After 8 pregnancies, 5 rounds of IVF and two failed transfers I feel less like I’ve “seen everything” and more like “What new challenge do you have for me now?” when it comes to Doctor reviews.

So, like, usual, I requested “Products of Conception” testing from our miscarriage, just for my own peace of mind that the miscarriage was caused by an Unbalanced Translocation and not some new thing…

There was a fair bit of time between my surgery (a D&C) and being able to see my OB for a review because we were on holidays, and then when the day for my review finally arrived my Mr 4 had come down with a bug so I had to cancel it.

So finally, yesterday (2^nd November) arrived and I was able to make it to my Doctor’s appointment.

We started the appointment by me explaining that I’d had spotting off and on since the D&C but not really been to concerned about it due to not having any pain or fevers or anything, to which my OB became quite concerned and asked if he could do a scan right away…

So of course I agreed to the scan and he thought that everything looked OK but still asked if I would go for a specialist scan just to rule out retained tissue or other issues.

I was happy to make arrangements for another scan, and then he said “Now, my news.”

I was sort-of just expecting him to say “Genetic testing showed an Unbalanced Translocation between chromosomes 1 and 21” but instead he said…

“I’m really sorry to let you know that there were no chromosomal abnormalities.”

I’m not sure I really processed what he meant as he started to explain the reasons why this might of happened and immediately I jumped to conclusions, thinking there must be something wrong, especially given I had spotting all through the pregnancy and since the D&C as well.

I told him I was really worried. Especially since we had also had two failed IVF transfers of “chromosomally normal” embryos prior to this…

He took some time to reassure me that approximately 50% of the miscarriages he sees are “unexplained” with “normal” chromosomes… and reflect that it was actually against the odds that we hadn’t previously had a miscarriage with “normal” chromosomes given how many pregnancies we’d had.

I walked away from the appointment feeling pretty deflated… it’s so hard to achieve a pregnancy with “normal” chromosomes when you have a Balanced Translocation (there’s only about a 1 in 8 chance of that happening for us), for it to miscarry for some “unknown” reason just feels really unfair.

I turned to my support group to ask for other experiences and to whether this had happened to anyone else in the past with Balanced Translocation… and I was overwhelmed by the support and stories of this happening to so many other people too. Many of those had been at much later stages in pregnancy as well.

It did make me feel in a way that I was grateful that if this was going to be the outcome, that it be the outcome now rather than later. I also took comfort in the thought that maybe there was actually something “wrong” with that embryo, but perhaps we just don’t have the knowledge or technology yet to test for whatever that abnormality is.

At least dealing with a miscarriage is something we’ve done so many times now that we have the ability to see the “positives” out of a shit situation and the resilience to just keep on powering on.

I’m not going to make any assumptions that scan outcome is going to be “fine” but lets just all hope that there’s no new problems to deal with.

Until next time, fingers crossed…