We meet at last – I love you!!

This time, there was no hanging around waiting for a room. We now found out that the hospital had a suite set aside for situations such as ourselves, and my husband could at least stay with me as there was a sofa for him to sleep on. Also, there was no hanging around in inducing me, and despite that it was almost 11pm, I was induced almost immediately. Thankfully, my body responded quickly to the medication, and the contractions started fairly swiftly. I was again hooked up to a morphine pump, and at 6am, thanks to a wonderful midwife, I had our little boy. I know this should have been the saddest moment, but instead I was elated. I was so relieved to finally meet him at last, the love I felt for him was overwhelming. He weighed just shy of 4lbs, but to me he was huge. How do women do it when babies are 9lbs?!!! He looked perfect in every way. He even had dark hair like me, but the rest of him was all daddy – the arms, the feet. But I knew when I held the back of his head that it felt like a water-filled balloon. The horrifying thought occurred to me, thankfully for only a brief moment,that perhaps his head would burst if we weren’t careful. Thankfully that didn’t happen.  We dressed him in a little babygrow and hat I’d bought in Mothercare the day before and we cuddled him. And my initial elation turned into sheer sobbing desolation.

My parents came to see him and so did my sister. My husband’s parents also came to see him. I didn’t want him to be thought of as a pregnancy that didn’t work out. He was a little baby, a real human being, even if his brain was in a very bad way, and I needed them to realise that he existed and that he wasn’t a figment of our imagination.

The hospital chaplain came to see us, even though it was his day off, and I realised that he was the same chaplain who’d written me that kind note two years previously for our other baby. We both knew that we were going to have a funeral, and that it would be for both boys, and he would be the one to conduct it.

We spent the rest of the day cuddling our boy and taking pictures. But we knew we’d have to leave him with the hospital. We kissed him for the last time and returned home.

The Endgame

By now, I hadn’t been sleeping well for weeks. I’d been waking up almost every night between 3am and 5am, tossing and turning, finally getting up to pace round the house, eventually going back to sleep again until the alarm went off at 6.30am and I headed back to work.

I was exhausted, and my memory and concentration were suffering. We wondered over and over what could possibly be causing this. There was nothing we could find in either of our family trees which pointed to cases of congenital mental or physical disabilities. Was it in my environment? Was it mobile phones, wifi, pollution, that piece of soft cheese? What had we done to deserve this nightmare?

A final MRI, carried out at 28wks, showed that the brain's mantle was thinner than it should be at that stage of gestation. This, we were told, was a sign that aside from the ventricles squashing his brain, the brain wasn’t developing properly regardless, and even if they could drain the fluid after he was born, he was going to have brain damage.

Overall, our to-ing and fro-ing went on for 9 weeks before we made a decision. We again decided, extremely reluctantly, to end the pregnancy on the basis that our baby would likely have a very poor quality of life, compounded by the fact that he was probably being afflicted by some sort of genetic condition which would put him at the ‘severe’ end of the disabilities scale.

I knew what was coming. I knew in going down the road I was about to go down I was choosing insanity – a just punishment for taking this abhorrent decision. I was once again given a little pot with a pill inside and a glass of water. I took it. We returned to the hospital two days later and once again I lay down in the ultrasound room. I knew that once the consultant put that needle into my stomach and into my baby that my soul would die with him, and there would be no coming back. We asked the consultant to take one last look at his brain, but the black mass had again grown since we’d seen it last, and there was little brain visible on the screen. He put the needle into my stomach, through to our baby, and put him to sleep forever.

‘I think you should terminate, the brain’s f***ed up’

We went round and round in circles in our thinking. We just didn’t want this to be happening. Perhaps our baby would be ok really? As with our first baby, while my head knew the truth, my heart was not having it. I was now 27 weeks pregnant and we needed a second opinion. So I spoke to a few people about who else, apart from our own consultant, would be good to see. We got a couple of recommendations for the same consultant, a professor with years of experience. We were warned his clinic sometimes overran by 5 hours, but we didn’t care, I just needed another view. Could things really be that grim? As it turned out, instead of seeing him at 4.30pm, we saw him at 9.30pm, so the five-hour overrun warning was correct.  But if we’d hoped for a different view, or even an ounce of sympathy, we were to be sorely disappointed.

