Anna Kettle is an author, podcaster and a marketing professional from Liverpool, a mum of one, and one of the co-founders of SPACE.

A Christmas less ordinary

It was December 2017 when my family plans were first turned upside down by the beginnings of a slow yet unexpected miscarriage.

But incredibly, it took three scans and almost four weeks to completely confirm that we has lost our baby for sure, which meant we spent most of the holiday season in a fog of uncertainty, just going through the festive motions and feigning half smiles, but unable to summon any genuine joy as we awaited our next scan appointment.

On 2nd January, we finally knew for sure. We had lost our baby. I was left devastated, and so was my husband Andy. It was such a sad start to the new year.

I never expected a miscarriage to happen to me until it did, even though I knew that it was pretty common. But I guess maybe no one ever really does.

For some reason, I just thought' ‘Well I’ve already had a child, so miscarriage and infertility won’t happen to me.’ I was kind of naive, looking back.

But once I had got past my initial disappointment, I reasoned that I would just take a few months to heal, and then try again. 

My son Ben was two and a half at the time and settling into his preschool year at nursery, and my husband’s new business was thriving. We had just moved to a bigger family home and it felt like the right time to extend our family. 

When one miscarriage becomes two

It was an annoying delay on our family plans for sure, but five months later, my husband Andy and I got pregnant again, and everything felt like it was finally falling into place.

But my excitement was quickly shattered again when I suffered a second miscarriage. 

The second loss hit me hard. I was not at all prepared for it to happen to me twice. After all, the only thing you ever hear from medical professionals after a loss is how common it is; how it’s just one of those things, and there’s no reason why you won’t go onto have a healthy pregnancy again next time. Most people do.

So I really wasn’t prepared for this. Experiencing two losses within a six month period felt so unfair and it left me feeling angry, anxious, and undone. I spent a lot of time in tears.

And I just had so many questions whirling in my head. What if something serious was wrong? What if it happened again and again? How many times were we willing to put ourselves through this? Suddenly nothing felt certain.

In the months that followed we were advised to take a pause and some time to grieve and heal, rather than rushing straight into trying to conceive yet again (which is stressful not fun, by the way).

Then later into the autumn, we decided we were ready again. Only this time it took us a lot longer to conceive. Seven months in fact! So when we finally found out we were pregnant again the following April we were ecstatic and just felt so relieved. This was it. Third time lucky, we were sure this was it.

Third time lucky?

And in fact, a scan at 8.5 weeks confirmed it - everything looked great. A healthy heart beat and a healthy size for the number of weeks. We’d now passed the point at which my previous miscarriages has happened, and there’d been no signs of bleeding at all.

For the first time in a long time, I finally began to feel like I could relax into the pregnancy. It was a year and a half later than we had planned, but we were finally going to have a sibling for our son!

Needless to say, the discovery that there was no heart beat on our next scan at 10.5 weeks hit us hard.

Not only did this third miscarriage tip us into the category of “unexplained recurrent loss,” but we just didn’t have any indication of anything being wrong at all until we were told. 

Nothing. Just stillness and silence. 

I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, even though I was looking at the screen with my own eyes. Less than two weeks earlier we had seen our baby with a healthy heartbeat. Everything has been fine, but now we were being ushered into a quiet side-room by nurses and offered surgery options.

We were both in total shock and couldn’t quite take it in. How could this be happening to us again? This wasn’t supposed to happen again!

The experience left me completely crushed. We really felt that this pregnancy was going to be okay, and discovering that it was just devastating. The baby I’d waited for, for so long, and then carried for almost three months, was gone.

But perhaps what hurt most was the loss of hope for future pregnancies that seemed to die with that miscarriage too. You see, we were both 39 by now, so time/fertility was no longer on our side.

To this day, our infertility story is still ongoing, and we have still not yet been able to have a second child.

Following that third loss we had tests that confirmed that we were carrying a healthy baby girl, and despite a large number of tests, the cause of my miscarriages still remain undiagnosed - which really means there’s no cure either.

The end of the road

Our consultant put together a potential treatment plan to at least try, but since we’ve been unable to get pregnant again, we’ve been unable to move forwards at all.

And although it’s not completely impossible, it’s unlikely we’ll get another shot at pregnancy now to even see if the treatment could have made any difference.

Without a doubt, recurrent miscarriage has been the greatest heartbreak I have ever faced. I don’t think anyone realises just how hard it is, unless it happens to them. I know that I certainly didn’t until it became my story.

That’s why I’m so passionate about supporting others going through this now, and fighting for better care too. If I can make a difference to the care & support that other women receive, then what I have been through won’t all be for nothing…

You can read more of Anna’s story & reflections in her blogs at www.annakettle.com