I had been ready to have children since my twenties and becoming a mother was something I desired so strongly I didn’t see a future without children in it.
Sadly I didn’t meet the right partner until I was 33 and we began trying 3 years later.
After only two short months, I saw those two pink lines before me. Instead of pure joy my first thought was, “This is not going to be that easy”. Something in my gut told me so and I was proven totally right. My first loss happened early at 6 weeks and as it was during Covid, I didn’t get seen for 3 days. They told me I’d need monitoring for an ectopic because they couldn’t find the pregnancy, but I had already lost the baby at home. The short, sharp shock was enough to contend with, let alone having to enter the maternity unit so often to check if my body was safe for weeks on end.
Eventually I felt able to try again a few months later, despite being terrified of it happening again and not really emotionally recovered from the experience.
This time, we had no luck conceiving again for another 15 months. During that time I was approaching 38 and went to have myself checked over, with an outcome of unexplained infertility for us both and a referral for IVF - something I just never wanted to go through. Just before treatment began, I fell pregnant naturally and achieved 7 weeks before an early scan confirmed a missed miscarriage. I realised then that I may never become a mother.
Despite this further trauma, I was determined to avoid IVF and fell pregnant for the third time straight away after this. I was numb at this point, expecting the worst, which of course came along and hit us like a steam train of grief at 6 weeks again. Another missed miscarriage but this time I had to go into hospital for medical management and for the doctors to send the pregnancy away for testing as it was our third recurrent loss. We know it was a one off chromosome abnormality, with the advice to forge ahead with IVF.
I was broken at this point, unable to handle the physical demands and horror of the loss and not processing the damage emotionally.
As I was now 39, I had only a short time left to try our funded IVF cycles, so just 2 months after this we started our treatment, still having not processed any of our grief thus far. Over 5 cycles in total over the next year, both NHS and privately funded, we had no success and had to say goodbye to 3 little embryos that we had hoped would become our children. The damage was deepening and during the end of the fifth and final round, I had to find some help to cope. This is when I was referred to The Haven and was offered a lifeline in recovery.
My advisor there became my hero, the weekly sessions something I absorbed and looked forward to on the path of forgiveness for myself and the journey we’d been living. She helped me see that there was light on the other side and I may possibly be able to find a way to carry on living without a child I had so longed for.
I gradually felt like a different person and relished the structure of the Time to Heal programme, welcoming my grief and learning how to sit in it and feel like I could finally heal. I am so glad I found The Haven when I did.
Halfway through the programme, when all seemed a bit lost for us and healing was all I could do, I fell pregnant naturally again.
This time, my baby grew beautifully and now, at 41, I’m about to welcome her to the world earth side any day now. It has not been easy and my wonderful advisor offered to continue on with sessions to help me through the pregnancy and the fear that has come with it, after so much loss.
This is above and beyond and I will be eternally grateful to everyone at the centre for turning my life around when I had nowhere else to turn.
If you need help and would like to make an appointment, you can contact us by email or by phone on 01444 233333.