Sarah was shocked how trying for her second child was such a struggle

Sarah: I knew I wanted a family and after we got married that urge became much stronger. But he said let’s just wait a year and then try, you know, try to have a baby. So we did that.

It was about a month and we were pregnant. And then we were shocked because it was so quick. We were like ok, we’re having a baby. It does take time and, you know, there are so many different factors to getting pregnant. It’s not, in my mind, you know it’s simple. How can it not be that easy?

It was the second month of trying with the second baby. When I found out I was pregnant, I literally three days later started to have a miscarriage.

I felt that when I had miscarriages that it retriggered some old anxieties that I had years ago after the death of my father. And that’s the sort of stress that’s difficult to control because once it’s there, it’s there. It’s difficult to get out of that.

I felt anxious and out of control. It was the only thing I could think about. You know, what’s different with my body? Why is this happening now when before it was so easy. In fact a lot of people would say to me you just need to relax and it’s almost impossible to do that because when you’ve put your mind to something and it’s not happening you want answers straight away, but you can’t get them straight away.

So I saw a consultant and she then said she wanted to do a laparoscopy and a hysteroscopy to see, you know, what’s happening. And so I had that pretty quickly. It was about four weeks after she said she wanted to do that. She told me then not to try and she did a number of blood tests. And blood tests she did during my period so that she could see hormone levels and things.

So I went in and had surgery and she found some very mild endometriosis and that I had polycystic ovaries but not the syndrome. It was just my ovaries were producing more eggs and they weren’t maturing as well as, you know, they should be.

When I was discharged from the gynaecologist I felt alone. I felt like, who’s gonna support me? You know, I’m just told go and get pregnant now and that was it. And it wasn’t happening. I even phoned up the gynaecologist’s office after about seven month’s and said I’m not pregnant now like what should I do? And they just said you’d have to come back in for another appointment. And I just thought I can’t go through that again.

I found that people would be careful what they said to me because of that as well. If people were then pregnant they would worry about telling me because I wasn’t.

I remember thinking every month, coz, Christmas was coming up. I remember thinking oh maybe I won’t be drinking at Christmas because I’ll be pregnant. And I would do that with every occasion that was coming up, weddings, birthdays and so on. And obviously I never was pregnant, so, I just started to forget about that.

You know, if you get into a stress situation you start to look at everything around you as a negative. And you just generally, you know, have a miserable side to you if you like. I started to look into things like acupuncture and reflexology and things like that. And then came across you. Then decided to go for that.

I learnt that you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t see life like, external factors in life shouldn’t make you feel like that. You know, you are what you make yourself. So, if you feel negative about things you should always try and turn that around and try and be positive about it, as hard as it is.

Taking time to do that breathing, and just relaxing and changing your mindset. I think it definitely helps.

I felt like it wasn’t going to happen for me. But then when I did fall pregnant I felt like is it going to stay this time? All the symptoms that I got for my period were there, so I just said to myself, no, it’s not happening again. The only thing that was different was that I was ravenous.

I had a scan at seven weeks and there was a heartbeat and I never had that before. So, I knew then that it was obviously going much better than before. It felt really good, just I was really excited about buying maternity…because when I wasn’t getting pregnant before I would imagine being pregnant. So you’d imagine buying maternity clothes or getting ready for the baby coming. And, um, I just didn’t think it would happen. So when I was actually in it, I just felt, well like I had a glow around me! Whereas before I felt like I was walking around under a black cloud almost. As much as you force yourself to smile and be happy, you’ve got an underlying problem that you’re always thinking about.

So it just lifted all of that. And just changed my life really!