My Infertility Story: Part One

Back-to-back pregnancy losses, a missed miscarriage, and a hospitalization

I met the love of my life when I was 34 years old. Being with this incredible man solidified my desire to have children. I knew having a family with him would be an amazing life. But we thought we had plenty of time. All that “after 35 it gets harder” stuff is just propaganda, right? So we went along in blissful innocence, ignoring the loudass ticking of my biological clock.

Marriage and honeymoon

Alex proposed two years later during pandemic-times, and we got married the following year, when I was 37. We planned to start trying for a baby during our honeymoon the next summer.

I remember worrying that it would happen immediately after getting my Nexplanon removed. Society falsely teaches us that pregnancy happens constantly, and we don’t protect ourselves, it will happen as easily as the wind blows.

After an amazing honeymoon, at age 38, I was pregnant the first month. Perfect! I remember thinking, okay maybe that was too soon. But we felt a giddy excitement, telling everyone and starting to make plans.

But a couple weeks later, we met up with friends at a restaurant, and I started to bleed.

Pregnancy Loss #1

A miscarriage usually doesn’t happen all at once. At first, it’s reasonable to assume it’s normal spotting during pregnancy. But then if it increases over the next few days, or even weeks, it becomes obvious. It can be a slow and dragged-out process, which is confusing and emotionally painful.

We were shocked and devastated. Again, society doesn’t prepare us for this. I definitely don’t remember being taught about miscarriage in sex ed class.

To our surprise, I was pregnant again the next month! I felt apprehensive, of course, but the internet says that the misfortune of a miscarriage usually only happens once, at most.

So Alex and I relaxed a bit, and delighted in thinking up baby names. I started feeling nauseous, so I carried a small paper bag in my school bag, just in case. All was good.

Everyone, including my doctor, reassured me that it would not happen again, and that miscarrying twice in a row is extremely unlikely. This is incredibly not true.

At six weeks, I had a persistent ache on my right side, that I now know is a perfectly normal corpus luteum cyst. But I was hospitalized overnight due to concern that I was having an ectopic pregnancy, since it was too soon to see the pregnancy clearly. It was a scary and highly stressful experience! And they kept doing vaginal ultrasounds which, under the circumstances, felt like a knife stabbing at my right ovary! But we were reassured that everything was probably fine and sent home.

A month later, at the ultrasound where we had hoped to see a heartbeat, instead revealed that the embryo had not developed. We were completely blindsided, because I had not bled like the first time!

This lovely phenomenon is known as a missed miscarriage. Your body doesn’t know the embryo has died, so it just goes along thinking everything is fine.

Since I wasn’t really in the mood to wait to bleed, the doctor gave me these horrific pills that induce CONTRACTIONS. I mean, it’s probably like giving birth without an epidural. So I spent Halloween 2022 on the bathroom floor screaming as everything was forced out of me. Sorry, I never said that a blog about infertility wouldn’t be graphic.

I discovered that the trauma of recurrent miscarriage, especially back to back, is set apart from having one miscarriage. I want to make it very clear here that it’s a terrible thing to have one, no matter how early or late. But because it’s common to have one (especially early) and usually the person gets pregnant again pretty soon after and it usually doesn’t happen again, when you experience two or more, you begin to lose hope that things will EVER work. After the first one, I knew it would work the next time. But after repeatedly playing pregnancy “Gotcha!”, it feels like you’re being lied to over and over again. (By the way, having two or more miscarriages is also pretty darn common).

I noticed that people become increasingly awkward and don’t know what to say the second time. Maybe they already said something the first time and now they feel stupid saying it again. This adds to the feelings of isolation.

Alex and I asked the doctor for a thorough fertility investigation but, apparently, they don’t normally run tests until you’ve had three miscarriages, which is ridiculous. Luckily, we had a different OB that day who signed off on it. We ruled out all the big things, finding no real cause other than “bad luck”. “Try again,” they said. So I tracked my ovulation and we tried for another pregnancy.

But that experience had hit me hard. I fell into a deep depression while, somehow, managing to finish my college degree. During the same month, we got to travel to gorgeous Banff for my husband’s work conference. I tried, but I couldn’t fully enjoy it. I cried constantly. I was also in a fog of depression during my graduation.

It just felt so unfair. I kept thinking, I should be going into my third trimester right now, our life should look like this. The world felt like a dark and unkind place and I felt all alone, like I was the only person experiencing this.

I found a therapist with personal infertility experience who helped me get my head back above the water. I practiced a lot of self-care and focused on our overseas move to Sweden. It wasn’t the time for such a big life change, but you can never plan around pregnancy loss.

We stopped trying to conceive for a few months, in case either a pregnancy or another loss (which felt more likely now because of, you know, having no more hope) interfered with our big move.

Maybe things would be better when we started fresh on the other side of the world?

To be continued…

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