I’ve never written anything like this before. I’m not into journaling, and writing anything down in the fog of my grief was not helpful to me. But just now I am sitting here on a plane and listening to a very excited, very newly pregnant woman, use the term ‘when.’

Now you may be thinking that this is all perfectly normal. Yes… Yes it is normal. But my heart stopped beating just for a second in pain. Pain for all my missed ‘whens’.

After three years of unexplained infertility (including the dreaded Covid 2020 year), my husband and I, newly settled in the USA, finally had our first IVF appointment. We were excited to begin. Our doctor was very honest with us and shared the statistics that our 39 year old selves had to digest. But we remained hopeful.

I felt the dreaded ‘period style’ drip

Now, you wouldn’t believe it, but that very month we became pregnant naturally. Wow, we thought. That’s it! We were just stressed! We excitedly started planning for ‘when’ our baby arrived, even buying our first house together. We’d planned the nursery for ‘when’ the baby arrived, had discussed names for ‘when’ he or she was here. We’d sailed through the HCG testing and our first two early scans, at 6 and then 8.5 weeks. Everything looked great, the chance of miscarriage was down to below 3% and so we started sharing with our friends and family. Everyone was so truly excited for us, having known how desperately we wanted a baby.

And then, one sunny morning, at 11.5 weeks pregnant, while I was soaking up the spring sun and waiting for contractors at our new house, I felt the dreaded ‘period style’ drip. Rushing into the bathroom, I stared in horror at the brown stains in my underwear. I immediately called my OB’s office and they calmly told me it was probably nothing to be concerned about but to come in the next day for a scan to check. Now, this was at 2:30pm. How on earth could I last for 21 hours? The panic inside me rose and my husband made the executive decision to go to the ER. One painful four hour wait, a torturous and silent internal scan and an, ‘I’m so very sorry,’ later, our world came crashing down around us. “You’ve had a missed miscarriage. We estimate the fetus died at around 9 weeks.”

And that was it. We were sent on our way with a big pack of thick sanitary towels. No leaflets to explain our options. No explanation of what might happen next. No support line to contact. Just a, “Call your OB in the morning and they’ll see you to talk about the next steps.”

And then two days later, it was all over. My baby was gone

The next 24 hours were (and still are) a fog to me. I remember at one point screaming at my husband to, “Get it out of me. It’s dead. Get it out of me.” Flashes of his panicked phone calls to the OB’s office where he begged them to see me earlier and to make sure I didn’t have to encounter any pregnant women or new babies when I visited. Crying and keening for my baby when I had to, indeed, wait in the hallway to schedule my D&C and see pregnant women checking out of their appointments. Desperately trying to ignore their sympathetic looks as they rubbed their perfect bumps.

And then two days later, it was all over. My baby was gone. And I felt the most dead and numb inside I’ve ever felt. If I was to give those days a color, it would be black. Just black. Black and blank. Lonely. Empty.

A few days passed like this before a beautiful friend reached out to me and suggested that I take a look at an Instagram account she had heard about. “It’s called TWGGE, The Worst Girl Gang Ever. It might help you know; to know that you aren’t alone.” As I tentatively scanned their posts, my tears were a river. Here were women that got it.

Signing into that first online meeting, actually laughing as Bex and Laura acknowledged how the whole situation was ‘so f*cking sh*t,’ felt like being wrapped in a big fluffy blanket and being told that everything would eventually be okay.

Throughout the next few months, that online community of strong, resilient women kept me afloat. Finding crumbs of joy in my days became my mantra. I healed. I started exercising again. My body felt better. I stopped feeling like I was a failure. Eventually I felt strong enough to visit the IVF clinic again.

Now, our IVF story is a topic for another essay on another day; a deep dive into the endless needles, the drugs, the scans with my buddy Wanda, and waiting (oh, so much waiting!) But six months, and two retrieval cycles later, we had done it! We had three frozen perfect PGT-A tested little embabies. We were ready. Or so we thought.

At that point I recognised that my ‘ifs’ would never again be ‘whens’.

