Captains log: 4th November 2018
I always thought I was little Miss Lucky Pants. I’d never had an ‘oh shit’ moment, in fact, I’d never even had the smallest of scares. I went through my twenties and early thirties thinking I was blessed. When I was 34 I discovered something monumental about myself. I discovered that I was infertile.

EVER been really shocked? Yeah, well, that was me.

HOW did I go from lucky to having the worst luck? Aren’t we inherently programmed to procreate? Don’t all women dream of becoming a mother? I had never really thought about it. I never wanted to get married either so perhaps that’s why I could never stick in one. But here’s something I didn’t feel…I didn’t feel a failure. It is just one of those things. I couldn’t predict it so couldn’t avoid it and I wasn’t going to feel any bloody shame over it either.

GROWING up you think you know it all. I didn’t know I didn’t ovulate. And it turned out, I didn’t really know what ovulation was anyway. My friend used to say “you know you’re ovulating when you get that clear minty gel”… erm, well she might have but I’d never seen it!

AFTER tons of initial tests which involved ovulation monitoring (or not, in my case) and checking to see if the swimmers swam, we found ourselves looking for private IVF clinics. Because in case you don’t know, IVF, like cancer treatment, is a postcode lottery. Yep, some bureaucrat decides, depending where you live, whether the NHS will help you or not. The irony is we could have been lucky but it got more complicated and the NHS couldn’t stretch to ‘complicated’.

THE first time we attended the fertility clinic my luck was back. I had the BEST consultant (in the whole wide world). And the nursing staff were everything you could want. Kind, patient and ready with the Kleenex (for tears you filthy lot!) for when you inevitability started crying. Which I did. A lot. I may not have been ovulating but my hormones were raging. Not being able to get pregnant is a funny thing. I have never been competitive. About anything. I have always put that down to being quite lazy. But tell a woman she can’t conceive and she becomes Usain Bolt. That shit makes you nuts.

AND then the fun begins. You leave your clinic of choice armed with vials of ‘magic juice’ that are going to make your egg production exceed all expectation (and hopefully not burst) and a box of needles, a plunger and a rather fetching bright yellow sealed bucket to dispose of my used needles. Classy.

You also make fast friends with ET’s finger. If you have never seen an ET finger style probe…google that shit. The first time I saw that coming toward me I started to edge up the bed to get away. Gives a fab picture though. Better than most TV’s in the 80’s.

LET me tell you something; when you can’t get pregnant you are like a beacon for every pregnant woman in the world. You see mums-to-be, new babies and toddlers everywhere. You also see those who don’t cherish their children and it makes you a psychopath. I was in a constant state of wanting to punch people. Berate them for not looking after something so precious. Hearing a baby cry reduces you to tears in seconds. I used to be that way only about animals. Pesky hormones.

THE first time I had to inject on my own, I was sitting in the front bedroom of my friends’ house (her of the clear minty gel fame), which had lovely old Victorian windows and she lived down a road where NOBODY had any fecking curtains and there we were sitting on the edge of the bed with my jeans around my ankles, syringe in hand, having just plunged and drawn into my magic liquid and pushing the air out before doing the next part. Again, classy.

WE did the old “on the count of 3 do it…no, I’m not ready, say it again… Okay, 1, 2, 3. No, wait, not yet, I need to breathe. Okay, start counting….” This went on for a few minutes before I just did it. How proud I was that I’d managed to inject myself. On a side note by the time I finished injecting months later, I was pretty much black and blue and looking like a kitchen colander but god I was fast at it.

DUE to many factors I had to go through ICSI. Conventional IVF is the ‘fun’ one. You pop your ready to rock’n’roll egg in a Petri dish and chuck in a shit load of the best swimmers and watch the strongest become champ before popping the egg back in. ICSI is a single best swimmer (the Michael Phelps of sperm if you will) injected direct into the egg before the popping back in process. It also costs a hell of a lot more.

THE first round ended in sadness, disappointment and tears. The second time was with the two best frozen ones we had in the freezer (their freezer, not mine) and that too ended in failure.

I was then shipped off to London for a blood test. A single blood test that cost £800. Robbing bastards! All I could think of on the way up there was that I hope they don’t bloody bruise me for 800 quid.

WHAT they found from those tests will have implications for the rest of my life. They discovered I have Lupus. For me, this meant that my uterus walls couldn’t hold onto my fertilised eggs. So Little Miss Lucky Pants had to then face the exciting prospect of not only going through the whole ‘lets inject for the next three months’ to get ready for the harvest (my eggs, not festival) but I would then have to start (if the pregnancy test was positive) on a new round of injections (that would last another 8 weeks) to hopefully make sure the pesky uterus got the eggs in a proper headlock and wouldn’t drop them like a hot stone. This resulted in a positive pregnancy test.

OVER the last 12 years I have read quite a few accounts of women in the same boat as me and a couple of words /lines have jumped out of each article. Shame. Failure. Not a proper woman. Is this true? Do we look at women who can’t conceive without assistance as failures? Do we believe this to be some kind of punishment thereby it’s okay to attach shame to them? Am I less of a woman? Frankly, I think my inability to walk in heels says far more in support of that than not being able to get up the duff.

NOR am I bitter and twisted with jealousy of others’ ease at getting knocked up. ‘Clear minty gel’ got the shock of her life when she found out she was pregnant as I was going through this process. She was petrified of telling me for no other reason than she didn’t want to hurt me. That made me sad. It still makes me sad,; that in her moment of happiness, she was instead, worried she would hurt me. Two months later, I rang he to tell her my pregnancy test was positive. I think I can still hear her screams of joy on a quite day.

MY ex-husband (number 2) and his wife had a baby girl just over 4 years ago. The day he told me about the pregnancy, I could see it in his face too. He was worried I would be upset. Not that he’d moved on but that their ease at getting pregnant would hurt me. It didn’t. I was genuinely thrilled for them. I wouldn’t wish infertility on anybody. Today, they are the proud parents of a beautiful little girl who is adored by her brothers. A new life is beautiful and should be celebrated.

I am not a failure. I do not feel shame. And I am not less of a woman. What happened to me along with millions of other women is part of life’s lottery. I had an awful lot of years having fun, having no responsibilities and getting to travel. I think I’ve been pretty damn lucky.

IVF hurts; physically for me, mentally for others. But every stab of those needles was totally worth it. Every intrusive scan? Totally worth it.

I may not have been one of the chosen ones [to be able to do this naturally] but I’m not a broken one either. Look what I got…two perfect boys. And if I thought getting up the duff was stressful, it’s probably nothing compared to their upcoming teenage years!

I am proud of what I went through to get pregnant. It taught me many things. And for that I am grateful and blessed.

BIG SNOGS
Kitty xxx