Misconception

by Jay-Jay Feeney

  It seems bizarre to me now, but I went to a party the day after our fourth cycle failed. Inevitably, someone who knew we were going through IVF decided to get to know me by discussing it. Of course, she couldn’t have known what had happened the day before. So, she wasn’t aware of the effect her best efforts were having on me. Our loss was raw and I started to get upset and then I just burst into tears and muttered ‘I’m sorry, I have to go.’ And then I realised I had nowhere to go.

  As I looked around the room I began to panic. I ran down the hall and up the stairs where I threw myself on a couch and bawled my eyes out, all by myself. I wanted to go home but my handbag and keys were in the kitchen where everyone was gathered and I couldn’t go back in there. My phone was downstairs too so I couldn’t call Dom, who was out with other friends. I felt trapped—suffocated.

  Four of my friends found me and asked if I was okay. I remember feeling like such a dick. It was obvious I was a mess. By then, I think everyone in the room knew what had happened and the poor woman who had been trying to make me feel comfortable felt terrible. It wasn’t her fault. How could she have known we’d just had another cycle of IVF fail?

  I felt stupid for making her feel that way. I knew I couldn’t go back downstairs and face everyone—they’d all stare at me when I walked into the room. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the sympathetic looks. I didn’t want sympathy. I wanted to bury my head in a pillow and cry myself to sleep. One of my friends retrieved my bag and keys and sent me home in a taxi.

  After feeling like a dick running away from that party, I decided I needed to get myself sorted and it’s a known fact that the healthier your BMI, the better your chances of conceiving. It was time to get rid of my tummy fat! I knew I was podgy. I had this huge chunk of blubber that sat nicely on top of my jeans and was the reason I couldn’t wear tight T-shirts!

  I ate a lot of carbs and drank a bit of wine, and had battled my weight my entire adult life. It’s not that I’d ever been obese, but I was carrying about 10 kilograms more than was really good for me. For IVF, that’s not ideal.

  Over the years, I’d tried Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, even the blood-type diet. They all worked reasonably well, but as soon as I stopped, the fat came back! I hadn’t weighed myself all year because I knew I was heavy and I was afraid of what the scales would say. I was scared of harsh reality! So, I waited until a Saturday morning, after a good, long sleep, got up out of bed, naked, went for a pee and then nervously hovered above the scales. No point mucking around, so on I got. The scales creaked as I put my foot down, I am not joking! So I stood, sucking in, and watching the numbers creep up . . . up . . . and away. Holy shit! I am 163 centimetres tall and my ideal weight would be 57 to 63 kilograms.

  I was the heaviest I had ever been in my entire life. I’d cracked the 70-kilogram mark and the scales said I was 71.8 kilograms. I just about died. In fact I got off the scales and got back into bed, wondering how I could ever go out and face the world again. It really was time to sort my shit out.

  Dom and I drink a bit of wine. We’re not raving alcoholics or anything like that, but we like a glass most nights. Dom can drink an entire bottle of pinot noir and it won’t affect him, whereas if I have more than two glasses of pinot gris, I start getting more ditzy than I already am. But then, Dom has a problem with excess. If we have chocolate in the house, Dom cannot just have one piece and leave it alone—he must consume the entire packet immediately. He can’t help himself. I have yelled at him many times when someone has given me chocolate and I have put it in the back of the fridge for my occasional cravings, but when I go to get it, it has disappeared.

  It looked as if I needed to cut back on food and wine to get myself prepped for a fifth IVF cycle.

  I also suffer serious stress and I know it’s not healthy. The doctors and nurses at the fertility clinics have all told me stress can contribute to IVF not working but, no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to keep it under control.

  I know I take on too much. I attend lots of premières and parties and product launches, I do interviews, photo shoots, TV appearances, write for a magazine, visit schools, MC events and I’m Mum to my nephew and a wife to Dom.

  I get up at 4 a.m. every weekday for work and I am expected to perform for the nation with high energy, entertainment and laughter for four hours every day and then prepare four hours of new material for the next day.

