Jade’s story

All in all, I am beyond tired and recently worked out I have only had two months in a row since September 2021 where I wasn’t taking some form of fertility drug. The cruelty of discovering my AMH was below 1 at age 36, and that on average I have just 2-4 follicles to play with month to month is just how fast I’ve had to make life-altering decisions and move through treatments. How I haven’t been able to afford any rest or ‘time off’ if I want the best chance of having a genetic child with my fiancé Joe. It has been relentless and we are now seriously considering our remaining options and how much more my body, mind and spirit can take.

It all started in February 2020 when I had my coil removed. I was 35 and Joe and I had been together for 18 months. We were keen to start trying for a family, but my coil had become displaced, so I ended up having to wait an extra five months to have it removed via hysteroscopy. Astonishingly I fell pregnant on our first try. It was so fast I didn’t even have a period before I saw the positive sign on a test in April 2020. Now, looking back I feel foolish for assuming we must have been ‘super fertile’. The world was a month into the first lockdown and so we kept the news to ourselves and enjoyed our bubble of happiness. It was a really special time. I was still working as a midwife, my career for the previous 12 years and although I knew the statistics for miscarriage well I felt confident, after seeing our baby’s heartbeat on an early scan following a small bleed after intercourse. A month later I was at work when I suddenly began bleeding again. I arranged a scan with my local EPAU but by the next morning my breasts had deflated overnight, and it was then thatI knew. Two days later an ultrasound confirmed that I had suffered a missed miscarriage at 8 weeks. What was really difficult to contend with was the fact there was no baby to be seen, just an empty gestational sac. I had been nurturing a ghost for weeks. I felt utterly cheated and cursed myself for recently buying a bigger bra and floaty dresses for my future bump. Instantly,I went into clinical-midwife-mode, which was wanting to be medically managed so that I could get straight back to trying again. The few weeks taster of pregnancy and the promise of parenthood had been blissful, almost other-worldly.I just couldn’t go back to who I was before. I needed to be a Mum.

After a painless textbook medical management at home, I was ready to chalk it all up to ‘one of those things’ and relied heavily on my belief it may have been the fact I hadn’t had a period before falling pregnant– maybe, in this instance my lining was to blame?...