Frozen Hope

by Jacqui Cooper

  Now I know that there can be quite a difference between a 33-year-old woman’s eggs and a 38-year-old woman’s eggs. With younger eggs, my IVF story might have been a whole lot shorter!

  6

  A Necessary Function

  Mario and I have this saying that started back when I was jumping. Every so often there’d be a day when I’d lose my nerve. I’d be standing at the top of the in-run waiting to go and everything would be okay, but for some reason I just couldn’t bring myself to jump.

  A couple of times when this happened I was able to reach Mario on the mobile. I’d tell him what was going on with me and he’d reply jokingly, ‘You just need someone to push you off …’

  We started saying this whenever one of us was dithering over something, and found it was a great way to snap ourselves out of indecision. I think that was how it was with Mario having a child with me – in the end he just needed someone to push him off!

  WHEN I RETIRED IN 2010, I wanted to get on with starting a family immediately, but Mario was still reluctant. Transitioning from sport to life is hard, even harder as a new mum. All of this needed to be considered but time was not on my side. He couldn’t picture it yet, but he trusted me and was willing to start the process.

  I can see where he was coming from, and in retrospect it was probably a good thing that it took as long as it did for us to get pregnant. I did a lot of adjusting in those years; the reality of a non-athlete’s life took some getting used to. For twenty years I’d been an athlete living out of a suitcase, spending the majority of my time in training camps and competitions, moving from one country to another. There was always someone asking how I was feeling, giving me therapy and massages, and making sure that I was well and happy and taken care of. It was a privileged existence, but strange and unnatural, too. Once it was all over, I had to ease my way back into the real world and adjust to a life just like everyone else’s.

  After I took off my skis and boots for the last time, I made an appointment with Ravi and had my IUD removed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a period, so no-one was expecting me to get pregnant straightaway. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get pregnant and I didn’t have a period, either.

  After six months, Ravi recommended I start on a course of a drug called Clomiphene Citrate, better known as Clomid. This is a relatively common first-stop fertility treatment, prescribed when it looks like you may have some trouble conceiving. In simple terms, Clomid is an oral medication that stimulates the ovaries; it causes a gland in the brain (the anterior pituitary) to start producing the hormone that will stimulate ovulation. It offers a kind of a kickstart for a sluggish cycle.

  Like most drugs, Clomid can have side effects. The list is intimidatingly long. Of course, most women experience few or no side effects, but it was pretty scary to contemplate the possibility of hot flushes, nausea, hair loss, headaches, insomnia, depression, dizziness, fatigue, rashes, fever, seizures, blurred vision, heart palpitations, bloating and more!

  Because of the health risks involved, you can take Clomid for a short period of time only. This period varies slightly from state to state in Australia, but the maximum time on Clomid for me was six months, starting October 2010.

  There’s a lot more to Clomid than just popping a few pills. Timing is the key to its effectiveness. The course needs to start early in your cycle, around about Day 3, which is the third day after your menstrual period begins.

  My first problem was that I wasn’t getting periods, so they had to give me something to start menstruation. To manufacture a Day 1 for my cycle, I took progesterone tablets for a week or so and then, when my period began, I started taking Clomid.

  The dosage depends on your level of fertility, between half to one tablet a day. I took the tablets for five days, which was the full course, and then watched the calendar, which dictated exactly when to have intercourse during that month. This was the crucial element: for Clomid to have the best chance of working, we had to have as much sex as possible within that calendar window. Believe me, it’s not as easy as it sounds!

  I’ve spoken to a lot a people about the damage that Clomid can do to an intimate relationship. For the first time, sex becomes a necessary function – part of a process and nothing to do with mood, time and place. Romance goes out the window as two people perform a mechanical function prescribed by a course of medication.

  I’ve heard people say that Clomid sparked an ugly tension between them and their partner. For a few, it was the beginning of the end of their relationship. Men say that it made them feel like sperm donors, and women say they began to see their partners as instruments of impregnation, nothing more. The whole dynamic can shift. It’s tough!

