Infertility

There were a number of things. I couldn’t, I felt there wasn’t a lot I could do apart from support her. And in that sense I felt to a certain degree helpless. I, she was giving up a lot, she was looking at her diet and things like that. One thing I hadn’t been able to do at that point in time, I hadn’t been able to give up smoking, so… that was what I felt was one of the key things that I could do. So obviously smoking, drinking, do affect fertility as far as I know. There was a lot of research on that. So finally, just before my fortieth birthday, 10th June I gave up and there were many, many things that helped me do that, but one of the key things was wanting to be able to help or do something towards the situation that we were in. 

By the time we got to see the, got to the clinic, it was about four or five months’ wait to actually get there. So by that stage we had actually been trying for over a year and still nothing had happened. At the time I was quite overweight, I was 5 or 6 stone overweight and I was concerned that that, perhaps, was causing the problem with my ovulation. We went to see the clinic, we saw one of the registrars at the clinic, and she said that she wasn’t sure whether it was polycystic ovaries, but she would test to see whether it was polycystic ovaries to start with, because that’s normally, being overweight and also having ovulation problem can be an indicator of that. So I was sent for blood tests and I was sent for a scan to see whether my ovaries looked polycystic at all. Those tests happened in April 2004 and went and had all the tests done, then went away to wait for our appointment to come back to be told what the results were. Then we got a letter through to say that our appointment would be November 2004 to actually be told what the results of those tests were. We were absolutely horrified. We couldn’t believe they were going to make us wait that length of time to find out whether I even had a problem in that respect. I did actually manage to go back to my GP, and my GP managed to get hold of the doctor at the hospital, or the records at the hospital and she was told over the phone that they’d, all the test results had come back clear and there was no problem. Which we were very relieved about. We were, you know, obviously it still didn’t mean that I was pregnant, but it meant that one aspect of the problem had been supposedly solved. So we had to wait for our appointment in November. We carried on trying. We didn’t do anything else. Still nothing had happened. We went to see the doctor in November. This time we saw the consultant rather than the registrar, and he told us at that appointment that I did have polycystic ovaries. So we were now utterly confused because we’d been told on the one hand that we didn’t and on the one hand that we did. And I was quite distressed because I felt they’d told us back in the summer that I didn’t have it, and I could have been doing something about it in that time. We’d wasted even more time. We talked about what to do. I was still considerably overweight at the time, and we talked about the fact that I could go on Clomid and see whether that would sort out my ovulation, but that really I needed to go away and lose the weight. Which was quite daunting. As I say I was 5 or 6 stone overweight. It was quite a scary prospect to have to lose all that weight, and be losing more time as well. You know, we’d been trying for nearly two years by that stage. But we decided in conversation with each other, and also in conversation with family and friends, that it was probably for my health, the baby’s health and everything else, it would have, make more sense for me to actually try to lose the weight first. So I started a diet, a very strict diet in the March of 2005. So this is now two years since we’ve been trying. And I lost the weight pretty rapidly. And we went back to the clinic in September 2005 and said, “Okay, we’ve done it. We’ve lost the weight. You know, what’s, what’s next?” And my consultant said, “Well, that’s brilliant, you know, you’re halfway there basically.

In terms of weight gain, that has been very difficult. My weight I have to say, it has been up and down. I have ballooned sometimes and I have tried very hard to lose weight again. But the comforting thing is that doctors have actually said to me, providing that I am not more than 10% overweight, then it shouldn’t impact on the success of fertility treatment. In fact the jury is out on that. I think it is if you have a BMI of more than 28 then there would be a problem there, but I haven’t, so I am learning to manage it, albeit I am at a fat phase at the moment. It is just one of those things and the fertility drugs haven’t helped as well. In the last two years I did manage to get down to about BMI of about 23 and I still didn’t conceive. So I am not too worried at this stage.