The seventh test sat on the bathroom counter in our Woburn home, and I would not look at it. I sat on the cold tile floor with my back against the tub, knees pulled to my chest, and counted to three hundred. I had learned not to hope. Hope was the thing that broke me each time, so I had stopped letting myself feel it. When I finally turned the test over and saw the two lines, I did not cry with joy. I cried because I was certain I was about to lose another one.
By then I had been pregnant six times in four years. Six positive tests. Six early ultrasounds where the room went quiet. Six drives home where my husband held my hand at every red light and neither of us said a word.
The years I stopped planning a future
People who have not lived through recurrent miscarriage do not understand what it does to ordinary days. I stopped buying anything. Not a onesie, not a name book, not a single thing that admitted I believed a baby might come. I avoided the baby aisle at the grocery store in Burlington and took the long way around through household goods. When friends announced their pregnancies, I smiled and meant it and then sat in my car in the parking lot and shook.
My body felt like a place that kept saying no. Every doctor ran tests. My OB in Greater Boston was thorough and kind, the fertility specialist was excellent, and still the answers came back as a shrug. No clear cause. “Unexplained.” That word followed me everywhere. I was thirty-six and running out of the one thing nobody could give me back, which was time. I started declining baby showers. I stopped telling my mother when I was pregnant because I could not bear to also be the one who told her it was over. The grief was not one large grief. It was a hundred small ones, stacked.
The conversation in my sister’s kitchen
It was my sister, in her kitchen in Lexington, who said the thing I did not want to hear. She had watched me lose pregnancy after pregnancy, and one afternoon she put a mug of tea in front of me and said she had read about a clinic in Burlington that worked with women in exactly my situation. Acupuncture. I almost laughed. I had been through reproductive endocrinology, genetic testing, blood thinners, progesterone. I did not believe a few needles were going to succeed where medicine had not.
I went mostly to stop her from worrying. That is the honest truth.
What I did not expect was the first appointment with Dr. Min Jeon. She did not rush me. She sat down and asked me questions no one had asked in four years. Not just about my cycles and my labs, but about my sleep, my digestion, the stress I had been carrying since the first loss, the way my body had felt different after each pregnancy. She listened the way you listen to someone whose story actually matters to you. When she explained what she was noticing, she used plain words, nothing mysterious, nothing I needed a translator for. She told me she could not promise me anything, and somehow that honesty made me trust her more than any guarantee would have. She explained that one part of my care would use ATP Resonance BioTherapy®, gentle low-level frequencies meant to lower inflammation and support my body’s own healing. Then she told me the most important thing: she would work alongside my fertility team, never instead of them.
The first ultrasound I did not have to mourn
I kept seeing Dr. Min through the months before that seventh pregnancy, and I kept seeing her after. I drove in from Woburn twice a week, sometimes past clinics and offices in Billerica and Bedford where I had once gotten bad news, and for the first time those drives did not feel like dread.
The morning of the eight-week ultrasound, I lay on the table and braced for the silence. Instead the technician smiled and turned the screen toward me, and there it was. A heartbeat. Fast and steady and real. I heard it fill the room. I had never made it this far. My fertility specialist looked at my chart, looked at me, and asked what I had been doing differently. I told her about Dr. Min and the clinic in Burlington. She wrote it down. She said whatever I was doing, I should keep doing it.
I am not going to tell you acupuncture is magic, because Dr. Min would never let me say that. My doctors managed my pregnancy. My medications mattered. But something in me steadied during those months, and I carried that baby past every milestone I had never reached before.
My daughter is asleep down the hall as I write this. For anyone across Greater Boston sitting on a bathroom floor right now, certain that hope is the enemy, I want you to know there was a version of me who believed that too.
If you are facing recurrent miscarriage or unexplained fertility struggles, you do not have to navigate it alone. Call Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic at 781-221-0162 or schedule online at awclinic.com.
Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic | Burlington, MA | Serving Greater Boston including Woburn, Lexington, Billerica, and Bedford | Specializing in recurrent miscarriage, fertility support, women’s health, and complex cases for over 25 years.