I made one. The other made me

Mother and Baby Editor Swati Chopra Vikamsey opens up about the pain and devastation of losing her firstborn Neev, and the bliss of a rainbow-hued lining with Sheyaan born through surrogacy...

Back in 2015, when I became pregnant with my first-born, it was an extremely complicated pregnancy from the word go. I was on complete bed-rest for the entire duration that I was expecting—the whole 5.5 months!

I started to bleed at about nine weeks. Tests confirmed that it was nothing to worry about. The placenta is probably forming low, my doctors reasoned. Having read enough about bleeding in the first trimester, I wasn’t too worried either, and agreed to a couple of weeks of rest. Until it happened again, this time at 13 weeks. This time it was a teeny weeny subchorionic hematoma (or a blood clot) behind the placenta that the blame was pinned upon. Time to hit the bed again. The bleeding dwindled a little in about two weeks, and I had just about started getting back to work, and life. But in week 16 saw red again! And there was no plausible explanation. After that, it never stopped. What made matters worse was that my amniotic fluid started dropping at around 19 weeks. The doctors didn’t have any answers. Google didn’t have any answers. The bleeding continued. And so did the pregnancy—amidst countless scares, untold stress, heavy bleeding, and intravenous iron infusions, I prepared for the inevitable every single day.