Infertility

It took a massive toll on me. Absolutely massive. I stopped eating. I got very depressed. I thought I was doing really because I decided that I wanted to be in control of things. I have learnt this since, but at the time I didn’t really realise. I started to want to get fit, and go to the gym, and I think what I was doing was trying to get control of my body, because somebody else had been in control of it, and my body had been doing things I couldn’t control. 

 

And so, I went completely doolally and became very, very thin and stopped eating altogether and very obsessed with weight, very obsessed with, well what I thought was healthy, and ended up having to have treatment for anorexia. Which was awful. And somewhere I never, ever thought I would ever be. But I couldn’t help it at the time. I had loads and loads of counselling. I had cognitive behavioural therapy in the end at a specialist hospital in the City. 

 

And I have had another bout of that once since, three years after having the girls, and again I think that is the reaction to chaos [laughs]. But I am alright now.

 

But I think it had a massive effect. We always kind of say that before we went through the infertility, kind of, not just the IVF, but the whole prospect of never having your own children, I was perfectly happy go lucky, normal, you know, I never had depression, I never had anything. 

 

And then this came along and I seem to have suffered [laughs] ever since. Which is quite …It is quite a shock and I can talk about it now, but it took me years before I could, you know, face up to any of it really. And I can remember, I go to church. I can remember sitting in church thinking if I can’t have my own children, I don’t know what I will do. I remember just saying in the church. “What are you doing to me? This is …” 

 

And I have got five brothers and sisters who have all married and had children like that [clicks fingers]. I have got fifteen nieces and nephews, so I felt very isolated and very odd one out, and very why me? And that was awful. That was very painful. They were all having babies, and everybody else tiptoes around you doesn’t dare tell you they are pregnant, you know, and all that kind of thing you have to deal with, and you don’t realise, but it actually just chips away at you all the time.

 

Not long after we decided to put an end to fertility treatment I did find out that I’d got pregnant naturally. And as you can imagine I was just so delighted. It was, I re-, I couldn’t believe it. I remember taking a photograph of the pregnancy test and looking at, up there on the camera thinking, “Oh, the camera never lies.” It was so hard to get my head round the fact that just literally months, weeks after stopping fertility treatment I’d got pregnant. I think I never imagined that life would be so cruel as to let me miscarry that baby. I’d told my friends and my family when I, it was still very early days. And I just, I really wasn’t prepared to have a miscarriage. It was, I, I’m not sure you ever could be. But I guess I just thought, “I’ve had my share of traumas. Now it’s my time to be happy.” And we were absolutely delighted. But sadly that pregnancy wasn’t to be. 

 

We’d actually, I’d actually noticed, one day I’d, I hadn’t felt very well, I felt quite, very very tired and just ill. It was hard to put my finger on how I felt, but I, I just felt generally unwell. And I noticed there was a kind of discharge, a kind of brownish discharge. And I remember phoning NHS Direct and asking them about this, you know, “Was it anything to be concerned about?” And they said, you know, “Keep an eye. You know, if, if it gets worse then of course see your GP. But the thing that you need to worry about is blood. If you see fresh red blood then, you know, do start to worry kind of thing and seek advice.” So we’d arranged to go out for a meal with some friends that evening. And I thought rather than sitting in and brooding about what this could or couldn’t be that I would carry on and go out for that meal. I went to the loo and there was blood. And I was just, I didn’t know what to do. I, there, it, there wasn’t much blood, but it was blood and it was very very bright. So I kind of went and sat back at the table, I tried to carry on as normal. But then I thought, “Right, one more check, then I’m going to relax and enjoy the evening.” I went back to the loo and then there was quite a lot of blood.

