Infertility

So I guess like most ladies of our age, for most of my teenage life my biggest fear was getting pregnant, so obviously, you know, contraception was really important. So when, I got married in 1998 and immediately stopped contraception and expected the inevitable to happen, as I expect lots of people do. And it didn’t. 

I started having, trying to have a child when I was 30. And I knew, I’d always known that I wanted children, but until then I’d been kind of, you know, busy doing all those kind of career things and feeling settled. And I really felt when I was 30 that I was actually ready to have a family and that was what I wanted to do. And a lot of my friends had started having children. And when it didn’t happen within just a few months I actually started to get slightly worried. I think even then I was quite aware of my age. Although 30 is relatively young, I knew that, you know, my fertility would soon start diminishing. And also I knew that there were long waiting lists for treatment and for tests and for all those kind of things. So I actually went to see the GP probably after only about five months. And I was really lucky because my GP was actually incredibly sympathetic, and I know a lot of people get told to go away and keep trying. But he said, “Oh, no, I’ll do some tests straight away. We might as well rule out any problems immediately.” Which he did. And then he referred me to a clinic fairly quickly as well. 

Probably exactly the same as most people’s. I think we kind of, you know, we’re very obsessed with the fact that, we all know about how to prevent pregnancy, we know that really well. And I think we kind of assume that the moment we stop preventing it we’re going to get pregnant. And I think that’s a general assumption on most women’s behalf actually. And I was aware that my fertility declined as I got older. I think the things I wasn’t aware of, you know, I used to smoke when I was younger and I had no idea that that had any effect on my fertility at all. So those kind of lifestyle choices, I think we’re not necessarily aware of quite what a big impact they can have. I think the really difficult thing for me was the whole thing about stress, and whether stress affects your fertility. Because some people say, “Yes, it does. It’s proven that it does” and other people say, “No, that’s nonsense.” And, and I used to get really worried about it. And the thing is the more worried you get about it, the more you are stressed about it. And I used to think, “Was it my job? Was it my lifestyle? Was it…?” Especially with un-, unexplained infertility, you do start to think that the choices you’ve made in your life have somehow made it worse

We started trying for a family in April/March 2003, and like most people we assumed it would happen very quickly. We first suspected there might be a problem after about nine or ten months. I’d been using ovulation kits to test whether I was ovulating, and for the first few months it came up that I was ovulating fine and then suddenly it stopped. And that’s when we first began to realise that perhaps things weren’t as normal as they should be. We carried on trying, but I did go to my GP. And the first time I went to my GP I was met with quite a lot of resistance. He didn’t take it very seriously. So went away, sort of thought about it, tried again for another couple of months. Went back to see a different GP at the same surgery, a female GP, and she was a lot more sympathetic. And that’s when I got referred to the fertility clinic at the hospital.