Twenty years on: It gets easier

I recently realised that this time twenty (gulp) years ago, I was enduring one of the hardest times of my life. At Christmas the year before, I was newly, happily, but tentatively, pregnant for the second time. But even on Christmas morning, my temperature dipped, and I worried, despite the beginnings of morning sickness starting to appear. Driving home, up the island, there was a tiny bit of spotting. We got home before New Year, and it all began.

I knew I had lost the baby, but my body decided to be “interesting.” My HCG levels kept rising, too slowly, then disturbingly quickly. I was hospitalised twice, once for an operation, but as my levels kept rising, I was brought in again, for close observation and treatment, for days and days of waiting misery, with a baby crying down the hall, just in case I forgot why I was there. I endured a potential cancer diagnosis, fortunately cleared by CT-scans, though not helped with stupid questions (“is there any chance you might be pregnant?” the radiographer asked me) and waited some more, until finally the hormone levels plateaued. The pohutukawa trees were in bloom outside my hospital room window. It was warm, the windows were open, and summer was happening outside, but to other people.

My life and that of my husband was more waiting, along with endless hospital blood tests and scans to see what was going on, being thrown together with pregnant women at hospital, forced to see all the charts of a progressing pregnancy in the waiting room, and being the source of fascination to the doctors and nurses. And we waited.

I got through the time by sharing this with fellow ectopic sufferers on a message board, though they were almost all in the UK or US, and I was in a completely different time zone. But I wasn't sleeping. And they were there, when I was here in the darkest of nights. I remember being overwhelmed with loss when our internet went out for a day or two – these women were my life-line, and losing them even for a few days was hard.

It was discovered in a scan that I had grown a new blood vessel, one as thick as a ballpoint pen, and they made plans to deal with it, and I was admitted. Then as it seemed to grow, they cancelled those plans, and made new plans. I was admitted to hospital again, for an hours-long procedure called an embolization. I was lying for so long on my back that a disc in my spine distorted. It was my first experience of agonising back pain, but not my last. The doctor didn’t care, he just wanted to finish the job. I’m sure he thought I was exaggerating. But I wasn’t.

I then had to wait weeks more to see if had worked, and then given one final operation to remove what was left of the vein. By now it was April, and I had been under hospital care for four months. My friend had given birth, and I’d visited on one of my many hospital visits down in the Unlucky Women’s Clinic, as I called it.

From the outside, it looked as if our lives were the same as they had ever been. I was working (luckily from home, as I was now self-employed), and physically looked normal. But it was all consuming. I was now 40, and the clock counting itself down was deafening. It was another two months before I was given the all clear, and could start my final fruitless family-building efforts. 

Twenty years on, I can write this without tears. I want to reach back and hug that woman who felt so fragile, but tried so hard not to show anyone (except a few very important people) how much it hurt. I want to enfold her in my arms, and let her know that she will be okay. That things will change for the better, and that she will grow in confidence and compassion and wisdom. That writing things down helps, and will become part of her life. That she’ll come to love pohutukawa, despite or perhaps even because of their association with the loss of her ectopic babies. I’ll tell her with a wonderful smile that twenty years on, she will continue to be supported by the most amazing people that she will meet and get to know in the most unconventional ways. That it will get easier, and bring gifts she cannot expect. And that I am not kidding.