11
Emptiness
I CONTINUED TO feel very cold over the next few weeks. In bed at night I’d have my socks on and a woolly hat, as well as the electric blanket. It wasn’t that I felt ill, I just couldn’t get warm. I tried to stay in the zone of daily meditation, walks and positive affirmations but it was difficult. I was constantly on Google, checking my symptoms, or lack thereof, and my adrenaline levels were very high. I felt frazzled and anxious. It was a big change in mood from the way I’d felt during IVF.
Christmas is always a busy time for us. On top of the day itself, our wedding anniversary is 21 December and Harry’s birthday is the 23rd, so it’s a very full and happy time. I love the cosiness: the cold nights, the sparkly lights, being with my family. But that year I didn’t want to be travelling all over the place, seeing people and being busy. Really, all I wanted to do was stay at home, curl up by the fire with the cats, and just sleep and eat. I don’t know if I’d have felt like that had I fallen pregnant naturally – maybe it was because of everything we’d gone through, and how precious our embryo was. Maybe I felt more protective. Also, there was the fact that Harry wasn’t allowing himself to be excited. I wasn’t feeling it from him, which I think meant that everything just felt particularly delicate and fragile.
My family has certain Christmas traditions – as every family does. As children, we always spent Christmas Day with our cousins on my mum’s side. They’d usually come to us in the morning, then my brothers, being choristers, would go and sing in the chapel at King’s.
Dad and my brothers still go to the Christmas Day service at King’s, but Mum finds it too upsetting to go since Rupert’s accident. Hearing the choristers singing brings back so many memories from when the boys were little and listening to the music is too emotional for her, so she and I stay at home and make sandwiches. Then, when everyone is back, after a late lunch there’s present opening and we finally have Christmas dinner at about 10 o’clock at night.
Harry always joins in with these traditions and that Christmas was no different, except he and I decided it would be romantic to go and stay for a few nights at the place we got married, St Michael’s Manor, near my family home. Because I was pregnant, he wanted me to be comfortable, and because my parents’ house would be so full with all the family staying, we’d have been sleeping on a blow-up bed there. It was lovely. We checked in on Harry’s birthday and had a wonderful Christmas.
I woke very early on Boxing Day, maybe 4 a.m., with a shaft of light coming in through a gap in the curtains. I went to the loo, half asleep, not really thinking about anything, but when I wiped I could see by that little bit of light that there was quite a lot of blood on the tissue.
I froze. Panic surged through me. Although I didn’t want to, I forced myself to turn on the light. I knew it was important to see clearly and yes, there was a lot of blood. As I got back into bed and woke Harry, I realized how strange it feels when the person who would usually hold your hand during a difficult time is so deeply affected by it themselves; when the person who would usually embrace you and reassure you needs their own reassurance.
It was too early to ring Dr Ram and there was nothing I could do except lie quietly and try to stay calm. I wasn’t in any pain or discomfort. After a while I went online and read that bleeding in early pregnancy is very common. It can be caused by a number of different things, including burst blood vessels around the cervix, and isn’t necessarily a sign of impending miscarriage. I listened to my relaxation tracks and focused on staying calm. I told myself, ‘There’s no way I’m going to lose this baby. I’ve seen this embryo, it’s a good embryo, this isn’t going to happen. This isn’t how our story goes. It’s not fair, it can’t be.’ I didn’t believe that life could be so cruel.
Usually when I have an anxiety attack, the moment the adrenaline starts pumping, my legs shake wildly and there’s nothing I can do to stop them. When Harry’s there, he physically holds them down, to still them so that the shaking stops. That morning, after the surge of adrenaline, I calmed myself but my legs shook uncontrollably for ages. Harry pinned them down and we finally got through it and managed to get back to sleep.
Later that morning I texted Ram. Even though it was Boxing Day he rang straight back, bless him, and said, ‘Let’s just keep an eye on this for the next twenty-four hours. Bleeding is common at this stage of pregnancy.’ Which was reassuring. Then I rang Chantal. ‘I had the same thing,’ she said. ‘Try not to worry. Have faith that everything will be fine.’ We then went over to Mum and Dad’s, and I told Mum what had happened, but I also told her what the doctor had said, what Chantal had said, and that I was sure everything was OK.
