I hope you don’t mind me posting this here. It’s something I started to write a while ago, not with the intention of sharing it with anyone, but really just to help put my own thoughts in order. It was then pretty much just left sitting there on my hard drive until I had a proper way to end it. I have that now, and I thought perhaps this might be of help to other people. So here we go...
2014 was a notable year for me in that it contained both the best day and the worst day of my life.
The best day came in October; our wedding day. Now it’s probably a hackneyed cliche to describe your wedding day as the best day of your life, but in this instance it’s true. Not only did the love of my life and I get married, but the whole day just went like clockwork. Every last little bit of planning and preparation that we’d spent months organising came together perfectly with even the things we couldn’t control coming good, with the weather turning out beautifully despite the awful forecast we’d had looming over us all week. Best of all though was the fact that we got to share the whole thing with our friends and family. It’s a rare and wonderful thing to see everyone you love and care about there with you at the same time, to look around the room and see friends you’ve known all your life mixing with friends you’ve made through work and family members, all laughing and joking amongst themselves like they’ve also known each other forever, all having a great time.
In the run up to the wedding, someone gave me some brilliant advice - they said it’ll all go so quickly so take the time to step back, take it all in and make sure you’ve got some memories of the day that you can look back upon. It’s advice I took and I’m glad that I did. It was an amazing day, and our lives felt just about perfect.
There was another day, about a week or so later that wasn’t bad either. We’d arrived back from our honeymoon and stopped at the supermarket to stock up on the way home. I took the shopping through to the kitchen while my wife used the bathroom. She appeared in the doorway a little later and said “Are you making a cup of tea?”
“No, I replied, “I’m just doing us some crumpets for lunch.”
“Oh.” she said nonchalantly. “You might want to look at this while you’re waiting.”
And she handed me a pregnancy test.
It was positive.
We threw our arms around each other and laughed and smiled and cried. I don’t know how long we stood there for. The crumpets had long since popped out of the toaster. We didn’t care. Things now really were perfect.
There then followed a couple of months of quiet excitement, of more planning, of baby names and the desperate urge to shout our news from the rooftops.
Which brings me to the other end of the scale. December 16th. It was all coming together perfectly. The day of our 12 week scan which, by coincidence, was also the day of a planned Christmas meal with all of my oldest and closest friends. I’d got it all planned out in my head; I could produce the scan picture over dinner, finally share our happy news, there’d be much backslapping and happy banter. We’d already told our parents the night before, so with all the right people told in person, that would mean we could announce it all to the rest of our friends via Facebook. A silly thing, maybe, but hey, it’s nice to share good news, right?
We walked into the hospital, me grinning like a stupid kid, and sat ourselves down in the waiting room. On the way in I’d spotted the machine that issued the vouchers you could use to buy printouts of the scan. 3 for a tenner, perfect; one each for our parents and one for us to keep. As I stood shovelling coins into the machine my wife said “What if something's wrong…?”
“There won’t be!” I said.
After a while they called us through, and in we went, vouchers clutched in over excited hand. We got settled there and the lady started to run the scanner over my wife’s stomach. She did it for ages. “How sure are you of your dates?” she asked. “Pretty sure.” my wife replied, meaning very sure.
“I’m not sure quite what it is I’m seeing.” the lady said, uncomfortably. “Let me just get my colleague to check.”
She left the room and my wife started to cry.
“It’s gone.”
“We don’t know that.” I said, denial kicking in with a vengeance.
After what seemed an age but was probably more like 2 minutes, the lady returned with her colleague. They scanned again and stood looking at the screen in silence. Eventually the second lady looked up.
“I’m really sorry. I can’t find a heartbeat.”
And then we were both crying. They left us in private, pausing only to pluck the photo vouchers from my hand on the way out, while the pair of us held onto each other for ages, in some ghastly parody of how we’d held onto each other in the kitchen only three months earlier.
