“I’m lucky my story has a happy ending.”
When Dee decided she wanted to become a mum again seven years after the birth of her first child, it never occurred to her that she might not get pregnant straight away
All about me…
Age: 29
Job: customer services assistant
Lives: Cambridgeshire
Significant others: Husband Steve, son Tom 10, daughter Kim 4 months
Type of treatment: We were due to start Clomid after lots of investigations but didn’t need to in the end as we fell pregnant the cycle before!
Trying for: 21 months
Advice for you…
Don’t make the same mistake I did and let the whole experience change you as a person. Try to believe that it is only a matter of time before you are blessed with, or without, treatment. A positive outlook will make all the difference to your relationships with the people closest to you and don’t be afraid to tell them how you feel. Keeping things to yourself always makes things worse.
Dee’s full story
I’d been broody since my son Tom was three years old but my husband wasn’t keen on the idea of another child. By the time Tom was six, I was desperate to become a mum again and upset that my husband still wasn’t interested. I finally bit the bullet in November 2003 and stopped taking my contraceptive pills. I told my husband that he’d just have to take his chances!
I was so excited by the idea of conceiving and carrying another child that it never occurred to me that I might not get pregnant straight away. I had a really long cycle after coming off the Pill and spent a small fortune on home pregnancy tests, which all came up negative. I was convinced that they were wrong and that I really was pregnant but, after two months of waiting, my period came.
In February 2004 my sister announced her pregnancy. I was thrilled for her but gutted for myself. I felt terrible for being jealous but just couldn’t help it; I hope I never let on how upset I was at the time. This jealousy was to rear its ugly head on many occasions over the coming year as I struggled to come to terms with the possibility of secondary infertility: I was constantly angry or upset, or both.
Since my cycles were long and irregular, I tried charting my temperature and using ovulation kits to see if I could pinpoint ovulation. I noticed that my cycles weren’t ‘textbook’ so I made an appointment with my GP, eight months after starting trying to conceive. She did some blood tests, at the start of what was to be a very trying 14 months, filled with bitter disappointments and lots of waiting.
My first lot of bloods showed that I had not ovulated so they were repeated a couple of months later, when ovulation was confirmed. My cycles were still very long and I was convinced that I had a hormone imbalance. I kept saying this to my doctor but she didn’t agree and simply told me to have regular sex and relax. I was so frustrated because I just wanted her to DO SOMETHING to make me pregnant.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. In September 2004, I had my first early miscarriage, which left me with mixed feelings. On one hand I was upset, naturally, but on the other I was pleased that I’d gotten pregnant and I was filled with hope again.
Imagine my joy when, next cycle, I got a positive again! I was so happy. However, it wasn’t meant to be. A week later, I miscarried again and this was worse because I’d convinced myself that all would be well and, silly as it sounds, had bonded with my foetus already.
I fell to pieces. I was so angry with everyone and everything: I couldn’t believe this had happened to me again. My husband couldn’t understand and neither could my family. I felt very alone.
Things had gone quiet on the fertility tests front as my GP was happy that I was ovulating and my husband’s sperm analysis was fine. However, I disliked the person I was becoming. I was only interested in where I was at in my cycle and felt stressed all the time as I was either waiting to ovulate, making sure that we were having sex at the right times (regardless of whether we wanted to or not!) and then waiting to see if I’d got pregnant. The crushing disappointment each month was horrendous; I’ll never forget it.
Once again I had a faint positive in March 2005 but my period arrived and that little foetus didn’t survive either. I just accepted this early miscarriage and barely cried; I used up all my tears on the second miscarriage.
My GP referred me to a consultant gynaecologist to investigate the recurrent miscarriages and I had loads of blood tests. All the original ones were repeated and we had many others to check for things such as Lupus and chromosome abnormalities. My husband also had his sperm analysis redone. All of the tests came back normal with no explanations for our problems. I had hoped that there would be something wrong so we could fix it.
We met the consultant in June 2005 and this marked a turning point in our journey. He was wonderful and confirmed that I wasn’t ovulating regularly and my cycles weren’t right. He decided to start treating me with Clomid.
By now we’d been trying to conceive for 21 months.
I collected my Clomid from the hospital in August 2005 and waited for my period so I could start taking my ‘magic pills’. It never arrived. However, I got a positive on 16 August and felt different with this fourth pregnancy. I was fairly confident it would all be fine. My husband didn’t want to get excited as we’d had so many disappointments before but I couldn’t help it. I was just wishing the time away to the magic 12 weeks.
Unfortunately, I had some bleeding in the early weeks, which was terrifying, and I ended up having quite a few scans. The pregnancy itself was fairly easy. I didn’t gain a huge amount of weight and I felt quite well once the sickness and tiredness of the early weeks were over. I did worry constantly about miscarriage, even up to the day before Kim was born. I couldn’t
accept that we’d be so lucky to actually have a baby. I don’t think it really sunk in for us that I was actually pregnant until I was about seven months gone and then we could start enjoying the experience and looking forward to becoming a family of four.
I found it hard to imagine what life would be like once the pregnancy was over, since I’d never looked further than getting a positive result on a pregnancy test. I also found it hard to think how things would be with a new baby, especially since it had been 10 years since I’d last done this! I worried that I wouldn’t cope, that Tom would feel left out, that my husband and I would argue due to tiredness. I seemed to worry about everything – it was such a waste of energy.
Kim’s birth on 1 May 2006 was very straightforward and such an amazing experience. My husband was there throughout and we were both so happy. It’s impossible to put the feelings into words really. The last couple of years of pain and heartbreak just melted away in that split second that my daughter was placed in my arms.
Kim is now 12 weeks old and I can’t imagine a time when she wasn’t here. It’s been very hard-going and there have been times when, to my horror, I’ve thought, ‘What the heck have I done?’. These thoughts are fleeting though and just due to lack of sleep and trying to keep on top of household things, entertaining Tom and generally adjusting to this new life.
My family feels complete now and I am so happy that I had the birth experience that I wanted with a beautiful healthy baby at the end of it. There will be no more babies for me for various reasons. One of them is I simply haven’t got the emotional strength to go through the conception experience again, which was the worst time of my life. I hope that those who don’t
have problems conceiving count their blessings. They’ll never know the emptiness that infertility brings and the damage it can do to a person and their relationships with the people they love. I’m lucky as my story has a happy ending and I’m very grateful for that.
