Please help me understand what is happening and whether my asusmptions could be right (possible miscarriage)

[fairywing]

Hi Guys can anyone help me with this, i am really baffled. I do realise i have been asking lots of questions this weeks, appologies for that, this is all very new and confusing for me!

Basically had a little bit of brown discharge, went for an early scan at what i thought was 8+1 expecting all would be fine but was told i looked about 6 weeks. Yolk sac was there but no fetal pole or heartbeat yet. I broke down saying that couldn't be right i had to be 8 weeks. Sonographer and nurse said all we could do is wait 2 weeks to see how things had developed. I came away feeling things were pretty bleak. Read the letter for my doc which dated me at 5+5 which just seemed ridiculously early and would have meant i tested positive before i was pregnant!!

I have since realised this has happened to lots of people and does sometimes work out fine and sometimes doesn't. Emotionally i am ok with this now, what will be will be.

I have been doing a lot of reading about my situation to help me understand what is happening and prepare me either way so i can ask the right questions etc. I am very glad i have. There is such huge variation in the way they date pregnancy and make decisions on what is viable. Obviously sometimes it clear what is happening, but not always.

Anyway the things that are confusing me are;

1. I was dated at 5+5weeks. However my gestational sac was 19mm. From what i have read a 19mm sac suggests a date of around 6+5 not 5+5. Does anyone know what their sac size was at this stage, could i have been dated wrong.

1. I have been looking at my dates and IF DP's sperm survived 5 days and i ov'd much later than i thought despite thinking i had ov pain a week before i could adjust my date so that i was 7+2 when i went for my scan. This would mean though that i had an extremely faint BFP at only 5DPO, unlikely but possible. It waouild also explain my early low HCG levels. My question is, obviously i don't know how long i took to implant. Does the time it takes to implant affect your dates, presumable embryo development can't begin until implantation has happened. This could close the gap in my dates, but would mean i got my BFP before i implanted - is that been possible??

I also think that i have a tilted uterus but need to ask about this at my next scan as i can't be certain. But if i'm right i know this can obscure the view in scans sometimes and affect when the heartbeat etc can be seen.

The other good thing i found out is that the sac is right at the top of the uterus. If i was threatening to miscarry it would usually be very low down.

If my assumptions about this are correct then it may just still be too early to see the fetal pole and it would be reasonable to assume that things may be ok at the next scan.

I realise i am just guessing and need to wait until the scan but i tend find it easier to cope if i can explain things either way. I have gone from thinking it was all over to possibly coming up with a plausible explanation for what is happening giving me enough hope to get through the weks and a half wait.

Thanks for reading and i really, really would appreciate your thoughts on any of this - hope i don't sound to much like an obsessive derranged preggers woman

You don't sound obsessive and deranged at all. Having been through the early bleeding rollercoaster myself I understand what you are going through. Although the facts overall don't look good you can't be accurately 'dated' at 5+5. When I had an early scan it was just recorded as

Hi fairywing,

Sorry to hear you're going thru this, you're kind of in Limbo Land at the mo aren't u?

So many questions and sorry to say I don't know the answera to many.

I do know that your body starts to release small amounts of hcg hormone from the moment of conception, so there is a small possibility that a very sensitive test may have detected the pregnancy before implantation. Altho, whether it would actually show on a HPT I'm not sure, it may have shown in blood tests but not sure about HPT.

All I can say is keep your mind occupied as much as possible over the next 2 weeks, keep yourself healthy and happy. As difficult as it is, unfortunately, nothing that you do or anything anybody says can change what is going on inside your body.

I do know that sometimes they can get dates wrong on scans, I've heard of lots of people being told they are 7 weeks pregnant and then 3 weeks later being told they're 12 weeks. Obviously however they calculate these things it isn't all that accurate because there are so many discrepancies.

Keep your chin up and stay positive.
The positives are that the blood you had was brown so it was old, it wasn't fresh. You haven't said that you've had any pain or more bleeding so this is good. If there was a problem with your pregnancy nature has a way of dealing with it and your body would probably start to miscarry. This isn't happening so keep thinking positvely.

I hope everything works out fine, keep us posted xxx

Thankyou for taking the time to reply to my ramblings!

No i've had no pain (other than when i had the internal scan) and bleeding has almost tailed of completely but at its height was there 3 times in one day when wiping and was only ever brown.

I know this sounds wierd but on Tuesday and Wednesday after the scan i felt that there was no hope at all, it was all over and i was grieving. Since then i cant help but feel that things are starting to point towards it being ok. I'm just not sure wheher i am basing this on unrealistic assumptions. As i said i feel i have already grieved in some ways so if i do miscarry although i will obviously be sad i am quite prepared for that. I just can't help but think i won't.

I guess the other explanation for the daes discrepency is that i implanted late and got faint positives very quickly after. The hospital keep saying that my first HCG test at 96 when i thought i was 4+1 was very low and 'barely pregnant' but rose well from there. Hmmm there are so many unknowns aren't there!

If it helps with the maths I'd like to offer this little gem in terms of ovulation pain.

The reason I'm on this forum is that ovulation pain actually happens around 5 days before your egg is good to go! I thought I'd ovulated yonks ago and we were safe, whoops. But as my midwife said we'd actually timed it perfectly to conceive. And I have a biology degree as well. Ooops.
Just as well me and DH had decided to start trying in January anyway, He wanted to try earlier but I'd just promised myself one last boozy xmas. Didn't happen as I'm now 11 weeks!
After I failed a preg test in the surgery I also got told by my GP that I wasn't pregnant as there are lots of reasons why a period can be late young lady, even though I'd passed three others.
He turned out to be less right than he thought!
Anyway loads and loads and loads of good luck and best wishes to you.

