My Miracle 2nd Child

One of the main reasons behind me wanting to support The Miscarriage Association is that by all accounts, I should not have brought my second child home. I had plenty of time to reflect on what it would be like to lose her, which made my heart break all the more for those who do lose their babies.

WARNING – the story of this pregnancy contains medical details that some might consider too much information, but is necessary to explain what happened. There are also photos of bumps and newborns and scans for those who wish to avoid that sort of thing.

The story is in three parts. The introduction, which is below, then the story of the drama in the second trimester, and finally the birth story. It’s a very long read, so grab a cup of tea and a biscuit!

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It was such a relief to get a positive test after all the drama that had come before just after my second loss. The pregnancy did not start out well, however. I recall bleeding and cramping so much in the first week I knew I was pregnant that I was totally sure I had lost the baby. Red blood came and went many times over the first 12 weeks.. it did not start tailing off until after 8 weeks.

Journal entry from April 20th, 2008

Pretty sure this pregnancy is not going to work out. I have had constant cramping and spotting since Wednesday and it’s getting worse. I never had this with Bethan, but I had it with my last miscarriage. The morning sickness I felt has faded a bit. This much spotting and cramping is not normal and although a few women do have this in their pregnancies, they are so much the exception rather than the rule. I think it is time to call a spade a spade.

Going for a private scan tomorrow morning (would have gone today but they are closed) to confirm pretty much. I still have the appointment on Friday at the hospital if I make it that far – if I do at least I can compare and know for sure as one scan on its own is often inconclusive, especially if bad news has only just started to happen. I’d also rather get the bad news in a nicer environment than Queen Elizabeth Hospital with a callous sonographer. I mean, there are nice ones up there, but sod’s law I’ll get a crap one. And if it’s bad news they try to keep it from you too, don’t answer your questions and treat you like an imbecile.

I feel like such a goddamned failure. I have no idea how I managed to have B at all as clearly something is wrong with me. I am not sure how I’m going to go through all this stress again in the future, but I have to somehow. At least they might take me seriously now with three proper losses.

Journal entry from April 21st 2008

The good news is that there is only one baby in there (so far)

The bad news is that she wouldn’t tell us if it was a boy or a girl! And that she couldn’t hold her hand steady enough on the perfectly-measuring-for-dates embryo to tell exactly how fast the heartbeat we could all see was!

And morning sickness is definitely here. And aside from a bit of red spotting yesterday, I’ve had no cramping or spotting since. I do wonder if that virus was affecting things..

I have the scan at the hospital on Friday. Hopefully that will be all fine – I’ll see what they suggest at that point. I definitely want to go for another scan before my NT scan at 12 weeks because of my history, so I may end up booking another private viability scan at 9 weeks.

In the meantime, finally, something is going right. With all that bleeding and cramping, exactly the same as last time, I wasn’t wrong to fear the worst. But for once, I was wrong! You couldn’t get more perfect measurements if you tried, unlike B who measured 3 days behind at her first scan! And unlike the last time I saw an embryo on the screen, this one is very much alive, albeit not as noisy as B.

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So, I paid for that early private scan at 6 weeks, fully expecting the worst, and was stunned to see baby’s heartbeat flickering away safely on the screen. I had many more scans, some private, some NHS due to the bleeding. There was never a cause found.

At 10 weeks, my daughter B came down with the measles that she had picked up from nursery/daycare. She ended up in A&E, but they failed to diagnose it as the rash had not yet appeared. A few days later it did, and she was diagnosed. I assumed I was safe having had the jab as a child, and also having apparently had it. I was wrong – 10 days later I caught the wretched virus myself. Thankfully it was a modified version as I had some antibodies, but the odds were pretty small on me getting it at all – 1 in 100 or less. By the time the measles was diagnosed, it was too late for antivirals. There followed some frantic research online whereupon I found out that the odds of having a miscarriage could be as high as 1 in 3 according to some research, or a lot less. Nobody knew for sure. I got extra scans out of it, but nobody could promise anything.

Around the time I realised I had measles and read that the risk of miscarriage was so high, I checked my livejournal and discovered that my dear friend Lisa had just succumbed to cancer. We knew her cancer was terminal, but it was still a horrible shock. Lisa was one of my closer friends and she is very, very much missed.

At this point, especially as I was trying to arrange a trip for all of us to America for my husband’s new job, I decided I had had enough and could not cope. I was stressed out beyond belief and exhausted. Little did I realise what was yet to come.

Shortly afterwards, my little brother (8 years younger) caught the measles from me – he’d been exposed to me on my birthday before I knew I had it. He had it fully blown, and ended up needing to call an ambulance as he got so dehydrated. He was discharged from hospital the same day but could not get transport home.. however the hospital records did not reflect this and when he did not show up at home several hours after his apparent discharge, me and my mum were going frantic and his friends filed missing person’s reports. I rang the hospital one last time to say I would be coming over to look for him and someone overheard my call and said he was still waiting for patient transport. Crisis over!

The next day I had a phone call from my mum. My husband answered, and I could see from his reaction it was bad news. Had something happened to my brother again? I took the phone. My mum told me that my dad had just died, suddenly, less than an hour earlier. My parents had separated many years ago, and my dad had remarried, but I was still close to him. It was completely out the blue – he’d had heart problems due to high cholesterol (despite being ridiculously healthy all his life – it was genetic) but he’d been assured they wouldn’t kill him. However, apparently they did – a sudden heart attack and nobody could bring him round.

I had to make the drive to my brother’s house 10 minutes away and tell him the news. It was awful.  The next day was Lisa’s funeral and so I could not tell any of my friends what had happened because I didn’t want them to give sympathy for me on a day for Lisa’s family and friends.  It was very hard to be at her funeral but I had to be there for her.

We had to arrange to go down to Cornwall for the funeral right away, which meant a still-recovering-from-measles brother and his girlfriend, and me and the husband and a grumpy 18 month old B on a long, cramped train journey. The relationship between us (me and my siblings) and my father’s new wife had recent difficulties, which meant dealing with the funeral and everything associated with it was particularly awkward and stressful.  I did not, could not cry at his funeral, unlike at Lisa’s the week before.  Nevertheless, I read a tribute to my dad (as he did to me at my wedding) and my brother and sister played music for him. I’d managed to squeeze in my NT scan just before going down (the people at the hospital were great about re-arranging it) and I knew I was having a healthy baby, so I was glad to be able to tell everyone this, and even more glad that I’d told my dad in our last phone call on my birthday a few weeks earlier that I was pregnant again.

We returned to London, and made the preparations for our trip to America. We were to spend four weeks in the San Francisco area, and 2.5 weeks in the Seattle area, although as you will read, the Seattle part never happened. The day came, we caught the plane, everything seemed to be perfect. Finally, after months of awfulness, things were going right. Or so we thought.

Read what happened next..