I didn’t expect it to work. I had the transfer, I carried on with life, I didn’t feel any different. But then I didn’t feel any different when I was pregnant with what became my son. And so when I took the test I genuinely had no idea what it would tell me. Then I saw that faint second blue line that I’m always loath to think of as definitively “pregnant” and so, as I told B, echoing the words I’d previously uttered, “I’m not ‘not pregnant'”. And when the line got darker, and the blood test showed only good things, I dared to believe that I might actually be “pregnant”. And the thing was that although I hadn’t expected it to work, when it appeared to have done, I just assumed that it would be a carbon copy of the pregnancy that I’d had with that first donor egg, first time around. After all, both the embryo that was sitting in front of me as a wiggling, jiggling boy, and the one that was sitting inside me, were created on exactly the same day. They were both graded the same quality. While I could never take anything for granted, never assume anything, I could see no real reason why the one inside me would not go on to become another one outside me. Until I started bleeding at just over five weeks. 

Even then I cast my mind back to a bleed at about the same time with my successful pregnancy when it turned out everything was actually fine. But the bleeding carried on. And on. And in my heart of hearts, even before the sonographer told us that the embryo sac was empty, I think I knew. We got ushered to an empty room. And people said that they were sorry and spoke in hushed voices. And all we wanted to do was get out of there and be somewhere, anywhere else. And eventually, after an interminable time we were.

This miscarriage was different from the last. I knew about it earlier, it wasn’t missed, it wasn’t during a pandemic, and, crucially, we already had a child. And that was both the best thing — and the worst. Because there wasn’t the searing anxiety of the last time, the not knowing whether we’d ever be parents, the fear that it might never happen for us. And there was our chunky-cheeked, pudgy-fingered, giggling son who still needed to be picked up from nursery, and bathed and put to bed, whatever crappy news his parents had had that day. Which was a great distraction. But also a reminder of what we could have won. The concept of a child, our child, was no longer an abstract one. We knew much more about what that bundle of cells might have become. Of course it hurt, of course it was painful — although much more mentally than physically — but, if we’re ranking these things, which as you know, I’m not a fan of, it wasn’t nearly as bad as the first one.