Today a line was drawn

I’ve been thinking about writing this for some time to try and track my journey over the past few years.

You’re probably wondering what I am talking about or why I think anyone might be interested in reading what I need to say. Not necessarily want to say, but need to say and feel it needs to be said.

Let me start at the beginning.

For about the last five years we have been trying to get pregnant. I was in my late 30’s by this point, and I’d been worried about getting older and still wanting a family, but finding someone I wanted to share that journey with had taken longer than I had hoped (particularly compared to my very precise teenage plans about exactly when I wanted to get married {25} and start having kids {28}).

Anyway, so we tried. And it didn’t work. And I wasn’t really that worried, I knew we weren’t that good at ‘timing’ things. But I went to the doctor and got referred to the fertility clinic at the local hospital.

I had my first appointment some months later. I’d just turned 40. The doctor thought things looked good for my age which reassured me.

And then everything started to go wrong. My cycles stopped due to stress, probably as a result of a new job I’d taken on. This had never happened before and it was s*ds law it would happen as soon as I was trying to have fertility treatment.

Needless to say, the doctors were less and less positive the more the months passed and they tried with clomid (to stimulate follicle growth/egg production) and trigger shots (to make you ovulate). They also didn’t really explain things, so I was rather in the dark about what they were looking at and how things were going, all I knew was that ‘not well’ was the summary.

After 14months of this treatment, and a month after my wedding the clinic told me they could no longer treat me. I was also not eligible for IVF due to high hormone levels. The only treatment they could offer was at a different hospital if I could find someone to act as donor for me. That was not an option unfortunately.

So I researched and found something called mild IVF (more details on this in another blog). The nearest clinics for me were in the UK (I live in Amsterdam, Netherlands). I would have to travel for treatment. My initial assessment at the clinic was good, they seemed unperturbed by my hormone levels and happy to treat me… for a fee of course!

And so I paid for 6 cycles of treatment, expecting these would be done within a year.

Treatment began in January 2018… well, that was the plan. However, my body didn’t want to play nicely and it took 4? 5? failed cycles to finally finish one in June of that year. This tortuous process continued with some cycles going better than others with many more cancellations, early ovulation and failure to fertilise.

Most times in the cycles that went ahead some eggs were retrieved (between 1-3 which is acceptable for mild IVF at my age), and they’d fertilise… but they would never ever make it to the magical day 5 and blastocyst state.

As you can imagine, as this happened cycle after cycle waiting for the embryologist to call with another piece of bad news really started to get me down. I thought about writing this blog post then, but I wanted to continue to see where the story went first.

Yesterday was the final extraction day for my 6th cycle. Two years after paying for them.

It wasn’t looking like a good one to be honest. And after the 5th cycle when they tried with a fresh transfer on day 3 (which failed) I had really given up and just wanted to finish.

You might be wondering why on earth I would bother. And I did think that some times myself… but I’d paid for them and I also wanted to know when looking back that I had done everything I could. Also, forget about getting any type of refund after you’ve paid for treatment!

So I went for my final extraction yesterday. They got one egg… or rather, they thought they did, they weren’t sure (take it from me, this is not a good sign when a professional embryologist isn’t sure!), but they would wait and see if it fertilised overnight.

I suspect you might know where this is going.

It didn’t fertilise. It was too immature. So another failure. And this was the last one. I will not throw more money at this. Nothing has worked.

And today I realised, this finally draws a line under my chance to have a child with my own genetics. Its not like I hadn’t thought about it, but, suddenly it hit home. And its pretty hard.

My sisters kids will be more genetically similar to me than any child I might carry from an anonymous donor egg. I’m not sure how I feel about that right now.

However, there is a next step for me. Donor eggs. I’ll talk more about that and the stigmas surrounding it in another blog.

And so, there we are. I will never have my own genetic child, which is kind of funny when I think about the 2 decades I did everything to stop myself getting pregnant.

Oh, and some words of advice if you are planning to comment below. Please know that the following comments to those struggling with infertility are deeply upsetting:

‘why don’t you just adopt’ – just no. There is no ‘just’ in adopting. Its a hard, gruelling process and its not for every couple whether through local laws or possibilities or personal reasons.

‘just relax and it will happen’ – again, no, it won’t. I know more about my biology than you, please don’t say this.

‘I know someone who unexpectedly got pregnant at X age, so it could happen to you too’ – probably not, I refer you to the blog above.

So what can you say? Why not try something like: ‘Sorry to hear about your journey, it sounds tough, let me know if you want to talk about it’

Thank you for reading