My three pregnancies have been on my mind as I’m approaching the one year ‘anniversary’ to my left salpingectomy (which will be tomorrow) and the end of my first cycle since my missed miscarriage this summer. My story is not (yet?) one of hope, so please don’t feel the need to read on if you feel that might not be helpful to you. I’ve been a bit more hesitant to write on this wonderful forum as my personal history has continued to add up the wrong turns because I know many of us look here to find hope and reassurance for our futures.
I have been pregnant three times, all within the last 1.5 years. In 2023, I had two EPs in my left tube. My first one was treated with MTX, of which I needed two doses before things resolved fully. A few months later, after working up to courage for it, I got pregnant again. I had been trying not to focus on it too much so didn’t test right away because my cycles had at times been longer. By the time I took a pregnancy test for my second pregnancy, I knew it wasn’t looking good because I had had odd bleeding and started to feel dull pain on my side of my previous EP. It was a very messy diagnosis. I had US three times over a 4-day period. Each time I was diagnosed an EP, the second time even a ruptured EP. But doctors ended up walking back their first two diagnosis and postponing my emergency surgery. I was hospitalised for 24-hours while they tried to decide whether I had life-threatening internal bleeding or just a regular, normal pregnancy. It was hard to trust their diagnosis when they confirmed for the third time that I had an EP, but I did end up going through with the surgery and they did confirm upon analyzing the tissue that it had indeed been an EP.
When I got pregnant again this year, the wait between my pregnancy test and the first US was excruciating, but they did confirm at 5.5 weeks that the pregnancy had implanted where it should, and at 7 weeks we saw its little heartbeat. When I started having some very light spotting at 12 weeks, I got really nervous, but many friends told me that they had had similar experiences and went on to have normal pregnancies. I never appear to fall in that ‘normal’ category. On a regularly scheduled US a few days later, I was told that my embryo had stopped growing at 8 weeks and that I had had a missed miscarriage.
So here I am one year post surgery and still trying to recover emotionally from yet another pregnancy loss as my periods follow their normal course (day 1 today). It has been helpful to learn with my last pregnancy that I could have an intra-uterine pregnancy and that my one remaining tube works. The miscarriage was heartbreaking but yet somehow is still my ‘best’ pregnancy experience because for the first time it at least didn’t have the ‘life-threatening’, medical edge that my two EPs had. But as I work with my counsellor to untangle what very much looks like traumatic stress response that I have developed to even the remote possibility of being pregnant, I am left feeling very much at a loss for the path forward on this journey. How do you continue to try for a baby when negative outcomes very much feel like what I should expect from a pregnancy? Am I just bringing more traumatic events onto myself? Or can I still claim hope for a better outcome in my decision to continue to pursue pregnancy? I’m also at a loss for the gentlest approach towards myself. I feel such terror thinking about being pregnant again, but is it better to give myself some time before trying to get pregnant again or does that just stretch out those hard feelings? Part of me just want to try as soon as possible so I can hopefully shorten how long I will experience this feeling of fear and terror, but I also wonder about whether that means I’m not listening to myself.
I hope that, for those of you who read all of this, it won’t contribute to increasing your anxiety. I know how much experiencing an EP creates anxiety about future pregnancies. My experience is certainly not a very common one and, statistically speaking, you are more likely to have a normal pregnancy than not after experiencing an EP. I have found reading and writing on this forum very healing through the hard times, so coming back here now felt intuitive.
Sending everyone here much love,
Cam