After that I had no more bleeding, so we began to feel more confident. We spent that day at my parents’ and it was lovely, although every time I went to the loo I was terrified. But as the hours wore on and there was still no more blood, I began to feel more relaxed.
I was just over six weeks pregnant but I still had no real pregnancy symptoms to speak of. I had an app on my phone that told me each day what should be happening at that stage. It said that by now I might have started to feel sick, have sore breasts or experience food aversions. I felt none of these things. I knew very well that some women don’t feel anything, or their symptoms are completely different to the usual ones, but I badly wanted to feel something out of the ordinary. I wanted some kind of further proof that I was pregnant. It occurred to me that my mum had been five months pregnant with Rupert before she found out – she’d stopped taking the Pill and just assumed her periods hadn’t come back. So I wondered whether I was like her, one of the lucky few who escape the symptoms.
The next day, the 27th, Harry and I travelled with the rest of my family to Wiltshire, to visit my cousins. There hadn’t been any more bleeding but I still found that going to the loo made me feel horribly anxious. By then I knew I just had to get through a few more days, because our first scan was booked for 29 December, the day before we were due to leave for Antigua.
I adore being with my cousins and even though they and I grew up more like sisters, Harry and I had decided to only tell immediate family we’d been going through IVF. Also, we wanted to experience that moment when, after the twelve-week scan, we surprised everyone with our announcement and showed them our ultrasound picture, just like other couples do. In hindsight, though, I feel that perhaps not telling them at that point added more strain to the situation, and I’d have felt better if it had all just been out in the open. It’s hard to pretend you’re fine and be your usual self when you’re not feeling that way at all.
We spent one night in Wiltshire and the following day went for a pub lunch together. During the meal, I just didn’t feel right and kept going to the loo to check everything was OK. I was desperate to leave and on the way home to London in the car, I began to feel pain, like period pain, which became more and more intense and uncomfortable. Harry was driving and I was sitting beside him, googling, telling him that cramping can be a normal symptom of early pregnancy. By this stage, I think he knew that something was wrong and that I was clutching at the best possible explanations, trying to persuade myself that everything would be OK. Neither of us could admit yet what we really knew was happening, not to ourselves or to each other.
I was six weeks and four days pregnant. Another woman might not even have known she was pregnant by then, so what happened next could have seemed like a late, heavy period. But I’d been on such a long journey to get pregnant that I was acutely aware of everything.
I had seen that life. I had watched as it was put inside me. I had the photo of our embryo by my bed. Everything I had done to get there, to that point, was with me in those moments. I knew exactly how long that life had been there, down to the very minute. I had done all that, and I was still failing. Or at least that’s what it felt like to me – that I was failing to hold on to this life; failing to make a safe place for it and to keep it within me.
By the time we got home I was in a lot of pain and bleeding pretty constantly. It wasn’t very heavy, but the blood was getting progressively darker and richer. I texted my doctor, who replied to say, ‘Hang in there, Izzy. I’ll see you in the morning.’ But I accepted at that point that we were losing our baby. I had to accept it because I couldn’t stop it – there was no one I could call, nothing I could do, no medication I could take to keep this from happening. There’s such a cruel inevitability about a miscarriage, about the way in which it can’t be stopped. You can’t hold on to the one thing you want so badly to keep.
I felt very unwell by then: miserable, achy, sore. Harry helped me to get as comfortable as possible on the sofa, and made me some tomato soup and toast with Marmite. What else do we eat when we feel unwell, except soup and toast? He lit the fire and put on the TV, and both my cats, Murphy and Morris, came and sat with me, Murphy on my stomach and Morris beside me. They don’t ever sit next to each other without hissing, and don’t even much like to be in the same room together, but that evening they sat quietly, together, with me.
The Winnie-the-Pooh bear I’ve had since I was a little girl was with me too. I knew it was a case of waiting it out; of sitting and trying to be comfortable any way I could. What I really wanted was a hot-water bottle, but even then I couldn’t allow myself to have one because the heat would’ve been bad for the baby. Really, I knew what was happening – that I was having a miscarriage – but still I held on to the desperate hope that it was all going to be OK. For the same reason, I didn’t take painkillers either, although my back ached terribly. Knowing what I know now, I recognize that those pains were similar to those of very early labour.
