So describe to me what the treatment was like?

It. When we first went for the appointment to get all the injections and that it was really exciting and it was such a positive move. And you think well it’s finally going to happen. And you get presented with this big box of needles and you think, oh my god. And [husband] had his crash course in how to do my injections. And it was ok to start with because you go away and you’ve got your injections to think about every day and you have to have them at the right time. You can’t have them late. You’ve got to keep them in the fridge.

And then after a few days I started going black and blue with all these bruises and I was thinking it doesn’t matter. It’s going to be perfect. And you carry on with it and went back for our scan and they said, Oh we expect you know, to have about ten eggs. And I’d got five and that’s a bit of a shock. I cried a lot then in hospital. It’s not as if it’s my fault and I’d done something wrong. And they said we’ll change your dosage of your injections.

And then going back in to have the egg collection frightened the life out of me. I’ve never been put out before and I was convinced that I would be able to feel them doing everything and I wouldn’t be able to speak. And I can remember coming around in this room. Them giving me the injection to start with thinking, that’s not going to do anything. And then hearing them say my name thinking I knew it wouldn’t work and having this pain and thinking, Oh they’ve done it,’ [laugh]. That was quite painful afterwards, very, very sore and very sensitive. And then you don’t sleep because you’re waiting for the phone call next morning to hear if, you know, the eggs have taken. And then you don’t sleep the next night because they ring you every day to tell you how they’re doing. And then we had, I had them collected on the Friday and we went back in on the Monday and they said, Would you like to see under the microscope?’ And it’s amazing to see them. Oh that could be our children.

So you sat and leant over a microscope and looked at them?

Yeah. And I saw them before they were put back. And they were gone. [Ha] it’s…

So how many did you have put back?

Two. We had two put back.

And then you had to go and wait two weeks?

Two weeks, two very long weeks. Before we’d had to think about the injections every day and it’s sort of, oh tomorrow I’ve got an appointment and the next I haven’t but another one after that. It was just two weeks of nothing. No appointments, just waiting. And it’s just like a lifetime.

I was all ready with our pregnancy tests and I had a show of blood the day before and at work I was just numb. And they said, oh no you’ll could still be pregnant. You just need to go home, put your feet up. Do take your pessaries.

That was a right performance. And you’ve. When they say to you it doesn’t mean you’re not pregnant, you could still be. In the morning you think, I’m ok. And you don’t sleep and then we did two tests next morning and I can remember doing it and getting back into bed and waiting for [husband] to come back in the bedroom and tell me. And he was crying. So. I can remember having to ring my Nan. We’ve done a test Nan and it hasn’t worked. She said, Oh you don’t want to take no notice of those newtests,’ [laugh]. And she went, she meant well by it but it didn’t help.

So it was very hard. And then we just sort of laid in the bed and cuddled each other but you don’t know, you don’t know what to do, what to talk about to each other, it’s not like oh well shall we go shopping [laugh]. Oh well what do we do now? Very hard. Felt very empty. We used to go to, we ate for comfort so go somewhere nice for lunch and as soon as we walk in, see a high chair. I go, I’m not staying, I’m not staying’ [laugh]. Let’s go somewhere else. So…

How long did that numbness last?

I think it was about May when we found out I was pregnant.

So a year?

Yeah. I didn’t know even when we got our letter from [hospital] to say we’d been approved for the treatment. It’s an automatic thing. You just cry. I said, I don’t know if I can face it. I don’t know if I can go through it again. You feel as if you put all your energy into picking yourself back up. I don’t know if I can. If I pick myself up again to face it. So now we’ve been so lucky you know our luck has changed. I don’t know if I could have kept going on and on. When you read all these people on different websites and they’ve six times, now it’s seven times. You think, Oh where does their money come from. So how are you strong enough to keep doing it and being knocked back again. Don’t think I could have.

Some people, some people like to take that time off work. But I actually found working in that thing, in that bit of time was the best thing that I could possibly do, because it was the only thing that actually distracted me and it did mean that I had to focus on something else and think about something else. I think if I’d been at home in that bit of time I would have gone completely bonkers, because I wouldn’t have thought about anything all day long and all night long other than whether it had worked or not. And our first treatment cycle didn’t work, it wasn’t successful. And initially I was, I wasn’t too bad about it. I just kind of thought, Oh, well, it hasn’t worked. That’s it and, you know, get back on with things.

Then it was a few days later that it actually really hit me that, you know, this was our only way of having a baby, this was our last chance. And if this kind of hi-tech thing didn’t work, then maybe nothing would ever work and maybe I’d never be able to have a baby. And I was just, I went through a phase of just being completely devastated. I really couldn’t cope at all. And I think sometimes there’s not enough support during that time. Because after unsuccessful treatment is probably the time you most need counselling and help. And the clinic did say, Oh, you know, you can come in and talk to u but they left a gap of a few weeks before I went back. And it was just a really really horrible time actually, really horrible time.

Because of the ups and downs I think. The ups and downs of it all. Because one minute you are absolutely, you have the hope of it is the best place, there is, you know, and then the down of it is not happening, it is either not going to happen, you have failed, you now the emotional ups and downs are terrible. But the fact is that you feel that because there are other people around you are letting everybody down. It is not just yourself, you are letting everybody else down. And the other thing that I found very difficult was that when you felt that you had let them down and they were saying you haven’t let them down, you still feel like you had, but also you are trying to cope with their grief as well. It was like a domino of grief, everywhere. I did say domino grief, yes it was. And it was everybody else around me, felt sorry for you and wanted to help and support you, but you wanted to do the same for them. In a funny way, as well, so it was the whole ups and downs. Yes definitely the ups and downs of it all, emotional trauma.

Grief is a funny word to use isn’t it? For

I think it is right though. I tell you what I did feel like, when they there is two things I felt like. The second time when the egg didn’t fertilise and we couldn’t obviously, and then when the fourth embryo wasn’t suitable for treatment I felt like our babies had died. And that again is absolutely, totally irrational, but I mean they weren’t babies at all, they were nothing. I mean they weren’t anything were they? But I did feel like it in those labs were my little babies that had died. And the same with the two that didn’t make it. You know, the same again, I had visions of them just sort of like slipping out and trying to hold on and things. Weird dreams and things like that, you know, of trying to sort of come to terms with it. And that is why as soon as you get pregnant, got pregnant I felt like even though it was a ball of cells that, you know [son], I didn’t know it as [son] then, but it was my little baby, you know, and I think it becomes exacerbated, the feelings, I think, I am not sure if that is true or not. Because I haven’t really talked about it to someone who has just got pregnant on their own. But the feelings for the ones that did and didn’t make it, I think are amplified. But there is a feeling of grief, about, it being something has died and that sort of thing. I felt like when me Dad died that sort of thing. It is the same feeling definitely. Although nothing has actually died, there has never really anything been there. Do you know what I mean?

