Tell me about these little episodes of bleeding. What happened?

Well, I actually, the first one, I’d actually just got to three months so, you know, that’s quite a milestone really in any pregnancy. You get to three months, you think, ‘Oh, the chance of miscarriage now is, you know, sort of almost out the window. And I was due to have my nuchal scan actually on, on the Tuesday, and on the Monday evening I started bleeding quite heavily. And obviously completely distraught and didn’t know what to do. Rang, rang the midwife and she just said, ‘Well, you know, theres not really a lot you can do at this early stage. You’ve just got to sort of see it through and just put your feet up and sit down and try and keep calm sort of thing. Which is a bit difficult [laugh]. Anyway it, it continued, but it did, during the night it did ease off. But we had to wait the whole of the next day until 4.30 to have our scan. So that day was a very long day, not knowing whether or not I’d lost the baby the night before. So that was quite an emotional, emotional roller coaster that day. It started off very traumatic but, yes, at the end of the day it was all good because it was all good news, the baby was still there and the risk factor for myself was very low. So that was, that was good.

So did it happen more than once, the bleeding?

It did, yes it happened again. Again, I think it was about four weeks, four or five weeks after. But that was very slight, very slight indeed. But I, you know, I still called the midwife, and they referred me to the unit, where they, they did a quick scan just to make sure everything was fine, and it was. And it stopped that evening, so, and since then, touch wood, I, you know, I haven’t had any other bleeding at all. And they just said it was, you know, some women do bleed early in pregnancy. So I was obviously just one of those women. So, but it is, it was very frightening.

No particular explanation?

No, they couldn’t find anything that was, you know, that was wrong at all. So, you know, despite the scans, every – and everything looked fine. And, as I say, I haven’t had any problems since in that department, so [laugh] hopefully I won’t now.

With my first pregnancy, it was, I basically had a miscarriage at six weeks, and it was a proper miscarriage. I hadn’t even been to the doctor, I’d just literally found out myself and told my husband. And then after that we sort of tried again the following year and I became pregnant pretty much straight away. And I ended up having what’s known as a missed abortion, whereby the baby died at seven or eight weeks but I retained it until my twelve-week scan and then had, they found out that the baby had died, so I had to have a D & C. And that happened again on two more occasions after that, sort of within a year, the following year and the following year.

And both those ones were discovered on the scan?

On the twelve-week scan, yes, so I’d have to go in and have the D & C.

The first time you discovered it on the scan, were you together?

Yes, yeah.

You weren’t on your own?

Yeah, but that obviously made the, the scanning of the following pregnancies pretty awful. And the, the most awful thing was that with the three missed abortions, my body was still telling me that I was pregnant, even though the baby had died. I was still getting severe morning sickness, swollen breasts, putting on weight, so my body in effect was still pregnant but – still producing the pregnancy hormones – but the baby wasn’t actually viable. So I’d go there every time at that twelve week scan thinking, ‘This ones going to be different. It’s going to be different. And then they’d sort of say, ‘Sorry’ – the words ‘We, we can’t find a heartbeat. So it would be pretty awful, but as I say my husband was with me all the time. But we would, wed go there hoping that everything was going to be OK.

Did they offer you any earlier scans after it had happened once or twice?

With, with the, after the second miscarriage I would, as soon as I found out I was pregnant, I would have sort of a, a funny light bleed at six weeks, then go and have a scan at six weeks, and everything would be fine. And then go back a week later, have another scan and then they’d say, ‘Right, that’s fine. Come back in five weeks time when you’re twelve weeks. So, in between the sort of, they reckoned that it would happen round about sort of seven to eight weeks. So we always had the hope because wed have a scan at seven weeks and think, ‘Yeah, it’s, it’s OK.” But in between at some stage, just for some unknown reason, the baby would just die, so.

How did you feel when you had the miscarriage?

I was devastated, actually devastated. The thing also with an early miscarriage is that you don’t really tell a lot of people at that time, so only my very close family, and like the parents really only knew, and my brothers, and my husband’s family. So when we lost the baby a lot of people didn’t really know why I was off from work or, you know, why I was not well and things like that. And in a way, at that time we just said, “Oh, she had the flu.” I think it was wrong. I wish I had at the time said, “Well, I just lost my baby.”

