I know it’s been a while, a whole year in fact. Life’s been pretty crazy but I’m still here and I’m very much still in this wild realm of baby loss and infertility with you all. I guess because I have now finished my family I often reflect back on the whole journey and I am now able to find some humour in the journey that was probably the biggest car crash of my life so far.
I find humour in some of it and also some deep dark sadness, but I know saying all of this stuff out loud will resonate with so many of you; some of the stuff we do, we think and we find ourselves doing that, well, basically just weren’t how we imagined it to be.
How I imagined it to be in my teens was I would get married at 24 to my Prince Charming and have a baby at 28 and I would definitely have a Summer baby because who would want a Winter baby that would be awful! I would definitely have a girl and call her Florence and we would be twinning and it would be just magical. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK! Why doesn’t anyone reign us in at school and say well actually life ain’t no fairy tale and this shit can be wayyyyy harder than that!
Ok well insta vs reality and all that, my Prince Charming fell into my plenty of fish.com inbox at age 25 and it took me 3 years to convince him to marry me because he wanted to buy a really expensive bike and I said only if we go buy a ring first. Family and fertility wasn’t even on the radar until age 31 and I had spent the whole of my uni years terrified of getting pregnant and spent far too much student loan on the morning after pill… if I had known what I know now I would have risked it for sure!
When we did decide to start ‘trying’ I was using one of those flo apps that gives you a flower on your apparent fertile days and I thought we were TRYING, actually hilarious when I think about a year later waiting outside the bedroom for a calpol syringe of sperm to inject into my vajayjay… I’ll come to that in more detail later… gotta build the suspense for the cray cray shit we end up doing.
So the flower days came around and we ‘tried’ and when it came to my period been due that month I waited for the day after and tested with a clear blue digital and for the very first time saw the words PREGNANT 1-2 weeks. Little did I know in my naivety that I could have known probably a good week earlier! I remember it well standing in what then was our conservatory and squeeling thinking how easy was that! I ran upstairs to the bedroom to announce I was pregnant and Prince Charming looked entirely disappointed that he only got one month of trying and that was it.
That very same day I worked out my due date, my mat leave, googled baby names and ordered a maternity bra- what a massive dickhead, makes me feel so stupid that I actually genuinely believed in that time that a positive pregnancy test = baby. It never even crossed my mind at any moment that I wouldn’t have that baby or that, that baby could die. I guess it’s quite nice in a way that genuine naive moment of not knowing all the bad things that can happen and just believing in everything including your body.
Being a geriatric now (almost 38) a lot of my closest friends are much younger than me and are in or approaching their baby mama era. I try my hardest to keep in my doom and sheer panic as I truly hope they can live in that bubble of excitement and that they never enter a game of jumanji like I did. I sometimes feel like they don’t want to be around me because they don’t want my baby loss world to be a part of their world in that moment – and I get that, I wish I’d had a choice but I never.
When that pregnancy ended I remember it was a Saturday night in A&E. I passed the pregnancy in the toilet cubicle and I flushed it down the toilet as when I asked what to do I was directed back to the toilet cubicle, I didn’t know what to do so I just flushed. At the time It didn’t affect me but I can remember it vividly if I want to.
I remember calling all of my closest people to say I had a miscarriage and the shame I felt, that I had upset them that they didn’t know I was pregnant but it was only because I wanted to keep it a surprise but then I felt bad, I felt guilty and I worried more about what other people thought and so I didn’t really focus on what actually happened to ME.
Because there is that whole thing of miscarriage is common, 1 in 4, every man and his dog has had a miscarriage, I didn’t think that much into it you know, I literally just thought well let’s just try again. I didn’t research, I didn’t obsess, I think I was still pretty ok and normal at this stage. 2nd time the whole process lasted a lot longer, even though the baby stopped growing at the same time as the first time the pregnancy lasted for weeks and I had retained pregnancy that wouldn’t pass.
We travelled around Italy for three weeks and I was still pregnant with a dead baby, I bought clear blue tests in Florence, Rome and Sorrento and they all still said I was INCINTO but I wasn’t I was just carrying a dead fetus. Dark isn’t it… but that’s the reality for so many of you too, I know it. People think oh she’s had a miscarriage and that the baby miraculously dissolves into thin air, not that it can go on for weeks or months even. Most people don’t realise that you still have to pass/have that baby whether it be vaginally or surgically… it doesn’t just disappear.
When the second one finally ‘resolved’ that was when I became a fertility guru, I read every article and piece of research about getting pregnant and recurrent miscarriage that I could find, I also read loads of shit too including mums net back to 1992 when Denise had hcg that was going down but the pregnancy was still ongoing…. Thanks for the hope Denise but fuck you man.
