Our fertility struggle: What it’s really like to be on the rotten end of the odds – Stuff.co.nz

OPINION: I was never particularly fussed about becoming a mother – my younger siblings were nightmares to grow up with, and the folks I dated in my 20s certainly weren’t people I could rely on to help me raise little humans. But when I started dating my husband, I realised that not only could I count on him to be a responsible parenting partner, but that I was actually excited for the adventure of raising children with him.

We started trying right after our wedding because though I was only in my early 30s, he’s about 10 years older and we knew fetal chromosomal abnormalities are more likely with older dads. When nothing happened after the first few months, we insisted on getting fertility tests conducted.

We had to self-advocate pretty hard as the ‘standard’ is to try for a year before testing if the mother is under 35. In our opinion, that seemed like it had a decent chance of being a wasted year if testing came back showing we had problems.

Low and behold: both of us have fertility issues. I am forever grateful that we did not blindly follow the standard protocol and advocated for our own health.

Our problems were significant enough that we were immediately recommended IVF with ICSI (where an individual sperm is injected into a collected egg instead of letting the sperm try to penetrate on their own) – the “big guns” of fertility treatment. As we had not been trying for a year, we did not qualify for the publicly-funded IVF treatments, so this procedure was entirely out of pocket, to the tune of about $13,000 to $15,000 including the treatment and the medications.

I was surprised that the medications and self-administered injections weren’t more scary: this is the part Hollywood depicts as particularly alarming and unpleasant. It certainly was no walk in the park, but we were able to establish a relatively sweet routine of waking up a bit early and doing the injections, then cuddling in bed and psyching ourselves up for the day.

We were lucky to have such supportive employers who allowed us the flexibility to leave at odd and unpredictable hours to get check-ups and do tests. The doctors are never sure just how a woman will react to the hormones, so she must be monitored closely to make sure she’s responding appropriately, or to adjust the dosages as required.

There’s no way to plan in advance for monitoring to happen at certain times on certain days, or even to know how long she’ll have to do the injections before egg collection. If either of us worked jobs where we needed to schedule shifts, we would have had an incredibly hard time being able to go to appointments.

I was unprepared for the really dismal numbers involved with IVF – again, Hollywood and popular ‘knowledge’ was unreliable in this instance.

Our doctors told us that out of all the eggs we collect, only about 75 per cent would fertilise, 50 per cent would grow to become ‘day-three’ embryos, and only 25 per cent would be suitable to transfer back or freeze on day five/six. As an over 30, I was considered to be very fortunate to have 11 eggs collected, and against the odds we wound up with five mature embryos (two to three more than we were warned we would get).

That’s when the hard part started. New Zealand typically only transfers one embryo at a time (again, pop culture made me think we could transfer two or more!), and the cost is about $2,000 per transfer, and each of our transfers failed.

It is hard to explain how devastating each failure is to go through – by this point we had already invested almost $20,000, we finally had the ‘right’ materials on hand, and all of the testing showed that it SHOULD happen. Alas, negative after negative after negative. We started doing (doctor recommended) experimental treatments that ‘might’ work, but research had not proven one way or the other, just on the off chance we could get lucky. But no dice.

It was also particularly hard to explain to people that it wasn’t happening, since everyone else also assumed that IVF = baby. So much of the narrative around IVF is either propagated by clinics and facilities who are selling fertility services, so it is in their best interest to promote the successful stories.

And in the news media, those stories just play better, so they’re preferentially reported. Even though the facts showed that we were not that far off average, we felt like abnormal failures on so many fronts.

By this time, we had not only qualified for the publicly-funded fertility treatments, but we’d also wound our way through the year-long wait list. We geared up for another round of IVF, but after our failures we had basically given up hope. The second round was less successful than the first, with three embryos making it to the finish line.

123RF

“It is hard to explain how devastating each failure is to go through.”

At the risk of perpetuating the hurtful success-story myths: our first embryo transfer from this second round has resulted in a successful pregnancy.

There is lots of fear and anxiety involved in this pregnancy, likely leftover PTSD from our infertility saga. Most parents-to-be are so happy and excited for each new stage and scan, but we have been fearful and worried, because we know just how wrong everything can go, and what it’s like to be on the rotten end of the odds.

We were incredibly lucky in our friends and family who have supported us through our ‘dark years’, as we call them. These people didn’t always know the right thing to say, and often said the wrong thing in ignorance. But we knew they were coming from a place of love, and they actually listened to us when we explained why certain things were very hurtful to hear.

They also understood when we needed to take a step back from pregnancy news – it was not that we were upset for our dear friends, but our own sadness and pain made it hard for us to be as joyful as our friends deserved. People who are struggling with infertility are often fighting an unrelenting and private battle for years at a time, and it is so horribly unfair to expect them to shunt their trauma aside to ape happiness over others having the success they so desperately want. We were so lucky that our friends were so compassionate to our situation.

For those hoping to be supportive to a similar couple, please don’t recommend naturopathy treatments, or tell them to ‘just relax’, or suggest that their behaviours are what is causing the problem.

In the vast majority of cases, none of those pieces of advice are backed by science (yes, even the ‘relaxing’ chestnut!), and the infertile couple is probably working very hard (at great expense) with their doctor to find a solution.

There are so many resources available for friends and family to look into to better support their loved-ones struggling with this problem – please take the 15-20 minutes to look into it for the sake of your friends and family. It made a huge difference for us.