After losing a baby, I’m not sure you can ever be ready to jump into an IVF transfer. I realize now that ignorance was bliss. I had no idea of the terror I would feel during that 9 day wait. Then the intense fear of those first phone calls about the HCG levels (of which mine, of course, didn’t follow a normal rise) and struggling with the wait to 6 weeks to confirm the pregnancy was actually there. This time we only told our closest friends and family. In my head, I just thought if I could get to 12 weeks, then I’d feel more confident. Seeing blood in my underwear again at 6.5 weeks had me throwing up and convinced that it was all over (baby was fine – no one had told me about the higher likelihood of early bleeds in an IVF pregnancy).

At the 12 week scan I suddenly realised that nothing was ever going to make me feel confident in this pregnancy. At that point I recognised that my ‘ifs’ would never again be ‘whens’. While everyone around me was saying ‘when the baby is here,’ in my head it would always be ‘IF the baby makes it earth-side.’

Another huge knock-back at the 20 week scan, where we discovered our daughter had a velamentous cord insertion and possible vasa-previa, had my mental health spiralling. Being told that my baby was likely to be born at 34 weeks with a NICU stay was like sandpaper on my soul. Why? We kept asking ourselves. Why us? How is this fair?

But somehow we did make it though. Our little miracle fought like a trooper to make it earth side. Nuggets of joy happened; the first kick. The hilarious 4D scan, where she was hiding and I had to dance her into a good position! The 30 week scan where we found out the vasa Previa had resolved and we could go full term. We tried to celebrate these little wins, but at no point in my mind did the ‘if’ become a ‘when’.

At 38 weeks and 3 days, our beautiful daughter was born via c-section. ‘When’ she was finally placed on my chest, I took the first deep breath I had taken in nearly 9 months. The relief that she was in my arms and I could see her little chest rising and falling was overwhelming.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, can prepare you for the experience of pregnancy after loss. It is a wild rollercoaster where you spend every spare second checking your underwear, analyzing each symptom, googling long into the night, and, in my case, praying to every god, angel and fairy out there for the health of my unborn child.

So as I sat there on the plane, coincidentally a few days before my second IVF transfer, listening to this excited mother to be, I made a promise to myself. IF I am lucky enough to have a second miracle pregnancy, I will make a conscious choice to use the word WHEN.

Sunday the 14^th March 2010 (Mother’s Day) is a day that I will never forget, I was just over the 6-week gestation mark with my first pregnancy when I started to experience some mild cramping and bleeding.  Over the course of the day these symptoms started to increase and later that evening I found myself staring at the bottom of the toilet not quite knowing what to do.  Sadly, it was obvious that I had suffered my first miscarriage, so many thoughts swirling through my mind.  How do you flush your baby away?  To me it was my baby, but to so many others it wasn’t a real baby, it was just a small clot of blood.

Two more miscarriages followed, same pattern, between the 8-10 week gestation mark, lots of hospital appointments, blood tests, there was a possibility that my blood was clotting when I was pregnant so a small dose of aspirin was advised during my next pregnancy.

On the 8^th August 2013, our son Jack was sadly stillborn at 28 weeks.  A scan of my pregnancy a few days before had shown that Jack was on the small size but we were told that it was nothing to worry about and that I would be booked in for another growth scan in two weeks’ time.  Jack was delivered naturally and peacefully in our local hospital and we decided that we needed some answers as to what had gone so terribly wrong.  The post mortem results showed that my placenta had started to fail and that also Jack had suffered from a blood clot which they think had passed through my placenta.  I will always blame myself, essentially my body had caused the death of our beloved son.

I was so lonely, no one really understood what I was going through. 

We bounced from hospital to hospital, trying to find answers as to why I kept suffering from a miscarriage between the 8-10 week gestation.  We even paid to have private care but this too resulted in a miscarriage.

I was so lonely, no one really understood what I was going through.  During each pregnancy I had received regular scans and had always seen a little heartbeat, no one seem to understand the heart ache.

This was my thirteenth pregnancy so I didn’t really hold up much hope.

