I started writing because I wanted to share the feelings I have experienced over the last four years. Of course I’ve shared them - some of them - with friends and professionals along the way. But there is a loneliness to infertility that is so deep. So any tiny thing I can do to ease the loneliness of someone out there is a good thing, even if only one person reads this blog. I write for myself too of course.
When things started going badly for us, I spent plenty of time in the sort of chat rooms where everyone includes their infertility “CV” at the bottom of each post. “MC 7w4d, IVF bfn, MC 11w6d.” That sort of thing. It’s such an apt reflection of the way infertility sucks away your life and makes it hard to define yourself by anything but your grim tally of failures. But I can see the value of sharing my CV here so people have some sense of my story, and I won’t have to keep filling bits in later as it becomes relevant to individual posts.
So, here’s my CV. I met my husband when I was 36, after five years in the tough old world of the London dating scene, and a five-year relationship before that. It felt right immediately; if nothing else, dating teaches you to know when you have a good thing. He proposed on the anniversary of our first date, and six months later we were married and trying to conceive. I was 38.
I’d spent my thirties worrying about fertility, including coming close a couple of times to embarking on solo motherhood with sperm donation. So I knew in my head that it might not be easy. But in my heart, like everyone else, I expected to get pregnant the first month I came off the pill, and was devastated when we didn’t.
We tried for a year. Nothing. I started investigating IVF after about five months. But then after a year of trying, when we were on the point of starting our first round of IVF, we got a positive test. I find it almost impossible now to imagine the innocent happiness and sense of expectancy I felt for those few weeks. It ended at 11 weeks with a miscarriage.
We picked ourselves up and started a round of IVF a couple of months later. We got four eggs, two of which made viable five-day blastocysts and went back in. Two weeks later, negative.
A couple of months later I tested positive again. All good until the 12-week scan. After that, we were told there was a 1/20 chance the baby had Down’s Syndrome. We took a decision to have the non-invasive pre-natal test (NIPT) which can tell you almost for certain, without the risk of an amniocentesis. The NIPT came back positive, and Down’s Syndrome was confirmed by amniocentesis a few days later. My husband and I spent ten days locked in a world of misery trying to decide what to do. We had discussed this possibility briefly earlier in the pregnancy, and both felt we would want to continue. And in the end, he did want to continue with the pregnancy. But in the end, I didn’t. We didn’t. I gave birth to our beautiful, tiny lifeless baby at 17 weeks in the maternity ward of our local hospital, to the cries of new-borns in the next room. We buried him a few weeks later.
We were broken, and it took us a couple of months to be brave enough to have sex again. By this time I was 40. We decided to do another round of IVF. I made one egg. It fertilised and went back in at three days. Two weeks later we got a negative. We were getting further without the doctors, so deciding not to bother with IVF anymore was not a difficult decision.
Three months later, I got pregnant again. We lost that pregnancy at 8 weeks. This time I needed a D&C. Since then, nothing.
In 18 months we had two miscarriages, two failed rounds of IVF and a termination.* We sometimes reflect that when we got married, my husband had never once seen me cry. That is how brief and happy our time together was before we started trying to conceive. Since then we have shared many, many tears.
I haven’t gone back on the pill, but more because we can’t quite bring ourselves to stop, than that we hope for anything anymore. We are investigating adoption, but honestly I don’t really have any idea right now what our future is going to look like.
We are each the lead protagonist in our own story, and I don’t know what the ending of mine will be. I fantasise about the day in the future when I will have made the remaining choices open to me, have made peace with my decisions and the path my life has taken, and feel able to tell my story. Until then I’m trapped in the deep, dark silence of the infertile woman, but I need to open up a chink to let some light in. So I guess this blog is my go at a first draft.
* Post-script: in November 2020 I had a third miscarriage, at eight weeks. In March 2021 I got another positive pregnancy test. Incredibly, as at August 2021, I'm 25 weeks and we seem to be doing okay.