One Woman's Experience with Recurrent Miscarriage: Eileen's story, Part I

 In today's episode, my guests challenge is with miscarriage. She has two miscarriages both at the end of the first trimester, and then uses IVF (despite the fact that getting pregnant isn't the issue)...and get's pregnant, and has a miscarriage....eventually she becomes the mother of two girls, but that's later in the story. She is a writer, and in one of her pieces about this topic  called On Fertility in The Toast she writes: When you give birth, you do it with others. When you miscarry, you do it alone. Even if doctors and nurses are present, numbing you, holding your hand, giving gentle instructions, they’re not with you, because what’s happening is both too awful, and too common, to be shared. Nobody wants co-ownership of the failed human. Many don’t even consider it human.

Even if your father is driving you to the hospital in his buttery yellow Lincoln, or even if your mother is riding in the ambulance with you, or even if you husband and sister are outside the procedure room waiting, you’re still alone. There was a person/being/cluster of cells that was alive inside you, and now it’s not. Times three. It happened when I was 31, 33, and 38.

I'll stop reading there and you can hear my guest describe her experience...our conversation is broken into two parts. In this first part I also spoke with a doctor whose specialty is recurrent miscarriage and he shares insights from his own research and experience.