Lottie Fitton
Trying for a baby is not something you usually do weeks into a relationship, but my partner and I met late in life. We were both in our 40s, him six months my elder. There was plenty of “us” left in us. I could have carried on with this – the first relationship that felt truly real – for a long time, before the mundanities of life set in and children were required to mix it up, give us a new focus, steer us in a direction. But time wouldn’t allow for this and within less than a year, we started “trying, but not trying”. After well over twenty years of ensuring I didn’t get pregnant, here I was, contraception free for the first time.
We were about six months into casually wondering each month if we were pregnant, when I had a doctor’s appointment about an unrelated minor complaint, but the conversation steered around to conceiving. Like everything in my life at that time, conception took over. And so it began, blood tests, folic acid and a waiting list for an appointment at the IVF clinic. Now 42, I was at the cut off age for NHS fertility treatment in my area – later than in many postcodes, I knew I was lucky.
A few weeks later, the country went into a national lockdown. I could write endlessly about that, but it would be a different story. For a while, I was the happiest I had ever been. That Spring of 2020 was perhaps the hottest and most beautiful I had ever known. I was working from home, and I was happy; free from the standard world of work, a world in which I struggled.
Our first IVF appointment came through a month or so later but due to the pandemic, it was over the phone. Our consultant was nice; conservative, realistic but kind. We were told there was less than a 5% chance IVF would work for us, but we wanted to go ahead. Our next appointment would involve further tests, it was booked in, but things were moving slowly and we knew we would wait a month or more.
But the pressure was off us. For the first time, we weren’t alone in this. For so many of my friends, pregnancy had been a standard private moment, a quick shag and bang, a baby, blind to their fertility privilege. But not for us. The discussing, reading, taking of vitamins, changing of diet, time keeping, ovulation sticks, best positions, understanding my discharge, temperature taking, the list went on. These things had taken over our lives, taken over our joy. But now, we let it all go. The doctors would do it all and we would be mere pawns in this game of life.
Three weeks later, I was pregnant. I was thrilled and scared in equal measure but also amusingly disgusted at the cliché I had become; “It will happen when you stop focusing on it”. The pointless pleasantries I had been told (from a place of love) so many times, had materialized, and so there I was. Pregnant, isolating, unable to tell anyone, and suddenly feeling immensely alone.
It wasn’t long before anxiety set it. I attribute this almost entirely to the pandemic and the impact it was having on me and my loved ones. I tried to relax; read all the books, did all the meditating but I had a constant burning underlying fear. This didn’t leave me for years and still revisits at regular intervals, uninvited and pushy.
At eight weeks I had my first mid wife appointment on the telephone and only left the house to go for blood tests. She did little to relieve my worries and amidst the long, long list of questions asked of me, not one was about me, about how I really was.
My 12-week scan was a fortnight away. The pandemic meant I would be attending this appointment alone. Beautiful or bad, it was a moment we wanted to experience together and so we had booked a private scan for eleven weeks.
At ten weeks I had some minor spotting. It was a heart dropping, stomach emptying feeling I would come to know well. Told not to worry, I was to wait for my 12-week scan. Nothing could be done or discovered before then. Fortunate enough to have our private scan booked, we moved it forward and went two days later.
This is a day I will never forget. For years I had imagined the moment I would first see that blurry, unrecognizable but unmistakable image on the screen, the moment it would be my turn to post that silent photo which in one instance, says so much. Instead…. there was nothing. An empty, hollow clouded hole, like an undiscovered part of the galaxy. I took that well-trodden route to the toilet to empty my bursting bladder. The sonographer did an internal scan and found a six-week-old fetus with no heartbeat. Those words “I’m sorry, there is no heartbeat”, will never leave me. Not just because they are so haunting when spoken in that context, in that room, but because it was not the last time, I would hear them.
I was referred to the NHS and the next day repeated the experience. A missed miscarriage. I had never heard of this before. It was typical, if anyone was going to miss out on something in life, it was me and not only did I miss out on children, but I also missed my own miscarriage.
Protocol dictated that I wait a week. Occasionally, people get their dates wrong and so there was a tiny hope that I would return the following week and healthy, seven-week baby would be there. But I knew my dates weren’t incorrect. Years of managing my cycle left no room for error. And so, I waited. It was a long week. Knowing the child inside me would never grow, was not alive, but my body still feeling pregnant, tricking my brain into nausea and cravings. I stayed off the wine, just in case. Looking back, it is my only regret. I should have accepted what I knew in my heart, what I had known for weeks, and enjoyed coffee, wine and cheese – the simplest of pleasures.
The week passed slowly, but I would come to learn that this was not the longest week of my life. I took medical management for the miscarriage. It was not an option. The pandemic put a hold on choices- there were no unnecessary surgeries being performed.
As instructed, I had gone to the hospital alone. But as the tablets took hold and the nurse said I shouldn’t drive, I called my friend – one of the very few who knew. Breaking covid rules, she picked up my boyfriend and drove him to the hospital so he could drive me home. We met in the car park – this is when the tears hit, along with the shivers and the freezing cold hotness taking over my body. My most vivid memory is an overwhelming craving for orange juice.
