Writing this feels overwhelming and honestly, a little surreal.
Putting my feelings into words is my attempt to make sense of what has happened, to process the whirlwind of emotions that keep crashing over me.
Maybe this will help me feel less alone.
Maybe it will reach someone else who’s navigating a similar heartbreak. Or perhaps it’s simply a way to release some of what I’m carrying.
I found out I was pregnant very early on, and I wasn’t sure how to feel.
That uncertainty made everything that followed even harder to comprehend. Knowing I hadn’t planned this pregnancy, yet still feeling the immense weight of loss, has been one of the hardest things to process.
Once I knew I was pregnant, I started picturing what life might look like, all those tiny moments that suddenly felt possible.
I was just beginning to accept this new path, to imagine myself as a mum. Despite the fear and uncertainty, I started to feel excited. I told my mum and a couple of close friends.
It wasn’t how I envisioned my first pregnancy, but I wanted to embrace those early moments, no matter how scared I felt.
At six weeks, I started bleeding. Not enough to alarm the out-of-hours GP (general practitioner), but enough for them to book me in for an early scan to ease my mind.
That scan did not go as I’d hoped.
It’s meant to be a magical moment where you see your baby for the first time. But the sonographer was distant and said she could answer my questions after she’d done the scan as she needed to concentrate.
I knew from then it was a bad sign. She suspected an ectopic pregnancy. But there was also a very early pregnancy visible in my uterus.
They thought it could be a heterotopic pregnancy – one baby in my uterus and another in my Fallopian tube. For a moment, I held onto this impossible hope that maybe one of those babies was still healthy. But the bleeding got worse, the pain intensified, and I was told I’d need monitoring over the next 48 hours to track my (pregnancy) hormone levels.
When they took my bloods again, the results confirmed what I already feared: the pregnancy wasn’t going to progress – wherever it was. My hormone levels had dropped, but not significantly enough to provide a clear picture. All I knew was that my baby was gone, and surgery was now a possibility.
It’s meant to be a magical moment where you see your baby for the first time. But the sonographer was distant and said she could answer my questions after she’d done the scan as she needed to concentrate.
I knew from then it was a bad sign. She suspected an ectopic pregnancy. But there was also a very early pregnancy visible in my uterus.
They thought it could be a heterotopic pregnancy – one baby in my uterus and another in my Fallopian tube. For a moment, I held onto this impossible hope that maybe one of those babies was still healthy. But the bleeding got worse, the pain intensified, and I was told I’d need monitoring over the next 48 hours to track my (pregnancy) hormone levels.
When they took my bloods again, the results confirmed what I already feared: the pregnancy wasn’t going to progress – wherever it was. My hormone levels had dropped, but not significantly enough to provide a clear picture. All I knew was that my baby was gone, and surgery was now a possibility.
It washes over me like a wave and I feel as though I’m drowning. In sorrow, guilt and grief. I’m left with so much to process. The guilt weighs heavy – like I failed my baby, like my body betrayed me. I know logically that’s not true, but those thoughts are relentless. I find myself retracing everything, wondering if I could have done something differently.
I keep thinking back to how unsure I felt at first, and then I hate myself for that. What makes it harder is knowing how serious ectopic pregnancies are. It wasn’t just my baby’s life at risk; it was mine too. That’s a terrifying reality to sit with: desperately willing your pregnancy hormone to rise, while knowing that its increase could have put your own life in danger. That conflict is so hard to describe.
I know miscarriage isn’t rare, it affects roughly 1 in 4 pregnancies. Ectopic pregnancies, though less common, still happen in around 1 in 80 pregnancies. But knowing that doesn’t make it easier. Now, I’m figuring out how to move forward. Some days I feel like I’ve turned a corner. Other days, I feel like I’m drowning all over again. This type of grief is messy, painful, and exhausting. But I’m trying. I’m grieving a life that never came to be – a baby I’ll never hold but will always carry in my heart.
The pain, both physical and emotional, is unlike anything I’ve ever known
If I could say one thing: Experiencing an ectopic pregnancy is a grief that I can't put into words and a pain that nobody can explain. Be patient with yourself and allow time to feel.
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