To be considering ignoring medical advice and trying anyway?

[LisaSimpsonsbff]

I think IABVU, but need someone to talk sense into me! I've had three miscarriages in the last few months - all v early (two at five weeks, one at seven). I had my first meeting with a gynaecologist (in the NHS) about recurrent miscarriage today. She is willing to do tests, but said it would be October (at least - at one point she said three months, at another four) before all the results were back, at which time we'd have a second meeting. She said not to try to conceive until then. She also repeatedly emphasised that the odds were low of these tests showing anything - 30-40%, she said. I really desperately want to be pregnant again for both psychological and practical reasons (bit complicated but: on a fixed-term contract, will be a bit difficult if I get too close to the end of it before falling pregnant). This seems like a long time to wait when the likelihood is that at the end of it they'll tell me they've found nothing and to go off and try again. Is this an irrational reaction? Talk sense into me!

Thank you for that really nice reply to my quite snappy one! Mine have been quite physically unpleasant but as you say that isn't the case for everyone - I have quite heavy periods anyway, and each of them has just been a flood on the first day (and painful).

I think your consultant was including losses before a missed period in that figure. It is absolutely true that the number of losses in the first few weeks are higher than was thought before modern pregnancy testing, but it's just not true that 50% of women who miss a period miscarry. Take a look at any of the antenatal groups on here, most of which are full of women who join as soon as they get a positive test, most of those a few days either side of their period being due. It is absolutely true that some of those women will leave the group because they start bleeding in the next couple of weeks - but not half of them! I still sometimes, when I really want to torture myself, look at the 'November 17' group, which I very briefly joined, and most of those women who got their positive tests alongside me are still pregnant. I can believe that 50% of fertilised eggs don't make it past six weeks (and that would also sort of chime with IVF success figures), but I think the majority of these go well before any pregnancy test could tell you.

well, from my experience there is a much much higher incident of mc than we think.
(And after my first, I didn't joint the ante natal groups on places like this until I was further on.)
Pretty much everyone I know has had at least one, many have had more than one.

(posted too soon)

but many of those women have never talked about it or said until you ask, so I have known them for years before finding out.
Sadly we are still crap at talking about it.

And many of the people I know didn't join forums like this or in rl until after 12 weeks.

I think the sample in the antenatal group here is actually a pretty good one - those women are all joining at four weeks(ish) with no way of knowing which of them will or won't miscarry. I also would never join a group like that so early again, but my point was that of the women who do, far less than 50% of them miscarry. I completely agree that miscarriage is underdiscussed, but I just don't think that 50% of women are missing their periods and then bleeding within two weeks. I don't know how far to trust these figures (spacefem.com/pregnant/mc.php?m=08&d=10&y=12) - they claim to be based on medical studies, but that's hard to check - but they seem much more likely to me. That would still make it much more common than you'd expect from popular culture.

Maybe you need aspirin, prednisone, viagra etc
Be patient.
I know it's hard, it took us five years of fertility treatment to gave children. Bit there may be a treatable reason that you are miscarry. Give your body a break in the meantime

Anyway, it doesn't really matter - as I said, it's a tangent from this thread! The doctor did say that the odds of success in the next pregnancy after three miscarriages (if you have no treatment) are 60%, so I agree with your essential point that the odds are still reasonable if I just keep trying by myself.

Ooh, but I did find the study: it's this one - www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3393170. Which says that 22% of pregnancies were lost before six weeks, and then another 9% after that.

In your position I would start trying now and wouldn't wait. If there was a very high chance that they would find something treatable, then I might wait, but from all the research I did after my miscarriage, it seems less likely that's the case, and more likely it will just be a case of telling you it's just a numbers game (rubbish though that is for you), and that as you say they'll be telling you to go back to trying naturally again anyway. It's that horrible running out of time feeling that another poster described that's so tough (not that I think that about YOU objectively, but I felt it so acutely when it was me), to me waiting four months wouldn't be a chance to rest, as I'd find it too stressful.

I was pregnant in mid September 16, mc October 6th at approx 6.5 weeks. Very painful, horrendous bleed that I found incredibly traumatic. The only thing that made me feel better was the idea of getting again and hopefully getting pregnant again. I managed to conceive within 10 days of the mc, and am now very uncomfortable, 40+1 weeks. Good luck xx

The idea that women should wait to become pregnant after miscarriages is kind of old-fashioned and a bit misguided. Do keep trying. If there's some horrible anomaly found, you can also choose not to keep a pregnancy and maybe could save money for ICSI, which would use only chromosomally-intact gametes. But most of the time, this kind of thing is pretty random, you probably just got bad luck of the draw.

I have been there. I started thinking it would never happen for me after recurrent early miscarriages. I got a genetic screen, all clear, which just made me feel even more uncertain about what was going on. When I started spotting with another pregnancy post-testing I thought, oh no, here we go again. Well, that pregnancy is now a precocious 16 month old little boy, so it turns out the eggs weren't ALL bad!

Thanks again for all the advice. I think I've actually swayed back round in my thinking and will wait for the tests. The thing is, the tests can't be done if I'm pregnant, or indeed for three months after a pregnancy. So if I try again and the same thing happens again I'll be back in the same dilemma with more time wasted. It's a bit shit and the work thing complicates it but in the grand scheme of things I have time (I'm 30) so I think I should get this testing out of the way now. I think I'll also get the NK cell tests that they do at Coventry done, so if anyone has any experience of that I'd be keen to hear it!