My Experience With Crohn's Disease & Miscarriage (Part 1)

When I began writing for Health Union four years ago, I was adamant about using this platform to remove the stigma and demystify every aspect of living with inflammatory bowel disease.

In the time since then, I’ve expanded my advocacy and storytelling, covering the intersections of mental health, other chronic illnesses, and infertility. Today, I want to add to that list by sharing with you my experience with Crohn’s disease and Miscarriage.

How Crohn's has impacted my menstrual cycle

Long before I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, I knew that my menstrual cycle impacted my GI symptoms. In the days leading up to my period, I’d have increased bloat and stomach pain like clockwork.

The first 48 hours of my cycle were miserable each month. In addition to agonizing cramps which would often cause me to vomit repetitively, I’d find myself running to the toilet time and time again. The increase in diarrhea and frequency was discouraging, especially before I knew that I was living with IBD.

Trying to get pregnant with IBD

For years, I used oral contraception to mitigate these symptoms and even to reduce my period to once a quarter (with doctor approval, of course), but this changed when I began trying to get pregnant for the first time.

With trying to conceive and then failed fertility treatments, I began again experiencing GI upset - even with my IBD in remission. Every month was hoping, praying for a positive pregnancy test and praying, preparing for follow-up GI distress.

When I finally did get pregnant via IVF success in 2018, I was grateful for a multitude of reasons - including that I’d be able to skip 9 months of debilitating period + IBD symptoms. In a recent article, I shared more about the impact of hormones on my Crohn’s disease, and I talked about the return of the period postpartum. Heavier, stronger, and longer bleeding than before childbirth, I have worried every single cycle about how it will affect my GI symptoms.

Hormones and an increase in painful symptoms

I have noticed the increase in urgency, frequency, and associated abdominal pain, and I have begged the universe (not so silently) to allow me to get pregnant one more time, enabling me to complete my family and also end this vicious IBD/Hormone change cycle.

In the interim, my GI and I have worked to manage the symptoms as best as possible, enabling me to continue living, working, and parenting my nearly 2-year-old daughter - but it has been less than ideal.

The heartbreaking reality of IVF

Just like the first time around, trying to conceive naturally has not been successful for my husband and me, and we knew that we’d need to return to IVF again in order to give my daughter a sibling.

Here’s the heartbreaking reality of IVF - even with chromosomally normal embryos, following protocol to a T, and doing absolutely everything possible (& recommended), you are not guaranteed a baby.

And twice now in the last four months, I’ve experienced this firsthand.

Twice in a row, I've prepared my body with the hormones and injections and testing for a genetically normal embryo to be implanted in my healthy uterus. And twice, those transfers have ultimately failed, leaving me to miscarry our babies.

The physical and emotional challenges of a miscarriage

With early miscarriages, at 5 and 6 weeks respectively, the process happened "naturally" for me, or without the need for further medical intervention.

However, to say my miscarriages were like "heavy periods" would be completely untrue.

In the second portion of this article, I'll talk more about the physical and emotional challenges of my miscarriages and how they affected my Crohn's disease symptoms.

Please, if you have any questions or anything you'd like to share below, I'm all ears. I'm an open book, and you're not alone.