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Pregnancy after loss: it’s not all wonderful with a chance of rainbows.
In January of 2019, a month after my frozen embryo transfer, I left my job in the middle of the day due to pregnancy complications that resulted in eight months of bed rest.
My family and co-workers were happy for me, but I couldn’t get past the fears that came with pregnancy after infertility and loss. Don’t get me wrong, after five years of trying to conceive, I was grateful to be pregnant again, but I couldn’t bring myself to be joyful—at least not yet. After all, 75% of the babies I had carried so far had died, and the 25% remaining was now being threatened by a subchorionic hematoma.
I couldn’t help but think to myself, “I thought pregnancy was supposed to be such a wonderful time.” Social media and advertisements all show smiling, “glowing” mommas with perfect bellies, but in my experience, being pregnant with a rainbow baby was hard.
When I found out I was pregnant in December of 2018 I decided I was, once again, going to do everything I could to get through the pregnancy and end up with a healthy baby. My doctor had high hopes, but couldn’t do much after successfully implanting the embryo.
After that, it was up to me to take the right medications, to move around “not too much and not too little,” and to eat a strict pregnancy diet. It all started with that dreaded pineapple core on embryo transfer day. I felt overly responsible for a process that I couldn’t possibly control. My pregnancy diet didn’t include any spices other than salt and pepper, I only drank water and kale smoothies, and when friends invited me to dinner I declined because I didn’t want to hit a pothole and dislodge my baby. Ridiculous, I know, but I was very motivated to continue my bland, kale-tasting food with water until the end of August.
10 weeks into my pregnancy, when I was told by my doctor that I could stop my progesterone shots and suppositories, I decided not to, just in case. I simply didn’t trust my body to do its job. I took the medication until 14 weeks after my frozen embryo transfer and was still terrified to stop. How could I trust my body when it had let me down so many times in the past?
When I was around 20-weeks pregnant, the people in our small-town had started noticing the absence of my car in my office’s parking lot and my constant refusal to leave the house. I still wasn’t ready, but at some point, I had to explain my confinement to the world, so I finally announced our pregnancy on Facebook. Still, I couldn’t convince myself to be happy.
They may not have been able to understand this, but I had no idea if my pregnancy would actually result in a healthy baby. All I wanted was a living child, and if that meant modern-day confinement then I would do that, even if there was no guarantee that it would help.
Although I love planning, I never put a bold, underlined due date with exclamation marks and little hearts on the calendar. What if, come August 26th, there was no baby due? I didn’t want to “jinx it.” Every day of my pregnancy, I thought “this day could be the last.” Every morning, I waited in bed until I had felt my little one moving around. Every evening, I prayed the same prayer, “Lord, please keep my baby healthy and growing and strong and… alive”.
I covered my uterus, my gestational sack, my placenta, the umbilical cord, my cervix, and every other part of my unreliable body in my daily prayers. When I woke up at night, I couldn’t go back to sleep without feeling a few kicks. Every day, I did at least three sessions of kick counts. I wasn’t satisfied with six kicks per hour. I needed more than that in order to not be frightened. I think I would have gone insane if my little boy wasn’t such a busy baby in the womb.
At my twenty-week ultrasound, I didn’t even have to think about whether or not I wanted to know if my baby was a boy or a girl—I had to know. I had to get to know as much about this baby as soon as I could before it was too late, so I could at least give him or her a name.
Even though the doctors were positive, I couldn’t envision a bright future that involved a baby. My doctor asked me if I could imagine my baby boy running around the yard. I couldn’t. I had a hard time believing he was actually real. For all I knew, there would never be a little child running around in my yard. I didn’t allow myself to dream.
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I started having panic attacks near the end of my second trimester. Whenever I thought it was warranted, I drove to the maternity ward and got hooked up to the non-stress test to be reassured that everything was going well. I didn’t have much pride left and didn’t care if the hospital staff thought I was crazy. I did everything in my power to ensure my baby’s safety. It’s a good thing I live in a country with healthcare coverage.
When I was 37 weeks pregnant, I asked the doctor to “get this baby out of me.” His reply was that he was safer on the inside than on the outside. From a medical perspective, this might be true, but in my mind, it was absolute madness.
When he tried to change the subject and asked me about my birth plan, the only thing I came up with was, “cut me open if you have even the slightest hint that the baby is in distress.” After five years, multiple losses, and a frightening eight months of pregnancy, who cares about a perfect birth plan?
I finally got induced at 39 weeks (thank you, pre-eclampsia). I knew I could walk around the hospital room as freely as I wanted, but instead, I chose to be hooked up to the NST the whole time. I didn’t care about my comfort. Labor isn’t particularly comfortable, anyway. I needed proof that my baby’s heart was still beating.
On August 22nd, Rainbow Baby Day, my son was born. The first thing I said when I saw him was, “he’s real!” I meant it. It became quite clear to me that I hadn’t believed in this baby until I held him in my arms.
I still have a hard time dreaming about the future, and I still worry about every tiny thing that seems “wrong,” but isn’t that what mothers do? In the end, I can’t imagine anyone being happier with and more accepting of her post-partum body and her everlasting c-section scar than a woman who has given birth to her precious rainbow baby.
Hannah Camus is a writer who lives in Northern BC, together with her husband, two puppies, and their rainbow baby, Lars. For five years, Hannah and her husband struggled with infertility and recurrent miscarriages. They went through IVF welcomed their baby boy in August of 2019. Hannah writes about infertility and baby loss for several magazines and about immigration to Canada on her blog, www.survivingminus30.wordpress.com. She also writes fiction and after having published a novel and a short story in the Netherlands, she is currently working on her first novel in English.