I have been sent many gifts—other books and DVDs full of advice, including self-hypnosis for increasing the success of IVF!
DAY ELEVEN—9 JULY 2012
I hope the placenta cells have begun to secrete human chorionic gonadotropin or HCG into my blood. Only three more sleeps to go until I get my blood test. This is the longest wait of my life. It’s torture!!
I want a sign—a twinge, anything. I have been having crazy dreams—I’ve dreamt I miscarried, I’ve dreamt I had a baby, I dreamt I gave birth to a monster. I’m guessing if I am pregnant, the monster dream is more likely! Yes, I want to have a little monster.
We had our house painted at the beginning of the year and Paul, the painter, called tonight. I was a little bit miffed when he said he was painting for a woman in my secret Facebook group who had told him I was waiting for a pregnancy test. It’s a closed group and everyone in it promises to keep things said in the group confidential. I don’t want to announce on there that I’m pregnant and then have the whole world find out about it.
But I had to be pleased when he said he just called to tell me that he and John—business partner—are Christians and they’d said a prayer for me and Dom. How sweet is that? I’m not a religious person at all but I really appreciated the gesture.
DAY TWELVE—10 JULY 2012
By now, the foetus and I should be an HCG factory. I have been taking it pretty easy since egg-collection day—keeping my diary relatively clear to avoid overexerting myself but today I was in the kitchen from 4.30 to 8.30 p.m. baking batches of Whoopie Pies for an on-air challenge between me, Mike and Dom, plus cooking dinner.
For the challenge we each have to make Whoopie Pies to be judged in the morning. Listeners vote for who they think will win and if they are right they are in the draw to win a prize pack. Dom and I are particularly competitive so, even though it’s not a big deal, Dom disappeared for the afternoon to sort out his entry.
Dom cannot cook. He definitely cannot bake. In the thirteen years we have been together, Dom has only ever made lolly log, which isn’t cooked, and grilled salmon and steamed broccoli. Seriously.
He sneaked off to his friend Rob’s house. Rob is the promotions manager at The Edge and he is also an amazing cook and baker. He brings his baking in to work and we all tuck in. Dom has persuaded Rob to make his Whoopie Pies for him and he arrives home feeling pretty good about himself. I know the competition is on and I have to win it! So, having never made Whoopie Pies before, I make two batches—one from a packet and one from scratch.
On my feet in the kitchen for hours, I start to get a sore lower back and my stomach cramps up a little. Then I got a headache. When I say I think I’ve overdone it, Dom isn’t impressed.
At about 7 p.m. I go to the toilet and find brown blood on my panty liner and pink blood when I wipe. I’ve been feeling crampy and start to feel panicky. Why is this happening again?
I start to go over all the things I’ve done and wonder if I caused this. Did I get too hot with the electric blanket? Was it the decaffeinated tea? Did I really overexert myself today? I’m hating myself right now and wonder if I’m going to tell Dom. I decide to wait until I need to go to the toilet again. Back to the kitchen and, of course, it’s all I can think about. Half an hour later I go to the toilet and find a tiny bit more blood. As I walk slowly into the lounge and look at Dom, he can tell by my face that I have something not so fun to tell him.
When he asks and I confirm there’s blood, he says he is resigned to the fact that we have just lost our embryo and I feel the same way. I just can’t believe it. I had already fantasised at length about how we would announce our pregnancy news to the nation. I always thought if I ever got pregnant I’d be so excited that I’d want to shout it from the rooftops, and I imagined getting a megaphone and doing just that! And I’d get a billboard—I’d want everyone to know about this ‘once in a lifetime’ event. Would it be announced in an exclusive story in a magazine or would I announce it on air?
I go the toilet a couple more times before bed and there’s only a bit more brown blood—not enough to call it a period, but more than spotting, I think. In bed, Dom is really showing the stress. I wonder if he has been crying. He blames himself and his voice breaks.