You know, but because it’s all taboo and, a lot of people actually just don’t know about it so you just – what’s the point of telling them now that you’ve lost your baby? A lot of people actually said, “Oh, it was just a little few cells or, you know, it’s nothing.” But it’s actually much more dramatic than you actually can understand, unless it has happened to you, because you really sort of, it’s like your hopes, you know;

Well – although the baby was only eight weeks or ten weeks or whatever – you just already had sort of thought about a future for that baby, so it is quite – and you can’t, you haven’t anything to grieve, you know. You don’t hold the baby to say goodbye, you’ve got nothing, so it’s quite difficult and the ERPC [evacuation of retained products of conception, surgical procedure] was quite difficult as well from the sort of physical point of view, I felt really very, in a lot of pain afterwards. You know, I thought probably a normal miscarriage which is sort of, everything sort of goes, is probably easier in a way, but you know, that’s something different for me;

But I think the emotional impact of the miscarriage is probably not recognised, and I think possibly theres nothing wrong to say you’ve lost a baby, and even if it’s an early miscarriage a lot of women have miscarriages and they actually hide it. And it’s only when you start telling other people, “When I had a miscarriage” and they say, “Oh, me too, me too.” And everybody else almost has had a miscarriage and they’re all keeping it inside. So, but it was you know, difficult;

When you first found out you were pregnant, did anybody point out to you that miscarriages are quite common?

You read it, but you think it’s not going to happen to you. You think, “Oh, these things never happen to me.” And also I had this idea that miscarriages only happen if you’d done something, you know – I don’t know, you’ve overdone or you’ve carried something heavy or, I don’t know, I just felt that it was not something, I was not expecting it to happen to me. I was worried a little bit about the baby and, you know, the whole thing, but I was so excited by it, I didn’t think it was going to happen to me, not at all, no;

Did you talk to any doctors or anyone else about your concerns about having another miscarriage?

I didn’t really, because I think the, the immediate problem seemed to be the actual getting pregnant, so whilst initially after my second miscarriage that was my fear – “What if I miscarry again?” – quite quickly the becoming pregnant became the issue. And so miscarriage was something that I really needed to just put to the back of my mind and cross that bridge if and when I came to it. And when I did become pregnant on Clomid, after 4 cycles of Clomid, I really didn’t imagine I would have another miscarriage. I really believed that the miscarriage had been bad luck or unexplained reason, just one of the 1 in 4 people that do have miscarriages. I knew that to have 3 miscarriages consecutively was rare. I did read a statistic that only 1% of people, 1% of women have suffered with recurrent miscarriage, which is 3 consecutive miscarriages, so I didn’t really expect to form, to form part of that statistic.

So the third miscarriage was when you were on Clomid but not yet IVF?

That’s right, that was the third miscarriage and so that was the, that was the trigger to then be investigated for miscarriage as opposed to fertility alone. They can investigate reasons for about 20% of miscarriages, about 20%-25% are chromosomal defect and a blood problem. So I was checked out for both of those and it showed that I didn’t have a, there was no chromosomal defect and there wasn’t a blood problem either. So that ruled out the reasons. It also meant that there wasn’t a quick fix to a mis-, to miscarriage either because it just meant that there was no explained reason and so, obviously, I still don’t know why I had 3 miscarriages.

Does it frustrate you that they weren’t able to actually tell why this happens?

It did until I had a viable pregnancy. Obviously, it’s still there at the back of mind because I would like to become pregnant again, I would like to have a baby again, another baby. But having had one successful pregnancy I no longer have had – my, my personal history is not that every, every pregnancy has ended in miscarriage. So, so it’s, it’s a frustration, but having actually had a baby puts paid to a lot of that sense of frustration.

How did you feel with the third miscarriage then, when that happened, what was your ‘?

