After 5 years of trying to conceive, my husband and I welcomed our double rainbow baby Alden James on October 1st 2024! It was a very long road to get here and unfortunately, our story is riddled with infertility diagnoses and recurrent loss. After trying for a baby for 3 years, we lost our first child at 8 weeks in June of 2022 to an ectopic pregnancy. My husband and I have double factor infertility. I have PCOS and he has low sperm morphology. We’ve tried lots of different medications and treatments with no success. Eventually, we had no choice but to move on to doing IUIs, which thankfully are covered by our insurance. We’ve done 11 medicated cycles, and 7 of them were with IUIs. On May 10th 2022, we found out we were finally pregnant for the first time after our 5th IUI. It was 2 days after Mother’s Day and I was just under 4 weeks pregnant at that point. I can’t even begin to describe the relief we felt when we realized it was finally over. All the cycle tracking, all the medications, all the missed work hours, all the stress – it was all worth it because it finally worked.
Pretty much right off the bat, things weren’t progressing as the doctors expected. My pregnancy hormone levels weren’t rising properly. They always rose consistently, but they were much lower than they should’ve been. Around 5 weeks, the doctors started to worry it was going to end in a chemical pregnancy or ectopic pregnancy. I was doing blood draws every 48 hours and ultrasounds once a week for a month and they still couldn’t definitively say what was going on. At every ultrasound, they just couldn’t see a gestational sac. Nothing in my uterus, nothing in my tubes, just nothing – but the doctors said they wouldn’t expect to see anything with my hormone levels being so low because they were measuring about 2 weeks behind where they should’ve been.
At 6 weeks, the risk of a chemical pregnancy was gone because I had progressed farther than that, but that made the risk of an ectopic pregnancy even more real. I was briefed on the dangers of an ectopic pregnancy and given a protocol to follow should I develop any adverse symptoms, but I always felt fine. They discussed my options with me for managing the pregnancy, but I was just not ready to hear it. We had been trying so hard for so long and I wasn’t gonna do anything to end that pregnancy without some sort of definitive proof of what was going on. Against the doctors’ guidance, I decided to wait two more weeks to see what my hormone levels would do. I was so afraid of ending a potentially viable pregnancy, thinking maybe it was just too small to see in my uterus yet. I thought surely if my hormone levels continued to rise, we’d eventually get to see something on the ultrasounds and know for sure where the embryo was and then I wouldn’t regret my decision.
At my 8 week appointment, my hormone levels finally rose to the point where you can usually see a sac, but they still couldn’t find it. By this point, I had already agreed to compromise and pursue medical management of the pregnancy. My husband was in full agreement with the doctors, pushing me to do the medical management from the 6 week mark. While this may seem like a negative because we were disagreeing, he was prioritizing my health over that of our baby. And he was right to. Without me, there would be no baby at all. He was thinking rationally about how dangerous I was being with my own life and I was just not able to be rational. I had to do some serious soul searching. My logical brain told me that by 8 weeks, not seeing a sac or hearing a heartbeat is very abnormal and it was time for me to be realistic. I had to ask myself if this was worth losing a tube or another organ over if I continued to allow the pregnancy to progress. Or worse, dying over. As someone who already has infertility issues, I just couldn’t justify losing a tube on top of everything else. And I certainly didn’t want to die.
I was given two options: Management with a medication called Methotrexate or a D&C. A D&C would be exploratory, as they weren’t really sure if it was in my uterus at all. And if they tested the tissue and found no signs of pregnancy, I’d need to do the Methotrexate anyway, so that’s what we decided to go with. Plus, it seemed safer than allowing my tube or some other organ to continue going unaddressed for any length of time when we were already playing with fire if that’s where the embryo truly was. We scheduled the treatment for the next day.
By the time I got home from the doctor in the evening, I was starting to have some of the symptoms the doctors were warning me about. It felt like the worst period of my life and all I could do was curl up in a ball and breathe through the pain. In retrospect, I now know that I was feeling contractions. Unfortunately, it progressed very quickly and I started bleeding within the hour. We decided it had gone too far, so my husband rushed me to the ER.
By the time they retested my hormone levels (which was about 3 hours after I was seen previously in the day), they had dropped by more than half. A drop that large was more than my levels ever increased in 48 hours, let alone 3, so I was sure my body was starting to pass the pregnancy naturally. They did another ultrasound and finally found the embryo. It was in my left tube. Thankfully, it was caught in time before my tube became too inflamed to the point of an inevitable burst. The doctors were confident I could avoid surgery and losing that tube if they treated me with Methotrexate immediately. So just after midnight on June 7th 2022, I officially hit 8 weeks pregnant, and officially started the process of ending the pregnancy by receiving the treatment.
The treatment stopped our baby from growing any further, but I still had to go through the traumatic experience of miscarrying the embryo. After about 3 days, the bleeding stopped, but my path to recovery was barely beginning. One of the hardest parts for me was the self-blame that I felt every day. You know, many miscarriages happen because there is something genetically wrong with the embryo. But with an ectopic, the embryos are usually healthy – they just implant in the wrong spot. That was so much harder for me to wrap my brain around. Losing a healthy child because my body implanted it wrong. My whole fertility experience made me distrust my body and made me so angry that I couldn’t do what most other women could. I spent the better part of a year cycling through the stages of grief, getting triggered by unexpected things, but still never giving up hope for our rainbow baby. We didn’t restart our fertility treatments again for 10 months because I just needed time to heal, both mentally and physically.
Over the next 9 months, we restarted our medicated cycles and did 2 more IUIs. On February 13th 2024, we found out we were pregnant for the second time after our 7th IUI! Much to our surprise at our first ultrasound at 5 weeks, we found out that we conceived two embryos! By our second ultrasound at 7 weeks, Baby A had a strong heartbeat, but Baby B’s gestational sac was empty. We learned that Baby B was a blighted ovum, but in this case, it was also known as a vanishing twin.
I was advised that I would likely miscarry Baby B before the end of the first trimester, but it should pose no risk to Baby A. But at every ultrasound, Baby B’s sac was still growing on pace with Baby A, just staying empty. It was very confusing for me. No genetic material means no baby right? But if I have to go through another miscarriage, then it is a baby…? A blighted ovum is clearly not as straight forward as our ectopic pregnancy was, but ultimately for me, a loss is a loss. And the thought of going through another miscarriage and hoping my body would still protect Baby A was terrifying. Blood is triggering, even when the doctor says to expect it.
Baby B held on for 13 weeks. I started bleeding at 11 weeks, but it took another 2 weeks for Baby B to fully pass. Even though I knew what was happening, it still ended with a midnight ER visit. Not because I was in any physical danger, but because I wanted an ultrasound immediately to make sure that Baby A was still ok. The mental game was bananas! Pregnancy after loss was hard. SO hard! Every minute. Of every day. But everyday, my body surprised me with what it was capable of.
I never thought it would take us so long to have a living child, but I also never expected to deal with infertility or miscarriage. As I reflect about this journey, I find that I’m hovering between two main emotions. Of course, I still feel all the grief from everything we’ve been through over the last 5 years. I’m still processing it all and reminding myself that a living child does not replace the babies we lost. But much to my surprise, I’m also feeling proud of myself for having the resilience to push through it. I wanted to quit so many times, but I just kept believing that one day I’d get to bring a baby home. And I’m so glad I held onto that because now we have Alden and he makes everything we went through worth it.
Photos taken by Lae_Lo Photography & Design.
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