Goodbye to Mr Frosty. An ode to him on Baby Loss Awareness Week.
By: Broken, Healed, A Stroke At
Tags: Grief And Loss, Miscarriage, Ivf, Short Story

Goodbye to Mr Frosty. An ode to him on Baby Loss Awareness Week.

I was in my early 30’s when I married my husband, so I wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. After meeting my husband to-be and then qualifying as an Adult Nurse, it looked as if I was finally settling down into something approaching ‘normality’ — something people were beginning despair would never happen — myself included at one point!

We waited a year before trying for a baby. I wanted to concentrate on my career and settle into the beautiful, grown up, family home we had bought. I wanted us to have some time for us to enjoy just being the “married couple”, such as throwing “grown up dinner parties” with my very “grown up” husband. It had taken me a long time to settle and finally feel like a “grown up” myself. The children would follow — naturally — we naively believed.

However, after four years we were still “childfree”, despite giving it our best efforts.

Fertility tests proved us to be both fertile; “unexplained infertility”. There was the minor matter of a benign polyp found on my right ovary to be removed first,then we were good to proceed.

This was when the shit was to hit the fan and my life was about to take a leftfield turn.

From there, I was found to have an undiagnosed congenital hole in my heart. An ASD — Atrial Septal DEFECT.

It doesn’t bode well, does it, when the word “defect” is right there in the medical title of your condition. A defected heart which could have led to Stroke, heart failure or even early sudden death.

I had a ‘simple’ surgical procedure to close the hole — the size of a two-pound coin — but my health was about to deteriorate even further. On the 28th December 2016, I suffered a Stroke which would take me nearly two years to fully recover from.

Those two years of recovery meant a longer than planned PAUSE before IVF, and the clock was still ticking.

I was finally, thankfully, after nearly 3 years on pause, deemed fit and well enough to undergo the physical and mentally gruelling procedure of IVF.

Sadly (or luckily enough depending on how you look at it), we only got two successfully fertilised embryos out of the procedure. I was now on the “wrong side” of 40. According to the fertility Doctors — it was due to me being a withering, haggard, OLD 40+ woman — all washed up — and with eggs gearing up for retirement.

One of the embryos was transferred inside of me straight after the IVF cycle and the other embryo, was to be frozen.

We nicknamed the embryo who went off to be frozen, “Mr Frosty”, he was our back-up ‘boy’.

As it would turn out, we would soon need our Mr Frosty.

To be considered pregnant by the clinic there needs to be a level of an HCG (pregnancy hormone marker) of a minimum of 50, which is checked with a blood test. This blood test is done 10 days after the embryo implantation.

For my first embryo implantation, my HCG marker was 47. I had failed the pregnancy test by 3 marks. I was a “little bit pregnant”, but not enough to support the embryo to develop. My period followed a week later and that was that.

We consoled ourselves with the fact that we had our Mr Frosty ‘on ice’. Time for us to bring him ‘in from the cold’. Our hopes and day-dreams were now transfixed on this little frozen embryo of ours who had been deeply sleeping in the freezer; patiently waiting for us to come back to get him.

It’s impossible to think about anything else during the 10 day wait from date of implantation to the day of the blood test.

10 long days of wishing, praying and looking out for any pregnancy signs, becoming increasingly crazy and obsessive with it all and the possibility that you could be pregnant. Examples being illustrated below…

“Do I feel sick this morning because I’m pregnant or because I ate a biryani last night, that was six days past its sell-by date?”

“Atishoo!” OOO…I just sneezed. “Can sneezing be an early sign of pregnancy” is excitedly tapped into Google. (Forgetting the more rational reason that you sneezed because the cat hair hasn’t been hoovered off the sofa)

I peed on a pregnancy stick the day before going into the clinic for the HCG blood test.

TWO victorious blue lines on the wee stick came up, almost immediately.

The blood test confirmed the next day that I was, indeed, pregnant. An HCG of 76, thank you very much. I had passed the official HCG marker with flying colours this time!

I WAS PREGNANT with my little Frosty Bear. Frosty Bear was on his way and coming to be with us.

Within days from the blood test, I began to “feel” pregnant.

I had a nose belonging to a bloodhound and I begin to crave meat. Great big hunks of steak and ham — I don’t even like ham?! My breakfast consisted of me now standing naked next to the fridge in the mornings, throwing the ham straight into my mouth, out of the packet. No time to be civilised and use a plate, when satisfying a pregnancy craving.

I continued to pee on sticks every morning, just to see those glorious, victorious, two blue lines appearing and confirming that our much-loved, anticipated Frosty Bear, was taking up, we hoped, residence inside my womb.

This was to be the beginning of the rest our new lives; someone to nurture and love. We would, at long last…be a family — properly grown-up like all the other early-40-somethings.

