My fertility story

I want to share my fertility story with you today.  I know a lot of you are just finding me for the first time and unless you’ve gone back to read (or watch) in my archives you probably don’t know what’s gone on for us in the last two years.

So I thought I would share what has been happening for us in the last two years, how I got into fertility yoga, how it helped me and where I’m at now. You can watch the video below or scroll on if you prefer reading.

Let’s go allllllll the way back to the beginning. When we first started trying to conceive our first, I just (naively) assumed that I would go off the pill and it would pretty much happen immediately. (ha!) It didn’t quite happen like that.

I had been on the pill for ten years since I was 16 and I’d been put on for my skin. I wish I’d known then what I know now about how the pill affects your hormones (but that’s a whole other post for another day).

It ended up taking us a little over a year to conceive our first and I wish I could tell you that I was all chill and relaxed about the whole thing, but I SO wasn’t.  I got really stressed out and started questioning would I ever get pregnant, what was wrong with me… and with us which put a lot of pressure on our relationship and trying to conceive really stopped being fun.

Hindsight is a beautiful thing isn’t it?  I wish I could go back to my 26-year-old-self and tell her to just relax a little and enjoy our time before we had kids and that it would happen.

My second pregnancy however was pretty simple and uncomplicated. I fell pregnant quickly and there were no complications at all.  Looking back I was also in a really good place. I was teaching and practicing a lot of yoga, I was looking after myself really well and we were in a great place in our relationship.  It makes me wonder how much of that and not stressing about the whole thing made the whole process so much easier.

When Rory was about a year old we fell pregnant again. I had only just finished breastfeeding and still very much recovering from postpartum physically and at 16 weeks I delivered that little boy.  We were obviously devastated and I didn’t really cope with the whole thing at all, though I don’t know that anybody does.

I remember just holding his tiny little body in my hands and wondering how does anyone go on from this?

But obviously I already had two beautiful boys and you don’t really get a choice about going on or not. So we just kept marching on and we didn’t really take the time to grieve after our first loss. We threw ourselves straight back into everything and started trying again pretty much straight away as well. We knew that another baby wouldn’t replace Orion but we also knew that we wanted a third child.

In hindsight I don’t think that was the best thing we could have done, but that’s what we did. Five months after losing Orion we fell pregnant again.  I wasn’t in a great place for this pregnancy. I really hadn’t grieved for Orion properly. I wasn’t looking after myself well. I was so anxious. I had lost trust in my body’s ability to carry another healthy baby and it was almost like I was already expecting the worst from the start of this pregnancy.

At ten weeks when we went for an ultrasound we found out there was no heart beat. I chose to have a D & C this time because I couldn’t face another birth as traumatic as the last. We went to hospital, had the procedure and went home.  We didn’t even have a conversation this time about whether we would try again. I think we were both just so shocked that it had happened again and were just too busy dealing with that.

But we obviously didn’t use anything to prevent pregnancy either because that very next month we fell pregnant again.  So this time I was doing a little bit better in that I had found a counsellor that I was working with and she was (and is) amazingly helpful for me.  But I still wasn’t looking after myself physically all that well.

I was making some progress on processing what had happened but I hadn’t really looked into yet how much losing babies affects your body physically and how to support it to heal.

As it turns out this pregnancy was the most stressful experience I’ve ever been through. At 7 weeks I started spotting, which obviously given my history immediately freaked me out. We went straight in and had a scan but surprisingly everything looked fine and we saw the heartbeat for the first time.

But literally about an hour after we came home I started cramping and bleeding heavier and passed a couple of large clots. I was so upset. I couldn’t fathom that this could possibly mean anything other than I’d lost this baby too.

And yet, we went in for another ultrasound the next day and there was our little bean, still beating away. The next few weeks were some of the most anxious of my life. I barely did anything because I was so afraid to do anything wrong. I continued spotting and did pass a few more clots the day after that second ultrasound.

At ten weeks we went for another ultrasound. No heartbeat.

Again I chose to have another D & C. This time the process wasn’t quite as smooth. First time we got straight into surgery and I got to go home that afternoon. This time I spent all day next to maternity, listening to newborn babies cry just waiting for my turn in theatre. It felt like a cruel joke the universe was playing on us.

I also ended up losing a significant amount of blood and they wouldn’t let me go home.  They wanted to put me in a room with 6 other women who’d just had babies for the night but I put my foot down there. Instead they found me a bed in generals so I was with a bunch of old men, but anything was better than having to be in the maternity ward.  There were a few times overnight where they were considering doing a blood transfusion because my blood pressure was so low but in the end I didn’t need it and I went home the next day.

At that point I just felt broken. I felt like I can’t do this anymore. I so desperately wanted our third child but I just couldn’t go through another. I had lost all hope that we would ever have another healthy baby.

I was in a really dark place and we both decided that we needed to stop and take a break. We weren’t sure how long it would be for, but we had to be ok with the fact that maybe it was forever. It was a heartbreaking decision to make but we just had to.  It was affecting our relationship, my health, my kids… everything.

I get a lot of questions about what came next. I think it’s pretty common to get to this point where you are feeling lost and broken and you wonder, now what?  When you’re faced with that big void of nothingness because you’ve been so busy planning for a baby that it feels like your future doesn’t exist without one. It’s a really hard place to be.

When I was there I knew I needed to be proactive or I would just spiral further into depression. I’m someone who works best with a plan. So that’s what I did. I created a happy list (literally just a list of things that make me happy) and started working through it.

At first it did feel like I was just going through the motions and that it wasn’t really helping. But little by little I started noticing that I was feeling more positive and looking forward to the future again.

Some of the other things I did:

+ saw a naturopath and acupuncturist to help me physically heal from losing three babies

+ continued with counselling

+ started closely following my cycle to understand my body better and to look after myself as well as I could (this has been life changing – more posts to come on this soon!)

Eventually about 7 months later I came to a place where I started feeling like I could start trying again.  I had to get to that place where I was ready and willing to accept another loss. I knew I was going to go into another pregnancy very positive but I had to be at that place where another loss was worth it for the possibility of having a healthy baby.

How did I prepare for this pregnancy?

+ I quit all the things I was doing for fertility  – I had to stop waiting for someone else to give me the go ahead and trust the fact that I felt ready was the intuition I needed to listen to.

+ practiced yoga for my cycle – instead of just practicing strong yoga all the time (which I would often previously do) I connected with where I was in my cycle and tailored my practice to suit to improve fertility and get my head in the right place too.

+ focused on the positive – every morning I would take ten minutes to visualise what I wanted to create and silently recite my mantras. I share these in my 28 Day Fertility Yoga Course if you want to know more. 

+ continued eating really well for fertility and hormones, taking supplements etc.

So luckily it didn’t take us any time at all to fall pregnant. We fell the very next month and I really do think that all of these changes helped.

I’m currently 26 weeks with a healthy baby boy and while there have definitely been times during this pregnancy where I’ve felt anxious, for the most part I’ve managed to enjoy it.

So I guess that’s why I share what I do now. I wish I could go back to that very first loss and tell myself to take a break and take the time to get myself back to healthy and positive first.

If you’re still with me, thank you for reading to this point. I’m assuming you are because you’ve been on or are still on your own fertility journey. I’m so sorry that you’re going through it too.  If you feel comfortable I’d love to hear your story. Share it with me in the comments below.