IVF Rainbow Babies

Having seen a close friend go through the horrendous experience of miscarriage and stillbirth I had put off having children, as I actually didn’t know how I would personally cope with such a loss. When I fell pregnant I was overjoyed and terrified, knowing how loss affects familie, especially single mothers.

Sadly, it ended in a late term miscarriage at 19 weeks, and my way of coping was to almost pretend it hadn’t happened, I didn’t want to be one of those statistics, which state up to 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, and surely if I didn’t acknowledge it, it didn’t really happen! I pushed all emotion down and we went into total denial. 

What I have learnt through this heartbreak is this, to me every child matters however far in pregnancy a person is. I also learnt a lot about grief. 

I learnt that everyone is entitled to grieve differently, some may not even feel a need to shed a tear, some may sob endlessly, and both are fine. For the heartbroken however, acknowledging the loss is essential and it’s imperative to both physical health and mental well-being to grieve. Life may never be normal again when you have been to such depths of darkness, but we can move forward, with as little scar tissue on the soul as possible, and saying goodbye was the key for me.

I will never forget the thousands of couples who are so desperate to have a child, and are still searching for the solution to their recurrent losses, or for some why that miracle of conception just doesn’t happen. Whatever losses I have and will endure in the future, I know there are so many women also still waiting for their miracle to arrive.