From WNBC reporter Megan Meany I want to do my own little public service announcement for women who have suffered a miscarriage: See a high-risk fertility team ASAP! In the last five years I have had multiple miscarriages and after each one my obstetrician would just tell me “keep trying.” So I did, with considerable heartbreak and failure. You have to understand, miscarriage was not part of my family history. It wasn't supposed to be my baby story. My mother has five children. My two oldest sisters each had three children in five years and warned me over the years: Beware. We are a fertile bunch. My other sister has two kids and my sister-in-law, three more. The sisters in my life quickly became moms to their own broods and I became a very experienced aunt, the ultimate mommy-in-training. I have attended enough baptisms, birthday parties and baseball games to earn full-fledged motherhood certification; I knew I would be ready when my maternal time came. So at 33, when my first miscarriage occurred, I was shocked. But... I grew up a little bit. I absorbed and accepted the statistics that one in four pregnancies will end this way. And after the recommended wait, I tried to get pregnant again. At eight weeks, I lost pregnancy number two. This one required medical intervention and so it felt like more of a loss than the first. The third time was the charm, I had a successful pregnancy and gave birth to my son in 2006.
A few years after my son was born, we wanted to give him a sister or brother. But I miscarried several more times. Most of these pregnancies were thankfully very brief, a few weeks long. But the last miscarriage was the most painful one, because it occurred after four months of pregnancy. I had gotten to know that baby in my sonograms. She was doing very well, had a strong heartbeat and then she was gone. Without going into any disturbing details, suffice it to say that when your pregnancy ends, your body doesn’t always know it and you have to go through a traumatic medical procedure to finish what your body could not. After the last episode my doctor team told me: "Miscarriage is usually just bad luck." In other words, keep trying…but I was too traumatized to process that and move forward. I needed time to absorb my situation. Over the next few months I got lots of advice and support from friends, friends of friends and family -- everyone seemed to think it was time to see a specialist. And so I booked the appointment with the proverbial fertility clinic. I think there was a part of me that didn't want to be in that club. I didn’t want to acknowledge any maternal deficiencies on my end. I wanted to be relaxed and stay positive, but it was the best decision I ever made. After a month of pinpricks and prodding, the doctors discovered that I had two very common and very treatable blood-clotting issues. In a nutshell, nutrients had a hard time reaching the baby because my blood would coagulate. My new doctors also found a cyst in my ovary and polyps in my uterus, and when they removed those they learned that I had extensive endometriosis. One year and a demanding regiment of medications later, I am 15 weeks pregnant and confident that this pregnancy will succeed. So I repeat: Go to a specialist and don't make my mistake of waiting until you've had multiple miscarriages. Obstetricians generally won’t refer you to a high-risk specialist until you have had three miscarriages! That is too long to wait. If I had sought the advice of a high-risk fertility team sooner, I might have had a little girl or a larger family. The "what ifs" haunt me. So pick up the phone and call a specialist if you can. Take control of your own baby story. Megan Meany is the traffic reporter for WNBC's "Today in New York" and a frequent contributor to TODAY.Related stories: