So intrauterine insemination is basically a procedure where semen is taken away, and it can be donor’s semen if there’s a male fertility issue. But in my husband’s case he had to provide a sample, take it up to the hospital or the fertility clinic. That was washed and spun to, I think to get the optimum sperm, to kind of get the best swimmers for want of a better analogy, and then inject those back in a procedure that was fairly similar to a smear. It, there was nothing painful or uncomfortable about it really. It was just fairly straightforward. Kind of wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. It was very very simple and quick, and low-tech I think. I think I was surprised by that. I expected things to be a little bit more scientific. But it did seem fairly basic. And I think also IUI for us, it did feel very much like, you know, Well what is it, what is different about IUI than what we’re doing naturally I couldn’t really see the benefit of it. But I carried on with it because I wanted a baby and I was told that this was the route that I needed to take. And I guess something about being infertile and having this label of infertile did make me question myself on so many different levels. I started to question everything, all the, all my decisions, what I knew about everything. I think because a fairly fundamental part of my life I wasn’t able to do, I started to wonder about everything. How, I started to feel inept and that did have an effect on everything that I did. It made me question my own decision-making abilities. And in a way I just, I certainly feel as though I handed over responsibility for my, for making a child over to fertility specialists. Because I clearly didn’t know how to do it. And I was like, There you go. You get me pregnant And it was almost absolving myself of responsibility, of feeling unable to achieve something. So my husband’s sperm was taken off, washed and spun, and then injected back into me. I would lay down for a few minutes at the clinic, and then that was it. It was just kind of, you know, the two-week wait, which a lot of women and men will be familiar with. We had three attempts at IUI. We were recommended to have four attempts, but actually on the third one my husband needed to be away with work. And so he’d taken his sperm sample down to the clinic. It was washed and spun and then injected back into me. But I remember lying there, and this was the first time that he hadn’t been there with me, and I remember lying there on this hospital couch thinking, If I get pregnant now, my husband wouldn’t have even been in the same room And that really was a wake-up call for me. I think this, this would have been about three or four years into, or four years into making the decision to start trying to have children. And I remember thinking this was so far removed from the kind of rosy-tinted notion of making a baby that I’d had. And I decided then to put a stop to fertility treatment. I decided not to have IVF, and to, to leave it there and to try and regain some kind of control of my life, our life.

And then we had, we started IUI and we had – they said we will do six. Because they did a few tests and everything seemed fine. So they said, Let’s do six IUI’s and see how we go. If they don’t work then let’s think then about IVF. And on the sixth IUI there was some evidence of being some implantation. It was a very low HCG level and that then made me feel more confident that things weren’t blocked, that thing’s weren’t, you know, that it could happen. So they said, Well let’s do another six

I mean at every stage they gave me lots of choice. It wasn’t, but six, another six sounds good and we did another four. So we’d done ten in all. And I think I just became dispirited. I thought that’s enough. Let’s do IVF. Because it’s really expensive you know, if you do ten, you start getting to thinking well we could have done a couple of IVFs. So we said let’s do the IVF. And they were really supportive about that. There was no sense that they wereI never felt they were pushing me one way or another. But if I said to them, What would you do if you were me They would often, they would say. But at the end of the day it’s our choice.

And the IUI’s you did them in six months. Did you do them in six months on the trot or

They wouldn’t let you. They made you have a month off in between. I always suspected that was for mental reasons rather than physical reasons I think, but I would have been much happier just doing that. And, a couple of times they gave me Clomiphene, a couple of times I grew some little cysts and they made me have another month off which is awful. I hated, I hated the months off. They drove me more mad than the months of doing it. I would have been really happy to doand it’s my understanding as well if you did six in a year you raised your chance of I don’t know, ovarian cancer, some, some, it was some health risk, but at the time I was just thinking I want to get pregnant. And I want to get pregnant now. That was my mainnbsp;

So I used to pester them into letting me not have months off and I think when I grew the cysts, I said, Well let’s do it without the Clomiphene then So I think a couple of those six were done without the stimulating drugs.

Were they happy to do that?

Yes, I mean they said, it’s less likely to happen And I said, Well not less likely then not trying Because I mean in a lesbian relationship you’re not going to accidentally get pregnant in the month off. So, you know, and I felt that I was getting older, and also I’m impatient anyway. And wanted to get on with it.

So yes, they were pretty good at advising but then going along with what, but most of the time I think it coincided with what they thought.

Probably because when I had the Clomid it was just a question of taking tablets and then going at the time for a scan, which they don’t do any more and if it didn’t work that is when you had a period. In terms of the IUI, the thing that I found most stressful, was that depending which nurse I saw, everyone seemed to have a different opinion as to what was going to happen. So what was happening, I had two or three follicles developing nicely and I was expected to go for treatment two days later to actually have the eggs released and my husband’s sperm to be processed and put into the uterus and at the time I expected that all to happen. I went in the next day and another nurse, nothing had changed, and the nurse said, Oh no, there is more than two follicles we can’t let this proceed. You would be an ideal candidate for IVF, but we are not going to take that risk And at the time I had to cancel business plans, tickets to a meeting in Switzerland and it was just so very devastating. Nobody pre-warned me that that could potentially happen. And I found that very, very difficult to deal with.