‘Not pregnant,’ I say. Almost in disbelief.
Peter is silent for a while.
‘Maybe it’s too early,’ he says. ‘We should wait for the results of the blood test from the clinic.’
‘It won’t make any difference,’ I say. ‘I’m not pregnant.’
I hold the test in my hand, staring at it. I was so sure that this time it was going to work. That this time our luck had finally changed.
Then I have an idea. I prise the stick open: it falls apart relatively easily in my hands. I take out the little strip where the test lines appear. I hold it up to the light and examine it for a trace of a second line, even a very faint one.
But there’s nothing.
Then I start to wonder whether the test might be faulty. My mind runs through all the possibilities. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the detergent ball. Perhaps they have forgotten to add the chemical that reacts with the pregnancy hormone. Perhaps there are other women out there like me with a false result due to a dodgy batch. But, at the same time, the slow slide into disappointment and despondency has begun.
I guess zebras sometimes change their stripes, but leopards never change their spots.
We are due at the clinic at nine but I persuade Peter that, for once, it won’t matter if we’re late. I want to avoid the other women who were with me at egg collection and who I know will all be testing on the same day. I don’t want to have an awkward conversation in the corridor in which I blurt out that I’ve already done a test at home and the result was negative.
My plan works. When we arrive the clinic is empty, and I’m able to go in and out without seeing anyone.
Afterwards we walk to Regent’s Park and sit on a bench in the sun, waiting for the call. After two and a half hours it comes. The moment I answer I can tell from the way the nurse says ‘hello’ what she’s going to say. I ask her if there is any of the HCG pregnancy hormone in my blood at all, wondering – almost wishing – whether at the very least it might be another biochemical pregnancy. But she says there’s nothing. Not a trace.
Even my most pessimistic self can’t understand how after everything – the daily blood tests, scans and injections; the litre of milk and two of water; the extra supplements and acupuncture that I’ve been having on the side; Hoffman; and, of course, my sabbatical – that the result is negative. That it’s all been for absolutely nothing.
We sit in silence. I can hear the trickle of a fountain over to the right of us; the sun is warming my face; but my internal world has stopped with the shock and sadness that this is happening to us yet again.
The next day I start the process of telling people, by text and email. Family, friends, colleagues. So many people now know what we’ve been going through and that it has been one of the main reasons for my sabbatical. It’s hard and the last thing I want to do, but I know they’ll be waiting for the result.
The phone rings. It’s Beth. As soon as I pick up, she bursts into tears. Another friend sends me a text, urging me not to give up and saying she wants to organise a fundraiser to raise the money for us to try again. I am so touched by their concern and friendship. But how could I ever agree when people would probably just be throwing their money away.
I am due to start back at work tomorrow. I can’t put it off any longer, having already taken five weeks more than I was supposed to. The saddest thing is that all the happy memories of the last few months are difficult to hold on to now that the foremost reason for taking my sabbatical has failed. I lie awake all night thinking everything over. Just before I started treatment I had coffee with a friend of a friend who had been through multiple rounds of failed IVF at other clinics and had got pregnant with Mr Taranissi first time. She enthused about his clinic and said that she had met lots of people who had been there and that every one of them got pregnant. I remember saying how I hoped I wasn’t going to be the first person to let her down. But of course I am. Just in case I’d forgotten, good luck and miracles are what happen to other people.
I try to imagine what the rest of my life might be like: never experiencing what it feels like to be fat with pregnancy; never getting to feel that first kick of life inside me; never being able to say ‘I think my waters have broken’ (never even knowing what that really means); never being told to push by a kindly midwife; never being able to shout legitimately for gas and air; never having a newborn baby placed on my chest and saying hello for the first time.
After a while I become aware that Peter is lying awake next to me.
‘What do you think we should do now?’ I ask. ‘Is it time to give up?’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Of course not. I don’t want to accept that the last six and a half years have all been for nothing. But then I think about what not giving up means. Another round of: How many follicles? How many eggs? How many fertilised? Then the dreaded two-week wait. The fear of spotting. Now the fear of not spotting. I’m just not sure that I can do it any more.’
