Due November after loss

[CloudsInMyCoffee09]

Hi there,
I've started this thread so that mamas who have similar due dates following a previous loss or losses have somewhere to chat and feel supported.

I've been on a November due date thread but I feel there's a huge difference in the mindset of people who have experienced loss and those who haven't - which makes total sense!

We have different worries and milestones to make it past etc, so please join if you need somewhere to chat, rant, vent, or share your worries.

Pregnancy is an anxious time as it is without having previous trauma to contend with. Is it just me, or has all the joy been sucked out of the experience?

Amazing news! So pleased for you that your scan went well! Xx

@Pumpkinspice13 thank you! 💕

@Xwx1010 I've only gone and blumin booked it 😅

@CloudsInMyCoffee09 i am checking that my test results will be in ratio based results as just read some places give you high/elevated/low risk results and I’m not sure how helpful that is 🤦🏻‍♀️

@CloudsInMyCoffee09 just check about how the results will be presented and the conditions tested as a few do different ones so be sure you’re happy with that. My place was insisting on a scan too (extra cost) but as I’d had one in 7 days they let me leave that off.
I’m excluding the sex chromosome from mine too x

@Xwx1010 thanks for the advice. It says it gives high or low risk but that the results are more than 99% accurate, so if it says high risk it's very likely there's something wrong... are you saying you want to the actual figures too? Is yours at a clinic like Window to the Womb type place?

I don't think i'd want to know sex this early, definitely wouldn't be able to stop myself imagining the future if I knew that, which I'm trying to avoid doing till I feel more confident about it all. xx

@CloudsInMyCoffee09 surely the parameters or what’s low or high risk is subjective? Like how are they measuring high or low - by % / ratio?
e.g Is anything under 1 in 50 high and anything over 1 in 50 low? Anything in this range would be high risk to me?

If it’s high she said they give you a call but wish they had told me this before I booked it - apparently if the nhs nipt is ratio based.

Just don’t know if it’s worth the £300 for high/low risk without knowing how they’re measuring that. Maybe I’m overthinking it??

@Xwx1010 oh gosh I don't know, it's all so complicated! I might give them a call on my lunch break and talk it through!

Also realised I've booked it for next Friday, which means two weekends and a bank holiday delaying my results! x

@CloudsInMyCoffee09 definitely speak to them, I’m going to speak to my partner too xx

@Xwx1010 some times I feel like I create these dilemmas for myself so I have a mission to focus on and so I feel like I'm doing something useful for my pregnancy 😅

@CloudsInMyCoffee09 be lovely if we could just chill out and think about button or zip up baby grows wouldn’t it 😂

I need to switch my brain off from it all, probably best just focusing on the next scan and trying to disconnect until then - wish it was next week!!

I feel like I've reached a real milestone today. I've just had my first obstetrics appointment having had to cancel 2 last year!

I'm not that familiar with the NIPT test but have just found a few bits of information that might be helpful. On one page I found that the test correctly identifies "high" risk for the three trisomy conditions 99% of the time so in 1% of cases a baby carrying a trisomy chromosomal abnormality will be assigned as "low" risk. A lot of the sites quote "very low chance" which I would put as considerably low than 1 in 100 for most cases the issue is even with 1 in 50000 if you have 50000 women with that risk one will be carrying a baby with the trisomy abnormality, I would interpret any low risk result as as good as you get for not having one of the trisomy conditions

On a Canadian page they quote that 96% of those assigned as high risk did have trisomy 21 for downs syndrome and for the other two conditions the stats were 95% for Edwards (trisomy 18) and 77% for Pataus (trisomy 13)

@Superscientist aw congratulations lovely! What a great milestone to smash through ❤

Thanks for looking into that! I spoke with the clinic and they said that they do just tell you high or low risk but that basically if they say low it's a tiny chance, and if they say high, it's a very high chance... but there must be some point where low turns to high and you can be closer to high than you realise. It's so confusing! I thought it was a good idea to get it booked but maybe it'll just mess with my head even more! xx

Thanks, the timing of the Obstetrician appointment and my miscarriages meant that the appointment usually came through the week I passed the pregnancies so it was always a bit of a kicker.
They are going to do some extra monitoring because of some medication I'm on and I will need a glucose tolerance test too. My clotting risk profile might have changed since my booking appointment based on family history so she's going to look into that too. It feels very different to the pregnancy with my daughter in 2020 when it was very much only doing things that are absolutely clinically necessary.