  Mario and I had an additional problem – distance. Just as I retired, he had started a new job that required relocation; he had to move temporarily to Brisbane. So here I was back in Melbourne with no-one but Oscar and our new cat, Mickey, to cuddle, and Mario was travelling all over Queensland as a national commercial manager for a large chain of pubs.

  Our timing sucked, but there was no way I would begrudge Mario this important career opportunity. He’d spent the last eight years patiently waiting for me to see out my sporting ambitions, and a lot of that time he had been in Melbourne with no-one but Oscar to snuggle up to! It was my turn to be supportive. We were just going to have to work around that.

  Meanwhile, there was plenty going on to keep me busy. For the three final years of my career, I had been sponsored and supported financially by La Trobe Financial. The owner and CEO, Greg O’Neill, offered me wonderful financial support after we briefly met in a Melbourne cafe in 2007. It was a lifeline I needed at the time. He and his company were able to see value in an ageing athlete. Nobody else did. I really do believe that he thought that the best was yet to come. He was right. With his support, I was able to set new Australian and world records. All of those wins and world titles in the twilight of my twenty-year career came because his company knew that Jacqui Cooper still had more to achieve.

  On my retirement, after the Olympics in Vancouver, it was Greg who again threw me a lifeline. This time it was a retirement lifeline. Not long after the closing ceremony, Greg called me and asked what I was doing. I said, ‘Not much.’ He then said, ‘You don’t have to give me an answer right now, but would you consider being our La Trobe Financial company ambassador?’ My first thought was, ‘I know nothing about finance!’ I was told that a role for me would be created at his company and my main job would be to be available to present, speak, represent, endorse, engage and inspire staff and clients. It sounded perfect.

  With my new role as La Trobe Financials’ company ambassador, and with some professional speaking jobs too, I was all of a sudden very busy. It was good to channel some energy in a new direction. I think that was what Greg was hoping to achieve with me. Many athletes get lost and depressed in the months after retirement; he was hoping that he and his team at La Trobe would get me focused and excited about a new career. He was right.

  This was a totally unplanned career shift for me. I didn’t prepare for it in the slightest: no voice classes, no coaching, no putting my name down at speaking agencies and no touting for jobs. It was ridiculously simple. During my final months as a competitive athlete, my manager had been getting requests for me to speak at events after I retired. I thought, ‘Why not? What have I got to lose?’ I said yes to a couple of speaking opportunities, got some great feedback, and then more bookings started to roll in. Suddenly I was a speaker at corporate events, on the books of ten different agencies.

  Best of all, I absolutely loved it. I’ve always loved communicating and connecting with people. Mum says, ‘If there’s one thing Jacqui loves more than aerial skiing, it’s talking.’

  Getting work as a professional speaker is a bit like working as an actor or a model. I have my photo, CV, testimonials and promotional material with a range of different agencies. They put me up for a job and the client decides whether or not they want me to
speak at their function. Every job is different. I am essentially my own boss, which is fantastic for flexibility.

  With Mario away and so much focus on my fertility (or lack of), the speaking jobs and my role with La Trobe Financial were a welcome diversion. Anyone who’s been though it will tell you that once you travel down the medical intervention path to get pregnant, you’re in for an emotional roller-coaster. That first month on Clomid was a perfect example. I went from soaring jubilation to bitter disappointment in the space of a few days. I was on my way back from Brisbane when Ravi rang me to say that, according to my recent blood test, I had ovulated a few days before. This was incredible news. I knew that we had fulfilled our ‘sex schedule’, too, so I rushed out and bought a pregnancy test the following week and lo and behold, it was positive.

  I thought, ‘Bang, that’s all I needed.’ I’d had a dose of Clomid to hot-wire the ovaries and we’d hit the jackpot the first time. I was both elated and terrified: ‘My God, I’m going to have a baby!’