Despite clinging to that shred of hope and doing what my doctor told me to by hanging in there, I also had the overwhelming feeling that I needed to do one last thing for this soul, this life inside me. I knew that I needed to let it pass, peacefully, so rather than fighting, tensing up and holding on, I tried to relax and accept that what would be, would be. I tried to let it go, and wish it on its way with love. After everything we’d been through, after seeing the embryo on the screen and watching as it was put inside me, it was so hard, but I believed that I had to. I had invested in it, believed in it, loved it, but now I needed to say goodbye.
As well as wanting to let go peacefully, I also felt so sorry for our baby, for me and for us. ‘How is that fair?’ I wondered. ‘Why me? Why us? How do I not deserve a break?’ Harry had been such a rock through everything. He’d taken care of us as best he could, and I felt it was so unfair on him too. I could see he was in just as much pain as I was.
We went to bed and the pain continued. That night was incredibly spiritual, though. I felt as if I was on a different planet. A tiny part of me still continued to hope but deep down I knew I was losing the baby, and there was something that made me feel very connected to what was happening. It was as if I was setting something free, even though I wanted to keep it so much.
Although the pain was constant and unrelenting, I finally fell asleep around 3 a.m. I woke about three hours later and again the cats were with me. I realized I was no longer in pain and wondered for a moment whether everything was actually OK and I wasn’t miscarrying after all. Harry went downstairs to make breakfast and I got up. I found it really difficult to stand up – I was incredibly dizzy – but the pain had definitely stopped. Still there was that little part of me that couldn’t stop hoping.
I went to the loo and it was then that I felt the sensation of the baby passing through me and out into the loo. I felt our little soul leave me, a physical feeling I will never forget. There, lying helpless, all our hopes and dreams. How were we supposed to flush them away? It was a feeling so cold and terrifying, so utterly lonely – the sensation of losing something so precious – it will never leave me.
I shouted downstairs to Harry, ‘We’ve lost it! We’ve lost it. It’s gone.’ He ran upstairs. I couldn’t look. I left the bathroom. There was no way I was going to flush. I didn’t know at all what to do. What do you do in such a terrible situation? I know that Harry later took charge of everything, making decisions that no one should ever have to make.
We went to the scan that morning. It had been meant to be such an exciting moment – we’d wondered whether we would see a heartbeat, what the baby would look like, whether we’d be able to make out anything on the screen. Instead we got into the car and the silence between us was deafening. The journey I’d been so excited about making was now a cold nightmare. We sat quietly yet the love we have for each other filled the car loudly. In those moments, there seemed to be nothing more for either of us to say or do. I couldn’t begin to think, ‘What next?’ I knew, and had accepted, what had happened but I still needed proof from my doctor.
When we got there, I said to Ram, ‘I don’t want to look at the screen.’ So I didn’t, although Harry did. ‘I’m afraid, Izzy, that you have lost the baby,’ Ram told us.
Gone, alone, empty … He tried to make the best of it, telling me that I wouldn’t need a D&C (dilation and curettage, which is a procedure done after a miscarriage to remove pregnancy tissue from inside the uterus, to clear the uterine lining), that everything had been expelled naturally and I wouldn’t need to go into hospital.
I think because he’d been along the path with me and Harry, Ram felt sorry for us. ‘Have a holiday, and we’ll meet when you come back,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing we can do until the bleeding has stopped, and that can take up to six weeks.’
We went home, both still very quiet, and when we arrived we found a pigeon had flown into the window of our conservatory and died. By the strangest coincidence, I’d seen the exact same thing once before when I was staying at my parents’ house, on the day my mother’s sister died of ovarian cancer. It was really haunting, and even now I worry about seeing dead pigeons. They make me terrified that something bad will happen.