‘It doesn’t matter what I do, naturopath pills, alcohol, meditation, fucking vegetable juice, whatever. I’m just not meant to have kids. You’re just going to have to go and have kids with somebody else. I just can’t have kids.
‘I’m just mad,’ he sighs, ‘and I’m sorry for holding you back.’
‘You’re not holding me back!’ I tell him and my heart is heavy.
DAY THIRTEEN—11 JULY 2012
If the foetus is developing as it should, my HCG level should be increasing. I woke up with just a tiny bit of brown spotting and a killer headache. I’m so worried I check in with the secret Facebook page and post the following:
Hi girls. One more day before my pregnancy test, but I don’t think it’s good. There was blood last night (only a little bit but more than a spot) and I am feeling headachy and crampy.
I get loads of supportive feedback and these make me feel better and give me hope.
And just when the stress was getting too much to bear they went and made early pregnancy symptoms the same as pre-menstrual ones just to f*** with your head a bit more! Hang in there Jay-Jay!!!
—Karen
You are doing so well Jay-Jay! I really admire you how you can keep it cool at work. I was listening to the Edge on my way to work this morning, and seriously you sound so fun and professional. Don’t give up girl, we are all thinking of you here xx —Nat
I get nervous every time I go to the toilet and Dom is on my case the second I walk out of the bathroom door. ‘Any blood?’ he asks frantically. My answer changes every time because sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t. What there is is mostly brownish.
Dom has decided it’s all over and he’s looking pretty sad and angry.
In other news, I did win the Whoopie bake-off—at least all that baking paid off.
DAY FOURTEEN—12 JULY 2012
It’s Pregnancy Test Day—The Dreaded Two-Week Wait is officially over today!
I wake up with a little more spotting and see a bit of red blood later on. I feel like Dom’s right and we’ve lost it, but I need to hear it from the nurses. I leave the studio just after 8.30 a.m. and go for my blood test—the diagnostic lab is just 300 metres up the road so I am only gone about 15 minutes. I am not even missed!
The ladies at the lab are excited for me—they know how many times I’ve been in there over the last few years. It’s nice to receive positive energy from them to help me through until a nurse from Fertility Associates gets the results and phones me. The day drags on.
I ask Dom how he’s feeling and just as he says, ‘I’m alright, but I’m expecting it to be bad news. Aren’t you? Anything other than that will be a surprise,’ the phone rings. Shirley checks I’m okay to talk then says, ‘I haven’t got good news for you’. My heart sinks.
I yell the longest and loudest ‘fuck’ that has ever come out of my mouth. Dom moans in the background.
‘I know, I know,’ Shirley responds. There is a long pause.
‘I knew it,’ I say. ‘Fucking hell, I’m so mad.’ I put my head down and wail, ‘Oh, Shirley!’
‘I know love, I know, I know.’ It must suck for her having to call people with this news.
‘Far out, this sucks!’ I blurt out half crying, half nervously giggling.
‘I know . . . it does,’ Shirley agrees.
‘Well, thanks for telling me anyway,’ I say to her.
‘Alright, well stop your pessaries and I’ll give you a call tomorrow.’
At least there’s a plus side. I don’t have to stick those horrid little balls up my vag anymore. But I’d do it forever if it meant I could have my own baby.
I look over at Dom and he looks blank. He gets up and comes over to hold me. I’m sobbing now and all I
can say is, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m really sorry,’ over and over again.
‘It’s not your fault, it’s mine,’ he says.
‘It’s nobody’s fault!’ I tell him back. ‘It’s not your fault you can’t have a baby. Stop blaming yourself.’
He’s not crying but I sense he wants to. My head is pounding and I cry out loud for a few minutes. And then we sit in silence for a long time.
I email my boss and Mike to tell them the news and word soon gets around work. It’s not long before an enormous bunch of flowers arrives. We’d only told sixteen friends and family members so I text them all as soon as I can get it together. My phone goes crazy with text messages and emails.
