A dad shares how after having their first child he and his wife experienced multiple losses, including a miscarriage at nine weeks of pregnancy, an ectopic pregnancy and one of their twins during a twin pregnancy. They were told it was possible that they could lose their other twin which caused them both anxiety, but they were lucky this didn’t happen and they are now parents to two wonderful boys. Speaking about his losses was when this dad realised just how common pregnancy and baby loss is.

Me and my partner quickly got pregnant not long after we started dating, within the first few months. We both believe that it was a blessing regardless of how little time we had known each other and we had a beautiful baby boy nine months later.

This blessing became clear as a year after our first was born my wife got pregnant again. A few weeks after finding out she was pregnant, my wife started feeling unwell and had a miscarriage around nine weeks of pregnancy. 

Later on, she became pregnant again, unfortunately this was an ectopic pregnancy. The worst thing about this was half a week or so before we found out it was unsuccessful, we had an early private scan as we were nervous following the miscarriage, and we were told everything was fine. A few days after the scan my wife woke up in pain feeling generally awful. She gave it a few hours and then we decided to go to A&E where she was sent for examinations. That’s when we found out that unfortunately the egg had attached to the fallopian tube and my wife had to be operated on before it grew too big and would put her in danger. The ectopic was hard for me because of the loss, the danger to my wife and the helplessness I felt, however it was even harder for my wife going through it. Also, the knowledge that having one ectopic pregnancy increases the chance of having another and lowers the chance of having another child. 

A few months after our second loss my wife fell pregnant again, she was eligible for early scans because of previous pregnancy losses, and we found out we were having twins. During a second scan we found out we had lost twin A, and we were told that it would be possible we could lose twin B. This filled both me and my wife with massive anxiety following our previous losses. We were lucky that this did not happen and we are now parents to two wonderful boys. 

Thankfully for my mental health, during this period I had plenty of people who I could speak to who were understanding and who had unfortunately gone through similar. It was only during our losses and talking about them that I realised just how common pregnancy and baby loss is. 

All of our losses were extremely sad but reminded us just how lucky we were to have our eldest and now to have number two after a couple of years of bad news and sadness.