To the team at CRP, a million thank yous!

We started trying to have a baby just after we got married in the beginning of 2018. We fell pregnant relatively quickly but suffered a missed miscarriage just before the 12 week scan. We were told countless times that it was just one of those things and to just try again.

We fell pregnant again a few months later. This time there was so much anxiety around the pregnancy as we now knew what could happen but as we had been told it was very unlikely to happen again we tried to stay positive. We suffered another missed miscarriage early in the pregnancy. After our second loss we decided to speak to an obstetrician privately. She assured us that given our age and health there should be no reason why the next pregnancy wouldn’t work out. As a precaution she prescribed us progesterone pessaries and low dose aspirin from the next positive pregnancy test and we left feeling like maybe this could be the answer.

Again we fell pregnant and the drugs seemed to be working. We passed the heartbeat milestone, the 12 week milestone, the 20 week milestone and we thought that it was finally going to be our turn to bring home a baby. At 22 weeks I had concerns about the baby’s movement and so we booked a scan as a precaution. We found out that the baby’s heart had stopped beating and our whole world fell apart. I delivered our daughter B a few days later and what followed was many months of grieving and hopelessness (and a global pandemic). The results from the postmortem were inconclusive and the NHS tests that I was finally eligible for said that nothing was wrong. Honestly we didn’t know what else to do but try again so we did and suffered another early missed miscarriage.

After our fourth loss I had almost given up hope of ever bringing home a healthy baby. I was trying to prepare myself for a life without living children but we decided to try one last thing and that was Mr Shehata’s clinic. I will be forever grateful that we made that decision.

Mr Shehata really listened to our story and we felt instantly reassured that this was a doctor who could really help us. He quickly identified that I had too many NK cells with too much activity and Rob had DNA fragmentation all of which could explain our losses. It was such a relief to finally have answers and stop questioning why this was happening to us.

It took a while for us to get pregnant again and we ended up using the clinic’s superovulation programme. When we finally fell pregnant again the anxiety that shadowed the pregnancy was crippling. The staff at CRP really held our hands through the whole process. I think I’ve probably cried in front of all of them! We stayed under the clinic for the entirety of the pregnancy and our regular scans with Professor Akolekar played a huge part in reassuring us of our baby’s wellbeing. His scans were extremely thorough and he really took the time to talk us through everything that he was seeing. After 8 long months our miracle was born, a little prematurely but strong and healthy. It felt like there was suddenly light in our life again.

Twenty months later and we are now at home with not just one but two beautiful little boys. Our second pregnancy through the clinic was much easier to handle mentally but the anxiety was still there. But this time we knew that the drugs were the answer and that was all we needed to stay positive.

Words can’t really describe what the clinic has given us. Their work has completely changed our lives and given us the thing that we wanted most in the world. We will be forever grateful for the work of Mr Shehata and his amazing team and we sing their praises at every opportunity. We heard about the clinic by pure chance through a friend of a friend of a friend who had used them. So we try to tell as many people as we can about the work that they do in the hope of helping other couples going through the unimaginable grief of repeated pregnancy loss.

To the team at CRP, a million thank yous,

Rob and Ellie