The next hour or so is a blur. They came back and told us that our baby had made it to 7 weeks before quietly stopping, they couldn’t tell us why. As we were about to leave, the first lady pressed an envelope into my hand, the refund for the photos that we never got. I shoved it into my coat pocket (where it stayed for the next couple of weeks. I couldn’t bear to just put it back into my wallet where it would be spent on something as mundane as a coffee or a Starbucks panini one lunchtime. Eventually I handed it to a homeless guy on Christmas Eve and told him to spend it on something that made him happy on Christmas Day. That felt right.). The lady then led us, both a teary mess, the length of the hospital to another department where a lovely nurse quietly and gently took us through our options. We booked in to return the next day to have things “dealt with” and then drove home, mostly in silence, save for a few sobs and sniffs.
We walked back into the house and my wife went into our downstairs bathroom where I could hear her crying. One of the kids (I’m lucky to have step children) had left a ball in the hallway and I lashed it as hard as I could against the wall; I’ve never hit a ball as hard in my life and I remember it ricocheting from wall to wall. It’s funny the things that stick in your mind.
Then we had to tell our parents, who we’d only told the day before. There’s only one thing I regret through all of this, and that’s telling our parents in the first place. We couldn’t have done anything else differently, we did everything right, it just went wrong for us. But the decision to tell our parents was completely wrong. We only did it because we needed help with childcare while we went for the scan and we didn’t want to lie to them. Telling my parents that they were getting their first grandchild and seeing how excited they were was brilliant. Taking that away from them less than 24 hours later felt cruel beyond belief as I blubbered down the phone at them, crying as much for them as for us.
Last but not least, we had to tell the children. We’d not told them, but there was no way we could hide it from them, the state we were both in. So we did - they had been going to have a little brother or sister and now they weren’t. Seeing their bewildered faces started us off again. Our 9 year old said “Please don’t cry. I don’t want you to cry.” And then she threw her arms around me and gave me the biggest and most needed hug that that I’ve ever had.
And that was it.
Only it wasn’t. Not even close.
There’s the physical stuff that follows, of course. My wife had to go through this, not me, but it hurts in its own way, seeing someone you love going through so much discomfort, from the cancelled procedure the next day (having spent all day sitting on the ward waiting), to the botched procedure the day after to blood clots to infections to every single complication I think it’s possible to get. There was just a constant physical reminder there of what had happened that dragged on for months.
But that’s still just the tip of the iceberg.
I’d never really understood quite what a miscarriage meant before. Not emotionally, I mean. It’s not like it’s actually a baby as such, is it? You’d never held it in your arms or anything, had you? Yeah, it’s upsetting but you can always try again, right? It’s not until you find yourself there that you realise that you are actually, really, genuinely, properly mourning. Maybe not for the baby itself as such, but for the hopes and dreams and plans and expectation and excitement that are all just suddenly extinguished. They reckon 1 in 5 pregnancies end in miscarriage, often before the pregnancy has even been picked up. Prior to this happening to us, I was unaware that anyone else that I know had experienced one. We didn’t tell that many people at the time, not because there’s a stigma as such but because it makes people uncomfortable and there’s only so much sympathy you can take before bursting into tears again. Of those we did tell, I was stunned at how many would say they understood what we were going through because it had happened to them too. It’s just not something people talk about.
And it doesn’t end there. Like all grief, it gets easier, less raw over time. But it doesn’t go away either. No, as much as something died that day, something else was born. Something dark and reptilian and cruel in the back of your brain that rears up and hisses whenever it sees a “Baby on Board” badge on the Tube. It snarls at the sight of a smiling mother pushing her baby in a pram. You see a close friend’s scan photo posted excitedly on Facebook and it’s there, in your ear, whispering “just scroll down, don’t ‘like’ it, just pretend you haven’t seen it”.
