Trigger warnings: Miscarriage, D&C, uterine scarring, infertility, fertility surgery
If you’ve been following our Long Road posts, you know this journey has been… a lot. Years of trying, losses, procedures, and a rotating cast of doctors who kept telling us things were fine when they weren’t. This week, we finally feel like something actually changed.
Monday Was Surgery Day
We drove down to Naperville, Illinois to see Dr. Miller – and if you’re in the reproductive medicine world at all, you may already know the name. He’s considered one of the best hysteroscopic surgeons in the country, and after years of hitting walls here in Wisconsin, we decided it was worth the three-hour drive and the out-of-state referral to see someone at the top of his field.
The hysteroscopy had a few goals going in.
Removing Uterine Adhesions (Scarring) From My First D&C
After our first miscarriage, I had a D&C. What followed was something I wouldn’t wish on anyone – and something that I think gets dismissed far more often than it should be.
The D&C left behind both intrauterine scarring and retained products of conception. My periods after that were basically nonexistent. Not light – nonexistent. That’s actually a well-known warning sign of significant uterine scarring (sometimes called Asherman’s syndrome), and it’s the kind of thing that, if caught early, can potentially be addressed before it becomes a much bigger problem.
Except no one was alarmed. For years. We flagged the period changes, and provider after provider either brushed it off or didn’t follow up. A sonohysterogram was done and didn’t catch what was going on. It took another full year before one doctor finally noticed something was wrong. When they went in for that first hysteroscopy to investigate, they found that my uterus was completely full of adhesions. Not a little scarring – completely full.
That first hysteroscopy attempted to address it – but the surgeon, though well-meaning, didn’t have the experience needed for a case like mine, and the procedure left its own scarring behind. So we went into Monday’s surgery with years of compounded damage to clean up: the original adhesions, the retained tissue, and the scarring from the previous attempt to fix it.
Removing a Uterine Septum That Five Doctors Missed
This one still stings a little, honestly. A uterine septum – a band of tissue that partially divides the uterine cavity – is one of the more common uterine anomalies, and it’s associated with recurrent miscarriage. It was first flagged during our saline sonohysterogram with Dr. Miller back in December and confirmed during the D&C he performed to remove yet another miscarriage in March. But before that? Five different providers here in Wisconsin looked at my uterus and didn’t catch it. If we’d stayed local, we might never have known it was there.
Dr. Miller removed it Monday. Something that had potentially been contributing to our losses for years, and it took finding the right surgeon to actually deal with it.
Testing for Endometriosis
This was one we’d been wanting to rule in or out for a long time. The biopsy results are back, and I do not have endometriosis. That’s genuinely good news – one less thing working against us.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Dr. Miller is cautiously optimistic. With the scarring cleared out and the septum gone, he thinks we have a real shot at a successful pregnancy – a “sticky baby,” as they say. We’re not popping champagne yet, because this road has taught us not to do that, but for the first time in a while we feel like we’re working with a uterus that’s actually been set up to succeed.
There will be a follow-up SIS to confirm everything healed cleanly before we move forward. One step at a time.
The Womed Leaf – and Why It Matters
One thing Dr. Miller used that we really appreciate – and it’s pretty new to the US – is a device called the Womed Leaf. If you’ve had a hysteroscopy before, you might be familiar with the traditional approach to preventing adhesions from reforming after surgery: a Foley catheter balloon is placed inside the uterus to keep the walls physically separated while everything heals. It works, but it’s uncomfortable, it has to be manually removed, and it’s not a perfect solution.
The Womed Leaf is a different approach. It’s a thin, degradable polymer film – picture something roughly the size and shape you’d need to line a uterine cavity – that gets inserted through a small flexible tube, similar to how an IUD is placed. Once it’s inside, it self-expands to gently fill the cavity and keep the uterine walls from touching each other during the healing window. That physical separation is what prevents new scar tissue from forming, which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid here given the adhesion history we’re working with.
The really nice part: you don’t have to do anything after. The film breaks down on its own over the course of several days and is naturally discharged within about a month. No removal appointment, no discomfort from a balloon sitting in there. It’s been used in Europe for a while now, and early data looks promising – but it’s still relatively new on this side of the Atlantic, which tracks with the kind of care Dr. Miller is known for. We wouldn’t have had access to it closer to home.
And Then There Was Seelie
Here’s the part of this story that is very, very us.
I was just starting to come out of anesthesia – that foggy, surreal stretch where you’re not quite sure what’s real – when I pulled up our barn cameras and saw that our Guernsey doe, Seelie, had officially gone into labor. At home. Three hours away. While I was on the operating table.
This was Seelie’s first freshening, and we’d been a little anxious about leaving during kidding season. But the timing of the surgery wasn’t something we could move around, and honestly, you can’t plan around goats. You just can’t.
She didn’t need us at all. Both kids came out beautifully, and Seelie took to them like she’d been doing it for years – no intervention, no drama, no frantic calls to a neighbor. She handled it like an absolute pro while her humans were three hours south, one of them still coming out of anesthesia.
It felt like a sign. New life, right on cue. A little reminder that sometimes things go exactly the way they’re supposed to.
We’ll keep updating here as we move through recovery and next steps. Thank you, as always, for following along on the harder parts of this journey – it means more than you know.
