Writer Rebecca Barry Hill tells the Herald about her journey to motherhood after recurrent pregnancy loss.
Writer Rebecca Barry Hill tells the Herald about her journey to motherhood after recurrent pregnancy loss.
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 target="_blank">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.
But by then we were deep into the world of fertility appointments, genetic testing, sugar-gluten-alcohol-caffeine-free, food-colouring and body lotion-free, of zinc and folic acid and progesterone. I was struck by the fear this was something I could control, blaming myself for the late nights in my 20s, my Dad blaming himself for using weed killer in my childhood. There were years of trying to yoga and meditate my way out, because the internet tells you stress can lead to pregnancy loss, of regretting the treatments I’d had on my hair, of asking an elderly Italian woman to bless me, of my younger sister struggling to tell me she was 13 weeks’ pregnant, of having a soybean fat emulsion injected into my bloodstream over the course of several hours (a controversial practice to try to counter the possibility my immune system was attacking each tiny womb invader), of oscillating between desperately not wanting to others to feel pity or embarrassment, to wishing to punish them for their ignorant remarks.
Recurrent pregnancy loss affects 1 per cent of reproductive-aged women. Photo / 123rf.com
There were many. The Uber driver who asked, then demanded, why I didn’t have children, and who wouldn’t read between the lines when I went quiet (because who wants to tell a complete stranger about their “unexplained” infertility?) Not me back then, which made simple interactions rife with potential outpourings of grief, like a pesky leak waiting to spring. It would sit there, just under the surface, until a colleague said something like, ‘We left it late to have kids too’. Or when a dad of three I’d just met at a barbecue suggested we were “just cruising” through life. I wanted to throw my drink in his face but instead, I smiled and nodded. Or when a well-meaning writing teacher asked me about the demons I planned to exorcise in his class. I wanted to say I was thinking of putting it all down on paper but I couldn’t get the words out, and I haven’t done verbally or in print, until now. To avoid tears, I went mute, and he got a little miffed when I refused to explain myself.
The DNA tests so far hadn’t uncovered much, except that I had a gene known as MTHFR (or motherf***** as I liked to call it), which could be a reason, but might not. We were 32 when we started trying, not out of the average. In the end it was decided that the best possible route would be to try IVF, to optimise the quality of embryo used to inseminate me.
My wonderful fertility doctor never once blamed our eggs, sperm or habits, even when I’d ask her if I should be drinking tea, or wearing vinyl, or thinking about spiders. Nor did my incredibly supportive best friends, who by this time had already had babies and were working on number two. We were lucky when the first embryo stuck – I was pregnant on the “first” try! A few weeks later, I was back in hospital, our hopes dashed for the eighth time. We had three embryos in the bank, but after my body had rejected what was apparently a perfect one, I had very little hope left. Then, a miracle with embryo two.
Writer Rebecca Barry Hill went through 10 pregnancy losses and IVF before having daughter Zoe, who is now 7.
Our daughter has just turned 7. Seven incredible years of feeling daily awe and disbelief that she is here and she is real. The grief has now become gratitude – without our five-year ordeal, our beautiful girl would not exist. My heart feels deep guilt for those who have not been as fortunate as we have because I know the devastation of pregnancy loss is like nothing else. There were two more losses after she came along, and each time, the pain was no less. But in the end, sharing the truth was the greatest gateway to healing, something that has taken me years to appreciate after all the lonely times spent stuffing it down. As were the friends and family who loved us all the way through.
Rebecca’s note: Fertility Associates has a wonderful counselling service for those experiencing infertility. fertilityassociates.co.nz