‘It’s hard,’ he says. ‘And unfair.’
‘So what do you think we should do?
‘I think we only give up when there’s no more hope. There’s still hope.’
We fall asleep in each other’s arms. When I wake up I feel light, but within moments consciousness takes over, and with it an overwhelming sense of sadness.
But there’s no time to dwell on it. It’s Monday morning and back to school.
The Infertility Diaries Part XXIII
Beyoncé is having a baby. She said she’d become a mother at thirty. She’s now twenty-nine and a half so her timing’s perfect. Unlike me, she was clearly the ‘-est’ of a lot of things at school: the prettiest, the talented-est, definitely the luckiest. The Evening Standard runs an article with the headline ‘30 THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU’RE 30’. Item Number 2 reads:
HAVE A BABY (IF YOU’RE A WOMAN)
We’ve all read those scary news stories – surely every 29-year-old is quaking with infertility fear? Now Beyoncé, our top role model, has got herself pre-30 pregnant. Time to follow suit.
Good advice, I’d say.
SHOW ME THE EVIDENCE
In addition to IVF I have tried most alternative therapies associated with infertility. Acupuncture. Homeopathy. You name it; I’ve been there. I haven’t just got the T-shirt, I’ve got one in every colour.
A few years after we started trying for a baby, someone recommended an acupuncturist to me who she was convinced had helped her to conceive. There’s nothing as persuasive as a personal recommendation so Peter and I both went to see her.
I have never got over how odd it feels to lie on a couch and have needles stuck into you. It’s not that they hurt – they are more like tiny pins than needles – it’s more that I can’t quite understand what they can actually be doing, as they hardly puncture the skin. The session would always start with her feeling my pulse and saying wise and weird things like, ‘Your yin is working hard today,’ or, ‘Your spleen is a bit sluggish.’ I wanted to believe it meant something but I could never really persuade myself that it did.
After each session Peter and I would compare notes.
‘How many needles did you have today?’ I’d ask.
‘Oh, I don’t know, about fifteen,’ he’d reply.
’Fifteen! That’s not fair. I only had two. Where did she put them?’
‘Well, I had three in each ear…’
‘In your ears? I only ever get a couple in my hands and feet. Sometimes my stomach if I’m lucky.’
‘Maybe my need is greater.’
‘Maybe you’re just getting special treatment,’ I harrumphed.
Despite my ongoing competition with Peter about numbers of needles, I enjoyed my visits to Ann the acupuncturist. She had that motherly quality that a lot of alternative therapists have, and it made me relax as soon as I arrived. She was also a cranial therapist, and would sit at the top of the table and hold my head whilst the needles did their thing. I could never work out what this di
d either but it felt nice. I often wonder whether she had some psychic-like power and just by feeling my pulse or touching my head she could tell what was going on in my body and why I wasn’t able to conceive. If she did, she never said.
So if acupuncture alone couldn’t help me, maybe something else could. The next thing I tried was changing my diet and taking homeopathic supplements. These had incredible names like Saccarromyces boulardii and Lactobacillus plantarum rhamnosus salivarius. You couldn’t make it up, except someone clearly has. And then there were the fertility detox diets. In one of them, food was subdivided into three groups: the green group, the blue group and the brown group. On days 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12 and 14 you could only eat foods from the green group, and on days 3, 5, 7, 8, 10 and 13 you could eat from the green and the blue groups. Food in the brown group was forbidden at all times (no prizes for guessing that this was all the nice stuff). It was a full-time job just keeping up with the menu-planning and shopping, and then there was the cooking. I defy anyone to live this way on a long-term basis.
