RPL - A Father's Experience (Part 2)

It is hard to express how I felt at that moment other than 'devestation'. Imagine this - take the most important thing in your life you've ever done. The pride from it, how proud you were to have accomplished it. Now because of your accomplishment, someone you know and care about has died.

It's harsh - but really, that's how I felt. It felt like someone near and dear to me had died and it was my fault. It sounds crazy for someone that doesn't have kids or doesn't want kids. How can a few cells be loved that much?

After I got off the phone with my wife I left work and immediately went home to meet her. We held each other, she cried, I did on the inside - I had to be strong for her. We spent the aftenoon not saying much. We laid on the couch and watched TV. Oddly enough, I remember we watched a Star Trek - TNG marathon on TV and we watched that for a solid 5 hours.

After we both calmed down - the questions started to pop up:

- Why did it happen?
- Did we do something wrong?
- How do we prevent this from happening again?
- Crap, how do we tell people that we lost our baby?

The last one I thought was the most daunting - and clearly the most painful. That's when I found out most people don't let everyone know they are pregnant until the end of the 1st trimester.

A quick aside from my experience - my hope is that people talk about pregnancy loss and not pretend it does not happen. It is not something that we need to hide or be embarassed about - it affects a lot of people. It is a life and we need to acknowledge it as such.

My wife set up an appointment with her Doctor/General Practitioner (GP). He's a nice middle aged Irish fellow. To be honest, he seemed kind of 'slow' to me but hey, he's a doctor and I'm not right? What he said to us was

- This is normal and happens in 1 in 5 pregnancies
- This happens to a lot of people
- Most of the time, you will never find out why it happened
- Most of the time, you can't prevent it.

Seriously!! I was furious! He hadn't helped us with any of our questions! He told us he would refer us to the Regional Fertility Program after 3 loses.

Being of the internet age, I immediately was on Google and had looked up a whole bunch of reasons. I learned that what my wife's GP told me was the 'general concensus' amonst the medical community. My wife was on a 'wedding' forum and had found a bunch of things. She tried 'baby aspirin' and other things that I can't think of right now.

We of course tried again. You'll have to excuse the lack of specific dates at this point - we lost another pregnancy in mid July. Really good friends of ours got married in late July and my wife was hoping to find out she was pregnant on their wedding day as they found out they were expecting on our wedding day. We lost our second pregnancy about a week before the wedding.

At this point, we were pretty defeated. I still had to be strong for my wife though. We tried and tried - and I admit, sex is less enjoyable with recurrent pregnancy loss on your mind. She found out she was pregnant again in November. At this point, we were just waiting for the 3rd loss so we could go and get a referral.

We went to her doctor and he agreed to refer us. He promised us that we would have a baby within a year. I wanted to tell him to go fly a kite - but I bit my tongue and tried to remain hopeful.

There was of course more waiting - we were told on average, it takes 6 months to get a first time appointment at the Regional Fertility Program clinic.

... to be continued in Part 3.