Pregnancy · Life · The Waiting Weeks

When I wrote my first post I was five weeks pregnant and riding a wave of terrified optimism. So here’s what’s happened since.

The in‑between weeks

If you’ve been through pregnancy after loss, you’ll know that the weeks before your first scan are an emotional whirlwind. You’re pregnant, technically. You feel it. But you also know that feeling it means nothing yet. So you just… exist in that in-between. Trying not to get too excited. Not really managing that, but trying anyway.

By the time my first scan came around, at 8 weeks, Luke and I were absolutely not relaxed about it. On the drive there we went through every worst case scenario we could think of. No heartbeat. A weak one. Something wrong. By the time we parked, we had practically talked ourselves into bad news.

I kept thinking what if there’s no heartbeat. What if it’s weak. What if.

But there was a heartbeat. Strong. Clear. Right there on the screen.

I don’t have a better word for it than relief. That total, almost physical release of something you’ve been holding without realising how tightly. We both had tears in our eyes, just that thing where your body reacts before your brain catches up.

For approximately four hours, and then my brain found the next thing to worry about.

The NIPT and the waiting

The 10‑week scan came with the same pre-scan nerves. The baby was moving, properly active, arms and legs all over the place, and watching that is one of those moments where you forget how to be an anxious person for a second and just feel it.

They took blood for the NIPT test at this appointment, which is a chromosomal screening, and then came the waiting. If you’ve done this test you’ll know that those days are their own specific form of torture. You’ve seen the heartbeat. You’ve seen the movement. You’ve allowed yourself to feel it. And now you wait to find out if there’s something they can’t fix.

No abnormalities. All clear.

It sounds like a small sentence. It wasn’t small. That result was the first moment in this pregnancy where I genuinely started to exhale. Where «this is really happening» started to feel less terrifying and more like the good thing it actually is. I slowly stopped obsessively checking the miscarriage probability calculator I had bookmarked on my phone. If you know, you know.

12 weeks: all clear, and one more surprise

The 12 week scan is the big one, where they do all the physical measurements and check that everything is developing as it should. I had the same anxiety walking in. I think I will have some version of it until I can actually feel the baby move. But the moment I saw the heartbeat on screen, the tension dropped out of my shoulders. And Luke’s.

Baby: completely cleared. Growing well, developing perfectly.

And then the doctor asked if we wanted to know the sex.

My partner and I have zero patience. I don’t know how people wait until birth. I would go crazy. So yes, of course we wanted to know.

We’re having another boy.

I sat with that for a second. Before all the miscarriages I actually thought two boys would be wonderful, fun, easy, best friends. And by the time we got here my only real wish was for a healthy baby, no preference. But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a small, quiet feeling when she said it. Not quite sadness, more like a gentle acknowledgement of something that might not be. The girl who could have been. The mini me. The one I imagined doing all the things with. I let myself feel that for a moment, because I think you’re allowed to, and then I let it settle.

Because genuinely? I’m going to be a boy mum. Fully, officially, a boy mum, apparently that’s a whole thing online. They’re going to be best friends, I really hope. They’re going to be chaotic and loud and probably destroy half our house and I am so here for all of it. Or at least I think I am. Let’s check again in a few years.

This baby already feels like the missing piece of something that was already really great.

Our boy Tadhg is going to be an incredible big brother. We can both see it already. We did a little gender reveal at home for close family. Cabbage water, baking soda, the whole science experiment. Tadhg was completely absorbed in the colours changing, the real magic for him, far more interesting than the actual reveal.

Out the other side

The first trimester is done. I made it through twelve weeks of exhaustion that was genuinely paralysing at times, the kind where washing your hair felt like a full undertaking and I am not proud to say I could go longer than a week without doing it. The hunger was, and still is relentless. I rested more than I thought possible. I snacked constantly and still do. And somehow here I am, in the second trimester, with some energy again.

If you’re in the middle of the first trimester right now and it feels endless and heavy and like your whole personality has been replaced by fatigue and carbs: it gets better. I promise. The light at the end of the tunnel is real and it arrives around week 12 and it feels great.

Less anxious. More excited. Belly very much out and no longer hideable, which I’m welcoming, honestly.

On to the next chapter.