This time last year, we were celebrating falling pregnant after 2 and a half years of trying and before seeing a fertility clinic. We were overjoyed to have finally made it this far.

It was our first ever pregnancy so we were a little naive and told a few friends and family straight away and even bought a few baby grows through excitement. I had irregular cycles so even though I was excited, something always just seemed a little off for me as I knew I’d conceived on a late ovulation. This means nothing by the way but it just seemed too good to be true to me.

We sailed through the first few weeks – no morning sickness for me! Definitely thought wow what a breeze. I started to get some shoulder pain around 6/7 weeks and me being pretty anxious knew all about the risks of an ectopic pregnancy. I was seen by an EPU who did a scan for me and baby was in the uterus, little heart fluttering and shown as around 6 weeks.

A couple of weeks continued and we decided to book in for a private scan as I was still anxious and wanted to see the baby again. We were around 8 weeks when this happened.

We turned up to the scan really excited to see how much baby had grown. The private clinic we went to was not actually very appealing when we got there and they were also running late. Their card machine had stopped working so I had to pay them in cash after the scan.

We finally got to go in and the lady put the big screen on in front of us and moved the probe around on my belly. We could see the baby but it was very still. I didn’t will really know what I was looking for though so it appeared normal to me. She said ‘I can’t find a heartbeat.’ Then she continued to probe around prodding and then zooming in and forcing me to look at the still image on the screen. ‘Look, look no heartbeat!’ She kept talking and I just started crying – my husband had to clean the gel off me and then the lady, rather insensitive lady, proceeded as normal to hand me photographs and send me to the cash desk to pay.

It felt like our world had fallen apart but we still couldn’t believe it was real and were adamant they had made a mistake. We booked in with NHS EPU which was an agonising 3 day wait.

The EPU confirmed our fears and at that point I had grown to have a little acceptance of what was going on. 2 days later I was in surgery having my baby removed under General Anaesthetic. It all happened so quickly and I’d never been under anaesthetic or been admitted to hospital either so that was a shock in itself.

At the start of November, we attended an early pregnancy loss funeral which was very hard for us. The service was morbid and I’m not sure if I would choose that route again if we went through that again. Still, it provided some closure.

That was a very hard time in our lives and one we felt we couldn’t share with many people at the time as it’s considered such a taboo. We built a memorial garden at home for our little one and the steps taken to help us move on deserve their own post! Fast forward a year and we are almost 25 weeks pregnant with our rainbow baby after going on Clomid at the start of the year – again, a story for another post.