All of our hopes were pinned on our referral being accepted into the recurrent miscarriage clinic at Warwick and Coventry Hospital.  It was only then did we get all of the answers that we were looking for.  Following a Cervical Biopsy, it showed that I suffered from the condition Natural Killer Cells and that this condition would need treatment in the early stages of pregnancy and due to my blood clotting disorder then I would need to be take clexane every day.  This was my thirteenth pregnancy so I didn’t really hold up much hope, I just presumed that the pregnancy would fail and that we would need to start the process again.  Luckily for us this was not the case, following the fantastic treatment from Warwick and Coventry and being under the care of an amazing consultant at our local hospital, our daughter Emily was born at 33 weeks by caesarean section in July 2017.  Emily spent the first 4 weeks of her life in SCBU, I was always told that I would never make full gestation and everyday of my pregnancy I just hoped that we would get past the 32-week mark.

I think it’s safe to say that my body wasn’t really built for being pregnant.

Our second daughter Charlotte was born in March 2020, just as the country went into lock down!  I had been given the same tests and treatment plans as before and Charlotte was also born prematurely at 32 weeks by caesarean section.  Our family was complete!

I think it’s safe to say that my body wasn’t really built for being pregnant, a blood clotting disorder that only happens when I’m pregnant, my placenta starts to fail later on in pregnancy and combined with natural killer cells, it was quite clear that I would never of had a successful pregnancy so I owe everything to the wonderful team at Warwick and Coventry and the fantastic consultant at NDDH for enabling me to achieve my dream of being a mum.

I’d naively assumed that the road to parenthood would be straightforward for us. That’s what society prepares you for, and I’d seen that play out with friends and family. Three years down the line I feel like a different person. I have a lot more knowledge about women’s health, a whole new dictionary’s worth of jargon and acronyms, and a feeling of desperation rather than hope.

Our first pregnancy came quickly – 3 months of trying and we got the positive test. We felt so lucky. A little bit cautious, but nothing gave us a reason to suspect anything would go wrong, so we shared the news at Christmas time. This would be my parents’ first grandchild, a cousin for our little niece on my husband’s side. Everyone was so excited.

I desperately tried to understand what was happening to me as I writhed in pain in my bed

Blood tests came back normal; my first midwife appointment went well. So, when we went for our first scan, I wasn’t really prepared to hear the words ‘it’s bad news’. At that appointment I learned about anembryonic pregnancy – where the foetus doesn’t develop properly but the gestational sac keeps growing. Your body thinks that you are pregnant, but there is no embryo. I had to have vaginal pessaries to remove ‘the remains of the pregnancy’ and was told to go home and rest. I was not told about the debilitating pain, the contractions I would feel and the quantity of blood there would be. I read about those things on online forums as I desperately tried to understand what was happening to me as I writhed in pain in my bed. The lack of knowledge around miscarriage is incredible when you learn how common it is.

After 12 weeks of bleeding, several follow up appointments, a lot of tears and confusion, we got the all clear from the doctor that everything was ‘normal’. They told us it was bad luck, a very common occurrence and that we should just try again. We told ourselves the same thing, just bad luck, and tried to move on.

A few months later we were back at hospital. What I had thought was my period, was actually another miscarriage. It started around the same time as my period, lasted a few days, then the bleeding stopped, only to start again a couple of days later. By then I felt extreme exhaustion, just a tiredness like nothing else, and developed pain when I peed – I thought I had a UTI. At the hospital we found out it was an ectopic pregnancy, not viable, in my left fallopian tube. It seemed like my body was miscarrying itself this time, but there was a risk the tube could rupture. I had to go back to the hospital every 48 hours for 10 days for a blood test to ensure that my HCG level was going down. If it went up, I’d need medical intervention, and potentially surgery. Luckily that didn’t happen for us, but the bleeding again lasted a couple of months, and the feeling of loss hit even harder the second time.

There were posters on the walls about the benefits of breastfeeding and what vaccines to get your baby.

At the hospital where I was treated, there was no specific area for pregnancy loss patients. Every time I had to sit in triage, then go to the maternity ward and sit in a waiting room surrounded by women with big baby bumps. I saw newborn babies in their mothers’ arms getting wheeled down the corridor as I waited. There were posters on the walls about the benefits of breastfeeding and what vaccines to get your baby. Even as the doctors there told me that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in loss, there seemed to be not a thought for the feelings of the mothers who are going through such terrible pain and loss.

