next cycle. I went in to see her, because she suggested earlier and more frequent care to deal with my anxiety, but literally the very next day I started bleeding again. This was right around Christmas, and I fell through the cracks at the clinic, with no follow-up beyond a blood test and an ultrasound, until mid-January. That was incredibly hard to deal with.

At my January appointment, which was supposed to be routine prenatal appointment, the practitioner told me she thought we needed to take a three-month break, to regroup and recuperate, and try again in spring. I didn’t want to hear that, but I abided by it for two months before booking an appointment with a new doctor to get a second opinion — the nurse practitioner had moved on to another community in the meantime. Waiting was making me feel worse, and I was tired of not having any insight into my body.

The new doctor immediately set up a referral to a fertility specialist, and said we could go ahead and start trying again. If I happened to get pregnant before getting into the specialist, so be it. And that’s exactly what happened — it took three months to get that appointment, done through telemedicine video conferencing, and two and a half months to get pregnant. Luckily the specialist rolled with it and changed gears from fertility investigation to early pregnancy monitoring, and got us started with beta tests and early ultrasounds until I could snag a regular prenatal appointment locally.

I was terrified throughout the whole first trimester, utterly convinced I would lose this baby like I had lost the last three. For some reason, so far, this one has stuck. My miscarriages are unexplained, but I’m nearing the third trimester and trying to keep breathing.

Our entire journey to parenthood, both to our first child and to our second, has looked nothing like I ever would have imagined. That five-year plan is thoroughly out the window! For so long, I felt like we were being pummelled by the universe, and I had to learn a lot about myself and my coping mechanisms in order to get through it with any sense of grace left intact.

I can’t say I’m grateful for the experience of loss — I wish it had never happened. But I am grateful for the empathy I now have for others who have walked this path, and the lessons I’ve learned along the way.