I was no stranger to hardship when it came to becoming a mother. It took 3 years of trying to conceive, several surgeries/procedures, 5 iuis, and 1 round of IVF to conceive my daughter. I felt scared of losing her the whole time I carried her but nothing prepared me for the heartache of losing babies I had carried until she was a year old. I got pregnant without intervention for the 1st time ever! When I finally started to believe my luck was turning around I started spotting red and I knew I was losing my baby. The next day, at 7 weeks, the baby came out in the toilet.
Five months later we went forward with IVF to transfer our last embryo which ended up being a chemical pregnancy. I felt hopeless since that was our last embryo. Three months later I was pregnant without intervention, once again! I once again did not believe that could be my story until we got to 10 weeks and saw the baby wiggling around and we had graduated from our fertility clinic. We announced to everyone on social media that we were expecting our rainbow baby and that our daughter would be a big sister, she even wore a rainbow big sister shirt in our announcement post. Six days later, on St.Patrick’s Day, we had our first midwife appointment. Everything looked great at our appointment (good fundal height and bloodflow to the uterus) until it came time to use the doppler. Our midwife couldn’t find a heartbeat. I wasn’t concerned at first because it was so early and we had been doing vaginal ultrasounds up until that point. Our midwife wanted to assure us that everything was okay so she went to get a portable ultrasound machine and OB that was more experienced in reading first trimester ultrasound. It seemed to take forever before the OB talked to us and I saw the darkness on both he and the midwife’s face. The OB asked if we wanted to see, I remember thinking “Of course I want to see my baby, why is he asking that?!” It was then that we saw our baby was no longer wiggling and he pointed out where the baby’s heart should be beating but was not.
We received the NIPT results just days later and found out we were having a boy with no abnormal genetic markers. We named him Lucien because it means “to illuminate” and he was our light of hope when we thought we no longer had any and whom we believe has become a star in the night sky for us. We had one other loss, a blighted ovum at 7 weeks, after our last round of Letrozole (11 months after losing Lucien) and just a month before we were planning to go through another IVF egg retrieval but it wasn’t as hard as losing Lucien. We also had an unsuccessful round of IVF and our only transferable embryo failed to implant. After that we were out of money and resources for IVF. I held my breath each month that we would still be blessed with another non-IVF pregnancy but ultimately holding out very little hope. In July of this year, about a year after our last frozen embryo transfer failed we got lucky once more! A triple rainbow! This has been the hardest pregnancy after loss as I have just read too many stories about losses happening very late into pregnancy. I will never feel completely safe, I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Currently I have about 3 factors that make my pregnancy higher risk but this baby deserves my love just as much as the others and I’m trying to do my best to choose hope and excitement over fear.
Lisa A. New Mexico
Photos taken by Birdie + May Photography.
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