By Amy Braier
Your Stories: Amy’s Story
Around 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, but for us it was 3 in 4. We were in the unlucky 1% of couples who experience recurrent miscarriage, defined by the NHS as 3 or more consecutive miscarriages.
I was 35 when our daughter was born and we took for granted that we would have another child. We knew the statistics and not to leave it too long, but many of our friends had had children in their late 30s and we had no reason to think that we wouldn’t too.
I got pregnant very quickly but I had no pregnancy symptoms at all and a gut feeling that something was wrong. We had booked a ten-week scan at a private clinic. The sonographer started the scan and we waited anxiously for the image to come into view but there was nothing there, just a black screen.
We left in a daze, with a photo and the measurements of an empty sac and no information or support. At home we worked out that it was a ‘blighted ovum’ or anembryonic pregnancy, which occurs when an early embryo never develops or stops developing, is resorbed and leaves an empty gestational sac. I'd never heard of this. I felt my body had let me down and was angry that I had lost so much time with a ‘pregnancy’ that wasn’t real, but once we decided to have surgical management things moved quite quickly and we were able to put it behind us. We thought we'd had our bit of bad luck and next time all would go well.
A few months later I was pregnant again and we booked an early scan for reassurance. This time we saw the heartbeat and let out a sigh of relief. But then we were told that our baby was measuring a week behind, the heartbeat was too slow and things weren’t looking hopeful. We had expected the scan to reassure us or to confirm another missed miscarriage and had no idea there is a terrible no man’s land in between the two – an unviable pregnancy.
It took two weeks for our baby’s heart to stop beating and it's almost impossible to describe the trauma of that fortnight. I was still pregnant, with a tiny heart beating inside me, but I wasn’t going to be bringing home a baby. The waiting was awful. This was the first time I emailed Chana and I received a call back the same day. It really helped to hear a sympathetic voice on the end of the phone, validating my feelings.
After a week there had been no growth but there was still a faint heartbeat. I was reduced to wishing for a longed-for baby's heart to stop beating to put us out of our misery.
A week later, when the lack of heartbeat was finally confirmed, my main feeling was relief. After a second surgery I didn't cry, just felt numb. It took a few months and some counselling sessions through Chana to be able to process what had happened and let myself feel grief for my lost babies and a lost year of trying.
As the months passed, more of our friends started to announce pregnancies and have second babies. We had some basic fertility tests and I became consumed with anxiety about trying to get pregnant. Although it's hard to admit, I was filled with envy and anger that it seemed so easy for everyone else. I was desperate for another child and for our daughter to be a big sister. There were times when the mere sight of a Baby on Board badge would make me cry. I stopped going to shul because our community is a young and growing one and the weekly sight of new bumps and babies at the children's service was too much for me.
Having counselling with our support worker during this time helped so much. I appreciated the fact that Chana didn't set an end date to the relationship so it didn't add to the sense of pressure. She would be there as long as I needed her to be. It also made a huge difference seeing a specialist fertility counsellor. She gave me a space to cry, to speak my fears and negative thoughts out loud and to be reassured that these were normal responses and I wasn't a terrible person.
Over a year after our second miscarriage I still wasn’t pregnant. I had given up hope that I could get pregnant naturally and was worried about leaving it any longer so we decided to try IVF. Just before we were about to start treatment I found out I was pregnant. I was mainly terrified but the little part of me that still had hope thought that just maybe this one was meant to be.
But then, a week later, I went to the toilet and saw blood. By morning it was clear it was another miscarriage. It had taken over a year to conceive and I had been pregnant for nine days. Some people refer to an early miscarriage as a chemical pregnancy but we lost our August baby that night and all our hopes and dreams for him/her. Thankfully I already had an appointment with our support worker in the diary and it was a relief that she understood the depth of our pain and loss.
All the doctors we had seen had said there was no reason we couldn’t have a baby if we kept trying, but I wasn’t getting any younger. I wasn’t sure how I would bear the emotional rollercoaster of trying to conceive – wishing the time away instead of enjoying what we had – only to find we couldn’t get pregnant again or to suffer another loss.
However, two months later, to my shock, I was pregnant again. I didn’t dare to hope that it would work out. I counted the days to our first scan and checked for blood literally every time I went to the toilet. Pregnancy after loss was a fundamentally different experience. By 12 weeks it was considered a normal, low risk pregnancy in medical terms, but that wasn’t how I experienced it. It's easy to tell the story in hindsight but at the time I had no faith that it would work out. I felt so vulnerable and full of fear and struggled to manage my anxiety. I lived from scan to scan and counselling appointment to appointment and we told nobody except our parents until well after 20 weeks. I was so frightened of ‘tempting fate’ by embracing the pregnancy and letting myself believe things might be okay. Our support worker was an incredible source of support during this time. Mostly I saw her on my own, but sometimes she saw Jason too to help us communicate better with each other and understand our very different responses to uncertainty.
Nearly three years after we started trying for a second baby, our beautiful son Joshua was born. His middle name is Samuel, after Chana's longed-for child.
Sadly our story with Chana didn't end there. Shortly before Joshua was born my mum was diagnosed with cancer. On his due date we found out it was an aggressive cancer and on the day of his baby blessing we were told it was incurable. She died when he was 6 months old. I had a new baby, born after three losses, and was now dealing with another kind of loss and the joint pressures of newborn and palliative care as well as looking after my dad. Our support worker’s unique skills as a fertility counsellor who also had experience of bereavement counselling were invaluable and I don't think I'd have coped without her.
Chana offers counselling for 6 months post birth for mothers or couples who are still in need of emotional support in certain circumstances - something I'll always be grateful for. I felt comfortable with our support worker, she already knew me and what I had been through and I didn't have to explain myself or start again. From bris anxiety to how I would cope at the funeral with Jason in the Cohen room, I could talk about it all to her.
I always said to myself that if I was lucky enough to have a baby I would speak openly about our losses in the hope that people reading about them would know they were not alone and their feelings, however negative, were normal. In 2019 I joined the board of the Miscarriage Association and, in September 2021, I became the Chair. I am so grateful to Chana for giving me the space to process and work through grief and loss and meeting me with sympathy and understanding. The statistics on pregnancy loss and mental health are both shocking and depressing and I know how lucky I was (in the middle of all my bad luck) to have the support of Chana.