pregnant or not. But the signs of being pregnant are the same signs as getting your period — for me, bloating and tender breasts — so every month, it was a mental and emotional nightmare. On the day of my best friend’s wedding I was due to get my period and spent the whole day wondering if I would come on or not. Of course, I did.
Whenever I got my period, I’d have an awful crash. It was as if I was properly, clinically depressed; I would go back to bed for the first and second day and cry for most of the time. I remember coming down for breakfast and sobbing and sobbing in front of John. He was understanding, but he couldn’t really comprehend the heady combination of a bitter disappointment plus a hormonal crash that made me feel so low.
Sex became something that was difficult to deal with as a couple. Exactly when I ovulated began to control our sex life. Scheduled sex is like sitting down to dinner when all the food is ready, but you’re not hungry. We were no longer a normal couple having normal sex, because I was always thinking about the end goal.
Like me, John wanted two children but he would have been absolutely fine to wait a year and see what happened. So why did I get into such a fertility frenzy? There were a few reasons. We seemed to be surrounded by lots of breeding people. Because my friends (in fact, my generation of women, in general) were starting their families slightly later, everyone I knew was having their babies close together, one after the other. Unable to do the same, I saw myself as desperate, and felt that other people were looking at me, pitying me, thinking: poor her, she can’t conceive again.
Also, having got pregnant relatively easily before, I couldn’t understand why it should be taking so long this time. Plus, not only was I thinking about pregnancy all the time, I’d met a few other mums who were having problems the second time too, so I’d begun to talk about it all the time.
Life became all about pregnancy. I was reading different advice on the internet every day, taking handfuls of various supplements, having fresh wheatgrass juice every morning and weekly reflexology and acupuncture sessions. Looking back, it had become a full-time job. I couldn’t stop thinking that there must be something we weren’t doing which could increase our chances.
A year after we started trying, I made an appointment at a fertility clinic for us to get checked out. John’s sperm was a little bit below par, but not too bad. My tubes were clear and my FSH was under 10, but when the doctor did a scan to look at my antral follicle count, to see how many potential follicles I had that month, I only had one or two on each ovary. He told me that my ovaries looked more like those of a woman in her mid-40s, and I was only 37. Then I had an AMH blood test, another way to measure ovarian reserve, and my level was classified as ‘low’ too. That took the stress up a notch. Finding out there was actually something wrong was very emotional. It began to look less and less likely that I’d get pregnant.
As my tubes were open, so — in theory — the sperm could travel to fertilise the egg as in a natural pregnancy, doctors told me I might not need IVF, but was a good candidate for stimulated IUI (where you do hormone injections, the same as IVF, and on the day your eggs are ripe, they insert the sperm into your womb). Injecting the drugs made me feel out of it, not quite on this planet.
Even though I was open with close friends about having treatment, I still felt very alone. And I had to carry on with life as normal, looking after Jake and the house. It was a strain, though, and I remember on one occasion having a huge argument with my mum. I complained to her that Jake was being difficult, and she said it might have been because he was picking up vibes from me. I over-reacted and got really angry, telling her she was out of order.
The first cycle, I over-responded and produced too many eggs. That meant I had to have a horrible procedure called aspiration, where they pop the follicles via a tube that goes into your womb through your cervix. I was awake the whole time, and it was grim. I don’t think I’d realised what I was getting myself into with the stimulated IUI cycles. It was much more medical and full on than I’d expected.
What was amazing though, is how John and I totally came together once we’d started treatment. It became one of the best times of our relationship. He kept telling me it was the right thing to do, and I felt really supported. John never questioned any of the bills either. We were spending so much money, it didn’t seem real — £700 one day, £500 the next. What struck me about fertility treatment is that if it doesn’t work, it feels like a complete waste of money. If it does work, it’s money very well spent. After all, I’d rather have a baby than a new kitchen.
After three IUIs in four months, I started pushing the doctors to recommend IVF because the success rates are so much better than IUI. People say having IUI prepares you for IVF and I think it does; I had got used to the side effects of the drugs, and all the intrusive and personal medical procedures.
The lead-up to IVF was quite an ordeal, even before I started the drugs. I had to have a hysteroscopy; my doctor told me that it’s not certain why, but having this procedure can help to improve the chance of implantation. The doctor also did a dummy run to check my cervix was going to be open enough for transfer by inserting a tube into it and leaving it in for a few hours.
Having found the IUIs so traumatic, when it came to IVF I really tried to prepare for it, to get revved up mentally and physically. I was scared (mainly, that it wouldn’t work), but I tried to put a lot of positive energy into every procedure. I’d read a lot about whether the mind can make a difference to fertility. Even though I didn’t wholly believe it, I thought, there’s no harm in being positive. But I was up or down with every piece of good or bad news. Every day was a roller-coaster on IVF, not only because it’s so important to get right, but because the drugs were making me spaced out too.
John was more positive. He saw IVF as a solution and he wasn’t scared of it. Although he thought it might take more than one go, he also believed there was no reason why the clinic couldn’t help us. He was determined to persist with treatment until we got what we wanted.
At my first scan, they only saw six follicles developing, and the doctor in charge of me said that ideally they’d like to see more. He said I was a ‘slow responder’, explaining that it was as though my ovaries were deaf, and needed more drugs to ‘hear’ the message. This was a real blow. The doctor immediately maximised my drug dosage, but not only was I disheartened, I was now terrified it wouldn’t work. Afterwards, I spoke to a friend of mine who’d done IVF and had got pregnant, and she’d only had three eggs harvested; that made me feel better, and three eggs became my benchmark.
Every day, I did what the doctors said without questioning it. It’s quite invasive and personal, to give someone else the task of getting you pregnant, and it all felt quite mechanical — like being on a conveyor belt — but I trusted that the doctors were doing the best they could for us.
On the day that snow brought the whole of London to a standstill, and a friend had her operation for a brain aneurysm cancelled, the fertility clinic was open, having picked up key staff around London with a helicopter.
I forced myself to view the side effects of the drugs — fuzzy thinking, tiredness — as positive, proof that something was happening. I had some bloating and my ovaries felt strange, but I told myself it was all good. By the second or third scan, things weren’t looking quite so dire, as I’d gone up to eight follicles. Having the egg-collection operation was quite surreal, especially being with all the other women in the ward before and afterwards. It was odd to be sharing such a crucial moment in our lives with strangers. But it was also quite exciting. We all wished each other good luck.
When I came round from the anaesthetic, the doctor told us that every single follicle had yielded an egg — that meant we had eight, which was amazing. From then on, it became like a dream IVF cycle. Every day, the embryologist would telephone me and say positive things about the embryos. In the end, every single one of them lasted five days and went to blastocyst.
Before transfer, there was some debate about whether we should have one or two embryos put back. The embryologist was pushing for one, as the embryos were such good quality, but the doctor said we could have two. Faced with that decision in a more rational state, I’d have gone for one; as John pointed out, we already had one child, and having twins wouldn’t