By then, I felt completely cold and empty. I guess it was like I was outside my body, looking in as the day unfolded like an awful nightmare. It was by far the bleakest day I’ve ever experienced: dark and lonely. The atmosphere was so dreary and depressing, it was just awful. Harry and I took it in turns to hold each other and cry. We never fully let go together, because one of us was always trying to be strong for the other. In a situation like that, when your soulmate, the person who is usually there to support you, feels the same loss and grief, there’s nothing to do but try to help each other, even as you process your own sadness.
That day I had a feeling of overwhelming empathy for my parents and the grief they must have experienced following Rupert’s accident. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. How did they continue to get up each morning and carry on with life, let alone stay as strong as they did for the rest of us? I suddenly felt a deeper understanding of their loss. While I knew that I was facing my own grief that day, I also knew that as time passed it would get easier. Of course I wouldn’t ever forget what had happened, but I would heal. It suddenly dawned on me that my parents would never escape their grief. The admiration I felt for their love for one another was immense and their unbelievable strength was an inspiration.
Harry and I rang our families to tell them the news. My brother Magnus and his wife, Marije, were still in Wiltshire at my cousins’ but they got in their car straight away and drove up to London to be with us. Dad came over to our house, too, but Mum didn’t as she wasn’t feeling well – I think due to worry and upset. She didn’t know how to deal with what was happening – she’d been with me every step of the way but there was nothing she could do to make it better. A mother’s love. We are so connected that she was physically ill at the thought of what I was going through.
I remember once saying to her that I wanted a baby for her as well, for the family, because of what had happened to Rupert. ‘Izzy, all I want is for my daughter to be happy,’ she’d said. ‘If you didn’t want children, I’d be happy with that – you’re everything to me.’ So it wasn’t for her own sake that she was so upset that day, it was entirely for me. She might also have felt a bit guilty because her pregnancies had happened so easily, which meant she couldn’t fully empathize, and that must be very difficult for a mum. Growing up, my parents had always joked they only had to pass on the stairs and Mum was pregnant.
Along with the grief and the constant questioning of why this was so hard for me, why every hurdle was so high, I was also fearful. I wondered if, on top of everything else, the miscarriage had opened up a new issue, a new nightmare for me. That not only was it difficult for my body to conceive, but perhaps it wasn’t able to carry a baby either. Perhaps I simply wasn’t built for this.
Had I tempted fate by having IVF, by interfering with nature and forcing a result – was this my judgement for that? Was this the universe telling me that I had to back off and accept that the answer, for me, was always going to be no? I knew in my heart that wasn’t true but still, in that moment, I needed to blame something, and again I chose to blame myself.
On that terrible day I was already planning ahead. Being mindful and living in the present was impossible. Half of me was thinking about what to do next and the other half was thinking that I might not have the energy for another round of IVF, to get myself in the right frame of mind to try again. I was exhausted, demoralized and felt as if I’d never be able to find the kind of positive energy I’d had for the first cycle. I felt I’d failed my baby, and failed Harry, and failed myself, and I didn’t know where to go to change that.
I couldn’t bear it when people said, ‘It wasn’t meant to be, something obviously wasn’t right’, even though I knew they meant it kindly. I didn’t feel that. I know Harry found some comfort in that idea but in my mind I was the one who wasn’t right. ‘How can it have failed?’ I thought. ‘It was our highest quality embryo; it won the race. It was perfect. There was no problem with it. It’s my failure.’
The next day we flew to Antigua, and we were both so happy to be getting on the plane – to the sun, to a new place away from the dark and the misery of what had happened. But there were reminders everywhere: in my bag was the suncream and mosquito repellent I’d researched and which were safe to use during pregnancy. On the way to the plane I started to get a headache, so Harry gave me a packet of painkillers. For a split second I forgot what had happened and checked to see whether they were OK to take during pregnancy.
Once on the plane, one of my legs began to throb and became uncomfortable. Me being me, I thought it was thrombosis and that I was going to die. I started crying and became very anxious, and Harry was worried too because it was really aching. We told the cabin crew, who radioed down to ground control for medical advice, and in the meantime I spoke to a very sweet member of staff. I had to tell her I’d just had a miscarriage, because that meant there was a slightly higher chance of it actually being thrombosis, and she and I got talking. It turned out that she was about to start her first round of IVF. Isn’t it typical how life does that? Of all the members of crew to be working on that day, I ended up confiding in someone about to go through IVF themselves. I told her about all the holistic things I’d done and how helpful I’d found them. The thought that I could share what I had learned and that it might perhaps help someone else made me feel much better.