I think they do high risk /low risk as it's a difficult thing to do absolutes about. I've done a bit of reading on how the test works and they are detecting babies DNA in your blood sample. It is on some ways a binary thing they either detect an abnormality in the blood or they don't. The use of risk comes down errors. It's fairly clear cut if it is there but if it's not detected is that because they didn't detect the right part of the DNA in your blood or was it because they detected just two copies of the chromosome. There's also vanishing twin syndrome so there's always a possibility that the DNA they have detected in the blood is of the other embryo.

I would treat high risk as they have detected something and low risk as they haven't most probably as there was nothing to detect but there's experimental error in there.

I think sometimes the mix of tests adds to the confusion. You get risk factors, 1 on X because they are using observations to estimate risk. when studied 1 in 30000 with these measurements have trisomy where as babies with these other measurements 1 in 3 have trisomy. It's looking at epidemiology studies to categories chances of chromosomal abnormalities obviously this is less precise and there's larger room for errors which is why you get these broad ranges of risk.

The nipt test by contrast is only looking at your baby. I don't think they generate 1 in X data in the same way. I guess the biggest source of error is in the assignment of low risk versus unable to make reliable measurements

Disclaimer this is from an afternoon of reading an vague understanding not any expert knowledge!

@Superscientist thanks so much for looking into that! I guess your username is for a reason? haha.

You explained that really well when lots of resources sound super confusing, so thank you ❤

I'm going to ahead with it and have moved my appointment to Monday. I think it's worth it if I can get some reassurance before all the waiting for NHS tests and then potentially needing a NIPT anyway. Another thing to obsess and worry about haha.

How are you doing? xx

Hope everyone is ok! Do we have any more scans coming up this week? x

I'm doing ok thanks.

I'm glad the explanation helped. Yes I'm a scientist semi related to medicine so whilst it isn't my field usually I can have a vague understanding when I read about thing and am comfortable bringing information from various places together.

I have thought of an analogy which might be useful.

If you think about pregnancy, ignoring loss of periods just to make the analogy work! Signs of early pregnancy might be sore boobs, nausea and vomiting, fatigue and bloating. Now you could determine the chance a woman is pregnant by scoring each of these factors and then looking at how many women who had that score for each symptom were pregnant. There will be a bit of variance with symptoms a woman that has sore boobs might be more likely to be pregnant than one who's only symptom is bloating as there are lots of reasons for bloating unrelated to pregnancy. So a woman with all the symptoms might be given a chance of 1 in 2 of them being due to pregnancy, just sore boobs 1 in 10 and just bloating as 1 in 10000 (completely made up numbers). This is the scenario for the NHS screening.

Alternatively you could take a pregnancy test to detect if there is HCG in the urine assuming the test has been done correctly if you get a positive test there's a very high chance that you are pregnant, false positives are possible but not that likely. If you get a negative test there's a high chance that this is because you are not pregnant but false negatives are a possibility and it could be that it was there but not detected. For the vast majority of people a positive test is you are pregnant and a negative test is your not but there will be the odd case where the this is not the case.