 

So we had to go to hospital. We decided that that would be the best thing to do. It was the weekend, our GP would have been shut, and I needed some kind of reassurance. We went to a fairly small hospital close to where we’d been, just to get there quickly, and, but they didn’t have a maternity unit there, which was where I needed to be. So I ended up having to be transferred via ambulance to another hospital. And that did feel very traumatic. I remember lying there thinking you know, kind of hurtling through the streets, and it started to feel very very serious. For, not for the first time I began to cry. And I remember a nurse saying to me, “Why are you crying?” And I just thought, “God, you know, because I’m about to have a miscarriage. Why do you think I’m crying?” And there was such a lack of understanding about, you know, what I was going through. My husband had to follow the ambulance in the car. So it, it did start to feel very very dramatic. It was like something you see on the TV and, you know, I just wasn’t prepared for this at all. We got to the next hospital and this, at this stage it was kind of the middle of the night, because we’d been waiting in Casualty at the first hospital for a good while, with blood kind of, you know, a fair amount of blood. And I remember sitting in these waiting rooms on these plastic seats thinking, “Oh, God, I’m going to have to stand up and there’s going to be all blood on the seat.” And my husband actually asked them, “Could we be moved to a private room to wait?” And they were, they were ve-, they, they did accommodate us with that. Which was good. And I remember kind of, you know, standing up and my husband giving me his jacket to tie round. And I didn’t look back at the seat, because I knew it was covered in blood. I thought, “Well, I can’t deal with that now.”
 
So we went to the second hospital. They examined me. The bleeding at this stage had kind of abated a good bit. And they said that because my cervix was still closed that that was actually a good sign and that it could have just been a scare. They said it, by this time it was the middle of the night and they said, “You, you may as well stay here now, you know, stay in overnight, and just go home in the morning.” We were really really lucky because there was actually a hospital bed in a little private room, and it had a chair, a reclining chair, so my husband could sleep there for the night. I got in the bed. And we did, we did actually sleep really well surprisingly. We slept, got up the next morning, there was not much blood. We had to be, I had to be checked by a GP, a doctor before I could then be discharged. And they checked me. Everything was fine. They said, “You can go home.” I got up to go to the loo and then there was this horrible rush. I’d never experienced anything like it. Just, the baby just came away, or what was there. And I remember ringing the emergency bell in the toilet and a nurse coming through and she said, “God, didn’t we tell you last night you’re supposed to use a bedpan if you go to the loo?” And I remember standing there looking down into the toilet, thinking, “That is my baby. That’s like four years to get to this stage. And you’re upbraiding me for, you know, ignoring hospital protocol.” And I remember just being devastated. And I really snapped back, “Well, you know, it was my baby. If you want, I’ll get it.” And I think then she realised, you know, how close to the edge I was, because I did really snap. And then I went home. And that was it.

So in the February 2006 we started our first IVF cycle. Absolutely terrified. My cycle just happened to coincide with us having to do our first injection on our sixth wedding anniversary, which was not the most romantic way to spend your wedding anniversary. And we were very very nervous. We didn’t know what to expect, we didn’t know how we were going to react, how we were going to respond to the drugs. In actual fact I didn’t respond too badly to the drugs for the two weeks that I had to do what we call down regulation, which is just switching all the hormones off. I didn’t get all the headaches and side effects that I’d been warned about. But that in itself became an area of anxiety, because I was concerned that I wasn’t getting all the side effects and the drugs weren’t working. But I went for my down regulation scan and blood tests, and they said, “No, everything’s fine. You, you know, everything’s switched off.” Then I started the stimulating drugs. And again I didn’t get many side effects. And again I’m worried about that that meant that I wasn’t stimulating properly, I wasn’t getting enough follicles or wasn’t getting enough eggs. But that proved to be wrong as well. And I did actually end up getting nine eggs at the egg collection stage. Which is about right, about average. We had a fairly good fertilisation rate. We had six eggs that fertilised. And we got, so we got six embryos. Two of them didn’t survive the night. Which is not uncommon. Two of them were implanted, and two of them were frozen. And two weeks later I found out I was pregnant. Which was just absolutely amazing. And we just couldn’t believe our luck that, you know, we’d hit jackpot on the first cycle of IVF. We felt absolutely elated, shared it with all our friends, our family, work colleagues. And three weeks after that we were booked in for a scan to go and find out, you know, whether I was expecting one or two and check everything was okay. And two days before the scan I started spotting. Only a tiny amount, but enough to make us very scared. Went down to A & E. You know, they told me to go away and rest. I mean they were very very compassionate about the whole thing, but there’s not an awful lot they can do. They said they could book me in for a scan. But I was only two days away from having the scan at my clinic anyway. So we went to have the scan, that was April 2006, and were told that we had conceived twins but that they had both died and we’d lost them both. So that was just devastating. We could understand what they mean by the infertility roller coaster. Because we’d gone down to the depths, up to the heights and then right back down to the depths again. So that was very very hard. It wasn’t what we’d expected. We hadn’t thought about miscarriage. We just assumed that having been dealt such awful hands, you know, in terms of the infertility, that we would be spared the agony of miscarriage too.

