WARNING: This article discusses pregnancy loss which some readers may find distressing Recurrent pregnancy loss affects 1 per cent of reproductive-aged women, including writer Rebecca Barry Hill who lost 10 pregnancies – and had a baby. The first time, we counted our chickens. It had taken us 18 months to fall pregnant , so by the time I was five or six weeks, we held a dinner party with our parents and spilled the happy news, only to turn around a few days later and take it all back.
The second time was in Paris. No sooner had we celebrated my sister’s wedding in the Cotswolds, me sipping excitedly on soda water all night, than I was weeping in a toilet stall near le Jardin des Tulieres. This time, we didn’t tell anyone until we were back home – who wants their celebrations dashed by such sadness? But on the night, we hightailed it to a Parisian bar and ordered big glasses of red wine and soft French cheese, the only silver lining we could think of at the time.
It gets a little fuzzy after that. There was the mortifying moment I broke down at work a day after a miscarriage , when a colleague announced her second pregnancy. The time I made it all the way to nine weeks, only to clock my doctor’s expression when she couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat.
The time I wound up at the emergency room thinking I would haemorrhage to death. A separate visit to hospital when my body lost the baby but not completely. After the surgery, a teenage boy with a broken arm leaned i.