A story of loss, timing, and the path that revealed itself
We had prepared for 18 months, checking, aligning, rechecking, fine tuning and we were ready. Ready for the biggest project I had ever worked on and the most critical to date – Mission Critical was how it was framed within the financial sector.
Euro changeover in 2002 for a pillar bank, alongside all the other banks in the country and across the newly created Eurozone was a huge undertaking and everyone on my team was taking it seriously.
I was in the ‘war room’ when my phone rang, the voice was familiar, she said just 3 words and yet I heard fear, frustration and grief all rolled together ‘It’s ectopic again’.
Not for the first time, my heart broke for this mama. Just a short week ago, on Christmas day, I had heard the joyful news of this pregnancy after 5 losses and I understood clearly how much hope was carried in it after 10 long years of waiting.
She had tried on her own through the first four losses, sought medical help, and still suffered further losses — along with the loss of a fallopian tube.
It was at this point, long before Google became the behemoth it is today, that I asked the question quietly to myself: the doctors knew what was wrong, but they were not asking why it was wrong.
My job had always been to question why. No IT system was ever designed, commissioned, or signed off without a clear answer to it. Function followed purpose. Outcomes followed architecture.
My gut told me the same had to be true here — that Nature held the answer I was searching for, if someone was willing to look upstream rather than react at the point of failure.
It was clear she couldn’t — and shouldn’t — carry this alone. As the Euro changeover was completed and the war room dismantled, I became the container for what had nowhere else to go.
Grief is regulated when it is witnessed.
When it isn’t, it circulates unchecked — through the nervous system, through the body, through time. It looks for somewhere to land.
My role was not to fix or to reassure, but to stay. To listen without urgency. To absorb what could not yet be metabolised. To make space for what medicine had no language for.
And so she softened. It was noticeable first in her language — less sharp, less driven by anger — then in her body, as she began to exhale fully and allow the impact of the whole journey to land.
I remained the quiet witness.
What followed was not progress in any conventional sense. There was no plan, no timeline, no expectation of improvement. There was simply regularity. Calls that didn’t rush anywhere. Silence that didn’t need filling. A gradual return of rhythm where everything had previously been braced.
Time, which had felt punitive and endless for so long, began to behave differently. Not as something to survive or outrun, but as something that could be inhabited again.
And in the background, I still carried that burning question of why.
Why, in her case, was progesterone low? Why was cervical mucus hostile?
With only one functioning tube, she was fearful of the consequences and had run out of confidence in a purely medical solution.
So we began, carefully, not with intervention but with attention. With restoring conditions rather than correcting outcomes. With nourishment that supported signalling, rest that allowed hormones to speak more clearly, and rhythm that gave the body permission to stand down from defence.
Nothing was forced. Nothing was rushed. Preparation wasn’t a strategy — it was a way of re-establishing trust in a body that had learned to expect disappointment.
I watched her unfurl, like a flower blooming. Density gave way to lightness, and her spark returned.
Pregnancy arrived quietly — her seventh. There was no rush to declare it, no public relief, no sense of triumph. Just a careful noticing that something had shifted, and a decision to stay with the same steadiness that had carried her this far.
It was Christmas Day, and our house was at peak excitement — not for Santa, but for the cousin my twelve-year-old daughter was desperate to meet.
He didn’t disappoint. Just two days old, he arrived with his parents on their way home from the maternity hospital — soft-skinned, tightly wrapped against the winter’s chill, blinking into the light, his tiny hands briefly emerging and retreating again.
The next branch of our family had arrived.
It was only later, quietly, that the coherence became clear to me. Almost a year to the day from the call that had carried so much fear. Three months of preparation before conception. Nine months of pregnancy carried to term, without urgency.
This was never about process alone. In fertility, the mission is singular: a live birth.
I had walked this journey not as a practitioner, but as a sister — and on Christmas Day, I held in my arms, the outcome that medicine alone had not been able to secure.
Mission accomplished.
This was the moment the mission clarified. Until then, my training had been in systems that could not afford to fail. From here on, that same discipline was directed toward the most unforgiving system of all — human fertility — where the cost of failure is measured in lives not born.