Dom and I don’t really talk much about it for the rest of the day. There is nothing to say. I help numb the pain with a glass of wine after dinner and turn to the secret Facebook group for support.
What next?
We visited Dr Fisher as soon as we could to review the cycle and discuss plans to move forward. It would have been so easy to quit right then, but I’ve always known how much it means to Dom to be a father. I felt I had to find a way to make his dream come true.
‘What a bugger,’ said Dr Fisher. ‘There’s always some mystery in it,’ he says. ‘Aside from the one you miscarried, it’s probably the best looking embryo you’ve had.’ Then he told us if one thing stood out in this cycle it was really how complex Dom’s sperm abnormality was. There was a pause and then Dom laughed—after everything we had been through, it really was laughable.
Dr Fisher told us trying to select good sperm was really tough and he said, ‘I would have thought it was becoming a bit debilitating to you now.’ I agreed—it does wear you down after a while. Dom asked if we should carry on and wondered if it was becoming an obsession. Dr Fisher agreed that was a risk. He said around the world, it was not uncommon for people to do five or six cycles, but it was pretty unusual in New Zealand. He thought it was a bit about funding and a bit about Kiwis being practical people who, when something doesn’t work, decide they’ll do something else instead.
‘I don’t think you’ve been obsessed at all,’ he said. ‘I think what you’ve done is entirely rational and entirely reasonable. But it’s getting pretty tough.’ All of a sudden, I felt a bit down in the dumps.
‘Do you think my eggs have anything to do with it?’ I asked. He said before we started this cycle he thought that was the more likely thing, but now it seemed less likely. He flicked through his notes and said he now thought it was much more likely to be about the sperm.
Dom was laughing his uncomfortable laugh as Dr Fisher explained it was not about the surgery and the plumbing problems. It seemed to be a mystery. He also said my ovaries responded in a normal way and the eggs looked okay, but we could not be sure.
Then he raised the possibility of donor insemination.
He talked about an image he had of people who do lots of IVF treatment. It was like an ancient Roman statue—every time you saw them there was another bit missing. First, the nose was knocked off and then an ear. Then an arm fell off. Every time they have treatment, another bit was knocked off. Then, wise as ever, he said, ‘You want to be the same people you started as.’
I told him we are resilient and he agreed, but Dom admitted it was getting harder not easier. Dr Fisher said people can train for most things, but we couldn’t train for repetitive disappointment. He always says the most insightful things.
When I asked, he agreed he thought we’d have a much better chance of conception using donor sperm, but just because it was a simple procedure didn’t mean it would be easier to deal with a negative pregnancy result. Most people weren’t quite as upset as if they’d had IVF but it still knocked the stuffing out of them. His last comment was, ‘Whatever you do, you should do it soon.’
That was enough for us. All of a sudden we were excited about the prospect and impatient to get going. Time was ticking by—neither of us was getting any younger! Dr Fisher took us in to Shirley to explain how donor insemination worked and to talk about the cost. We joked with her about how they decide who has to deliver bad news, as she had four days ago. Dom asked if they play paper, scissors, rock! She said she volunteered because she felt it was part of her job.
Shirley told us we’d need to see the counsellor twice, three months apart before we could try again with donor sperm. At the second counselling session we could choose a donor from the bank. Dom asked about BYO sperm—we’d already had offers—and was told it’d need to be screened like the rest. She also explained I’d need blood tests to track ovulation before being inseminated. It sounded too easy.
As we were leaving Dr Fisher came to tell us there were six donors in the bank and we joked about how good-looking they might be, showing a preference for Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp. Walking to the car, Seven started yabbering away like he always does, and asked if we are sad we weren’t going to have a baby.
‘Yes,’ Dom told him.
‘Well, at least you tried,’ reasoned Seven. That’s what we always tell him—trying is better than winning. Sadly, I think that theory doesn’t work in this case.