He scanned me very briefly and announced, `` I think you should terminate, the brain’s fucked up.’’ Yes, that’s verbatim, I am NOT paraphrasing. To say we were shocked at how he was talking to us was an understatement. We had NOT seen this coming at all. If my jaw hadn’t been on the floor, I would have punched the horrible little *******. In fact I really wish I HAD punched the guy. He continued his consultation with phrases such as ‘when the brain’s this screwed up...’ etc etc. I thought how can you speak about my baby like that?! He may be in a bad way, but he hasn’t done anyone any harm, please be nice to him!!! We paid the bill (yes, we did pay him for his advice), and went out onto the pavement and sobbed into each others’ arms.

Rage, frustration and no-one to blame.

I suppose I am angry that there is no apparent 'culture' of carrying to term a sick baby in the UK. There is no encouragement from the medical establishment to keep a baby with abnormalities. The strength to do that has to come from within yourself , with or without the support and encouragement of your partner and family. But my family didn’t want me to have a life looking after a mentally and physically disabled child, who would turn into a mentally and physically disabled adult. And I felt powerless to keep him regardless of everyone’s views. I know this sounds horribly weak, and it is. I was weak.

It was around this time that the BBC’s Panorama programme was aired which showed adults with mental disabilities being abused by their carers. I couldn’t bring myself to ever watch the program; the headlines in the papers were enough. I didn’t want that fate for our child.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13611089

And there was another story about how a woman killed her own son, who had autism. Reading this, the old me would have thought ‘how can a mother do that do her own child,’ but now I saw it through different eyes. She wasn’t evil, just utterly at the end of ther rope looking after her severely disabled boy. As much as I wanted to romanticise things and think that maybe we’d cope ok, and that ‘god doesn’t give you what you can’t handle’ (I saw that written on lots of the US pro-life sites), the reality of it was that not everyone is able to cope. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/09/mother-killed-autistic-son-trial

Staring down the barrel of a gun

We pretty much had a scan every week from then on. The ventricles did nothing but grow at each and every scan. Even at only the second scan, the week after, the ventricles were now 17mm, in the ‘severe’ zone.  

What had initially been, to our untrained eyes, a couple of barely-noticeable black lines, rapidly turned into a black mass obliterating the brain. Here's a link to a lady who found herself in a similar situation with her baby. Our scans pictures were very similar. http://sociallyinappropriatemom.blogspot.com/2011/10/expectations.html 


An MRI indicated that it was probably caused by acqueductal stenosis, where the tube allowing the drainage of the cerebrospinal fluid is blocked. We were told that once the fluid ran out of space in the head, the skull would start to expand and then his condition would be termed ‘hydrocephalus’.

I didn’t want an amniocentesis. I wanted to keep our baby whatever. But again I caved in and had the amnio. It proved negative, but from our last experience, I knew this was no reassurance.

Within weeks, it got to the stage when they said our baby, again a boy, would be severely disabled. We were told that if we kept him, he would have brain surgery within days or weeks of his birth to have a shunt (a drain) inserted into his head and connected to his abdomen to get rid of the excess fluid. This would not be a temporary drain, but something he’d have for the rest of his life.

We just couldn’t believe it we were in this situation again. We were utterly bewildered. I couldn’t bear the thought of ending a pregnancy again and was furious with myself for having agreed to these tests, because if you don’t know, then there’s nothing to be worried about, and no pressure to do ‘something about it.’

I just kept wondering how on earth could a person go through it again and not end up suicidal or in a psychiatric ward? It felt like we were staring down the barrel of a gun. Why were we going through this? Why are we being persecuted? I am not religious at all, but even I began to ask, ‘what god have we upset?.’

All I knew that I was going to get this baby over 24 weeks whatever. At least that way he would get a birth certificate, proof that he did exist and did matter, and I would qualify for maternity leave, because I thought if I was going to have a nervous breakdown, at least I could have it under the guise of a maternity leave with a year to try to sort myself out mentally.

Coincidence?

I went straight home and googled ‘ventriculomegaly’. Here’s what it said on Wikipedia:

``Ventriculomegaly is a brain condition that occurs when the lateral ventricles become dilated. The most common definition uses a width of the atrium of the lateral ventricle of greater than 10 mm. This occurs in around 1% of pregnancies. When this measurement is between 10 and 15 mm, the ventriculomegaly may be described as mild to moderate. When the measurement is greater than 15mm, the ventriculomegaly may be classified as more severe. Enlargement of the ventricles may occur for a number of reasons, such as loss of brain volume (perhaps due to infection or infarction), or impaired outflow or absorption of cerebrospinal fluid from the ventricles. Often, however, there is no identifiable cause.

