In Vitro Fertility Goddess
If there is one thing I wish I could have experienced, it's a pregnancy without bleeding.
I know this sounds selfish, as there are plenty of women who would simply like to experience a pregnancy. At least I can say I've been pregnant, a total of four times and, although I've only ended up with one child I have ended up with a greatly enriched vocabulary of words to describe red, pink and brown.
Three pregnancies ended in miscarriage in the first trimester and during the one successful (although at times dodgy) one, I experienced two lots of bleeding, in the first and third trimesters. Now if there's one thing to take the joy away from pregnancy it's to discover that you have bled or are bleeding. All of a sudden you go from dreamily checking Baby Goods catalogues to fanatically checking your underpants every hour.
With my first pregnancy I was somewhat ignorant about the potential ramifications of bleeding and in fact didn't initially have a clue that I was pregnant because I had this dark brown blood spotting at five weeks and thought it was the beginnings of a weird period. When, like mine, your periods are totally irregular, you have no idea about these things, it all becomes an accepted part of nature's flaws.
When the spotting seemed to stop, I bought a pregnancy test and tried it. The double lines were there and that was all the proof I needed that I was indeed pregnant. For all I knew brown bleeding in the first trimester of pregnancy was normal and I didn't give it a second thought. However, just as I'd informed family and friends of my condition, the spotting returned, heavier, and like a brownish red discharge. At 6 weeks pregnancy I should have started to worry but kept trying to ignore it, even plugging it with tampons with the misguided idea it would go away.
Of course it didn't and I miscarried at 6 weeks and 5 days. Naturally, the second time around I was more alert to what was happening as the awful sense of déjà vu crept up on me again. The worse bit was, even with all the awareness in the world, there's not an ounce of empowerment. You feel utterly helpless, like you're observing the build up of a cyclone that could have fatal results or could turn into a low pressure system and fizzle out, without being able to do anything or extricate yourself from it in any way.
When I look back, each miscarriage and ‘threatened miscarriage' had some differences in the way they manifested. The first two miscarriages began with the brown spotting and yet the ‘threatened miscarriage' (although technically they're all ‘threatened miscarriages' until they actually happen), the one which went on to a successful pregnancy, was bright red to start with and then eventually became a kind of tea rose and then russet brown. All of this meant I was becoming fully conversant with the red spectrum of the Dulux chart. Really, I thought, books and doctor's surgeries should carry a type of ‘bleeding chart' with all the possible colours so we can identify them with greater accuracy.
The last miscarriage came on suddenly, starting with faint pinkish-but-not-fuchsia spotting and in twenty-four hours was in full swing.
All of this was very scary but the substantial crimson haemorrhaging I experienced in my third trimester was terrifying. To have gotten that far and to think that something was terribly wrong all of a sudden adds a new dimension to ‘fear in pregnancy', although of course heavy bleeding while pregnant is alarming at any stage.
After all of this doom and gloom, there are some slightly more cheery statistics out there, in that only 50% of women who bleed in the first trimester go on to miscarry. And as I said at the start, it's better to have been pregnant and bled than not been pregnant at all.
During my bleeding pregnancy, my husband bought me this Pregancy Pampering Kit while he was on a business trip to the US. I must say was fantastic! It's by no means a cure, but certainly gave me much needed papmpering and more importantly helped me keep my mind off it which I am convinced was instrumental in helping me pull through this terrible ordeal. Unfortunately, it's only available to US residents but the company assures me that they are looking to expand to other countries soon.