“Just like a heavy period”. I know many of you reading this will have heard these words. It is not like a heavy period, is it? The contractions which took hold of my body were indescribably painful. I was reassured only by the words of a close friend who had experienced both miscarriage and childbirth and confirmed the contractions are real. My contractions were induced. My body was not ready to accept the end of this pregnancy. The pain was a manifestation of everything I was feeling physically, mentally, emotionally. It lasted about three hours with half an hour of excruciating pain. On all fours, I rocked back and forth over a mountain of pillows pushing them into my belly, the soft pressure slightly easing the convulsions. And then it was over. A moment on the loo, I felt something large pass, I didn’t look back, but I couldn’t flush it away, my partner did that. Amidst his working day, meetings and zoom calls were dispersed with checking on me (I had wanted to be alone) and finally flushing away any remnants of life.
I felt like life had been flushed from me too. The emptiness was immense. But the freedom of pain was energising, and I felt better than I had in months. The anxiety momentarily lifted and I was also really proud of myself, of what I had been through and of how my body had coped.
The bleeding continued for three weeks, almost to the day. At 21 days you must do a pregnancy test to check the miscarriage is complete, that no “pregnancy” remains. It was my day 21. It had been another long wait where life was dispelled, held hanging. The bleeding was a constant reminder of what had happened, and it was difficult to “move on”. I had looked forward to this day, so I could put it behind me … for a while.
The day arrived and I was staying with a friend, due to drive home to meet my partner and take the pregnancy test. I was equidistance between my home in the North and my mum’s home in the South where I had just been to visit her and my sister, for the first time in over a year. They didn’t know about the pregnancy. The visit was supposed to be the moment I told them, arranged for 13 weeks and fortunately coinciding with a lifting of lockdown rules allowing me to visit. But instead, it was a visit to check on them. Things had not been great, mum not in good health, my sister not in a great place mentally. Just seeing them was to be enough. News of a miscarriage was out of context for them and felt irrelevant to the moment. I visited for one night, staying in a hotel and not hugging as pandemic rules dictated. It was that insanely hot summer of 2020 and the day, for mum, had been the best day. “The best day of my life” she had said to me when I bid her goodbye.
It was the last time I saw her. She died that night. Three weeks to the day that my tiny baby left my body, my mum took its soul and hers and went away. This is what I believe; this is what brings me comfort. I believed this child would have been a boy, “my beamish boy” and it comforted me to know she had him, held in the palm of her hand.
Two months went by and in November, the IVF clinic called. My appointment had come through. Numb and unknowing of what I wanted, we went for the tests and the minuscule chance of getting pregnant was confirmed. We decided to get through Christmas. My first Christmas without a mum or a dad. A lockdown Christmas. It was surreal and oddly calming.
In February we started our first round of IVF. I was 43 by now so it was no longer free. We assumed it wouldn’t work and paid for a package which would allow multiple tries. Beyond all expectation and in the manner of true miracles, I was implanted with a healthy embryo five weeks later. And then came the Two Week Wait. The TWW for those who don’t know the many, many acronyms within fertility, is how long you need to wait after implantation day, before you can do a pregnancy test. It a long, long wait, but I was still to learn that waiting could feel longer.
My pregnancy test was positive! It was, quite literally a miracle. The next week, we went for our scan. I was six weeks pregnant. The same week the first pregnancy had stopped. I was overwhelmed with fear. The thing about a fertility journey is emotions become familiar. You feel feelings in extreme ways and then, just when you think you are experiencing an emotion at the highest level possible, you are told something else, which undermines that feeling entirely and wham, a whole new feeling. The fear I was feeling, was soon whipped from within me, overrun within the space of two words: “There’s two”.
Having only met in our 40s, we had barely imagined one child, never mind two. Suddenly, our dream felt nightmarish. The shock of two, the cost of two, the pregnancy trauma and birth risks of two, the house required for two… It was utterly overwhelming, and we were in shock. Trying to process the words we had just heard, before then hearing the words “there are no heartbeats” followed by “actually, I can’t be sure”. We were told to wait a week and following that week, we were told to wait another two. Those three weeks were the longest of my life. Not knowing if I was carrying dead babies, or living ones, one or two. Time travelled slowly and I travelled through it feeling like I was floating through the ocean, like something else was propelling me along, because I had nothing. In those three weeks, I switched between desperately wanting them and being so afraid that I did not. By the time the scan day arrived I was shamefully and guiltily hoping they hadn’t made it; the idea of two had become too much for me, especially with the risks that they may not be healthy. But when I heard those words “I’m sorry, there are no heartbeats”, sadness followed the shame and then hope injected as I again heard “actually, I’m not sure”. A rollercoaster of a moment is under selling this, it was like nothing I had ever experienced before. The sonographer went for a second opinion “I wouldn’t like to call it” she said. But they did call it. No heartbeats. A missed miscarriage again. Only not missed this time, very much monitored and known about, step by step.
The thought of going through it all again was terrible. But no two things are the same and just like this pregnancy, this miscarriage was not simple. Medical management didn’t work and after a midnight A & E trip for excessive bleeding, followed by a swift exit as I completely changed my mind about needing the help of what felt like an understaffed, over run and unsafe place to be, I had an MVA procedure the following week. This is where they hoover out your womb to ensure all remnants of the pregnancy are gone.
It did the trick. I was no longer pregnant, no longer bleeding. But I was and am, still grieving my first loss, 9 months to the day prior. And of course, my second loss, the indescribable pain of losing my mum. Then my 3rd and 4th loss; twins. And now, the final and perhaps most intangible and ambiguous loss of them all – the loss a life I had imagined for myself for so long - the life of being a mother. At almost 45, I am no longer TTC but TTL; Trying to Live. That is where I am now; trying to accept and embrace a child free life whilst processing enormous losses, all of which happened in the space of 10 months amidst a global pandemic. It is period of time which will never leave me.