Associations

Ventriculomegaly is also known to be associated with other malformations such as agenesis of the corpus callosum, spina bifida, and heart defects. Fetuses with both isolated ventriculomegaly and with other anomalies have an increased risk of having a chromosomal abnormality, including that of Down Syndrome. Many conditions associated with ventriculomegaly can be defined prior to birth, but the possibility remains of other anomalies (either structural, chromosomal or genetic) only being identified later in pregnancy or after birth. Ventriculomegaly associated with abnormal findings and other structural malformations, often has an adverse prognosis, which ranges from disability (often mild) to death. However, in cases of mild isolated ventriculomegaly, there is around a 90% chance of a normal outcome.’’

I read this, and the thing that leapt out at me was that ventriculomegaly is apparently associated with agenesis of the corpus callosum, what our first baby had. But this baby has his corpus callosum, I had asked the ultrasound technician specifically. But what is going on, surely this cannot be a coincidence??

The Scream

From now on, my state of mind can best be described as:

                                               

The Sum of All Fears

At the 21 week scan, the ultrasound technician asked that we see the consultant again. I thought nothing of it as I thought this was a formality, but afterwards my husband said he could tell that the expression on her face had changed.

We moved to the next room where the consultant scanned me again. He told us that the ventricles in the baby’s brain were slightly enlarged (11mm), something known as ventriculomegaly. As long as they didn’t grow any more, most babies were fine. Our hearts dropped off a cliff. I thought this is it, this is going to get worse, we are not getting out of this one. And indeed that is what happened.

                                                     

What if it goes wrong again?

Miracle of miracles, I did conceive in November 2010. But now, instead of being anxious about getting pregnant, we were petrified that something would go wrong again. I didn’t want to be faced with ending this pregnancy and I was really against doing any of the ultrasounds. I didn’t know how someone could go through it twice and not be destroyed by it. All I could think of was ‘If they find something wrong with the baby, I am going to punch the ultrasound technician, there is no way I am going to be able to take it.’ Or the alternative scenario: they find something wrong, I say thank you and excuse myself to go to the ladies, then find my way up to the top floor or the roof of the building, and just walk off the side. But I caved in and went for the ultrasound. It was fine. Our baby has no problems.

Limbo – uni friend dies; due date; fertility probs

We had our son on the Saturday. My husband went back to work on the Monday, and I went back to work two weeks later. We were shell-shocked, but trying to get on with things. The chaplain from the hospital wrote to us to let us know he had taken our baby’s funeral service and that his ashes had been scattered along with other babies in the cemetery next to the hospital. It makes me cry, but I am happy this kind man took the service. Why was I not there? I think we thought that it hadn’t been a ‘proper’ pregnancy, and because of the decision we’d taken, we didn’t have a right to be sad, upset or even grieve. It was a very mixed-up time.

We got the results of the post mortem two months later, but it showed little more than had been shown in the ultrasounds. At least it did relieve my lurking fear that at least they hadn’t made a mistake. It didn’t say ‘there was nothing wrong with this baby, what have you done?’ It did say that our boy had ‘dysmorphic features’ which is the medical term for looking quite strange, so at least I knew my instinct when looking at him had been correct.  Because our CVS had come back normal, we were advised that we had probably been unlucky and to give it another go.

We continued to try but nothing was happening and we were becoming increasingly stressed. I was becoming more agitated but trying to keep a lid on it. On the outside I went to work, did my job, laughed, smiled, but inside I was very depressed. It didn’t help that that summer we got a call from an old university friend. He told us that one of our other friends from our time at uni had been walking home from a nightclub in central London a couple of nights before. He had been beaten round the head and left for dead. He was put on lifesupport but they turned it off a couple of weeks later. I heard of his death on the radio before I left for work one morning. Now I hadn’t seen this guy in years. Normally I would have handled this as ok given I was by now really only an acquaintance. But now this had a very negative impact on my already-fragile morale.