I mean the grief starts very early on I think, when you find out that you have to have fertility treatment. I think even before you start the infertility treatment. It’s not just kind of the grieving that we’ve done since the miscarriages. We, we haven’t had a failed cycle, and a lot of our friends have had the grief of, of going through the whole IVF cycle and getting nothing, getting to the end of it and getting a negative result. But I think even going right back to when you first find out that you have a fertility problem and you’re not going to be one of the majority that just, you know, goes to bed and makes a baby, I think there is an enormous amount of grief there in dealing with a loss of something that’s, that, you know, as I say should be so natural and so special. And I think for, particularly for the person, the part-, member of the, you know, the couple, the, the man or the woman who finds out that it’s potentially their fault is a very loaded word, but their problem that is causing that, there’s a lot of grief around that as well. I think it’s, it’s coming to terms almost with a loss. You know, it’s a loss of your ability to conceive in the way that everybody else takes for granted. And then you’ve got to come to terms with having to actually go through an IVF cycle. And then of course we had the grief of the loss of the, the children we conceived through the IVF as well. As I say we haven’t even encountered the potential loss of a cycle that comes to nothing, that is negative. And we have friends who’ve been through countless negative cycles. And the depths of loss there as well just must be horrendous, and misunderstood I think. People think, Well, you’ve done an IVF cycle and it didn’t work. But where’s the loss? But what they forget is that every IVF cycle creates embryos. And to, to the IVF patient those embryos are the beginnings of a baby. And even if they don’t implant, even if that cycle comes to a negative, those women and, you know, those couples still do talk, or some of them do talk about those, those lost babies, those babies that have been lost, that were never implanted, that never grew into anything, never developed into a child. But there’s still that constant sense of loss. So I think the, the loss in infertility is huge, and ongoing. It’s like a bereavement that never ends. Because as with, you know, with most bereavements, you have the bereavement, you go through very very huge depths of grief and anger and sadness, and then gradually you start to rebuild your life and start to move forward. But with infertility there isn’t that ability to move forward, because it never stops. It just goes on and on and on and on for years and years and years. And obviously at some stage it has to either come to an end in terms of, either you’re successful in completing your family, or you have to draw a line in the sand and say, We’ve had enough and we can’t do this anymore. But I think, either path I think you will always be left with that grief. I think even if we are successful and we do have a family, I don’t think we’ll ever really, well, we won’t ever forget what we’ve had to go through to get that family. We won’t ever forget that we’ve had all these years of our life kind of taken from us because of the infertility, and because by now we should have completed our family, we should have had at least two or three children. You know, we were planning to have a big family and we wanted them quite close together. So in four years we could easily have had, you know, I probably would have been pregnant with my third baby at this stage if everything had panned out the way it should have done. And that’s hard to come to terms with that grief. It’s hard to come to terms with the thought that all that’s gone and you can never get it back. So, yes, I think the, the loss is huge.

Oh, yes, I have felt really, and I think I said before I tend to shut myself away. Because that’s just how I deal with it. I don’t want to inflict my misery on other people.

I just find it hard to see other people at that stage. So I, you find that you’ll do what’s best, what works, and I find that that’s what I need. I just need a, two or three weeks where I can just get over it in my time, and then gradually open up.

Obviously it does affect him, it does affect him. And we’ve both cried obviously. But he is stronger, he can go back to work. And I think it’s just men in general don’t talk as much about things, do they? But when I’m ready I do, I talk to my friends, my family about it when I feel I can without constantly crying. But initially that’s what I do, I tend to just, I need that time just on my own, just to recover. People are different. Some people I guess can bounce back and it’s just, and, and perhaps work, they can, work can swallow them up and they cannot have to think about it. But everyone’s different. But that’s how I deal with it.

Then obviously it’s the huge stress about how many embryos there, are fertilised over night, are they going to survive the two days to transfer? Or the five days to blastocyst as in our last case. And of the two week wait is just hell, it is like you know, the two week wait, when you are just trying naturally. But times by a thousand, the investment financial, emotional is just huge. And you analyse absolutely everything. Everything that could possibly bea pregnancy symptom or a period symptom gets analysed. You just obsess about it constantly. And then obviously when it doesn’t work it’s just devastating. It really is.

And it takes a long time to recover from a failed cycle actually. What people don’t realise unless they have been through it, its grief. You are grieving for the babies that, you know, I suppose in its basic term we produce embryos, we produced what had the potential to become our children and on our first cycle we may even have named those embryos. We even had a little picture of them stuck to the fridge. We thought about them as our real, as our real children, and when they don’t make it, there is a real grief that you feel and you have to acknowledge that and give yourself the time to grieve for them before you are going to be anywhere near capable of moving on to do it again.

So it’s incredibly emotional. But it’s always described as a rollercoaster. And it’s so true because it is just highs and lows constantly. Sadly quite often a lot more lows than highs.

Did you know that when you went in?

We had been told it. Whether we’d listened or not is probably different. You always, everybody always says, oh it is a complete emotional roller coaster, but you don’t expect it to be as bad as it is, you don’t expect it to be as painful, emotionally painful. Certainly I didn’t, I never ever expected a failed cycle to hurt in the way that the failed cycle hurt. It was awful. Absolutely devastating.