We started to talk more seriously about donor sperm. I thought that after nine months, it was going to feel like our baby—it didn’t matter who the father was. Dom has to be certain so I told him I’d go along with what he wanted us to do. Without hesitation he said, ‘Let’s do it!’
Looking at possibilities, we started with the four people who had already offered to donate sperm to us. Dom’s brother had the closest biological link to us, but Dom didn’t think the biological link was a sticking point. He thought the main thing would be the path of least resistance. What’s going to be the easiest, not just in terms of getting it up there and the cost, but the follow through stuff as well? He knew he’d prefer a friend over a donor from the bank.
‘You want someone you know but that you’re not going to see all the time,’ he said. That ruled out two of our close friends, but Dom’s brother was living in Australia and Dom had a good friend living in another city and they were both possibles.
But how do you ask someone to donate sperm to you? It’s so awkward. If you ask to their face they may feel pressured to say yes. We didn’t want that. Then again, it’s not really something you should do by text or on Facebook. Dom said it needed to be done in writing to give the person time and space to think about what it actually meant before responding.
I wondered aloud whether asking a single person to donate would be easier because they don’t have a partner and kids to consider. But Dom disagreed—they would work out what a big deal it was once they went to the counselling.
‘What about our gay friends?’ I asked. Dom wasn’t keen, saying, ‘No, you don’t want to use someone who will see it as an opportunity to have their own family.’ Maybe this was because two of our gay friends had joked that they would donate to us and we could share custody.
Seven had been listening to this conversation from the back seat and he asked why we had to do IVF at all. I explained that we can’t have babies like normal people can.
‘Cos Dad had that surgery?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’
Eight seconds of silence passed and then Seven had a great idea. ‘Why don’t you just follow the book that we read?’ He was talking about Where Did I Come From? The facts of life without any nonsense and with illustrations by Peter Mayle, which I read to him when he asked me about how babies were made. Dom and I burst out laughing.
He can be so cute and funny sometimes and he doesn’t even realise it. He was nine years old at this point and had lived with us for almost half of his life.
He had started calling us Mum and Dad in January after staying with my mum in Waverley. In the van on the ride home he said to Mum out of the blue, ‘Do you think Jay-Jay and Dom would mind if I called them Mum and Dad?’
Mum said, ‘I’m sure they would love that.’
Seven went on, ‘Because they are kind of like my Mum and Dad now, a
ye?’
Mum agreed, and nothing more was said.
About an hour after Seven arrived home he said to me and Dom, ‘I’m going to start calling you Mum and Dad now.’ We were very surprised.
Dom replied, ‘Sev, you can call us whatever you want, as long as you’re happy, but we would love you to call us Mum and Dad.’ And with that, he started calling us Mum and Dad immediately.
He also made us call him Son, and he would correct us if we called him by his name. ‘It’s SON, not Sev!’ he’d say.
It took me a few weeks to get used to the idea. I felt quite uncomfortable with it at first because I felt guilty. I know my brother would be furious if he knew Sev called us Mum and Dad. He’s extremely protective of Seven in this way.
Sev would call across the house to me, ‘Muuuuuum!’ and it would take me a few seconds to register that he was talking to me.
I’m used to it now, though, and ever since Sev started calling us this, his behaviour has improved and he has become a lot more affectionate. (He’s not very affectionate by nature. It takes a lot of effort to get a cuddle out of him.)
All of a sudden we were beginning to feel like real parents.
At the time I was writing a weekly celebrity column for New Idea magazine—my humorous take on celebrities’ lives as well as sharing some of my personal experiences with celebrities. The editor asked if they could interview Dom and me for a story after our last IVF cycle.
I have no problem getting publicity for anything I do on my radio show, but I always feel uncomfortable opening up about my private life to journalists. I think it’s because I often end up saying too much and regretting it later. But since I write for the magazine and have friends on the staff, we agreed. Here is an extract from the interview.
Misconception Page 14