A couple of months later, I started to feel really desperate. Before discovering TWGGEF I think I was trying really hard to avoid my feelings. I latched on to the words I’d heard so many times: ‘at least it was early’ … ‘there was no embryo’ … ‘it’s just bad luck. Next time it will happen’. But now, after connecting with so many of the warriors in TWGGEF I can see how damaging those words are. What was meant to serve as a comfort for me, actually just delayed the suffering. By trying to minimize the pain, I felt like I didn’t deserve to be so sad. And with no outlet for my grief, I was really struggling. It’s only when I sought out support that I realised how much suffering I’d been through. Hearing other women’s stories, and connecting with people who’d been through similar heartbreak was so validating. I understood finally that I had to let those feelings in, and grieve what we had lost.

Fast forward a year or so, and the feeling of ‘it will happen’ was really starting to dwindle. I was finding it really tough to live in this constant monthly cycle of hoping, wondering and waiting. I’d tried everything we could think of: a cocktail of supplements, speaking to specialists, changing my diet, doing more sports, doing less sports, acupuncture. I went through a hysterosalpingography and a hysteroscopy, I had so many blood tests and internal scans I’ve lost count and still we had no answers for why we weren’t getting pregnant or staying pregnant.

People seem to think IVF = baby, and give little thought to how gruelling the process can be.

Out of desperation, we turned to IVF. It felt frustrating when we didn’t have a reason why we weren’t conceiving naturally, but our doctor said it was a way of reducing some risk factors and having a bit more control. I was pleased to be doing something different, but dreading the toll it would take on my body and on my mind. Strangely, family and friends seemed to be really pleased for us. There are still a lot of misconceptions around IVF and its success rates, but people seem to think IVF = baby, and give little thought to how gruelling the process can be.

The process for the egg collection went relatively smoothly, though I had 4 different injections to do each day. After all we had been through to this point, it felt like no big deal to be honest. We were lucky in that we got multiple embryos, though I wasn’t able to do a fresh transfer because of a risk of OHSS. We froze what we had and waited to do the transfers. Fast forward another six months, more injections, more medications, more money to the clinic and we’ve sadly used up all our embryos and have no pregnancy to show for it. With every loss, a part of me felt like it was being chipped away. I had to take some time off work as I wasn’t coping. People were loving and supportive and caring and sorry and none of it mattered. None of it took away the sadness. Frustratingly we still are no closer to getting any answers either. It’s hard to think about next steps but I am determined to not stop yet.

The fundraiser gave me an outlet to share my story and I’m so pleased I did

I joined the TWGGEF Run 10k to raise 10k fundraiser in January, mostly because of the mind-blowing fact that in 2025, the topic of baby loss is still a taboo. It breaks my heart that women today feel isolated and ashamed when they experience loss, because they haven’t ever heard anyone openly speak about it. That was my experience for sure. I felt a sense of duty to open up about what I’d been through – if I wasn’t prepared to speak honestly about it, how would anything ever change?

The fundraiser gave me an outlet to share my story and I’m so pleased I did. The conversations that came from it, and the messages of support and the donations I received were incredible. I shared the JustGiving page at work and my company matched a portion of my total. Colleagues and friends joined me to complete the 10k despite the TERRIBLE weather we had that weekend. The WhatsApp community was a beacon of positivity and encouragement. Only good things came from my decision to be honest.

I wish I could finish this post with my happy ending, but I’m not there yet. I’m sure a lot of you reading this can relate. So instead, I’ll leave you with wise TWGGEF words that always make me feel a tiny bit better on the darkest days. You are not alone. Your grief is valid. You can do hard things.

Sending love and strength to you all.

Caroline x

I didn’t think when I first started trying to get pregnant in 2018 that it would take so much effort. I had an understanding from the excruciating awkward occasional sex ed lessons at school that conception was as simple as a male and a female get it on and after some time a baby will pop out, such false advertising!

