IVF & Me

Copied from my Substack

This wasn’t exactly how it all started. This was 2017, a good three years into discovering motherhood wouldn’t be as easy as i’d always assumed. I’m the daughter of a midwife, with childbearing hips, who always believed I could decide exactly when and with whom I wanted to get pregnant. But along came the “unexplained infertility” of PCOS (polycystic without the syndrome), the bicornuate uterus (heart-shaped but less cute than it sounds), the month after month of Big Fat Negative test results, the male factor infertility, the hidden cervix. When I list all this now it all sounds pretty explicable to me so I guess the diagnosis was just a medical way of saying “sorry, we don’t know”.

Discovering you are infertile is a complicated path. It’s shameful, confusing and isolating and I didn’t want anyone to know until I could no longer bear the burden alone. So, after a chemical pregnancy on our sixth round of IVF treatment, I sat and wrote this article. Lewis read it and said it should be published and read by more people than my measly social media following. So I sent it round to some editors and Nicola Jeal published it in The Times. What followed was an overwhelming flood of messages to both me and Lewis - from strangers, old school friends, close friends, relatives, neighbours, politicians, colleagues - saying thank you for articulating the grief of it all and how brave I was for saying it while we were still in the trenches of treatment.

This article gave me a sense of control and empowerment that I’ve harnessed ever since. A rebirth, if you will, and you’ll excuse any crap pun. I realised I could own my story and narrate it in my own voice. Having spent years as a broadcaster, telling other people’s stories, I hadn’t been confident enough to tell my own - I thought I would sound self-indulgent, even silly. I worried that my writing style was too personal (I write how I speak) and mostly I worried that because I wasn’t an expert in infertility I didn’t have the right to speak about my own experience. It would all just fall flat and i’d be ushered out of yet another room - embarrassed, crushed. But, The Times published everything I had written in that crumpled up mess on the sofa on a rainy Autumnal evening. They published it word for word. Any other journalists reading this will know the deep joy of “no edits needed”.

Lewis and I went on to produce a YouTube series called “Our IVF Diary” which documented in real time our next round of treatment after this article was published. Again, it was about reclaiming the narrative and putting some purpose into the seemingly never-ending rollercoaster of infertility. I will perhaps write more and share this YouTube series in future posts here.

But really, this was where it all started for me. Vulnerable, accepting, admitting that I was sinking. That I was a shell of the woman i’d imagined myself to be. That my body had let me down. That I had failed. That I would never be the same again no matter how the story ended.

Spoiler alert… the goal was to be parents and the goal never changed. We just moved the goalposts.

The story continues…