Journey to Conception: Part 2 IVF..why the stigma?

It felt like a lifetime..but actually it had been 45 minutes to be precise. I sat there with the needle in my hand…shaking, crying and sincerely wondering how I had gotten here. This was the first day of my IVF journey. Unbeknown to me at the time, it was going to fail.

If you have read my blog post about the consultant telling us, that we would need an egg donor to conceive naturally, you already know how this ivf cycle ended.

But let me start from the beginning….

In the UK, depending on where you live and your fertility history amongst other factors, you may be able to get funded ivf cycles on the NHS. We were entitled to 3. We had unexplained infertility, all blood tests had come back fine at the time, so GPs didn’t have an answer as to why we had not yet conceived. I had never taken contraceptives so it was a real mystery.

It took a lot of courage for us to get tested, but we did. Thank God. There seems to be stigma around IVF, and i’m not sure why…we are blessed to be able to benefit from modern medicine..and the way i saw it…the scripture says that God knew us before we were conceived….so it will only be babies that are ordained with the exact genetic makeup via ivf that will be conceived. That has been my comfort anyway.

Before I was born, He knew me.
Jeremiah 1:5

So we were referred for IVF. Up until this point, i had not really thought too deeply about having children, i was living my best life, working, travelling, singing in ministry…it was great to be honest…but I knew that if I was to go for the ivf…i would need to allow myself to really want this. So i did.

I can say it was the most emotionally stressful and draining experience i have ever been through.

In that moment with the first injection….i felt incredibly alone. Even though my husband was very supportive. It was me having to inject, go for scans, go for procedures to ensure my fallopian tubes were not blocked. The hormones i was injecting, were creating a warped reality for me. Everything felt much worse than it was, i was inpatient, extra irritable and intolerant…in fact I must have been incredibly hard to be around. What made it worse was the fact that we had decided to go through this without an audience. So to be frank, nobody knew. I went through this without emotional support. Not something i would recommend looking back actually.

I even remember having quite an emotionally tough time in meetings, then having to inject myself secretly in the car afterwards. Knowing that no one understood why they were getting this version of me, and therefore finding it hard to blame them for just reacting. It was tough. But. I know now, it was part of my journey, unique to me.

At the end of the day, it was a tough process, but it changed me a little. It prepared me for the desire to become a mother. Because when that choice was formally taken away from me and us…it was devastating.

‘I’m sorry, this cycle hasn’t worked…you will need an egg donor’. That was the long and short of it.

I even remember finding out by email that the cycle hadn’t worked and that although we were entitled to two more cycles, my ovarian reserve measured by AMH was too low to justify any further cycles. We were invited back into a clinic in a month to ‘discuss our options’.

Fast forward to that final discussion with the consultant detailed in my previous blog, meant that we had done all that was humanly possible. The rest was up to The Almighty.