I almost had a sense of expecting it. On, on one hand I didn’t expect it because I thought I couldn’t be that unlucky and I realised that three, three recurrent miscarriages would be unlikely, but I think also what happens is your expectations, as you go along this journey your expectations are altered and almost lowered, I suppose. You start out with the expectation that you’ll get pregnant relatively easily and the pregnancy will, will be a success and obviously, your expectations alter. So on some level whilst of course it was very, very distressing to have that miscarriage, even though it was at 6 weeks, which is extremely early, but I’d known I was pregnant once I, when I was literally about 4 weeks pregnant. So whilst it was very distressing, there was almost a sense of why should I expect anything else, by then?

That’s sounds quite hard, was that?

It, it was difficult because the previous miscarriage I got over relatively quickly, based on the idea that I would be pregnant again within about 6 months and still had a, a lot to look forward to. Whereas by the time I’d had the third pregnancy, which was having taken Clomid, and knowing also that both of my fallopian tubes were damaged, I realised that the

So, we were given all this information. There was no rush, there was no hurry, we were told to go away and think about things and talk to each other and discuss things and for me there was never that much to discuss. It was, in some ways I was relieved to know what the problem had been; that they thought that this was why I had been having miscarriages, that this was why the baby had so many handicaps, that it was nothing that I’d done. There was nothing I could have done any differently so it wasn’t my fault, because, prior to that, I think I’d just completely messed myself about thinking, ‘Oh, it was that glass of wine, it was eating that cheese, it was something that I’d done that had caused this. And then it turned out to be just me, and the way that my genetic make-up is. And there was nothing I could do about that at all.

The specialist hospital explained that it was quite common to have miscarriages. It wasn’t, to have one as late as seventeen weeks wasn’t common and what they would look into is a type of blood clotting disorder that women who tend to have recurrent miscarriages they, they seem to have this, this phenomenon really. And so they explained that they would have to do several blood tests and it would take a few, a few months. That if I was found to have this sort of blood clotting disorder then there was a course of aspirin and heparin injections which would thin the blood and hopefully prolong the pregnancy. And so that’s what they explained would be the sort of course of treatment once I had, once I had got pregnant.

Did they in the end decide that that is what you had?

Yes. It was.

What’s it called?

It’s called antiphospholipid syndrome and basically the blood clots in the placenta and therefore oxygen cannot get to the fetus and the fetus is aborted.

So how were you feeling at this point, because you’d been through a bit already?

I felt, I felt a sigh of relief, actually, because, because now I could, now they had pinpointed what, what, you know, what my problem was. And it wasn’t anything that I had done or not done. It was just one of those things, but at least there was some sort of treatment that would give us, that would give us a better chance of prolonging the next pregnancy.

And I mean had, the three miscarriages, had that put a strain on between you and your husband? What was, you know, how were you coping as a couple with all of that?

I don’t think it, no, it didn’t put a strain on me and my husband. I think it really, it actually brought us closer together. I, it’s something that we, we both dearly wanted. My husband already had an older son from a previous relationship, older child from a previous relationship, and we desperately wanted, we dearly wanted our own. But no, no, no, it didn’t put, it took – it even brought us close, much closer together, and he was very much involved with all the hospital appointments, seeing the specialist, every step of the way.

So once you had a diagnosis were you feeling more optimistic about the future in terms of future pregnancies?

Absolutely. I’m, I, were very positive people anyway, and we very much, we have a, a very deep rooted faith and we knew that at some point we would have a child. We didn’t know how long it would take but we would, we know, we knew that we would have a family. And yes, were very, very optimistic about the future in terms of the, the treatment that would be available.

I didn’t [sigh] I just again, it, it does come down to my faith, our faith. I just felt that whatever happened somebody up there has got it in control. So we just needed to take whatever medical advice possible. Go to the specialist hospital, by now they knew us very well, [laugh] they knew us very well. Go to the specialist hospital. Stop working. And this time one of the things that they didn’t do the last time was to put a, a stitch in, because they, they were working on the fact that I had the, the blood clotting disorder, and the cervical incompetence wasn’t an issue, but to cover all eventualities this time I would be on aspirin, the heparin. I would have a, a stitch put in at twelve, thirteen weeks, which is very early, and be constantly monitored at the specialist hospital.