A week later, I came home from an evening out that had taken my mind off my constant anxiety. I was finally feeling more positive. But then I went to the toilet and saw blood.
Red blood. I had gone into the bathroom pregnant and come out into a different reality. Having to tell my husband, and make it real, was an awful moment. It had taken over a year to conceive and I had been pregnant for nine days.
Technically this was a chemical pregnancy, but I will never forget the sight of the blood and what it meant. Two years, three pregnancies, two due dates and what should have been a first birthday had been and gone.
However, two months later, to my surprise, I was pregnant again. I counted the days to our first scan and checked for blood whenever I went to the toilet. Pregnancy after loss was a fundamentally different experience. I felt so vulnerable and full of fear and struggled to manage my anxiety. I lived from scan to scan and we told nobody save parents until well after 20 weeks. I hid my growing bump.
My counsellor was an incredible source of support during this time and it really helped to have a safe space to talk about my fears and be reassured that my feelings were normal. Nearly 3 years after we started trying for a second child, our beautiful son was born. His middle name is Samuel, after the son of the biblical Hannah, another longed-for child. We will never forget how it felt to struggle to complete our family. The three we lost may not have had names or faces but for a short time they were part of our family and our imagined future.
Our experience has left other scars too. If an egg is fertilized after ovulation, the now developing embryo will attempt to implant in the uterus. When this happens, as the pregnancy progresses, a hormone called hCG human chorionic gonadotropin is produced.
This is what a home pregnancy test or a blood test measures to confirm a pregnancy. Prior to approximately 6 weeks of pregnancy, hCG is the only way to detect a pregnancy. At this stage of pregnancy, ultrasound cannot detect an embryo.
Chemical pregnancies tend to occur right after implantation. You will know the pregnancy is not sustainable by either getting your period, getting a negative pregnancy test or by seeing a doctor who can confirm that your hCG numbers are declining rather than increasing as they should be in a healthy pregnancy.
A miscarriage is the loss of a pregnancy in the first 20 weeks. A chemical pregnancy is a miscarriage that is considered very early in the pregnancy, before an embryo sack is detectable on ultrasound. The next day, she took another one, just to be sure. It was still positive, but the pink line was slightly fainter. The day after that, Alexandra took one more test.
The line was now barely visible. A chemical pregnancy, also known as a biochemical pregnancy, is defined as a very early miscarriage. Chemical pregnancies occur before a person even realizes they're pregnant , around five weeks of gestation and before an ultrasound can detect a yolk sac the first anatomical identified by within the the gestational sac by ultrasound. Jeffrey Sternberg, founder of The Fertility Institutes.
Like in Alexandra's case, chemical pregnancies present themselves as a heavy period or slightly discolored period blood. Sternberg breaks down how chemical pregnancies work in the body: "An egg is fertilized by a sperm, but the egg shortly dies off as it is not fertile enough to continue with the full cycle of conception.
Lee says Chromosomal abnormalities, advanced maternal age which the medical community defines as being over age 35 , clotting disorders and thyroid issues are some possible causes. The research focused on subjects 42 years old and younger who underwent single embryo transfer, a procedure in which one fresh and frozen embryo gets selected from a larger group and is implanted either into the uterus or fallopian tube.
When the results were compared to control subjects who attempted spontaneous conception, the likelihood of a chemical pregnancy was actually lower and not as common among those who underwent IVF. The authors hypothesize that the opportunity to select the embryo for transfer helps eliminate the possibility that a problematic embryo results in a chemical pregnancy. A's doctor told her that there was actually an upside if it can even be called that to her chemical pregnancy: it indicated that she could get pregnant, which A had some concerns about since she's almost In fact, a study by the National Institutes of Health indicates that your chances of a live birth might actually increase if you start trying again within three months of a miscarriage.
The research, which was conducted between and , featured 1, women between the ages of 18 and 40 who had experienced miscarriage before 20 weeks. The researchers did not observe any increase in the risk of pregnancy complications in the group who immediately attempted conception.
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