  I’m not complaining about this, I’m just saying I do a lot of things and I have a real problem saying no, probably because I care so much about other people. I will go out of my way to help others and, sometimes, I end up bearing the burden of other people’s problems, and that can bring me down.

  One morning while on air in March 2012, at a time when I had been feeling the brunt of being caught in the middle of another serious family drama and I wasn’t coping, I suddenly felt faint and nauseous. My eyes started rolling and I began to sway. Dom looked across at me and asked if I was okay—live on the air!

  I looked at him and I didn’t feel at all well. I almost lied but I’m not a good liar and I felt like shit. Most of all, I wanted to get out of there. ‘I’m not actually,’ I said, live on air, and burst into tears. Then it got really awkward. Dom was silent. Mike was silent. I imagine the listeners were silent, too. I realised then I was going to have to say why I was so upset. I couldn’t think of a lie so I told the simplest truth.

  ‘I’m exhausted . . . I’m just so exhausted,’ and I continued crying. ‘I think I need to go home.’

  It was about 6.30 a.m. Nobody tried to stop me. I grabbed my stuff, caught a taxi home, climbed into bed and didn’t get up for at least 24 hours. I did not want to go back to work—I thought I hated it. When I finally dragged myself out of bed I crawled off to my doctor—I was a wreck.

  My doctor took one look at me and said I was suffering from chronic fatigue and depression. She prescribed daily exercise and Citalopram—it’s an anti-depressant similar to Prozac. I have never been one for medicating. I don’t like drugs, I don’t do drugs and I’ve always tried to avoid prescription drugs—except for battling infertility. Paracetamol and ibuprofen are as crazy as I cared to get, but she promised me I would feel so much better on these happy pills and that they were safe to be used while pregnant. As long as I could still try for a baby, I would be happy.

  It was two weeks before I went back to work. We were in the last week of ratings but having clinical depression was a good enough excuse for Leon to forgive my time off work. I spent most of my day moping about the house, but I walked about 5 kilometres each day and I gradually started to feel better. The Citalopram kicked in about three weeks later and I felt good again. My head was clear. My moods were even. I suffered far less anxiety. I’d had a couple of bouts of really bad stage fright in the previous couple of years, but now I felt like my fearless old self. Unfortunately, one of the worst side effects was weight gain, and that was something I was constantly battling already!

  Alternative treatment

  As Dom and I began to discuss the possibility of a fifth IVF cycle, we thought back over all the free advice we’d been given—we looked at the serious stuff and the downright wacky stuff. We figured, if we went for it, it would definitely be our last shot. Although, I still say ‘Never say never’.

  We decided that if we did another round of IVF we’d keep it quiet. Obviously, we would have to tell our boss and our close family and friends but we weren’t going to go public. It’s just too much pressure to share it with thousands of others. We learned this when we did the Sunday documentary.

  Everyone I spoke to about IVF had some advice or wisdom to share—and I’ve heard the same is true for first-time parents. People shared miracle ways their babies came about, including losing weight, running marathons, detox, acupuncture, holistic massage, feng shui, alternative medicine and more. There are too many options and too much information for my brain to take in.

  I kept it pretty simple the first four times—cutting out coff
ee and alcohol were hard enough. Next time I was going to look at some less conventional tips and maybe, even, some of the downright kooky ones.

  I have a book at home called Make This Your Lucky Day—Fun and Easy Feng Shui Secrets to Success, Romance, Health and Harmony by Ellen Whitehurst (Allen & Unwin, 2008). I’ve never really been into feng shui, but it’s also true that I’ve never liked having a TV in my bedroom because the reflection is supposed to be bad luck.

  There is a chapter in the book about fertility, and a couple of success stories of women who got pregnant after rearranging their houses according to Ellen’s advice. I decided I had nothing to lose.

  ‘Place a pair of wooden elephants on either side of your bedroom door.’ I bought two wooden elephants from the Trade Aid shop and placed them in my bedroom. They look out of place and ridiculous but, hey, thousands of years of Chinese belief can’t be scoffed at.

  ‘Sleep on green sheets.’ I did this during a previous IVF cycle so it’s not guaranteed to work, but I decided to try it again, even though I’ve never been a fan of the colour green. When I was a kid I refused to draw with a green crayon—I felt sick every time I touched one. It sounds stupid and I have no idea why I felt like that. Despite that, I bought a couple more sets of green sheets for the bed in preparation for our fifth IVF cycle.

  There are other far-out suggestions in the book, but the author says if you can’t do everything she suggests, do at least one or two of them. One other warning she gives is to never vacuum under the bed while you are trying to get pregnant. In Eastern cultures, people believe the ling—soul—of your child circles your bed in its efforts to get to you.

  So, figuring I had nothing to lose by trying, I slept on nothing but green sheets for months, I had two wooden elephants by my bedroom door, and dust was gathering under my bed. It’s lucky I don’t suffer from asthma!

  Of all of the advice we’d been given over the five years we’d been trying, one piece stood out. So many people had recommended naturopathy and most of them had named a particular naturopath who specialises in infertility issues. Brad Crouch, who was, we’d been told, a miracle worker, can be found at Brad Crouch Naturopathic Clinic in Browns Bay on Auckland’s North Shore.

  I did a bit of research with friends and online forums and found lots of glowing testimonials on the OHbaby! website. After that, we decided we’d be stupid not to give him a go.

  We learned that Brad is a renowned medical herbalist, iridologist and naturopath with over 19 years’ experience in the field of infertility, including infertility management and using natural medicines to solve both male and female disorders. The results from his unique approach to infertility are really exciting.

  Once we’d decided we were definitely going to give it a go, I got on the Elevit, designed to give me the right vitamin and mineral levels to sustain a pregnancy, and Dom got on the Menevit, designed to maintain sperm health. Dom took Menevit the previous time and we didn’t notice an improvement, but we were nothing if not determined to give this our very best shot.

  Of course, the next thing we did was make an appointment to see Brad. We got in straightaway because it was fresh after the Christmas holidays, 19 January 2012. His office was up a flight of very steep stairs—the type of stairs you wouldn’t want to come down while you were drunk! It was a small, tired-looking room, no bigger than a standard bedroom. There was a two-seater couch, a reception desk and a giant beanbag. Brad’s son, Dallin, who is about to study naturopathy, was acting receptionist. He said his sister made the beanbag big enough to sink into but not get lost in. The walls were plastered with cards and baby photos from successful clients. Some of them were quite a few years old by then, but there must have been at least 150 of them. Dallin kept referring to them as angels. He knew how to strike a chord with new clients!

  We sat down and waited. I had no idea what I was really here for or what Brad would be able to do for us. We planned to tell him our issues in brief and let him do the rest. After half an hour of waiting we were finally led into a small, sunny room with a treatment bed behind a screen on one side and a desk with three chairs on the other. It seemed to have all the standard stuff you find in a doctor’s office but it was a little more casual and felt less clinical. I felt the room could have done with a clean—it seemed old, dusty and tired.

  I guessed Brad was in his mid fifties. He had an accent—South African, I thought, and made a note to ask him next time. He had a middle-aged man’s belly—big and solid, as if he liked a few beers during the week. But he’s a naturopath, so I assumed that he must be into healthy living.

  He asked us to sit and then he insisted that I sit directly in front of him, with my knees between his parted legs. He pulled me in close. I felt very awkward and uncomfortable, especially since we had just met. If Dom hadn’t been there with me I would probably have felt scared!

  He hadn’t asked any questions and all he knew about me was my name and that I was there for IVF issues after four failed attempts. He looked me straight in the eyes, and started rubbing my arm and pinching the skin on my hand. I joked that if I had known he was going to feel me up, I would have moisturised. He told me then that ‘dryness’ was the whole issue.

  ‘If I was to let out my little secret and what I know about infertility and why I’m the most successful person in fixing it anywhere, possibly in the world, it would be dryness,’ he said ‘You have no ping. Your insides are dry.’

  I was sniggering. What an odd to thing to say.

  ‘Getting pregnant is all about wetness,’ he said. And then he joked, ‘Because you do have intercourse under water, right?’

  Dom and I both laughed out loud. Not because he was particularly funny, but out of relief that he had a sense of humour at all. I need people around me to have a sense of humour—all the ‘by the book’ clinical, serious stuff is not who I am. It’s not what I’m about. Fortunately, Brad had an easy explanation.

  Once you’ve had sex, the sperm are swimming. You’re supplying the mucus for them, your eggs are floating in a current of wetness in your abdomen. You release the hormone into that same wetness and it diffuses through your body. There has to be a sea and an ocean, it all happens in wet. If you’re not wet, it’s not happening.

  Well, that was a lot more than I had bargained for—I hadn’t said a word yet. I was squirming the whole time because I really don’t like to talk about my sex life. Not at all, or in any detail, with anyone, not even with a man who may help me get pregnant. I’ve always been like this. I find it very uncomfortable. I don’t mind talking about other people’s sex lives and I can be very crass when I want to, but when the attention is turned on me, I’m out of my depth. I thought it was about time I interrupted him.

  As far as I was concerned, wetness was not my problem. ‘Can I stop you there?’ I asked, before he embarrassed me any further. ‘Dom has retrograde ejaculate.’ Dom cut in to tell him he’d had a tumour taken out a few years ago and as a result he has dry orgasms.

  I told Brad that Dom also had a very, very low sperm count and most of it was no good. Brad asked Dom to confirm he used to be able to ejaculate.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dom replied matter of factly, ‘All over her face. Often.’ I immediately burned up red in the face and covered my face with my hands, but Brad burst out laughing, thank God. That could have been very awkward for all of us!

  I handed Brad a copy of the letter Dom got after his operation. The room was quiet for a minute or so while Brad read it, and then Dom broke the silence. ‘So what do you reckon? We’re fucked, aren’t we?’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied Brad. ‘We just have to work around it.’

  I also said we had a problem because I didn’t seem to be able to hold embryos either. Brad took a deep breath and I wondered if we would be too much of a challenge for him. Then he called Dallin into the room. He handed Dallin a magnifying glass and told him to look into my eyes.

  To do that, I removed my knees from between Brad’s and pointed them toward D
allin. He was a good-looking guy, around 20 years old, chatty but understated. He was cracking jokes but talked so deadpan it was hard to know whether to laugh or not.

  I had to open my eyes wide, which is hard for me—I’m a squinter. Think Renée Zellweger! Dallin shone a light into my right eye and told me to look at it. I tried hard not to giggle. He looked through the magnifying glass and joked, ‘Yep, there’s an eye in there.’

  He started rattling off issues I had according to my eyeball—weak kidneys, weak heart, a bit emotional, slight prolapse. I interrupted him.

  ‘Did you say “a bit emotional”?’

  Dallin joked, ‘Yes, I saw you had a vagina, so I guessed you would be.’

  Funny guy. I love a sense of humour, usually, but that wasn’t funny. And it got worse when Dom agreed, ‘She can be emotional. Very much so.’

  I don’t think I’m overly emotional, but I know it’s hard to judge yourself. I’d never take Dom’s word for it, though—he can be quite insensitive and intolerant of any sign of weakness.

  Dallin changed to my left eye. ‘Let’s see if she still has a liver with all the drinking she’s been doing . . . A big hole in the liver.’

  I asked him if he was taking the piss now and he denied it, then he mumbled something about my uterus and passed the instruments over to his father. So far it wasn’t looking too good.

  Brad pulled me between his legs again and started looking into my eyes. He and Dallin chatted to each other about my conditions as if I wasn’t even in the room.

  ‘Did you say she was emotional because of the thyroid?’ Brad asked Dallin.

  ‘Yeah, she has five rings,’ Dallin replied.