Having children is something we take for granted. Most of us spend our early adulthood actively avoiding pregnancy, taking every precaution to prevent it. At some point though (unless fate/mother nature beats us there) we decide that parenthood is not quite as scary as we had once thought and sling those contraceptives in the bin. It is a very liberating experience, albeit an ever so slightly terrifying one, and you mentally start to picture yourself with a growing bump and dreamily compile a list of favourite baby names. A new chapter stretches out before you. Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones and it all goes to plan, and I hope you are, but then maybe, like me, you are not and nothing happens and the months drag past - your period becomes a sign of yet another missed opportunity, your body continually fails at something that should be easy. This is of course the point at which your colleagues at work, neighbours, friends and siblings will all announce that they are pregnant! Now I'm not saying that I wasn't happy for them (even if it happened in the first month when they weren't even really trying grrr) because I genuinely was, I was just devastated for me. Surely it must be my turn next? My husband already had two children and struggled to see me in such despair.
So the next step is an array of embarrassing and sometimes invasive medical tests. In our case they were inconclusive, the term is "unexplained fertility" and it is incredibly frustrating and beyond upsetting. Could it be stress, we wonder? I take the drastic step of quitting my job as the spectre of IUI (artificial insemination) and IVF looms large on the horizon and we had to determine how we felt about that. Personally I had never pictured myself at that junction, had never thought that having children would be that important, but all of a sudden it is and it is all consuming.
In many ways we were very lucky as it only took us three years from starting to try to facing IVF (one unsuccessful cycle of IUI behind us). The mechanics are pretty straight forward: injecting myself was weird, but copable; the internal scans to check on the eggs uncomfortable, but liveable; egg collection a bit sore, especially afterwards and the embryo transfer quite exciting in it's own way, "normal" folk don't get to look at their embryos on a big screen now do they? The worst part is dealing with the waiting and the desperate hoping. How will you deal with a negative test result? Will we do this again? At this point we were beyond lucky, we got pregnant first time. We even saw and heard a heart beat from our little mite at 7 weeks, but by the 12 week scan our baby had inexplicably died. To say I was devastated does not really begin to explain how I felt, our luck had ran out and I was lost.
We had some frozen embryos from that same cycle in storage, so we tried that avenue first and got another positive result and suffered another loss, albeit a much earlier and less harrowing miscarriage. Strangely this made us all the more determined to try again, we had got so close, our baby was agonisingly close, I could almost visualise her. She was waiting for us to gather ourselves together and try again, spurring us on.
This is the point at which, as you may already know, our story becomes a happy one. Our third shot at IVF brought us our twin girls. We were amongst the very fortunate ones, it had worked and had given us two perfect babies. I still sometimes have to pinch myself, I struggle to believe that they are actually here and mine and they are nearly three. So it was all worth it, all those dark days, all that money, but my thoughts continue to stray to those still on this journey. There are those for whom treatment doesn't work. I think of those nights when I laid awake seeing no hope of success, all those beautiful babies I couldn't even look at, let alone hold, and I say a little prayer for you, that your dreams come true as mine did.
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