A Month On From Miscarriage

Go carefully with this one.

As the title suggests, this article discusses pregnancy loss.

I’m at the end of my first menstrual cycle after a miscarriage. My hormones are, well, who knows really. I seem to be more sensitive to progesterone than I was before, meaning I’ve felt sick and had reflux for the last half of my cycle when progesterone naturally rises, a particularly cruel after effect as it mimics pregnancy symptoms. I’m grieving, I’m trying to navigate the impact of hormonal changes and unpredictabilities on my mindbody, and I’m pretty exhausted all the time.

I’m not ready to be articulate or to tell a compelling story. I’m just going to start talking, because I know it helps, and I like talking to my readers, and I want to keep writing my newsletter. These vestiges of who I am and what I’ve created are some of my anchors in this storm.

In August my nesting partner and I went through IVF. I will write about that experience at some point, but not yet. It was incredibly difficult, and fraught, and there were many points at which it seemed like it would not work. And yet, I stayed hopeful. So when the second line appeared on my pregnancy test, as faint as it was, I wasn’t entirely surprised. When, two days later, the line on the test came up strong, I was overjoyed.

I started bleeding about a week later, but tests kept showing a strong positive. I spoke to a nurse at the fertility clinic who said to keep testing, and that we would be able to see what was going on at the 7 week scan. The tests stayed strong and the bleeding stopped. I went looking for studies on bleeding in IVF pregnancies and was incredibly shocked to find one study where 67% of the IVF pregnancies had first trimester bleeding and only 9 of the 105 of these ended in miscarriage. I then had a few days of joy, and a peace I had not known in a very long time.

When I started bleeding again a week later, I was worried. The progesterone suppositories that you take to support an IVF pregnancy help to keep the uterine lining in tact, which can delay/mask signs of miscarriage. This combined with the continued digestive symptoms I was experiencing, meant I held on to the tiniest hope until the scan confirmed what I had been fearing, that I had miscarried. In retrospect I was able to figure out that it happened around 6 weeks, when I experienced some very strong pain that I had put down to indigestion/trapped wind at the time. It feels wild that I ‘missed’ it, but it’s a lot more common than people realise. I was far enough along to be termed an ‘early miscarriage’ rather than the very clinical ‘chemical pregnancy’ - the medical term for a pregnancy loss before 5 weeks. I know that some people find clinical terminology comforting, and I know that it can be particularly helpful when having an elective termination of pregnancy. Each to their own. When I had a termination a decade ago, it didn’t comfort me to think of the embryo as ‘a collection of cells’, I’ve written more about this experience in Curses And Shame. I grieved the loss of that baby, and I grieve the loss of this one.

Samhain is approaching (the Druid/Pagan festival of the dead that Halloween is based on), the veil between worlds is thinning. I feel grateful that I’ll have an opportunity to say goodbye, to honour my babies, and to heal through ancestral ritual.

Thank you for witnessing, and helping me to process.

-AJ