@Superscientist amazing, thank you! xx

All good, my symptoms have eased, my boobs arent as sore which is nice! Constipation is a real bugger, im trying everything to help but nope😅
Im hoping the placenta is just taking over which will explain all the symptoms kind of leaving😂 its like all new symptoms have come eg. Constipation, backache, little cramps, but more stretching feeling than cramps ect. Still not sleeping perfectly at night, i do keep waking up. Especially when hes snoring in my ear, nearly smothered him with my pillow last night because of his snoring. Doing a big clean today in the house and hes gone to a funeral. So i have around an hour or so to myself🤣 not that im complaining because poor buggers been at work all week while ive been off🤣

On the count down to my 12 week scan! 15 sleeps and its here! We've agreed he will come out of work to come to it and ive already got cover from another team as my colleague is off that week with here eye surgery.
A couple of people know at work, its like the worst kept secret ever🤣🤣

To those who dont know i just have a bad back😅 i dont know how long that will last though before people start realising whats happening!

@LER2023 aw glad some of your symptoms are easing up on you but not in a scary sudden and early way!

Haha bless you, and him 😂my friend was packing for an Easter picnic we were having at the weekend and she said 'is there anything you suddenly really dislike?' and i said 'My DP haha'. They don't have it easy when we're all over the place with stress, hormones and horrible symptoms do they haha.

Ooh I hope the 15 sleeps fly by! I have my booking in appointment this evening so hoping to get my scan date there and then rather than waiting for a letter or anything.

It's good that some people at work know. I've not been in this job long so no one knows, they probably just think i'm letting myself go and keep wearing the same baggy clothes because i've stopped making an effort 😅xxx

Can I sneak into this thread?

I'm currently 19 weeks, have a nearly 3yo and had a MMC (discovered at 10 weeks, 2 rounds of medical management to resolve, was grim) followed by a regular MC at 5-6 weeks in the 6 months prior to this pregnancy.

I have been so anxious and stressed this whole pregnancy. I keep thinking that when I get to this/that/the next milestone I will feel better, but it hasn't really happened yet because I keep finding new things to get stressed about.

At this point, I think it's a me problem and I'm really trying to manage it better ("It probably will all be fine and if it's not we'll deal with it then").

But I get really stressed when people say "congratulations" and I can't look at baby clothes etc without getting really tearful.

With my pregnancy that was the MMC I was so hopeful and excited - downloaded an app and everything - and then I managed to get myself back to a good headspace after that, but the second MC and getting pregnant again after that really messed with me in a way I didn't expect.

@InvisibleDragon Hi lovely and welcome to the thread, of course you can join 💕 I'm so sorry you've had to go through all that. It sounds very similar to my story so I feel your pain especially hard 😔

It sounds like you're doing exactly what the rest of us are doing, living from one milestone to the next and hoping at some point we'll feel better. It's easier said than done having that forced positive attitude - I can't keep it up for long.

You're so much further along now though, so things aren't half as delicate and risky as they were when you had your losses. I know you know all this already, and there's no point trying to rationalise because it doesn't work on any of us! I'm just giving the advice I wish I could take myself!

Do you have any more scans coming up or anything? We're here to support every step of the way xx

@CloudsInMyCoffee09 Thanks - yes, I have my 20w scan next week and a midwife appointment a few weeks after that, so lots of little milestones to look forward to.

And I generally like my job and it keeps me busy and distracted, which is also good. And my 2yo of course!

@InvisibleDragon aw that's good :) I'm struggling to keep my head in the game at work tbh. How are you finding having a toddler whilst being pregnant? I'm completely exhausted lately so the mum guilt is real! x

@CloudsInMyCoffee09 it's definitely tough - I'm often really tired so less keen on physical play than usual. And I've been reducing the amount I carry him too, which I think he's found hard - he used to ride on my shoulders for the walk to nursery and he doesn't like having to go by himself.

I also find I'm really irritable and less patient than normal, with both DS and DH. It's hard to be your best self to a whiny child when constantly stressed and tired.

Hi @InvisibleDragon I'm 17 weeks with my second after two miscarriages last year in August and December both passed as 10 weeks although lost earlier in the pregnancy.
I feel like I can't let out my breath until I get through to the 20 week scan! I'm high risk and finally made it to an obstetrics appointment this week that feels like an achievement for now. I'm hoping to start getting some more obvious movements soon and that might make things feel a bit easier.