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Dashed Hopes: Blighted Ovum

I confess that, despite being the owner of many a blighted ovum, I have been highly neglectful of them. By neglectful I mean that I've failed to acknowledge their very existence.

It wasn't until I was thirty-nine that I gained an awareness of the blighted ovum as they are incredibly insidious and it's only when you start poking around trying to make sense of your fertility problems that you generally learn about them.

So imagine my surprise when I learnt that not only was my first failed pregnancy likely due to a blighted ovum but that I may have had more that I hadn't a clue about.

It was explained to me that the definition of one is a pregnancy that starts to develop at the embryonic stage as a sac without the future content, the baby. So it's like having an unfurnished untenanted house inside you. Often it will self-abort before you've had time to realize it's there although some can linger, in which case you may experience a bleeding after blighted ovum is discovered. An ultrasound of blighted ovum is the chief way to confirm its existence before the bleeding commences.

Apparently they are fairly widespread and, the older you get, the more common, but nobody knows the true cause of blighted ovum. So yet again we find one of nature's many obstacles to reproduction and wish we hadn't. And another case of ignorant bliss being replaced by dashed hopes (this time in the form of cracked eggs).

Jodi Panayotov