  I had some business interstate and Mario was in Queensland so I decided to hold off telling him the news until we were together in a week or so. It was so exciting. I started to put together a little presentation for the dad-to-be. I bought a special card and a cute book about becoming a father. I went to wrap up the positive pregnancy test, but the digital display had timed out after 48 hours and the display was blank so I went and got another test from the chemist. When I looked at the result, I was stunned. Not pregnant.

  I just didn’t get it. I wasn’t bleeding and a period was due. How could I be pregnant and then not pregnant? I went back and bought a third pregnancy test that was a different brand. Again, it was negative.

  So I turned to ‘Doctor Google’ for some instant answers. When I keyed in my symptoms, the words ‘chemical pregnancy’ flooded the screen. This was the first time I’d ever heard of such a thing.

  Apparently, chemical pregnancies account for about 75 per cent of miscarriages, with the distinction that they occur early in the pregnancy, usually around the five-week mark. Basically, the sperm fertilises the egg, and the fertilised egg implants in the uterus for a couple of days, but the embryo does not survive.

  Most women don’t even know they’ve had a chemical pregnancy; their period just comes a bit late. In my situation, everything was under the microscope so I knew I’d ovulated and that our timing was spot-on. With no period and a positive pregnancy test, I had no reason to believe the Clomid hadn’t done the trick on the very first cycle. When I realised I must have had a chemical pregnancy, I slammed painfully back to Earth.

  As the fog of disappointment gradually cleared, I decided it was time to study up on the nuts and bolts of fertility. As an athlete, I’d done mountains of research on how my body worked, how to get it in peak condition and how to fix it when it was damaged. So I began to read up and approached my second month on Clomid in a more realistic frame of mind.

  The fact that Mario was in Queensland during these six months was actually quite convenient. We would look at our calendars and plan ahead, and I would fly to Brisbane to be with him during that important week of the sex schedule. It didn’t always work out though. Sometimes Mario had to go on the road and we missed an opportunity. I won’t pretend I wasn’t upset about this, but I just had to take it in my stride and not let the medical process dictate every aspect of our lives.

  Clomid isn’t very expensive. Compared to the costs involved in IVF, it’s a bargain, but you only get to use it for a short, specified period, usually about six months. If it hasn’t worked by then, the next step is IVF and that’s when you start paying the big bucks. Like so many others, I was feeling the financial pressure, hoping Clomid would do the trick and we wouldn’t have to resort to IVF.

  Some women choose to break up their six months. They take a month or two off for whatever reason and then get back into it. I was advised to do it all in one block to sustain the ‘kick-start’ action, so I took Clomid for six months straight. I didn’t experience major side effects, but it’s a strong medication that seriously messes around your hormones. Emotionally, I felt hypersensitive about everything and the unavoidable glitches and small inconveniences of daily life had a habit of taking on epic proportions.

  Getting pregnant was starting to become an obsession, and the extra hormones didn’t help. Also, I was no longer ‘working’ on my sport and even though the speaking jobs were coming in thick and fast I had a lot more time to fixate. My mindset was still very much that of an athlete and to optimise my chances of success I needed to understand as much as I could about what was going on. Athletes are constantly checking that everything is as it should be – blood tests, skin folds, muscle tone – and adjust intakes accordingly. It can be absolutely crucial to how you perform.

  Early on, Ravi told me to pay attention to when I ovulated as this was the best time to have sex. I had almost never ovulated so I didn’t know there were signs, such as breast tenderness, abdominal discomfort or changes in cervical mucus (what the hell was ‘cervical mucus’?). It was a whole new world and I needed help.

  So I went out and bought a machine! While I was in the USA on a short business trip in 2010, I purchased a fertility monitor. These days you can pick one up at your local chemist, but in 2010 they weren’t so readily available in Australia.

