Sinead Lynch was sat alone in a dimly lit room on the maternity ward when she was given the news. Her unborn baby had died.
It was 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic was still in its early stages. Sinead was forced to attend all her appointments alone until she found out her son – who she named Rían – had passed away at 20 weeks.
The 33-year-old, from Stockport, had lost two other babies before him. The tragedies baffled doctors who just couldn’t pinpoint a reason for the deaths.
“It was just hopelessness,” Sinead told the Manchester Evening News. “I couldn’t believe it had happened again.
“I thought, ‘How are we going to tell people?’, you don’t want all this pity from everyone, but you know you have to tell them again.”
Sinead and her husband Dan welcomed the arrival of their now six-year-old son, Jonas, in 2016. The pregnancy was healthy and the couple experienced no issues.
Two years later, in 2018, the couple fell pregnant again. They named their unborn baby girl Pearl. But at their 20-week scan, Sinead and Dan found out she had passed away.
“The hospital did a post-mortem scan and checks,” nursery practitioner Sinead said. “It was hard to hear because you want a reason.
“You’re just completely devastated. We had our little boy at home, but you can’t stop and grieve. You have to get up every day and continue to be a parent.
“I was blaming myself and wondering if I did something to cause this. They said it was a one-off and it wouldn’t happen again.”
But it did happen again. Sinead fell pregnant again in 2019 and everything appeared normal until the baby, named Murph, died at 12-weeks-old. From that moment, the couple knew something was wrong.
“They tested the baby and he was a baby boy and genetically normal,” Sinead added. “We had doctors saying lightning strikes twice so we must have been unlucky twice.
“We thought there must have been a reason. Everyone kept telling us we were young and to try again.”
When the couple lost Rían in 2020, their third miscarriage, they knew they could not try for a baby again. Due to appointment cancellations and delays due to Covid, the couple visited a private doctor.
Following a treatment plan, Sinead fell pregnant again. Tragically, she suffered a very rare molar pregnancy, when there is a problem with the fertilised egg, and the baby died at just 11-weeks-old.
“At least we had a reason for that loss,” Sinead added. “We thought we would give it a go one more time.”
The couple decided to visit a doctor at the Rainbow Clinic at the St Mary’s Hospital in Manchester, a service which supports women and their families after a baby dies.
The doctor looked into Sinead’s medical history and diagnosed her with pregnancy disorder chronic Histiocytic Intervillositis (CHI). The rare condition means her immune system can attack a placenta and reject pregnancy.
Sinead was placed onto a treatment plan and soon fell pregnant. The couple welcomed their baby boy Ardal into the world in August.
The couple say they were able to get through the devastating tragedies with the support of pregnancy loss charities such as SANDS. “Straight after losing Pearl, we made friends with other families who have been through similar situations,” Sinead added. “When we went through it again and again, we had the support from people who knew what we had been going through.
“We surrounded ourselves with people who understood. You find a lot of friends and family don’t know what to say and some people don’t know how to be around you. The common thing is that you lose friends along the way; they just don’t know how to speak to anyone or what to say.
“I had heard about (CHI) before, but I just didn’t know what was going on. I hoped it was that so I could be treated eventually; I knew it had to be linked and it wasn’t just a fluke three times.”
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