So every time before when you have been pregnant it’s ended in a massive car crash so why wouldn’t this time? OR you have been infertile for years and remortgaged your house on ivf treatment, never been pregnant before and you finally are, why on earth would this work out for you?
This is the one, it’s your turn, the odds have to be in your favour… you want to just scream oh shut up, but you smile and nod so you don’t offend the well meaning person in your life that clearly has no idea.
I used to track my Amazon guys where abouts to see if he was almost at my house yet with the third pack of tests I had ordered in two days because I had held my pee for 5 hours and I need another test RIGHT NOW.
Once I was in the middle of taking a digital pregnancy test apart with a kitchen knife when Prince Charming came down for breakfast and I think when he saw me holding the knife he didn’t event bother to ask wtf I was doing and just walked on past me.
Once it’s finally positive and your absolutely sure stood staring at your lined up piss sticks on your dressing table your in a whole new camp, because now it’s time to think about everything that could possibly go wrong, catastrophism at its best.
You go to the toilet and pull your knickers down and study them for any sign of anything that has colour, pink, brown, red. If that’s all clear then you move on to studying the toilet paper after every wipe and double wipe just to be certain you’re not bleeding. I still do that now I think it’s ptsd and now when my period arrives I have a moment of doom that I’m having a miscarriage even though I wasn’t even pregnant and it’s my period.
That month that was the start of my 5th pregnancy I hadn’t had a period after my 4th miscarriage. It was quite lucky in a way if you can call it that because I knew the hospital would do my bloods to see if it was ‘retained pregnancy’ or whether it was a new pregnancy. I of course knew it was a new one as I had tracked my hcg back to negative and tracked my ovulation for the insemination.
Locally everything has now gone digital maternity notes wise but I know that awful feeling and the anxiety before you officially register your pregnancy is proper fear. That feeling that the moment you fill in that online form you are about to jinx this pregnancy for sure! Every time that green book used to land in my post box guaranteed I would put it on the kitchen work top, go to the toilet and be bleeding. I HATED IT!
With this pregnancy I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, I could not bear the sadness and disappointment of putting another green book through the shredder. Every time I went to the Epau they said oh you really must register the pregnancy and I would say that I would do it… but I just couldn’t. I was 11 weeks before I did it.
I walked into my booking appointment and I got a tut and rolling of eyes off the midwife. “You won’t get your scan in time now you know you will be waiting a few weeks”. It really didn’t matter to me as I had already had 7 scans by this point and I had done my screening tests privately. I didn’t bother trying to explain my reason as she wouldn’t have got it anyway.
Anyone else ever looked on Amazon at the price of a scan machine? Yep me too! I also looked into hiring one. If I could go on dragons den with a ring doorbell to the womb I’d be minted and writing this from the Bahamas. In fact there are soooo many things that could be created and be big money makers for possessed women like I was, but I don’t have time.
You could create all the uterus CCTV in the world and someone would still tell you ‘what will be will be’. Some sort of pee pot with infertility quotes on would be good, I had to buy a second measuring jug for the kitchen… don’t worry if you have ever been to my house for a roast dinner your gravy was made in the kitchen jug I promise. It’s kept in the same cupboard as the baileys glasses 😉
Walking into the scan room no matter how many times you have done it before, it just gets worse every time. The sonographer asks you if it’s ok to do an internal scan with a probe, your thinking hun I could do it myself if you gave me chance and there’s really no self preservation left on this road to pregnancy is there.
TMI I mean what even is that? It’s just not a thing is it, not when you have been through infertility or loss. I wake up most mornings to photos of vaginal mucus in my dms and half a dozen sticks to squint at, I’m here for it me, I wish someone cared about my knicker contents back in the day.
The scan starts and it’s the silence, if I could see the screen I have pretty ninja eyes and often could see or not see a heartbeat even before I was told. In pregnancy after loss all you want to know is there’s still a heartbeat. You don’t care if your ovaries look lovely or your baby has all its limbs… you just want to know it’s alive! you hold your breath like it’s going to help the sonographer get you an answer quicker.
You walk out of that scan with a little bounce in your step, you breathe a small sigh of relief. You wait for your scan report and walk out of the hospital and then the thought hits you… the hearts stopped beating, the babies died. Yep it’s lasts all of ten minutes that reassurance and your mind still goes there. People don’t get it, I think sometimes partners don’t too. Maybe it’s easier to disconnect when you’re not responsible for carrying and keeping the baby alive but I know for sure that feeling of fear wasn’t the same for Prince Charming.
You walk into work and your colleague, your friend shares with you that they are pregnant, the exact same weeks as you! Your mind goes straight to, oh god my baby will die and theirs won’t and now im going to be tortured watching it happen for someone else all over again because why would they both survive? It’s not exciting, it’s traumatising, all of it.
Every appointment you go to having to put something right or re tell your full journey from the start, listing the meds you have been on and why, explaining anything that is out of the norm for the nhs and feeling like you have to justify it all. Everything feels like a battle and it’s exhausting.
I used to rehearse in my head what I wanted to say at certain appointments, points I wanted to make and questions I needed answering to help me be able to make it to the next appointment without going insane. A lot of the time you’re told ‘that’s normal’ but you don’t know normal, you have never been there and so everything is new and different and it’s all pretty scary.
For some of us we have a danger zone, a week or gestation that is massively triggering and a huge mountain to climb. As you approach it you feel like you can’t do it, your legs are giving in beneath you and you need to claw your way to the top to be able to breathe. Sometimes curveballs are thrown as you like balls of fire trying to knock you back down the mountain and you feel like you’re holding in there with your last strength.
If you get good news it’s alien to you, you don’t know what to do because this doesn’t happen to people like you. People say well aren’t you happy? But you can’t be, you cannot dare to be happy for a moment because if you then something will come along and take it all away from you just like before, you will slide back to the bottom and there’s nothing there to catch you.
THEN we even start to worry about things that aren’t or haven’t ever been an issue before! You get so annoyed and frustrated with yourself so you don’t need anyone else telling you that it’s annoying because we FU***NG know it is! You just want to be a normal pregnant person but you just can’t!
People ask you if you have started buying anything and your body freezes in panic, you can’t possibly buy anything because when the baby dies what will you do with it all?!
Then this whole new pressure comes where you are responsible for monitoring your babies movements and you have to make a decision as to whether it’s regular or not or if maybe things aren’t ok? You have gotten this far and now it’s all down to you again to know, but you don’t have a normal or know what to expect. It sucks!
I don’t use the word lucky very often in talking about my journey but I would say I was pretty ‘lucky’ with this 5th pregnancy of mine all the way up to around 28 weeks other than the crippling anxiety and stress, it had been pretty straight forward and maybe I could even use the word ‘normal.’
A couple of days before 28 weeks I had my GTT appointment and got a call the next day, 24 hours before we were due to fly to Rhodes to say I had gestational diabetes. GREAT something else my body couldn’t just be normal with and now another thing to monitor and worry about. Why couldn’t I just catch a break!
After a week in Rhodes watching Prince Charming eat and drink whatever he wished to indulge in whilst I lived off eggs and cheese I returned with very itchy limbs and then was also diagnosed with ICP and medicated. So I now had two further diagnoses that have a higher risk of still birth.
Whether you have lost babies early in pregnancy or very late in pregnancy or even not at all but have fought a battle through ivf to get pregnant in the first place. I think there is always a point you reach in pregnancy after loss or infertility that the fear of still birth hits you big time. So that immense pressure of movement and making the judgement is all consuming and it’s all on you.
At 31 weeks pregnant was when it all became more heightened for me, I had actually been for a consultant app that day and other than my GDM & ICP everything else was just all good and so I was signed off to be seen again in 3 weeks time. That night I was laid on the sofa watching the pride of Britain awards balling my eyes out and went to the downstairs toilet, had a wee and then looked back and thought gross who’s left all that blood in our toilet.
The fear gripped my whole body and I realised it was me I was bleeding and it was a lot. I screamed Prince Charmings name like some possessed woman, he was upstairs painting, I just shouted I think he’s dead I’m bleeding.
Within 5 minutes we were in the car on the way to the labour ward, on that car drive I could not turn it around in my head, it was all been taken away from me again. Now I had intense cramping and I literally felt like he was going to fall out of me.
When we arrived I was put on the monitor and I knew the heart beat was mine and not his, it felt like there was no sense of urgency for the midwife (I’m sure there was) but for me it felt like forever until it was his heartbeat and not mine. Thankfully he was alive, I was terrified but they could do anything they wanted to me now if it meant that he would survive.
The cause of my bleeding was unknown and went on for 3 weeks, I visited the hospital most days with bleeding because I didn’t trust anyone. First and foremost I didn’t trust my body to not let me down again but I also didn’t trust the hospital or the staff.
Loss and infertility does that to you, it makes you feel like you are the only person that really cares about you and your baby. You come to learn that everything feels totally subjective from one care giver to another and so who are you supposed to believe in and trust that they will fight for you, if you have felt not listened to before?
One of the days I had taken myself back into the hospital with bleeding I was placed on a monitor and I heard two midwives discussing me behind the curtain. One of them said she’s ‘just’ really anxious it’s her history. In that moment I felt not heard and I felt embarrassed that I had gone in again, that they thought I was a time waster and I didn’t really need to go that day.
You feel a hinderance sharing your worry or advocating that you in fact think something is wrong and that you are crazy. You have been through the darkest worst times of your life and you just want someone to hold your hand and to say I’m here, I will listen to you and everything you are concerned about we will look over it all and we can make sure this is ok together.
You don’t want to feel alone anymore like your constantly fire fighting and at war, you want to feel like you matter and that this baby matters.
At the 34 week consultant appointment I was desperate for that day to come around, I think I was there so early it was before the clinic even started. I had wrote a timeline of everything that had happened and saved an album on my phone titled ‘bleeding’ I had taken photos of all the blood loss in the toilet, on tissue and my clothes. Why did I do that? Because I genuinely didn’t know if he would believe me. How bad is that, I thought a doctor would need to see hard evidence before they would take me serious.
My name was called and I walked into the room, he said, how are you and how have you been. I burst into tears and I said he’s going to die if someone doesn’t listen to me. I handed over my green book and whilst he read through the last few weeks, I showed him the photos of the blood loss and explained about the pain I was in. I was frantically talking like I was on fast forward because I was so desperate to get it all out.
He put down his pen and he said Samantha I think it’s time we delivered this baby, he made a phone call and I was admitted there and then.
I was scanned and sent out in an ambulance to another city to be delivered. When he was born I was told I had a partial placental abruption.
I wholeheartedly believe that if I didn’t fight for my son, if I hadn’t been listened to on that day, I believe he would have died.
Yes pregnancy after loss is a stressful anxious time but don’t ever let anyone make you think you are ‘just’ anxious. As a woman that has been through everything that you have to get there, you deserve to be heard.
Always advocate, don’t care what people think and never give up on a bad day.
To be continued 🫶🏻
Crazy Fertility Queen 