  Using the machine is a simple process that sells itself as maximising your chances of getting pregnant. All I had to do was pee on a disposable stick, then insert the stick in the special slot on the monitor, and the monitor would detect if there was a rise in luteinizing hormone (LH). If there was a spike in the level of LH, the machine would show extra bars on the mini monitor. One bar meant not fertile, two bars meant there was a rise in LH (entering a fertile period), and three bars plus an image of an egg indicated high fertility and ovulation. If the level of LH was rising, it meant that I was about to ovulate. From this I could predict my peak fertility days (two to six fertile days, depending on which brand you buy) and these are the best times for you and your partner to get busy!

  There are plenty of women who swear by fertility monitors. They’re a great way to learn how to read your body and how your cycle works. I assumed I’d pee on the stick and the machine would tell me when I was fertile and that would determine what to do next.

  Big problem: I wasn’t ovulating. For reasons that would only emerge further down the track, I was peeing on the stick every single day and the reading always came back flat. To make matters worse, I was using up all the sticks and had to keep buying more online from the USA because they weren’t available to buy in Australia yet!

  Then the machine itself began to time out. Once you start getting readings, it establishes a pattern for you every month, but with no readings after 45 days the machine didn’t know what to do with me! I was full of disappointment. I had invested a huge amount of emotional energy in that machine, and I had become more or less addicted to those daily readings.

  The machine became a bit of a joke. We used to talk about ‘checking the levels’ and friends and family got into the habit of asking me about them. I’d be on the phone to my former coach, Jerry, and he’d say, ‘So, Jacqui, what’s going on with the levels?’

  It never did settle into a pattern, but a couple of times the stick indicated that the hormone was present and I might be about to ovulate. Then it was all systems go. I would book the first round-trip to Brisbane I could get, no matter the cost!

  One of those rare mornings that the levels jumped, I had a presentation to do in Geelong. There was no guarantee that ovulation was about to occur but as I was driving back to Melbourne afterwards I passed Avalon airport. Next thing I knew I was on a plane to Mario. Meanwhile, in Brisbane, he was in meetings and didn’t get my messages that I was on my way. I arrived all excited and revved up about my possible fertile state and Mario was about to get on a plane to Rockhampton. My response was something like, ‘You can’t go to Rockhampton. We have to have sex RIGHT NOW!’

  Tim
es like these certainly put pressure on our relationship. I wasn’t as patient as I could be, especially with all those Clomid hormones zinging around, and I’d whinge that Mario wasn’t as committed as I was, which just wasn’t fair. Mario had a massive workload, with big responsibilities, and it wasn’t the kind of workplace where you discussed how you and your partner were trying to start a family. No-one knew about his bi-state juggling act and stressed-out partner. Those six months were pretty hard on us both.

  Back in Melbourne, I continued to be hyper-aware of what my body was doing and what it was supposed to be doing. Still heavily reliant on the fertility monitor, I was fully focused on every step of my cycle and I was thirsty for any hint or helpful tip that could make Clomid work for me.

  This is when I first developed a rather unhealthy dependence on trawling the internet. Key in a simple search term like ‘getting pregnant’ and a vast array of possibilities comes up, ranging from official medical information to lengthy discussions between women just like me, desperate for any scrap of insight that might provide the magic ingredient to getting pregnant.

  I would spend hours and hours online clicking on TTC (trying to conceive) websites and forums. It was a whole new world, with its own special language. I went from aerial skiing acronyms like FFF (which translates as ‘full, full full’ for a triple-twisting triple somersault) to TTC, AF (‘Aunt Flo’, or your period), DH (dear husband) and BD (‘baby dance’, or sex).

  Boy, did I waste endless hours chasing down the tiniest useless detail. Even worse was reading page after page of someone’s story only to have the discussion thread suddenly terminate without revealing what had happened in the end. I eventually worked out that you have to sign up and become a member before you gain access to entire discussions. I didn’t want to do that. Providing my details to random international websites might trigger an avalanche of junk mail and/or catastrophic security issues. Yet I continued to torture myself by following these stories, feeding my growing desperation, terrified that I might miss a vital clue. It was not helpful. The internet can be a great resource, but when you start depending on it, as I was, it can become a double-edged sword.