I went to see my IVF doctor yesterday, and he was going over my file, trying to look back over my history and see if there is anything we might have missed. He told me that I had now had two miscarriages. I can’t tell you how stunned I was to hear him say this. What he was referring to was the very first appointment I had with him in Jan 2000. I had had a positve pregnancy test, which had been followed up by a HCG blood test that had come back as negative. So I had been referred to him as an obstetric patient. He did a scan and told me that I had polycystic ovaries, and that I was not pregnant, and while it wasn’t impossible for me to fall pregnant, I would require some assisted fertility treatment. Basically not so much totally infertile as ‘subfertile’. I guess when he told me my hormones are all screwed up, I just thought I had had a really long period. So I kinda classified the incident in the back of my brain as a ‘false positive’, and didn’t think on it much more.
Except that it made me think about what happened when I was just 20. I was on again off again with Number1Boyfriend in 1990 and we had a positive pregnancy test. We didn’t have alot of money, so I was planning on going to the QEII public hospital. I don’t know why, but they didn’t scan me or anything, maybe that wasn’t a routine thing for women my age back then. Well eventually I got a bleed, and the doctors told me that I had miscarried. They never investigated further, which is unfortunate, as I might have found out about the PCOS earlier. Anyway, when I had the ‘false positive’ in Jan 2000, I got used to the idea that perhaps the incident 10 years previous was a similar thing, and that it wasn’t a miscarriage at all.
Only now, after talking to IVF Dr yesterday, I realise I have actually had THREE miscarriages. How can I have been so confused and ignorant about my own medical history? I have always been one of those really annoying patients who asked a gazillion questions and demand second opinions. The scary thing is, that I know Ihave a better understanding of all this stuff than most women I have met who have undergone IVF, they seem to blindly accept everything that they get told. They don’t even know what drugs they are on half the time, or what they do to you. Yet here I am, absolutely shocked and stunned to discover that I have had three miscarriages, not one!
So to make things even more confusing, I find myself thinking that my reaction to this latest miscarriage is totally unsupportable and kinda nonsensical – how can I be so upset about this, when the second time it happened to me, being somewhat incognisant of the facts, I barely batted an eyelid. Now I find myself being fully aware of just how dire the situation is, I feel quite ten times more hopelessness than I did just the day before last. Hubby seem shocked when I told him all about it last night. But hasn’t said boo since. He tends to take things in his stride quite readily, whereas I tend to worry away at things far more than is perhaps necessary.