Summer turned into autumn, and now I faced a double-whammy: my baby’s due date and mass redundancies at work. Now being upset at my baby’s due date was not something I was expecting. It seems silly looking back, but I’d had my baby back in May 2009, and so that was that, no? He’d been due end September/early October, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was a physical reaction just as much as an emotional one. I didn’t even need a calendar for me to tell that it was my due date, that was the weird thing. At the same time, at work, we were being called in one after the other to be told whether we were keeping our jobs. I kept mine, so why should I be bothered? But one day I came home and brushing my hair in the mirror, all of a sudden I noticed I could see patches of scalp that usually i couldn’t see. My hair was falling out. Now was the time to admit that I wasn’t handling any of this well at all.

I went to my GP, and she put me on sertraline, an anti-depressant also known as Zoloft. I’d been fighting going on anti-depressants for ages, but I couldn’t deny that I wasn’t right inside. Did it make any difference? I think so. Whether you say it was the placebo effect or the medication working, stepping out in front of the train on my way to work seemed less like a good idea. Things seemed a bit more bearable.

But we were still ‘trying’, and nothing was happening. A year after I had our baby, we were back at my GP, and she suggested a hormone blood test for me and that my husband should ask his GP for a sperm test. My hormone test came up as normal, but my husband’s sperm test showed poor motility and very poor morphology. This was quite a blow. As he’d had a varicocele that had been operated on in the past, he went back to the original urologist for advice. This consultant ordered another sperm test, and this showed the same issue, as indeed did a repeat test a few months later. We were told that if we should ever have to consider IVF, then we would have to do ICSI, where they select a sperm which looks good to inject straight into the egg. I really didn’t want to go down the IVF route. Why weren’t we conceiving?

Finally, we meet our son

Our baby was dead, and now I would have to give birth to him. I was terrified. But if I’d thought we’d go straight from the ultrasound room to a delivery suite, I was much mistaken. There was no room reserved – we’d have to wait our turn. They were very busy and we were not an urgent case!!! Whatever they had given to our baby had made me very sleepy and we lay out on the lawn in front of the hospital, where I snoozed on my poor husband’s lap for a good few hours. It was a beautiful day. The sky was blue and the sun was shining. I thought, how can it be so nice when we feel so utterly wretched?? The contrast was astonishing.

I gradually emerged from my stupor, and it was late afternoon and they still hadn’t found us a room. What the hell was going on? They then told us to go home and they’d ring us from there. Now I was terrified if I left they’d forget about us. How long can you have a dead baby inside you? I had no idea. But eventually a room came free and I got in that evening. But it was too late to induce me, they would have to do it the next morning instead. My husband, very reluctantly, left me and returned home. I slept fitfully. At 6am I wandered around the corridor and found a midwife willing to induce me.  Contractions began, and boy they were painful. I asked for pain relief and because we weren’t going to have a live baby, I could have morphine, via a pump which I could press a button and administer it myself. I’ve had this machine in the past when I’d seriously injured myself in my mid-20s, and it worked great then, and it did now.

Our baby, a boy, was born at 6pm the same day. He was just over a pound in weight. When I try to remember the emotions of that time, my strongest memory is of thinking ‘he wasn’t meant to be, he wasn’t meant to be’. He was perfectly formed with little hands and legs, but the oedema on his tummy was big and red. His face looked strange, as if he had Down’s. I knew this couldn’t be the case as the CVS had tested negative for that, but anyway I had never seen a baby at 20 wks gestation before, so I had no way of telling.

The midwives were very kind. I had no idea what to expect, but they wrapped him in a little blue blanket and put him in a little blue basket with a tiny teddy bear. He was weighed and measured, and they took pictures of him with his teddy bear which they put in a booklet for us. We spent the rest of the night with him, cuddling him and talking to him, and taking our own pictures.

We left the hospital the next day. Leaving him was the hardest thing. We’d requested a post mortem, so we knew we’d be back in a few months for that, but we asked the hospital to arrange his funeral. With that, we got in our car and headed home.

A part of my soul dies

So what happened next? It seemed as if every time we went for a scan they were finding some new abnormality.  We weren’t being given a fatal prognosis, but we didn’t know whether he’d last to term or go on and survive. And that was the crux of our angst. We found ourselves coming to the conclusion that we didn’t want him to have a life of suffering. Surely it would be kinder, certainly not for us, but for the baby, to end the pregnancy?

