About > Allison’s Story > Miscarriage #5 (AGAIN?!)
Miscarriage #5 (AGAIN?!)
As amazing as it was to have our son, we also knew our journey was not over. My husband and I have always envisioned having multiple kids and knew that we wanted more than one.
Side note: In the recurrent miscarriage space, I see so many families in this space of already having kids but wanting more. My heart goes out to you because I feel like once you have started your family, people can be even less sensitive to miscarriage or fertility struggles… if you already have a kid (s), then surely a loss is not such a big deal. So first, let me say, a loss, no matter when it happens or under what circumstances it comes, is still a loss. Loss is devastating. So don’t let doctors, friends or family try to negate any of the feelings and emotions this may bring up for you.
But back to my story. Very shortly after our son was born, I got yet another positive pregnancy test. I have to admit, I was thrilled! My mind once again went to the place of, oh wow, this is how it is going to happen! Everyone always says, as soon as you adopt, you’ll have kids! It’s so easy after you adopt (and they always have at least one example of this happening). I have to admit, these stories did give me hope and when we made the decision in the back of my mind, I hoped that this would be our story, that once we had a baby in our arms, everything else would fall into place and just easily.
So as soon as I had that positive test, I immediately jumped into action starting my protocol to help control for the APS (ie, lovanox shots and daily baby aspirin) and honestly, let myself get a little excited. From here, the details are a bit hazy (we did have a newborn at home!), but within a week or two of getting that positive test, I started bleeding and braced myself for what seemed like an inevitable outcome. I will say overall, the distraction of our new son did ultimately soften the blow of this miscarriage. But as with each loss, I did lose some faith and hope that a biological child would ever be a reality for us.
My biggest lesson from this miscarriage was that, adopting does NOT mean you will magically go on to easily have biological kids. Throughout that first year I had SO many people telling me this over and over again. I sometimes would set the record straight, sharing about my miscarriage, but other times, could not bring myself to go through the trouble. But it was irritating all the same.
After this let down, my husband and I made a conscious choice to not get pregnant for a few months so we could re-group and come up with a plan to figure out why I kept miscarrying. Again, I didn’t want continue down this path knowing at some point, I would be unable to continue on. So we took a few months pause, and I’ll share more about what we did after that pause in the next part of my story…
What Helped Me
1
This Guy!
Miscarriage is always hard! For this particular miscarriage, though, I was still on a high from the adoption of our son so while there was still heartache and plenty of tears, the presence of my son did help to soften the blow.
2
Taking a Break
It is ok to take a break from trying, no matter what your age! I often found I needed time & space to heal and grieve before moving forward. After this 5th miscarriage, we intentionally took a break from trying. We committed to meeting with an IVF doctor, but set that date for a few months in the future, when we would be out of the newborn phase with our son.
IVF (MORE DISBELIEF)
In the spring of 2019 we decided to take our first steps towards continuing to build our family and for us, we sat down the path of figuring out if biological children were in our future. We were open to ideas and wanted to continue doing as much testing as possible to avoid recurring miscarriage.
We met with yet another IVF clinic and I instantly did not like the feel of this one and felt they were pushing me into IVF but for no other reason than most miscarriages were due to chromosomal issues, therefore if we went the IVF route and tested embryos we could avoid this. We had only had the option to do testing on one of our pregnancies (the 3rd miscarriage) and it came back with no chromosomal issues. So as you can imagine, their reasoning was tough for me to follow.