7 weeks later, after the positive blood test, I went to go for my first scan at the fertility clinic. To go see my little Frosty Bear on the ultrasound screen.

5 mins after being called in, I am staring at the blank screen in utter disbelief. The scanner is showing that my womb is nothing more than a black hole of emptiness.

There is NO baby to be seen.

There are NO sounds of a heartbeat. Nothing.

Gone.

Just like that — my baby had gone.

My womb once again, was derelict and empty.

Where have you gone, Frosty Bear? I remember thinking to myself as I blinked away the tears in that claustrophobic, hot, air-less, scanning room at the clinic.

I couldn’t wait to get out of that clinic, in which so many women had probably cried desperate tears of longing and sadness. To me, the clinic reeked of desperation, not hope anymore. I wanted to leave asap…and never return.

The promise of hope that Mr Frosty had brought with him and the joy that he would have brought to us and our families, was over. He is no more.

There are no other embryos in the freezer for us — he was it — our last chance with the NHS and a fear of what will happen to us next pours over me.

Didn’t he know how loved he already was by us? Couldn’t he have felt our love when he had been inside me?

Sometimes, love just isn’t enough to bring something to us that we want so badly.

I thought of his idyllic future growing up surrounded by a loving family, delighting in him every day. Everything was in place from our end for him to come into being — all he had to do was turn up and join us.

I was, quite simply, heartbroken.

I went into the spare room the day after the scan and I saw the baby clothes lying on the bed that I’d bought in a moment of excitement and expectation; that I couldn’t contain myself not too purchase.

Now, I felt like the baby grows were laughing at me, taunting me in their unused state, still wrapped in their sterile plastic packaging. A reminder of my failure to keep him.

I sat down on the bed and took the baby grows out of their packaging. I held one up. I stared at the beautifully embroidered yellow baby chicks on it with its mother standing by proudly next to her chicks. 100% organic, soft white, cotton. I longed for my Frosty baby to be in them, alive once again, next to me. My little baby chick.

I lifted the little newborn baby hat up to my nose and inhaled deeply, imagining the delicious, soft, clean scent of my baby being kept snug and warm in there. Instead, the smell of the plastic quickly brought me back to my senses, to my sad reality, to feelings of emptiness and loss.

The silence of that room overwhelmed me with grief, the very room that would have become his nursery. In that moment, the silence added to the stark reminder that there would never be my Frosty Bear — living and breathing in this room; making it become a noisy, messy room; filled with love and stinky nappies. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I sat there and howled out my grieving tears over someone whom I’d never even met. I grieved for the hope that he had brought with him and felt like it was now slowly ebbing away from me.

I text my closest friends whilst sitting in that room — to inform them of our devastating baby loss news. Too sad to speak.

“Hold each other a little tighter tonight”, one friend wrote back. It was a perfect, sensitive, kind response; also, being a needful reminder that Jamie and I still had each other to turn to in our sadness. We could bring comfort to each other and ride the tsunami waves of grief together.

In the next weeks following the scan, my “Mothers Guilt” sets in without me even meeting him in person.

I was plagued by guilt, unanswered questions, doubts and wondering how and WHY he went like that.

Why have you left? Had I drunk too much coffee (four cups in 7 weeks). Exercised too much or not enough? Had I even sneezed too hard perhaps?

“Can sneezing cause a miscarriage?” is now what’s being tapped into Google.

Was there something wrong genetically, so he had no choice but to go? Did he want to stay but couldn’t?

Was there at least couple of days when his heart would have beaten, his heartbeat, living by connection to my own heartbeat?

Or perhaps I had imagined him — nothing more than a figment of my overactive imagination? Maybe all those pregnancy tests had been wrong, from a faulty batch. But then my meat cravings told me otherwise and the all-important blood test had shown to the world that I was pregnant. The fact that I had “felt” pregnant was a comfort.

The Doctors said we could try again, there’s still time but that made me upset. It felt like it diminished him and my brief, oh so brief relationship to him as his mother.

I didn’t want any other baby, I wanted (still want) my Frosty Bear baby back. I had seen his face in my dreams but now I would never know what he would look like. A faceless face forever.

The miscarriage not only hurt emotionally but physically as well. I was unprepared for how strong the cramps would be. Every muscle cramp was a reminder that My Frosty Bear’s home was being being expelled out of me like discarded rubbish; services no longer required.

Slowly, over the 9 days of bleeding, the miscarriage became subsequently lighter, less crampy, less painful. The physical symptoms of my pregnancy subsided. It was coming to an end; bringing about even more feelings of loss to a future that Jamie and I so badly want. The HCG marker falling every day……

Going, going,

Gone.

HCG marker returned to 0.

We are now, once again, back to square 0.

Goodbye my darling Mr Frosty Bear. Rest now. I love you and the glorious, joyful, 7 weeks that you brought to your Daddy and to me, your Mummy, when you were here with us.