WARNING: This article discusses pregnancy loss which some readers may find distressing
Recurrent pregnancy loss affects 1 per cent of reproductive-aged women, including writer Rebecca Barry Hill who lost 10 pregnancies – and had a baby.
The first time, we counted our chickens. It had taken us 18 months to fall pregnant, so by the time I was five or six weeks, we held a dinner party with our parents and spilled the happy news, only to turn around a few days later and take it all back. The second time was in Paris. No sooner had we celebrated my sister’s wedding in the Cotswolds, me sipping excitedly on soda water all night, than I was weeping in a toilet stall near le Jardin des Tulieres. This time, we didn’t tell anyone until we were back home – who wants their celebrations dashed by such sadness? But on the night, we hightailed it to a Parisian bar and ordered big glasses of red wine and soft French cheese, the only silver lining we could think of at the time.
It gets a little fuzzy after that. There was the mortifying moment I broke down at work a day after a miscarriage, when a colleague announced her second pregnancy. The time I made it all the way to nine weeks, only to clock my doctor’s expression when she couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat. The time I wound up at the emergency room thinking I would haemorrhage to death. A separate visit to hospital when my body lost the baby but not completely. After the surgery, a teenage boy with a broken arm leaned into my cubicle and cheerfully inquired what I was in for. Poor, friendly guy. He didn’t stick around long when I gestured vaguely down below.
The only thing that was consistent with each loss was the cycle of grieving, the fluctuating hormones and moods. My husband soon learned that the first step, the heaving, purging sobs, was physically necessary, that I didn’t want to be touched as I lay on the bed convulsing. Mourning yet another child that had died inside me meant leaning into the pain, because the only way out was through. After the sixth or seventh loss, I stopped telling my closest friends. What was the point? It would only depress them. I wasn’t even sure why we were still trying. Carrying a pregnancy to term clearly wasn’t meant to be.