It’s sneaky too. It can sit quietly for weeks, waiting to ambush you when, say, you are sitting at a football match. You’re watching your team win 2-1 against Exeter. It’s a good game. When out of the blue it’s there, hitting you like a punch to the stomach, wallop: “Your baby would be three months old by now”. And there’s that lump back in your throat...
Or you could be sitting in a really nice little cafe in Reykjavik. Lunch is great, the atmosphere is good but hey, you’d better get up and leave midway through because that gorgeous little baby boy on the next table keeps smiling at you and neither of you can take it and before you know it the pair of you are standing outside in the street, hugging each other and crying again as the world goes on around you. And that nasty thing is there chuckling to itself. “Off they go again…”
It’s hard. It really is. I don’t think any words that I can muster can make anyone appreciate just how hard unless they’ve experienced it themselves, and it’s not something I’d wish on my worst enemy.
And making it worse, against the backdrop of all this, eventually we’d reached a point where things had settled down enough that we could try again. We’d been positive; after all, last time we’d got pregnant within a month of trying. So we tried again. And again. And again.
Eventually we sought medical help. It turned out things weren’t great with either of us. My fertility wasn’t quite where it should be and my wife’s ovarian reserve was through the floor. They tried a couple of cycles of fertility drugs but they did no good. Eventually the doctor shook her head and said that they’d done all they could on the NHS. Given our ages, we could either keep trying and hope or we could try IVF if we wanted, but because my wife has children from a previous relationship we weren’t entitled to any cycles on the NHS.
We looked into it and found that given our ages, there was only a 20% chance of it working. And it was expensive. Very expensive. We discussed it and, over a meal in a restaurant during a weekend away (and more public blubbing), we decided that we’d give it a go. We’d be sensible though. We’d do two cycles and that would be it. We wouldn’t let it take over our lives.
Easier said than done. We signed up and got things going. IVF is awful. A horrible process that as a guy I got the easy side of. Not so my wife, mauled about, injected, scanned over and over again, multiple self-applied injections… Initially it wasn’t working. They extended the cycle of injections. Another scan later and they said it wasn’t looking good, but we could try to move forward. I believe they usually hope to harvest 10-20 eggs. In our case, they managed to retrieve 4. Then there’s the wait to see if they were mature. They were, so they tried to fertilise them. 3 took, one didn’t. So they implanted 2 and froze the third.
There then follows an agonising 2 week wait. The day before we were due to take the pregnancy test I got a text from my wife while I was at work. She said she’d been naughty and couldn’t wait any longer. There was a photo attached of a pregnancy test. It was positive.
We went for a seven week scan at the IVF clinic. We’d been told that the baby we lost had made it to around 7 weeks before it stopped developing, so this was tough. The lady said not to worry if it took a while to find a heartbeat. We sat there, breaths held, and a mere 30 seconds or so later she announced “Congratulations, there’s a heartbeat.”
There then followed a very long 7 months or so. It becomes all consuming. Knowing what we’d invested (both financially and emotionally) and knowing first hand how much it hurts if it goes wrong means you can think of nothing else. My work suffered and I think in all honesty, our relationship suffered as we were both so on edge the whole time.
We had a couple of scares along the way (one particular mad and tearful dash down the motorway after the midwife had sent my wife straight to hospital after the baby hadn’t moved for a day or so will stay with me until the day I die; I was convinced we’d lost her). However, it all passed by and, three and a half years since our journey began… we have our daughter. And she’s beautiful; I now spend every day longing to get home from work so I can see her and cuddle her and play with her. She amazes me every day.
Miscarriage and fertility issues are awful, and there’s so little understanding in the wider world of those who take it all for granted, but if there’s anything that I’ve learned from this it’s that there ARE people out there who understand and have gone through the same things, and talking about it helps. It really does, which is why I decided that I wanted to finish writing this story, in the hope that it might help someone else. And there’s one other thing I’ve learned - no matter how slim the odds, there’s always hope. There’s always the chance that it might work as it did for us, and believe me, when it does it makes it all worthwhile.