A mother has spoken of her heartbreak and confusion at suffering four miscarriages that doctors could not pinpoint a reason for. Sinead Lynch, 33, suffered her third loss in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when her unborn child - who she named Rían - passed away at 20 weeks.
Sinead, from Stockport, had lost two babies prior to Rían, with baffled doctors unable to identify a cause. She told Manchester Evening News: “It was just hopelessness. 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. In 2018, the couple fell pregnant again, naming their unborn baby girl Pearl. But Sinead and Dan found she had passed away at their 20-week-scan.
“The hospital did a post-mortem scan and checks,” 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."
She adds: “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 when Sinead fell pregnant again in 2019, her unborn son, Murph, died at 12-weeks. After suffering their second loss in quick succession, the couple were convinced something was wrong.
“They tested the baby and he was a baby boy and genetically normal. We had doctors saying lightning strikes twice so we must have been unlucky twice."
Lynch, a nurse practitioner continues: "We thought there must have been a reason. Everyone kept telling us we were young and to try again.”
After the loss of Rían, their third miscarriage, in 2020, they decided to 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 once more. 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 next visited 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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