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'I'm pregnant after multiple losses – and it's a mental and emotional battle'

Photo credit: Elyse Marks
Photo credit: Elyse Marks

Berlin-based writer Seetal Savla (@savlafaire), who grew up in Leicester, began sharing the story of her fertility issues in a blog post on Mother’s Day 2019. Since then, she has continued on her mission to crack open the conversation around IVF, donor conception and miscarriage, especially within the South Asian community.

Now pregnant, here, she writes for Women's Health about how it feels to be expecting, after sustained and heart-wrenching loss.


The second blue line on the pregnancy test I'm clutching between my thumb and my index finger is building, becoming more and more decisive. But it's not a flood of elation I feel, despite my deep longing for a baby. Instead, standing under the harsh glare of the bathroom light on another Monday evening, my first thought is: 'Here we go again. How far along will I get this time?'

It was a different story when I had taken a test six months earlier. After six years of battling infertility, which included an early miscarriage and four failed IVF cycles using my own eggs, I was delighted to be pregnant following my first donor egg IVF round.

My husband and I were cautiously optimistic. That ended the devastating day we discovered there was no heartbeat. The subsequent two months were brutal for us both, albeit in different ways. While I bled constantly, switching into autopilot mode to pull myself through this painful phase, he felt like a helpless bystander. Writing for Brown Girl Magazine, Anjali Patel perfectly summarises my struggle: 'A miscarriage is a death we experience in our bodies. It’s incredibly intimate and traumatic.'

The questions about our plans for our remaining two frozen embryos started flowing a few months later. My answers were vague, phrased to politely end conversations. The thought of getting pregnant, coping with another messy miscarriage and rebuilding ourselves, again, was petrifying.

And then, one day, we were staring in shock at a positive result. The pregnancy that people kept insisting would happen if we just 'relaxed' had materialised, as if by magic. It was an event so surreal that we couldn’t connect to it, feeling too scared to believe that some good luck had finally come our way – and without any medical intervention.

Pregnancy after loss is a complex combination of conflicting emotions. Throughout the first and second trimesters that followed that Monday evening, clutching a positive test and refusing to allow myself that this time would be different, I swung between numbness, muted excitement, paralysing fear, disbelief, gratitude and acute anxiety.

As perinatal psychologist Julianne Boutaleb explains, this is a common reaction among those who are pregnant after loss. That's because: 'The veil of naivety has been pulled back. [People who are pregnant after loss] know how easy it is to misjudge a twinge or bleed, so they become hyper-vigilant of every nuanced change in their bodies. This will be particularly heightened if they have also come through infertility and needed assistance to get pregnant as well.'

I, naturally, feared that history would repeat itself. My anxiety always peaked prior to scans as the route to clinic and the familiar sights and sounds of the different rooms transported me back to the hope and heartbreak of our previous pregnancy and miscarriage. Of bleeding so heavily on public transport that I soaked through my trousers and trainers. Of the metallic clanging of the speculum used to open the cervix to extract remaining tissue. Of being given bad news alone.

According to a 2020 study conducted by Imperial College London and KU Leuven Belgium, one in 6 women who suffer pregnancy loss experience long-term symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as flashbacks, hypersensitivity, disassociation and self-blame.

Becoming pregnant again while suffering such symptoms further complicates an already emotionally charged situation. Having lived through multiple losses, I initially found it almost impossible to trust that my body could carry a pregnancy to term. Why would this time be any different?

Speaking on the Finally Pregnant podcast, Dr Shema Tariq echoes this view. When she was pregnant again after losing her son Altair at 21 weeks’ gestation, she 'wanted to be put in a coma and woken up in nine months at the end of it.' Fearing the worst, she 'deliberately [shopped at] John Lewis because we knew we could return stuff if we weren’t able to bring our baby home.'

Some might consider this behaviour to be irrational and negative, but our aim is to protect ourselves from further pain. Struggling to tame our intrusive thoughts, my husband and I decided against sharing our surprise news with family and friends. It gave us the time we needed to get closer to believing that the pregnancy was real, without the pressure of others’ expectations.

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have breathed a word to anyone until our baby had arrived safely, but it was becoming difficult to explain why we couldn’t commit to attending weddings, birthdays and holidays.

Telling everyone at 20 weeks’ gestation made me feel simultaneously overjoyed and overwhelmed. When loved ones congratulated us, my default reply was that while it was wonderful news, we were proceeding with caution because there are no guarantees at any stage.

This response was mostly met with unbridled enthusiasm, unintentionally invalidating my fears. In this, my experience is sadly standard. 'The world does not necessarily treat those who are pregnant after loss any differently, so every normal stage of the journey [such as announcing the pregnancy] has the possibility of triggering [them],' says Julianne.

Frustrated at first, I eventually accepted their excitement and allowed them to hold hope for us. Several factors enabled me to reframe my mindset. Working through my crippling concerns with a South Asian therapist to unpack the cultural fears, obligations and guilt surrounding motherhood was invaluable.

She helped me to realise that worrying about worst-case scenarios wouldn’t make them hurt any less if they were to occur. And, of course, that's true: knowing that miscarriage was a possibility during my previous pregnancy didn’t lessen our pain and grief, when it came to pass.

The phenomenal friends that I have made through the Trying To Conceive (TTC) community on Instagram also offered me timely advice. Looking back, they told me that wished they could have embraced their long-awaited pregnancies and enjoyed every milestone, from the first scan to preparing the nursery. This hindsight has encouraged me to make the most of this precious moment.

Celebrities can positively influence us, too. Rihanna’s loud and proud approach to her impending motherhood gave me the confidence to believe in the best possible outcome for us. I may never be pregnant again, so I now refuse to let my fears and anxieties overshadow my joy.

The imminent arrival of a ‘rainbow baby’ doesn’t replace the babies we lost or erase the trauma we endured. However, with adequate support, including people who hold space for us to process our pain and honour our losses, we can learn to savour this special time of our lives.

That's what I am trying to do, every day.

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