 

So we took the summer off, regrouped, sort of built up our strength, lost a bit of weight, got fit, went on holiday, and decided to go back and tackle another cycle in the September/October time of 2006. And started doing down reg injections again at the beginning of October. Two weeks into down regging is when your period is supposed to start, and mine didn’t start. So this was a further concern. We were just completely thrown. “What on earth was going on? Why had this happened?” And we looked up on the Internet, like you do, and found all these horrendous things that it could possibly be. The main one being potentially that I’d developed ovarian cysts, which can be a side effect of the down regging drugs. And we sp-, I, eventually after a week of waiting for my period I phoned the clinic, completely beside myself. “What on earth was going on? Why had this happened?” And we looked up on the Internet, like you do, and found all these horrendous things that it could possibly be. The main one being potentially that I’d developed ovarian cysts, which can be a side effect of the down regging drugs. And we sp-, I, eventually after a week of waiting for my period I phoned the clinic, completely beside myself. “What on earth was going on?” And they said, that, you know, there was a possibility I’d developed a cyst and I needed to go in and see them the next day. Drove down to the clinic in complete silence. We were so scared about what was, what we were going to be told. And went into the clinic, the waiting room. The nurse came to get us and we went in for our scan. And while she was scanning me she said, “I’ve found something.” And we both sort of looked at the TV screen. And I mean I’ve never been able to work out what they’re looking at on the scan pictures. So I was just looking at this sort of blob and thinking, “This is a cyst.” And [husband] was thinking, my husband was thinking the same thing. And she said, “I’m going to have to go and get a doctor.” And then we really went into panic. We thought, “Maybe it isn’t a cyst. Maybe it’s a tumour or something even worse. And she came back and she said, “You’re pregnant.” And we were just absolutely stunned. And we had, you know, we had been through the scan that showed me that I had completely blocked tubes. When they did the scan back in January and put the dye through my tubes or into my womb to go into my tubes, nothing went through my tubes at all. They put as much dye as they possibly could, and absolutely not one drop went through. So we could not fathom how I had conceived. And it was, I mean it was nothing short of a miracle. And we were just stunned. And again, you know, back up into the, the heights of joy. We just thought this was amazing, this was absolutely amazing. After everything we’ve been through, we’ve managed to conceive naturally. And we left that clinic walking on cloud nine. Book, we were booked in for another scan the following week, on the Tuesday, to go back and check everything was okay and check dates and all the rest of it. And on the Monday I started bleeding. A huge, huge bleed. And the Tuesday we went back for another scan, and confirmed we’d lost the baby again. So that was really really hard. That was absolutely devastating. To go through two miscarriages in the space of six months was just, and to have had the joy of a natural conception taken from us as well was just absolutely crushing. And we found that very very hard to bounce back from. In fact we haven’t started another cycle yet. Because we’re still, we’re now into, what? seven, eight months from that second miscarriage. We still haven’t worked up the courage to do it again, because it was just so a-, well, devastating is the only word I can think of, just absolutely horrendous. We just couldn’t believe that we could have lost a second baby, or a third baby, because the first time we lost twins. So that was, yes, absolutely crushing.