| "Helping women track their ovulation in a smarter way" | 
This is one person’s experience in her own words, shared with their permission. Individual experiences vary. Premom provides educational information and tracking tools and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. For medical guidance, consult a healthcare professional.
The words no one wants to hear
Back in the fall of last year, I became pregnant and later lost our little boy in a missed miscarriage, around the 8 to 9 week mark. We went into a boutique ultrasound at what I thought was 9.5 weeks, and got the words no one ever wants to hear: no heartbeat. That pregnancy had been full of ER visits and scares during my baby’s short life, and it ended with an ER visit, a D&C (dilation and curettage), and a very rough recovery.
The months I kept to myself
My hormones hadn’t recovered, my cycles didn’t come back, and by March I was starting progesterone to try to bring them back, hoping to start Clomid to help me ovulate more on time. I ovulate on my own, just not regularly. My mental state was in the gutter for months, honestly, which has never been me. I worried that it was me, that I couldn’t carry a healthy pregnancy past eight weeks.
I didn’t have a great support base, and I sequestered myself away for months because I felt like no one in my life understood the loss I was grieving. The truth is, they probably didn’t. A few people I knew had been through a miscarriage, but each life is sacred no matter how early, and I think most of us carry loss differently. It’s a club we never wanted to join. People said some of the most hurtful things to me, including a doctor during my recovery, who offered that I ‘could be an older mom, and that’s fun too.’ It was like no one knew what to say, because there was nothing to say.
Three years of tracking, and a PCOS diagnosis
I’ve been using the Premom app consistently for over three years to track my cycles. I knew I had slightly irregular cycles, and that when the time came for my husband and me to grow our family, I’d need to learn more about my cycle, when I ovulate, and all the details that matter when you’re trying to conceive. Each time I was pregnant, it helped me track my symptoms too, but I quickly became best friends with Premom’s LH strips, and eventually their pregnancy tests, which picked up my positive before any other test did with my twins, including the early ones.
My cycles got even more irregular and long after my first year of marriage, and I was diagnosed with PCOS two years ago. It added up, I was having cycles up to 100 days long. Incredibly frustrating.
Getting my cycles back
Later, after we looked into my and my husband’s fertility, we got a clean report, thank God. My cycles came back at the end of March. After pulling myself out of some pretty deep grief, I decided it was time to get back on the horse, knock off the pounds I’d gained from too much ‘grief Chick-fil-A,’ and start on medication to help with my cycles. The first cycle back after the loss, I ovulated on my own, in regular timing, around cycle day 17, but I wouldn’t have known it if it weren’t for Premom’s LH tests. I was so grateful I caught my LH surge, got to skip multiple rounds of meds, got my cycle back on my own, and eventually got pregnant the next cycle with my sweet twins.
Premom has been the app I lean on to track my cycles, ask questions, especially while pregnant and after my loss, and find people going through similar things so I felt less alone in that dark time. I joke with my husband that Premom, and the army of other moms on the app, have helped me with more random questions than any doctor has. Which is partially true.
Fifteen weeks, two girls
I’m writing this at 15 weeks with healthy, fraternal twin girls, ordering the basics for their nursery. My husband and I both felt an odd sense of peace this first trimester that I hadn’t expected at all, given everything, and so far it has been a very uneventful pregnancy, besides finding out it was two babies. We’ve started planning the nursery and letting ourselves get excited since seeing our girls last week, and we’re finally getting comfortable telling more friends and family soon.
Learning to not dread the ultrasound room
Ultrasounds were incredibly rough for us, the entire first trimester and into the early second. But I’m actually looking forward to my anatomy scan now, to see the girls. I wasn’t sure I’d ever enjoy going to an ultrasound again, because that’s the room where we found out we lost our baby. I never thought my husband, a pretty tough guy, would recover from that either, but he stopped doing his deep breaths at the last appointment, and says he’s starting to not hate them anymore. It’s such a conflicting thing after a loss, but this time I had us doing ultrasounds regularly in the first trimester.
What I’d tell the woman I was six months ago
I look back and wish I could hug myself six months ago, a woman who had never felt more alone, sad, and full of grief, without the motivation to get out of bed at the start. God is so good to us, but that doesn’t help much until it’s all hindsight. I keep praying for my rainbow babies in there, and for every woman who has felt that same way, or lived through years of infertility and heartbreak. I wouldn’t wish that feeling on anyone.
And while I envy the women who get a seamless, blissful pregnancy with no bumps, I know this is my story. Even deep in the grief, I knew it had to be this way, so that one day I could help a friend, or someone else who needed one. I can’t step into anyone else’s shoes when it comes to loss. But I know those depths, the loneliness, the betrayal, the confusion, the guilt, all of it. I hope this reaches someone who needs to hear it from a person who was in the thick of a traumatic loss: it will be better one day, and you are going to be able to do this.