So that’s how I found myself, at 20 wks gone, sat in a room in the Fetal Medicine Department, taking a pill which would soften the cervix in preparation for birth. I returned to the department two days later, after the pill had taken effect, and went in to the same ultrasound room where all our scans had taken place. There, in a similar procedure to the CVS, the consultant put a needle into my tummy and gave our baby an injection into his heart to stop it beating. Now, the thing is, when they do that, they may as well put the needle into your own heart for all the difference it makes. A few moments before, our baby, a boy, was moving. And now he is not. And we’ve done that. Oh my god.

The world has gone mad

We had had no appreciation of what we were letting ourselves in for when we turned up for that first, fateful ultrasound. Until then, we simply hadn’t realised that couples who were willing and able to have children could ever find themselves in our situation. We thought the ultrasound was to look at pretty pictures of our baby. But here we were.

I asked the hospital that if we decided that it would be best not to continue, what would happen? I knew after a certain amount of time you had to give birth, but I’d assumed it was quite late on in pregnancy. You give birth after 14 weeks came the reply. Oh my god. So these people expect me to go into labour and deliver our dead child? Are they crazy??

As fate would have it, the day after the 18 week scan I felt my baby move for the first time. Now this really was torture. I was acutely distressed. It’s as if in a matter of moments everything you have ever believed in your whole life counts for nothing: treat others as you yourself would want to be treated. Do not kill.

But we still couldn’t accept what they were telling us. While I knew at an intellectual level that what they were telling us was correct, I needed to hear it from someone else for my heart to really accept it. So I sought out a private ultrasound clinic on Harley St and we raced there, not least because I’d learnt from frantic Googling that there was some debate about whether the corpus callosum could be seen that early in a pregnancy. But this scan showed the same issue – the brain was not in good shape.

Stop looking and it will be ok!!

From then on, we pretty much had a scan every week. We saw the head of the fetal medicine unit within four days of the initial scan. I should have known then that if you are in the NHS system and get to see the head of the department within a few days, you are in fact screwed. But we thought we were getting amazing service, which of course we were, but we didn’t realised where it was leading. He performed a CVS. This is where they stick this amazingly long needle straight into your tummy, without anaesthetic, and take a sample of the placenta to have a look at the baby’s chromosomes. It sounds and looks alarming, but my experience of it was fine – I'd had waxing which had hurt far more.

  

The results of this came in within a few days, and all seemed to be ok – no abnormalities had been spotted. Together with a scan soon after which showed that the exomphalus had cleared up, we thought we’d got away with it. But they wouldn’t stop the scans. The scans would last an hour. A geneticist joined us for one of the latter scans. This in itself was scary. Inside, I was getting angrier. I thought they were determined to find something wrong with my baby!!!! STOP LOOKING AND IT WILL BE OK!!!!!!  

They then found something called oedema, basically excess fluid, and this was under the skin in the head and chest. Still, this didn’t sound too bad; human beings are almost entirely made up of water, aren’t we??

Then we came to the 18 week scan. Here, they told us that they could see leaks in the heart and that the middle part of the brain was missing, a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum, and thus the rest of the brain was malforming because of this missing bit. The consultant told us this is a Very Bad Thing. I don’t think there are words to describe what we were feeling. We simply could not believe it. We had been so hopeful, so optimistic. And now the penny dropped at what they were asking us to consider. No no no no no no no no.

Dreams turn to dust

It had been a year since I miscarried, and my friend had just died. I don’t know how we managed to conceive at a time like that, but evidently we did. When we found out our news, our first concern was that I might miscarry. But much to our relief, once I got past the 6/7 week mark when miscarriages are most common, we thought, ‘this is in the bag, fantastic’. Oh, how naive we were.

The letter from the hospital soon arrived with the appointment for the first scan, and we skipped into it a few days later, completely oblivious to the fact that this would turn out to be the last day we would ever experience true happiness.

I was 10wks+5days. It didn’t take long for the ultrasound technician to tell us that she was very concerned and that we would be booked in to see the consultant. She said she could see an increased nuchal and an exomphalus containing bowel. What on earth was she talking about? We really couldn’t believe what we were being told. As we rapidly learnt, the nuchal is the fluid at the back of the baby’s neck and if there’s too much, it’s very likely that there’s something wrong with the baby. Some babies do have thick nuchals and turn out fine, but they are the minority. As far as the exomphalus was concerned, it sounded pretty unpleasant, but it is usually a fixable thing. However, the two things together are not a good sign, and so the ultrasound technician had hit the panic button. We went home speechless, and while my husband got straight onto the pc and started researching, I went straight to bed, too depressed to stand.