I think part of my problem with it all is that I’ve never really believed in vitamins. Throughout my adult life my eating philosophy has been to have a varied diet plus a little bit of what I fancy. Admittedly, I don’t always manage five fruit and vegetable portions a day. Who does? And I’m probably a little too friendly with a few carbohydrates. But overall I think I’m pretty healthy. Consequently I found the mass of homeopathic remedies that I was prescribed a little overwhelming. I saw one nutritionist who put together a protocol for me that involved taking eighteen different supplements a day. I really liked her and she looked amazing, which made her a great advert for her own advice, but I just couldn’t face putting all that stuff inside me. We had a rather awkward conversation when I received her prescription and asked her if she could recommend just one or two things off the list that she thought would really make the difference. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘They are all essential.’ She wouldn’t back down. I didn’t either.
Sometimes I wonder whether the nutritionist, like my acupuncturist, knew something about my body that I didn’t. Perhaps if I had followed her combination of pills and potions to the letter things would be different. But sometimes you have to go with your gut. And my gut said no.
If you are dealing with infertility and conventional medicine doesn’t work for you, it’s natural to want to try other options. Added to this there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that alternative therapies can help. But when I asked my consultant in Oxford what he thought, he said: ‘It makes me feel like I’m in the film Jerry Maguire. Do you remember the sequence when Tom Cruise is banging on the table shouting, “Show Me The Money”? Well I’m Jerry Maguire, but in my case I’m shouting, “Show Me The Evidence! SHOW ME THE EVIDENCEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”’
So if alternative therapies make you feel better, and you think that they are working, then carry on doing whatever you’re doing. My problem is that the needles and supplements never really made me feel any different. They certainly never got me pregnant. I wish I could say that they had and that I am a living, breathing piece of anecdotal evidence. But sadly I can’t.
The Infertility Diaries Part XXIV
I am longing for the day when I can attend a pregnancy yoga class. I’ve been doing yoga on and off for nearly twenty years and it’s something I’ve always looked forward to. I’ve observed that there are two types of yoga mothers to be: the earth-mother type who wears expensive-looking floaty linen; and the sporty type who wears tight-fitting lycra-layers which show off her bump. I wonder which type of yoga-mother I’m going to be. Lately it seems as if every regular class I go to is sandwiched between a class for pregnant women. I have to admit that it’s crossed my mind that I could just go along and pretend.
THE SECRET CYCLE
I try my best not to go through our next cycle. I really do. There’s a lot going on in our lives. I’m back at work, busy as I ever was. Added to this, my father has had to go into hospital and we are spending all our evenings and weekends there with him.
At our follow-up appointment with the clinic they strongly advise us to have another go. They still can’t offer us a diagnosis but they do suggest we throw in some immune treatment next time around, just to make sure we’ve covered all the bases. Like all our previous clinics they seem confident that next time it will work.
I do want to give Mr T at least one more attempt at performing his miracles on me, but I also know that our time and money is running out fast. If we are going to go through it again the timing needs to be precision perfect.
I go in for a blood test and a scan on the first day of my period. All the indications are that it would be a good month to try again. It is two months since our last cycle and, having waited an age for that to start, now everything is happening in a rush.
‘To be honest, I’d rather have a break,’ I say to the doctor who sees us. ‘I only want to start if it looks like it’s going to be a really good month.’
‘Well your blood results are excellent. Oestradiol not too high. Lots of small follicles in both ovaries. It looks like it is a good month.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
Later that day I get a call from the clinic.
‘Mr T says you’re ready to go. No down-regulation this time. Straight to stimulation. Congratulations.’
‘Oh,’ I say again.
Why do I sound ever so slightly disappointed? Of course I don’t want to miss a good month. Not with my forty-first birthday fast approaching. Perhaps – as Peter has written in every birthday card he’s given me for the last few years – this really is going to be our lucky year. I have one month left. Enough time to go through another cycle and get the results before I am yet another year older, further in debt and closer to menopause.
