I’m back. Over two years of not posting here, because I was in my head.
I’m sitting here with my baby, my little girl. She has been the focus of so much of my time over the last three years, yet she’s only six months old. How does that work, you ask?
Infertility. That’s how it works.
It’s such a hard thing to talk about. Secondary infertility. It took a while to have our son, so we thought we’d start trying early for a second child. So when our son turned one in late 2021, it began. And nothing happened. For over a year, no luck. No miscarriages or losses or anything. Just a negative line, month after month. So we signed up with Fertility Associates, only to be faced with a months-long wait for our first apppointment. That came and went, and we found out that my egg numbers were low. That was a kick in the teeth. I was an older mum, yes, but only 35. So not especially old.
The vitamin routine began. We signed up for IUI. We did it. It didn’t work. Then a bout of covid-19 wiped out the sperm count (turns out fevers and viruses can do that, and it takes at least 3 months to build numbers back up again. Did you know? We didn’t). We continued. Every month, a negative test. It became all I thought about.
It saps your energy, having things like this sitting on your mind, weighing it down. It’s lonely. How do you talk about it? There’s nothing to say. And in the meantime, people are suffering pregnancy losses and trying to cope with them in silence. Maybe we need to talk about all of it more – the whole journey, every struggle. I told close friends some parts about what was going on, so I wasn’t totally alone. But it’s still isolating.
I’ve blocked a lot of those two and a half years out now. It’s just a blur of appointments, daily blood tests to check hormone levels, vitamins, supplements, old wives’ tales. We were finally accepted into a study of people with secondary infertility, and were put into a group and given a free round of IVF. By now, it was January 2024. I got the IVF hormone medication and awaited my period so I could start the whole elaborate process on Day 1. But the period never came. That second line on the test finally, finally appeared. They tactfully kept me in the study with the hint that we could still do the IVF if this pregnancy didn’t go to term. But she did, and now she’s here. She’s got her dad’s eyes but otherwise looks exactly like her brother.
She arrived the day after my dad’s birthday. I spent his birthday evening quietly having contractions on the couch as I ate cake. The contractions continued into the night as I counted the minutes and breathed quietly through them. Then we left my mum to look after our son, drove to the birth centre in Hamilton, and she was born an hour after arrival, in the birth pool, without pain relief (I’d arrived too late to get any gas, haha!). Of course it happened while my midwife was away for the week. But she arrived early, early enough that Josh was able to go to his sister’s wedding ,which was happening on the original due date. This baby is considerate like that.
She was possibly early because a week earlier, we’d done an ECV (external cephalic version), which is a procedure to turn breech babies into the correct position. This can sometimes trigger the baby to get into birthing position. We had it done at 37 weeks, which meant the last week of my pregnancy was extremely comfortable despite being enormous, because she was finally in the correct position instead of having her head above my belly button. It meant I could give birth in the pool at the birth centre the way I’d always wanted to and never gotten to with my son due to complications.
So everything worked out nicely. I’m finally finding myself again. I often think of those whose infertility journey is much longer and more unsuccessful than mine. I think of those who don’t struggle to get pregnant but who instead struggle to keep it, a whole different level of grief and loss. I think of how those with secondary infertility exist in this weird limbo, where they already have a child, so people think they should just be grateful. We’re not “really” infertile. It’s a weird position to be in. I had a friend experiencing it at the same time as me, which I think helped us both. We could share complaints and stupid jokes to get through. When she told me she finally got pregnant, she was very considerate, knowing how it might make me feel, but luckily I was able to share my news at the same time. Our daughters were born only a month apart.
So now I am coming out from underneath that all-consuming cloud. I’m sending love and baby dust to anyone still walking underneath it.