What took us so long? On miscarriage, investigations, and the mental health cost nobody measures.

I don't know if earlier investigations would have saved my pregnancies. I'm honestly not sure anything could have. But I think they might have saved my mental health.

In 2015, I had three pregnancy losses. A miscarriage and two ectopic pregnancies. When I eventually sat in front of a consultant, desperate for answers, I was told my ectopics didn't count. I'd need two more 'regular' miscarriages before anyone would investigate.

Three losses. One that mattered, apparently.

I've never forgotten how that felt. Not just the grief — I was used to grief by then — but the institutional dismissal of it. The sense that my losses needed to add up to a number before they were real enough to warrant attention. The weird thought process that maybe I should get pregnant to miscarry again, just to be in with a chance of knowing what was going on.

So when I read recently that earlier intervention — starting after just one loss — could prevent thousands of miscarriages a year, I felt a bit wobbly. Why did this take so long?

The scale of it

One in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage. That's not rare, but it doesn't mean it's normal. That's somebody in almost every team, every office, every family. Sitting at their desk, holding it together, saying nothing. Wondering if they're the only one.

I supported the Stylist and Tommy's Every Loss Counts campaign because I wanted my losses to mean something. It feels, finally, like change is happening at a medical level. Like the system is beginning to take this seriously.

But there's a cost that research doesn't capture and policy doesn't fix.

What loss actually does to a woman at work

The impact of loss on women living through it — whether from a natural or IVF pregnancy — is rarely short-lived. It follows you. It sits in the passenger seat on the way to work. It's there in meetings, making it hard to listen because it's taking all your energy not to cry. It quietly dismantles confidence in a way that's hard to name and harder to explain.

There's the mental load of managing treatment, managing loss, and managing a career simultaneously, while most of the people around you have no idea. The performance of being fine. The calculations about who to tell, what to say, how much to reveal.

And underneath all of it, often, a growing sense that you are somehow less than you were. That the woman who used to walk into rooms and own them has gone somewhere, and you're not sure when she's coming back.

She hasn't gone. She's just carrying something invisible and enormous, and she needs someone in her corner.

Trust me on that, I was her.

What I do about it

I coach ambitious women who are navigating fertility treatment — IVF, miscarriage, loss — while trying to hold their careers together. I do this work because I lived it. I know what it's like to get devastating news at lunchtime and be back at your desk for two o'clock, to be injecting in the loo between annual performance reviews, snorting down-reg meds at strategy away days. I know what it costs, and I know it doesn't have to cost as much as it does.

If you're in it right now, I want you to know that what you're going through is really hard, and it's a lot, and it does count.

Every loss counts.

If you'd like to talk about how coaching could help, you can book a free call here