How interesting, so i do ovulate very late in my cycle! Thank-you for that, that would help to bridge the gap with the dates.

Just wanted to link to you this thread, for you to read some of the positive stories of where many people including myself have had incorrect measures with early scans and it has been fine. I know that it does not always work out ok but it can. I hope that you have good news at your next scan. In the meantime, would your doctor do blood tests to check for hcg doubling?

Oh goodness. You sound just like me six months ago. I don't know that my story will help you, but I will tell you just to give the other side to all the positive messages (sorry).

I was just like you. I had a scan at about 6 weeks that put me a week or more behind my own dates, and I kept on believing that things were OK. I believed every possible pregnancy symptom going and convinced myself that things were OK.

But another two weeks went by and I was still experiencing pregnancy symptoms and the tests were still coming up positive, and I had an early 8 week scan. It showed an unviable pregnancy .

I left things to happen naturally and it took another two weeks, and I had an awful haemmorrhage (sp?) and was very ill with it.

I think what I am trying to say to you is that you can really only take one day at a time and find out things as you go long. I truly hope everything works out ok for you, but I didn't want you just to see all the positive stories and build up too much hope, just in case.

No i have asked a few times about this and they just keep saying they won't be conclusive. Although the last time i asked they said they won't mean anything because they won't know what they were 48 hrs ago....erm so how about you do another one 48hrs later! Seriously

Sorry that last message was to rainbowdays!

Thank-you Nonickname I know it would be silly to get my hopes up too mch but it just seems everyday i learn something new that means there could still be a chance. I just like to understand how everything works really, i think i'm maybe a scientist in a stoopid persons body

I have had 3 mcs and 3 live births. I've had early brown spotting/ early red spotting/pain/no pain/nausea/no nausea (although for me the nausea was the main confirmation the pg was viable.)

The difficulty is, some of the early signs of mc happen in a viable pg, and some of the viable signs can remain in a missed mc.

I agree with NN - support is great, but what will be will be, and you can only really wait and see. Lots of people will be keeping their fingers crossed for you.

I know your right, its this sac size that is frustrating to me though. I am conviced from what i have read that the sonographer has dated me wrongly by my measurements and that she should have dated me 6+5 not 5+5.

For what it's worth, I had a scan due to heavy red bleeding at what I thought by my dates was 7 weeks dot on. The sonographer put me back a week. Then I got put forward a week at my 12 week scan. It's hard to accurately date a pregnancy by a scan so early on, and all babies develop at different rates. You'll probably find at your next scan that you're alot closer to the original dates you had.

I'd like to say to keep up the hope.I was scanned early 5-6ish weeks and was told there was a sac but no embryo in it.
My blood tests over the next week showed hormone levels so low they had never seen a viable pregnancy that low.I grieved as a miscarriage seemed to have occured. They re-scanned me a week later to double check prior to an evacuation procedure of the womb and found a healthy 6wk embryo complete with heartbeat!He's nearly 2 now and am 14 wks pg again.
So where was he hiding?A pg can survive with low levels of HCG.
Sometimes things just don't make sense,babies don't always follow the rules of science.There is always hope.

fairywig - regarding the blood tests,it is not the level that is important more than the doubling, but you do need sequential ones 48 hours apart. I just noticed your hcg levels were monitored earlier, so if they were happy that the levels were rising, that is a good sign for now. You could well have ov'd late and that would explain you current situation. Your level of HCG of 96 at 4+1 is not particularly low, not sure why they would say that, it is a low hcg, but not at that early stage of pregnany. As for getting a faint positive test before it implants, this is possible with a very sensitive test, as hcg is produced before implantation. I agree with you I think that you have been mis-dated with the scan.

On my early scans the variation in response from "all looks ok in size" to , "no you are wrong with your dates or you are miscarrying". But each time the later scans were more accurate and exactly in line with my dates. I hope that this is the case with you.

fairywing

The same thing happened to me.

I had one of those digital tests that tell you how pregnant you are, and it told me I was 1-2 weeks pregnant, which means 1-2 weeks since conception. By LMP I was actually 6 weeks, so quite a discrepancy.

By 7 weeks (by the digital test) 9 weeks by LMP, I decided to pay for a private scan as I was very worried, having previously suffered 2 miscarriages.

What you described in your OP is just what happened at my scan.

Roll on forward many weeks and I'm now nearly 23 weeks pregnant. Basically, my dates are all over the place. LMP is not an accurate way of dating my pregnancy, and neither was the digital test.

Take each day as it comes, and try to relax. What will be, will be.

Oh llareggub that does give me some hope, thank you.

I should have added that my "official" due date from the 12 week scan is nearly 2 and a half weeks further on than the date I calculated from my digital test. In fact, you could even say I found out I was pregnant before I even was! All very odd.

The body is a mysterious thing.

Good luck!

Well the 2 weeks went much quicker than i expected. The scan is tomorrow morning so in 24 hours time we should know whether our baby is dead or alive. I'e been ok for a week or so but today i am feeling really anxious about it all again.

Wow that did go fast

Hope everything is okay for you tomorrow Fairywing, i'll be saying a wee prayer for you and your jellybean tonight

Hope everything is okay for tomorrow fairywing xx

Good luck fairywing

Just to update i went for the second scan today. There had been some development. A fetal pole has grown to 7mm in the last 2 weeks. Unfortunately that only dates me at 6+4 when i should now be between 9 & 10 weeks and there is still no heartbeat.

I hae opted to leave it for 2 weeks to see if i miscarry naturally before going for medical or surgical management. Will probably opt for surgical.

Thank-you for the support through this.

Sorry fairywing - is there any way it could suddenly catch up? I've heard stranger things on here.

Sorry to hear it wasn't very encouraging news fairywing, take care of yourself.

Ladylush I asked but Hospital said not.