Short-term thinking

When more of your pregnancies have ended in miscarriage than a live birth it’s hard to imagine a positive outcome. So hard in fact that I find myself just separating myself from any possible outcome at all. My defence mechanism is a commitment to short-term thinking. As long as I get through another day and I haven’t had any signs of a miscarriage then I can face the next day. Of course thoughts of the longer term do creep into my mindscape. I just immediately try and shut them down because to visualise a future with a happy outcome feels too dangerous.  

The trouble with short-term thinking is, well, short-term thinking. Being pregnant can mean quite a lot of admin and planning. The clue is in the name; ‘family planning’. There’ll be even more admin and planning if, like me, you have a history of miscarriage and therefore are (lucky enough to be) taking progesterone, aspirin and folic acid. This holy trinity is prescribed in cases like mine when you have a history of 3 or more miscarriages. It’s not a silver bullet, but thanks to something called the PRISM trial, researchers proved that progesterone could reduce the chance of miscarriage in people who had had many.  

Getting the meds

Getting the necessary prescription was tricky. I was given a prescription through the recurrent miscarriage clinic over 2 years ago, which had expired long before this unexpected pregnancy came to be. So I had to go, cap in hand, to my GP to ask them to replicate the consultant’s script. Thankfully they obliged although only prescribed around 4 weeks’ worth. (The advice from the original consultant was to take it until 16 weeks then reduce the dosage until 24 weeks). 

Thanks to my committed short-term thinking approach, this seemed perfectly reasonable. Afterall, I remain in the head space that at any given moment, this could all come crashing down. The same sort of thinking came into play when I bought my first packet of pregnancy multi-vitamins. They were on offer – 3 for 2 – which made good financial sense if I was actually going to be taking them every day for a full-term pregnancy. But what if I wasn’t? What if I ended up with boxes of this horrible reminder of what could have been? In the end I bought just one packet with 30 tablets in.

Stock check

Despite my reluctance to imagine a future in which this pregnancy has lasted the course I am, as it stands, still pregnant. And after a happy outcome at our private scan I did a quick stock check of my various meds. We were due to go abroad 5 days after the private scan and it turns out I would run out of everything while we were away.  

Like anyone who had the internet would, I Googled it. Through that I gave myself a crash course in how to get emergency prescriptions and spent most of my Sunday speaking to several pharmacists, NHS 111 call agents, and a GP.

Not that it requires explanation (although I suppose in a way that’s what this blog is supposed to be) but I truly believed the scan would yield the worst outcome. My mind couldn’t go anywhere but to the depths. How would we ‘arrange’ what needed to be done before going abroad? Would I have to wait and deal with it in another country or worse still, wait until we came back to deal with it? At no point before the scan was I thinking not having enough progesterone was going to be my main problem. 

Still in the game

As it turns out, I had to do some quick thinking and fast talking because things are going exactly as you would hope. I can’t quite settle into the idea that this is my reality or my future yet, but this has been a pretty good problem to have because it means we’re still in the game.  

Please, please let it stay that way.