But when I decided I wanted to start trying for a family months turned into years and there was still no baby. I finally plucked up the courage to ask my GP, knowing that it was probably my Polycystic ovaries hampering our efforts and they quickly had me in for blood tests that started us on the path for fertility support. Thanks to Covid my husband had to hand over his part of the testing to a lab tech in a car park nearly an hour’s drive away. We still laugh about whether that was one of the weirdest things we’ll ever experience, they said to keep the specimen at body temp so he drove along a near empty motorway whilst I smuggled a specimen sample pot in my cleavage. We then handed over the sample to someone so cloaked in PPE in the car park outside we weren’t even sure they were a member of staff. They obviously were though, and we received the results that everything was on track for us to start discussing our options with the fertility team when they got in touch. We joked that there wasn’t much to do during lock down and when Christmas was cancelled for us due to the pandemic, we managed to finally make a baby all on our own.

We had faced our adversity and overcome our issues… we thought.

We tearfully told our families and select friends before even the first scan because we were just so excited it had finally happened to us; we had faced our adversity and overcome our issues… we thought. I could hear the relief in my best friend’s voice who had told me just the week before that she was expecting, getting pregnant as soon as she had looked at her new husband.

Fast forward 9 months and I am sat waiting for an appointment by myself whilst my other half Tom waits outside because…. still Covid… and then we finally get called in. We were there to discuss early induction, because he was measuring big and I was anxious to get him out. I’d been having nightmares, like I knew that it needed to be sooner. I hadn’t had a particularly difficult pregnancy apart from a bleed at 10 weeks that they described as a threatened miscarriage, and after a check over and a scan we were reassured, everything was ok, it was “just one of those things”, but perhaps I shouldn’t do any high impact exercise for the remainder of my pregnancy. Oh, and also being called and given the wrong results after our 12-week scan. We had an increased chance of our baby having trisomy 21 so we technically broke covid rules leaving the city to have an unnecessary NIPT test at the private clinic that could see us soonest. It wasn’t cheap either but I said that’s what my annual bonus bought us, information about our baby. When I called to tell them, we’d had the test the woman on the phone was very confused as to why, checking my details again and then going silent. I asked what my results were and she read off completely different figures than the ones I had received the week before. “So was I given the wrong person’s results” I surmised. She stayed silent, I don’t know if she was scared or loyal, but eventually I made her confirm which results were correct. Our baby didn’t have any additional chance for anything the 12-week scan checks for. A fact that was solidified by the results of the NIPT test a few weeks after and the news he was a he!

My last words to her, after she insisted, I go to 39 weeks were, “is there nothing I can say to make you change your mind”

Nearly 6 months after that, and nearing the last hurdle, I waddled into the windowless room to be confronted by the consultant or registrar. Who explained she was a locum, but made no small talk whilst bad-temperedly clicking through computer screens then left the room then came back complaining about the system… the other staff… the everything! She couldn’t access the right records so she then made decisions about him coming into the world based on limited information, a decision based only on what we could tell her of the growth scan appointment that we remembered, from weeks before, as first-time parents, with no medical backgrounds. My last words to her, after she insisted, I go to 39 weeks were, “is there nothing I can say to make you change your mind”. “No, no” she shook her head gesturing for us to leave the room. I don’t think she ever made eye contact with me, the whole appointment. A few weeks later on the day she scheduled me to be induced Holden Cosmo Moore was pronounced dead. “I’m sorry, there’s no heart beat”.

Her round belly bulging with life whilst my cold swollen stomach had become a tomb for my son.

I called my best friend later that day, in a blur, just wanting to hear her voice saying all the right things to comfort me, we were closer than sisters, but as I told her I could hear the panic and self-conscious tone creep in as she internalised the worry, being pregnant herself, due 2 weeks after me. She was so strong for me, and put all of that fear aside to come to my house the following day, just before I went back to the hospital for him to be born. Her round belly bulging with life whilst my cold swollen stomach had become a tomb for my son. I said goodbye knowing I wouldn’t be able to meet up with her again for some time, maybe ever.

I can talk of hope and the future and all of the things that came after, but even several years on, a part of my soul is trapped in that room with the consultant forever, still screaming and begging the universe to change. We found out at the medical review that he was “genetically, internally and externally perfect.” My son was perfect in every way, and yet he died and I have to live the rest of my life without him, furious at a flawed person and a broken system.