                                                 

A good friend dies

2008 was to end badly, with a very good friend dying. She was 31, married with a baby, and shortly before her return from maternity leave had been diagnosed with something called Inflammatory Breast Cancer. It’s not a typical breast cancer as it comes up as a rash rather than a lump. They gave her chemo, then a mastectomy followed by radiotherapy, but it wasn’t enough. She died a few days before Christmas, only 9/10 months from the initial onset of her symptoms. Her daughter was 20 months. I was blindsided. I knew it was an aggressive cancer, but it was my first experience of what ‘aggressive’ in relation to cancer meant. I don’t think I imagined for a moment that she wouldn’t live. I was so sad for her, her husband and her daughter. I remember that the latest iPhone had just been released. This was the height of technology, so how could my friend die leaving a child? It seemed so Dickensian.  So I went into 2009 on a massive downer.

Miscarriage

We’d only been trying a few months and I wasn’t expecting anything to happen to be honest. I had just had my 31st, therefore, according to the Law of the Daily Mail, my fertility has nose-dived, a just punishment for a Woman Who Works.

More to the point, it was after Christmas and I thought I should lose a few pounds. So I dug out books on Atkins-type diets and set about curbing my liking for carbs. Within a very short space of time, I began to see what I thought were the results. ``This is brilliant,'' I thought, ``I’m losing a bit of weight, but get this, my bum may be getting smaller but my boobs are getting bigger!! How wonderful! I must tell all my girlfriends what a miraculous diet this is!!!''

But they really were getting bigger. Hmm. I told my husband of this development over the next few days, and being more of an expert in this area than even me, he evaluated the evidence and said he agreed. One night he asked, `Are you sure you’re not pregnant?’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I replied, `What a preposterous idea’. Impossible. But the next morning, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. When was my last period? I have very irregular periods, so an absence of 6 weeks or so would never be enough to get me worried, but thinking about it, it had been quite a while... I headed for work, but decided to take a quick diversion to Boots to buy a pregnancy test.  I got to my office, said ‘hi’ and dived into the ladies. A few minutes later, and I am looking a positive result. Dear Lord. I certainly wasn’t expecting this. We are with child!! I float back to my desk in a daze. I become amazingly productive and race through tasks like a demon. I tell my husband in the evening. We are both shocked but delighted!!

Our plans are on fast-forward about how our lives will change. We have looked up the due date date and made a mental note of when our sleep-deprivation will start. We begin to wonder about bedroom colours, what type of buggy we might need, car seats, maternity wear. I'm even looking at what nurseries and primary schools are in the area.

Physically, I am feeling fine – no morning sickness or any other signs apart from soreness in the bust `area'. I have already decided I want a c-section. Why on earth would any sane person chose the risk of incontinence or any of the other horrid things that can go wrong in childbirth? No Siree, none of that for me, thanks very much.

However, these naive sentiments are not to last long. Within a few days, while at work, I notice I am bleeding.  I return to my desk and suddenly realise something. My boobs no longer feel strange. They have gone back to normal. They no longer feel pregnant. It is as if a switch has been turned off. 

I ring my husband, then I ring a doctor. I am given an appointment within a few hours and we both make our excuses and leave work early. I am given a scan, and while there is a heartbeat, it is slower that it should be and is evidently slowing. We are told to expect me to miscarry. We are beside ourselves. We hadn’t seen this coming. I am frightened. What happens? Will there be a lot of blood? I can go to hospital and have an op to finish things up, but I'm not a fan of hospitals and prefer to miscarry naturally at home.

Yes, there is a great deal of blood. It soon becomes clear that the only practical place to be at a time like this is to strip off and sit in the bath, and so that is what I do. The miscarriage was painful and horrible. Our happiness, dreams and hopes had been dashed. But I tried to console myself that this is a very common experience, and I can’t be too down, after all, lots of people experience much worse.

A fateful decision

It's 2007. What could be more delightful than to decide to begin a family? We’d been married a year, we had good jobs, we’d got the house, the cats, and the husband had even warmed to the idea of starting a family.


But three years down the line, writing this as I am in October 2011, I can confidently say that this has so far turned out to be the worst decision of our lives. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d scream to the old me – ‘’Don’t do it!!! You are happy, you have your sanity, you love life, don’t ruin it!’’.