So, this becomes the secret cycle. I tell no one. I avoid my closest friends so I don’t have to lie to them. I work right through it, shooting up in the disabled loo of the theatre like a regular drug addict. I fabricate a meeting across town so I can sneak into the clinic for a four-hour intravenous blood transfusion, which is a core part of Mr T’s immune therapy. And even on the morning of egg collection I am back in work and at my desk by 10 a.m., slightly drowsy from the anaesthetic. But no one notices. At least I don’t think they do.
In some ways it’s just like the old days. But things have also changed. This time I know I’ve tried it another way. Four months off. Feet in the air. It didn’t make an ounce of difference – in fact it was arguably one of the least successful cycles I’ve ever had. I keep thinking about all the women in the world who have sustained pregnancies in the most terrible circumstances. Running a theatre isn’t going to make or break it. It’s either going to work or it isn’t. I’m not sure whether I’ve actually got anything to do with it.
The day after egg collection six out of our eight eggs have fertilised. This is a good result in our fertilisation rate stakes, and one more than last time. By Day 3 all six are still developing and the embryologist at the clinic says that Mr T is extremely pleased with their quality and has recommended that we wait until they reach blastocyst(!) before putting them back.
Day 5 arrives. A Saturday. Peter is working so I go to the clinic alone. Up until now he’s always been with me for our embryo transfer. But in the same way that I’ve been pretty relaxed about everything else this cycle, I feel fine about this too. I settle down in the waiting room. Nervously excited. Within a few minutes one of the embryologists calls me through to the reception.
‘Hi Jessica,’ she says. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Well, a little bit anxious, I guess. How are they doing?’
‘They’re fine. All of them are still developing,’ she says.
‘But?’ I say. I know there’s going to be one. This is me, after all.
The embryologist looks at me kindly.
‘Yes, but, none of them have reached blastocyst yet,’ she says. ‘So I think we’re going to wait until tomorrow to m
ake a decision on which to put back.’
‘Tomorrow?’ I say. ‘That will be Day 6. Is that normal?’
‘Well, not normal as such, but it can happen. It does happen. There’s nothing to worry about.’
Here we go again. Nothing to worry about but something new to google: blastocyst transfer on Day 6. For every negative entry I find there’s also a positive one, and, naturally, the obligatory story of a woman who had two blastocysts transferred on Day 6 and now has twins. But it’s like spotting. Of course it doesn’t necessarily mean the worst but it’s also not a great sign. Our embryos are developing slower than they should, and, contrary to Aesop’s fable, the tortoise doesn’t always win the race.
On the bright side (the Price side), Peter will be home tomorrow and can come with me for the transfer.
Sunday morning. We arrive at the clinic for a long wait. Eventually the embryologist calls us downstairs.
‘How are things today?’ I ask tentatively.
I’m already practically convinced that none of them have survived and they have spent all this time planning their strategy about how they are going to tell me.
‘They’re fine,’ she says. ‘You’ve got a couple of really nice ones.’
‘Really?’ I say disbelievingly.
‘Yes. Really.’
After another long wait three of our embryos are transferred. The other three are deemed not high enough quality for freezing. When we finally emerge from the clinic it’s long past lunch. We’re starving and the five of us (me, Peter and our three embryos) head to Soho for a burger. I’ve already worked out long ago that I’m going to be a junk-food-in-moderation mother. Might as well start as I mean to go on.
So here we are yet again. My ninth two-week wait. A couple of days in and I have a few tiny spots of dark brown blood. My heart sinks as I return to the Internet for what must be the millionth time to search ‘spotting’ and ‘implantation bleeding’. Even as I’m doing it, I’m thinking: what the hell is there that I don’t already know about this subject? But I find a new site which says that spotting a few days after transfer is much more likely to be implantation bleeding (a good sign), and spotting near to your pregnancy test date is much more likely to be the onset of your period (a bad sign). Previously I’ve always started spotting just a few days before I was due to test, so I decide to tell myself that it must be implantation bleeding. After a day it goes away, adding further fuel to my theory.
The Pursuit of Motherhood Page 14