When I woke up, the nurses were laughing. I asked if everything was ok, and they said, ‘Yes — we’re now calling you the eighty-egg girl!’ Apparently, in my half-awake state, I’d asked a nurse how many eggs they’d collected, and, though she’d said 18, I’d thought she said 80, and repeated it.
It took the embryologists an hour to find viable sperm in the straws. In the end, they found enough and did ICSI on my eggs. Out of the 18 eggs, this time 16 fertilised. By day three, we still had eight good embryos, so they said we should hold off until day five, when the embryos would reach blastocyst stage (an advanced stage of development); this would allow them to choose those that had the best chance of implantation. On day five, they called us and said, ‘Actually, we still can’t choose between them, as they’re all looking good, so we’re going to wait until day six.’ We had two good-quality blastocysts to put in that day. Sadly, the others had started to die away, so we had none to freeze.
I was really churned up. It felt like we’d reached the end of a big journey and I couldn’t work out what we’d do next if I didn’t get pregnant. Before embryo transfer, I asked if I could see the embryos, but the doctor, Mr Taranissi, said that too much movement can be traumatic for them, and that he preferred to put them straight in. After transfer, he left us alone for half an hour, saying, ‘This is your moment to be together.’
I felt so full of emotion. I said to Nick that I could feel it working. He told me not to be silly, that it was far too early, but I really did feel positive. When it was time to stand up, I was scared. But the embryologist reassured me with a really clever image. He described the womb lining as being like the bread of a jam sandwich, so the embryos couldn’t fall out. I still spent the journey back home the next day with my feet up on the dashboard, though. I must have looked like Lady Muck, the back seat crammed with bags from my month spent shopping in London, and the seat pushed back as far as it would go.
The next 10 days of waiting were hard. But I was disciplined, and didn’t do a home pregnancy test. I took the blood test at the clinic at 7 a.m., then Nick and I went for breakfast at a lovely café nearby called Patisserie Valerie. We both ordered scrambled eggs and bacon, but I was too nervous to eat. The call came and it was positive. I couldn’t process the enormity of it. If we hadn’t pushed to have the operation, if we hadn’t kept going with treatment, we never would have had this incredible news.
A few weeks later, we discovered that we were having twins, and Mia and Milly were born by Caesarean section at 38 weeks. It was a surprise, as we had thought we were having at least one boy, but it was an incredibly good one. We both feel so privileged to be parents, when we’d been so close to it never happening.
Q: WHAT’S YOUR ADVICE TO ANYONE DIAGNOSED WITH A LOW OR ZERO SPERM COUNT?
See a specialist and find out all the possible options. We went to our GP to discuss the first set of sperm-test results. He’s a great GP, but not a fertility specialist. He just said, ‘You must be devastated,’ and that there was no way Nick could father his own children. I’m really pushy until I’m completely convinced; I thought: that can’t be it – there must be some new technology that can help us. It was only when I asked to be referred to a urologist that we got a more detailed picture.
Q: WHAT DID YOU TELL FRIENDS ABOUT WHY YOU HAD TO HAVE IVF?
At first, we didn’t tell anyone anything. Once we decided to tell a few close friends we were having treatment, after our first failure, everything became a lot easier. Before, I’d felt as if I was lying all the time. Everyone in our group was so supportive and it was amazing how many people knew people who’d been through it. We didn’t tell them why we had to have IVF though – people naturally assumed the problem was on my side, and we let them.
Q: HOW DO YOU THINK A ZERO SPERM COUNT DIAGNOSIS AFFECTED YOUR HUSBAND?
I suppose all men who want children worry, to some extent, about their fertility and whether they’re going to be able to father a baby. After Nick’s diagnosis, but before anyone else knew we were trying, I remember a guy at a wedding telling us his wife was pregnant, joking he had ‘ace swimmers’. Even though it was in jest, it hurt. Nick is very down to earth and practical, so he doesn’t talk very much about his emotions, but I know he found it hard to take. His reaction was to shut down and not want to talk. I didn’t push him: I read some good advice that said men can talk about fertility for a maximum of three days, and then they want to move on. I’m lucky because, when I needed to talk, I could go to my mum, sister and friends.
Q: WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE IF YOU HADN’T GOT PREGNANT?
The idea of sperm donation seemed very alien to me, whereas adoption seemed more natural. At the time, I also thought it would be easier, though I’ve since found out it can take a lot longer.
Q: WHAT’S YOUR BEST ADVICE FOR ANYONE HAVING IVF?
Make sure you rest properly after embryo transfer. Your body has been through a lot, and so have you. And you want to give yourself the best chance. For the first week after the third transfer, I went to stay with my mum. Not that Nick didn’t look after me, but I knew that if I was at home, I’d end up doing housework. Mum made me lie down and did everything for me.
The other piece of advice is, don’t test early, as you can get the wrong result. I met a girl at the clinic who’d done a home test that showed up positive, but her blood test showed very low levels of pregnancy hormones, and it turned out to be a negative in the end.
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Looking for people to speak to for the book, I tried to find a man to interview whose child had been conceived using donor sperm and whose partner had had IVF. Even though there are thousands of children conceived using donor sperm every year, I couldn’t find one. Perhaps ICSI has meant a drop in the numbers of male—female couples using donor sperm. Or perhaps men just don’t want to talk. It’s interesting that of the couples I spoke to whose infertility was partly or wholly ‘male factor’, all of them allowed friends and family to think that the issue was the woman’s.
Fertility coach, Anya Sizer, says she always recommends the website mensfe.net, which is dedicated to male fertility issues, as a good source of information and support. It appears (as a generalisation) that men prefer not to share in the same way that women do on fertility websites; there are a lot fewer posts on the forums, but each one has been viewed hundreds, sometimes thousands, of times. Mensfe.net is an excellent website and includes personal stories, as well as information on vasectomy reversal, sperm donation and nutrition, plus questions answered by doctors and a section on the emotional effects of fertility problems.
As regards nutrition, the latest research shows that it may be worth men whose partners are having fertility treatment taking antioxidant supplements, such as vitamin E, L-carnitine, zinc and magnesium, although it’s not proven which particular supplements are most effective. That’s the conclusion of a 2011 Cochrane Review of 34 randomised controlled trials involving 2876 couples.4
The Donor Conception Network (donor-conceptionnetwork.org) has a section aimed at men that includes personal stories. If you’ve been told that your best option is donor insemination, it’s recommended you have counselling first. And be clear about your legal situation: in law, if you are married, you (the ‘intended’ father) are automatically the legal father if your child has been conceived by donated sperm, but that’s not always the case if you’re unmarried. (See www.nataliegambleassociates.com for more information.)
Infertility Network UK have a very useful factsheet on exactly how ICSI works, one on male infertility generally and one on the emotional side of male infertility (www.infertilitynetworkuk.com). For a full-length account of IVF from a male point of view, read Test Tubes and Testosterone: A Man’s Journey Into Infertility and IVF by Michael Saunders (Nell James Publishers). ‘The idea behind my story was just to get men talking about fertility. I imagine it will be bought by women and hopefully read by men,’ says Saunders.
I had premature ovarian failure
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