Hi @Mul82 I am so sorry you find yourself in this totally awful predicament, it’s super unfair some of us find ourselves here whilst some others at the end of the spectrum have kids they didn’t even want.
I’m in a very similar situation to you sadly, this is my story.
First started TTC at 40.5, but not properly, like dh and I just stopped using contraception and I was tracking my cycle/ovulation, but he wasn’t into the whole having sex on a schedule thing, plus seemingly everyone else around us got pregnant so easily we thought it’d just happen. A few months in of nothing happening I put pressure on him to try properly and meanwhile he’d also quit smoking. At 41.5, pretty much the very first month of trying properly, I became pregnant and we were both over the moon
- that first pregnancy ended in natural MC at 6 weeks
- EPU advised to wait 3 months to try again (which I wish we’d ignored), first time we tried again after that time had past I fell pregnant again, but started to miscarry naturally again 24 hours after a positive pregnancy test
- Didn’t want to wait this time and we got pregnant again the following month without waiting for a period in between. As the NHS will do nothing nor offer an early scan before 3 MC i booked myself a private scan at 7 weeks as I was super stressed at that point that it would go wrong again. Scan shown fetal pole and heartbeat so we were relieved a little. Sadly the 12 scan shown the baby had stopped developing the week after that first scan and were diagnosed with MMC , for which we chose surgical management and had the tissues sent for kayrotyping to understand whether is was lost due to chromosomes abnormalities. At this point the reality of my age and concept of low egg quality really started to sink in, esacerbated by the fact that seemingly we could get pregnant very easily, but my eggs may be too bad to ever result in a baby.
- we went to see a private clinic to do some investigation into possible other causes for recurrent MC and found nothing obvious, the consultant said statistically, it’s likely to be an issue of egg quality and because of my age, creating normal embryos would be harder and harder - I was past 42 at that point.
- the consultant advises IVF with PGT-A testing to ensure we’d pick a normal embryo, but that if we want to try one more time naturally she’d support with progesterone and blood thinners. Given IVF eye-watering costs we go again naturally with the aforementioned medical support. We see a heartbeat at 6.3 weeks, we go for another scan 2 weeks later and it’s another MMC 💔. I choose a D&C and have the products sent for testing again.
- test results from both embryos come back as two separate abnormalities so the egg quality theory starts to become a definite reality.
- we decide to go with IVF, literally steal (almost), beg and borrow to scrape together all the money to try IVF as I cannot physically and mentally face the prospect of more MCs. I blow all the rest of my savings and the process from EC to embryo transfer takes around 7 months. My ovarian response to stims was good, we ended up with 5 blasts to test, however only one was normal and only one shot at transfer so our consultant recommended additional tests which I accepted to undergo and pay for without question as I wanted to have the best chance (hysteroscopy, ERA, EMMA, ALICE, NKC endometrium and blood)…only for the transfer to end in a chemical pregnancy, so another MC.
I now feel truly hopeless in the sense that what kept me going every other time was the fact that there were a next step to try, but now we’re bled dry financially and with even a tested embryo failing, I’m feeling acceptance may be the best option for me, but of course that’s really hard, especially if you know you can still get pregnant or have a decent response to ivf, it’s especially cruel.
The NHS assigned me a counsellor after the 3rd MC and she was nice, but I didn’t find her helpful at all in that sense as I was looking for coping strategies ways to work on acceptance, but her method was essentially based on telling me to have hope and keep trying so eventually I discharged myself from it. Since my failed ivf round a couple of weeks ago I found myself a private therapist who works in the way I need and I’m hoping that will help me, but I realise not everyone can afford private therapy and find the right person to work with them in the right way.
The reality is that hope is still well and truly there for me and it’s still in essence what’s keeping me going, rather than acceptance, despite me now being 43. Speaking to some other women on here who had success going down that route and reading the book ‘is your body baby friendly’ has opened another door of hope for me (for better or worse) in the sense of exploring immune issues further, in case they play a part, I also learned that some immune treatments may even impuegh quality so I booked myself in with one of the leading reproductive immunology clinics in the country, spending the last of what I have on my credit card on a consultation and any testing the may recommend, before myself and DH go back to trying again naturally. The hope I’m holding in this is limited as I already had most immune issues tested by my ivf clinic so I’m unsure whether this other clinic can do much else, but I thought it’d be worth the second opinion at least as just trying again naturally without trying absolutely nothing different feels like a recipe for disaster.
I realise this is a very long message and I am sorry if it’s no use to you, but in essence I think getting adequate mental health support in these situations may be our best bet. Hope can be a wonderful thing and of course without hope then you’ll definitely be at the end of the line, but can also be a cruel one that keeps us going on this treadmill, but may not even amount to anything 😔
I hope whatever you decide to do next works however it needs to x