We got to Antigua and Harry’s parents were amazing. They kept things normal, even though I’m sure they were deeply upset too. I moved between our hotel room, the restaurant and the beach every day, no further. It was perfect for what it was, and Harry and I did our best to comfort each other.
I woke up every morning to blue sky and sunshine, and yet it was like waking up the mornings following Roops’ accident – to the memory of what had happened and the feeling of grief in my tummy. At first you don’t remember and life is normal, then it all floods back: that sensation that something horrible has happened, even though you can’t remember immediately exactly what it is.
It was hard to get out of bed and summon the energy for the day. I didn’t even want to wear a bikini because I didn’t like the way I looked. I’d been pumped full of hormones, I was bloated and still bleeding. The blood loss was relentless and I was desperate for it to stop. I couldn’t even use tampons because my cervix might have been dilated, which carries an increased risk of infection. So it really was horrible, and a constant reminder of the awful experience.
We’d go to the beach each day and I’d take a book with me, but mostly I listened to music because I’ve always used it to cope with difficult periods in life. I listened to ‘Quanta Qualia’ so often that I’ll always associate it with that time. It’s such a beautiful piece of music but I find it difficult to listen to now without crying.
After the first few days Harry and I began to talk about the future. Almost immediately after we found out I was pregnant we had started discussing moving house because where we lived wasn’t a family home. It was stunning, a former artist’s studio with our bedroom on a mezzanine, and I adored it, but it wasn’t suitable for children. Even though we didn’t have any yet I still wanted to move, because I knew that if we stayed put, I’d feel absolutely stuck and as if we weren’t moving forward with our plans. We wanted to find a house that needed doing up, so we could throw our energy into it. I wanted a project, something creative and new that would feel as if we were moving forward with our lives.
We looked for properties online, setting up viewings for when we got back from Antigua. Even though we were putting so much effort into thinking about a new home, I was still keen to talk to Harry about what else we might do next; when we might think about trying a second IVF cycle.
Harry was about to go to Australia on tour – McFly were supporting One Direction there – and I’d decided to go with him. My feeling was that we could get in one round of IVF before we went but Harry, thankfully, was more measured, determined to slow things down. ‘Let’s not think too far ahead. Let’s get you mentally and physically better first,’ he said to me. I’m so grateful that he took on the rational-thinking role and put the brakes on. Looking back, I wasn’t ready to go ahead with a second round of IVF so soon, but at the time I believed I was.
Miscarriage is so horribly common and yes, mine happened very early on. I can’t begin to think about what some women go through with a later loss. But I do know that if that’s what I went through, it shows you the strength of the bond between mother and child. People can be very quick to say, ‘Oh, it was so early. If you hadn’t been having IVF you might not even have known you were pregnant.’ But I did know, and I still mourn the loss of that baby. And I think about the knock-on effect: I wonder would Lola have been the second child if the miscarriage had never happened? And what would it have been like, for her and us, if she had had an older brother or sister? Of course these are questions that no one can ever answer, but I wondered about them then, and I sometimes wonder about them now.
I still think of that baby as my first child. I felt so connected to that embryo from the very beginning. Even during my pregnancy with Lola, I never had quite the same immediate attachment as I did the first time. Possibly because the first experience meant I never felt I could relax with Lola until she actually arrived safely. I was always so fearful of something happening that I stayed focused on reaching the next milestone, making it to the end of each week, and getting one step closer to her being safely outside my body.
Some people say that the spirit of an unborn child comes back in your next baby, which is a beautiful thought. A friend of mine said to me that what made their miscarriage a little easier to bear was the thought that if they hadn’t suffered their loss, they may never have met their next baby. For me it was different because our embryos were in a pack, three of them, ready to go from the same moment. It’s comforting to know that Lola was part of that, and somehow it feels as if we are all still connected to our little soul.