THIRD time lucky, ok so this is the pregnancy that we have to have, the planned miscarriage because the nhs won’t do anything before this point. At this point I was still pretty low level crazy fertility queen because I was still only testing with a digital test and didn’t know the early testing frenzy that eventually takes over.
This time I cried I balled my eyes out at pregnant 1-2 weeks on the test because I knew it was going to end, I knew something was wrong with me. How weird that all I could think is I hope this ones fast, I hope I don’t need surgery. There was zero hope that there would be a baby.
My main memory of this time was after I found out there was no heartbeat I went to work, I drove there from the hospital and I got out of my car in the car park where I taught my dance class that night.
A member of my staff got out of her car and just asked how I was like any normal human interaction and I replied I was pregnant again but it’s died and now I’m going to teach a dance class and just like a robot I did. I smiled at people, I greeted their children with a Disney smile and all I could think was I’m never going to have a child like you do.
I questioned if I deserved it, maybe I did something awful that meant it would never happen for me, maybe it was my fault. We all do it don’t we, blame ourselves and wonder what we could have done to change it. I now know it wasn’t my fault and I spend my life telling people it wasn’t there’s but I know that feeling, that blame and torment of being the woman that’s body can’t carry a baby, the wife that can’t make their husband a dad.
I also know when I’m sat in those moments of darkness with you, the most awful moments and I’m being that validating twat saying all that shit that means nothing to you in that moment that one day you will be able to know I was right and the rationalisation does come, just not right then… so for now I’m happy to be that validating twat saying all the right shit.
Sometimes I even give myself the ick big time! I had no one that knew anything about any of it though and there was no validation just pure torment and bless yous … and that I will never do, unless you sneeze and need a tissue but not because your baby died.
The fourth pregnancy was my first time on my treatment plan that had cost us the earth but I was willing to try anything. This was the furthest I had ever got and I really thought it had worked. We were still awaiting sperm results that we had paid for just a week before I found out I was pregnant and on that day when we went for the result and found out that the sperm was super fantastic, we also found out this baby had stopped growing and there was no heartbeat.
I passed this baby at home, I sat on the toilet and held it in my hand, I shouted for my husband to come see but he didn’t want to. I rang the hospital as I wanted them to test the baby and they told me to store it overnight in the fridge and to bring it in the morning. I stored the baby in my husbands packed lunch box on the top shelf of the fridge. I remember laying in bed staring at the bedroom ceiling thinking my baby is in the fridge downstairs with the milk and cheese.
HORRIFIC is the only way to describe that day, walking through the hospital with my baby in my hand bag. I was told because I had held and touched the baby they probably wouldn’t get a result because of my own dna. I couldn’t even do that right, I couldn’t even store them correctly for testing, what a shit mum. You’ve thought this stuff too right?
The fifth time it was no longer fun, it was absolute torture, trying, the timings, the planned sex, the pressure… absolutely god damn awful. The pressure on the man is not spoken about very often or what it does to your relationship but I’m a glass of wine down and the seat belt light is on, on this flight so buckle up. It’s shit and if anyone that is infertile or struggling to have a baby tells you they were making love it’s BOLLOCKS!
The woman is thinking ‘it’s not going to happen it’s going on forever I’m not going to get the sperm’ the man is thinking ‘oh god it’s not happening and she’s going to lose her shit and then we are going to have to do it AGAIN’
One time (at band camp) when it didn’t happen I remember getting up and throwing on joggers and a hoodie leaving the house and driving to Sainsbury’s and just walking up and down every aisle crying like some sort of deranged psycho because it was the most important day and I didn’t get the tad poles. I then went home and continued to cry like a lunatic and he must have felt like dog shit but I didn’t care. I didn’t give two shits how he felt because I needed the sperm, it’s a one track mind and you lose all normal life sanity.
Once I dressed up, it didnt happen and god I was devastated, I was so embarrassed that I could be so repulsive that it still didn’t work, that lingerie went in the bin. I know now it was the pressure, but in that moment we are so crazy nothing could make it ok. Well maybe a few billion sperm could but you know….
I was sat on a train to London crying into my cup of Yorkshire tea the next morning when prince charming messaged me… there must be another way?
I went down a rabbit hole and I replied ‘there is… it involves a syringe and a sterile pot’ I got a thumbs up in return and so, at home insemination began.
The following month we tried Insem for the first time, my ovulation came around quicker than anticipated so the syringe and sterile pot ended up been a calpol syringe and a special edition baileys glass. If you have ever had a Christmas Baileys at my house your mind is going wild right now isn’t it…. Well ‘cheers’ as that month was the month we conceived our first rainbow. We won’t ever know if he was conceived in the calpol syringe as we had alternated insem and ‘making love’ but I’d like to think he was just for the bants at his 18th birthday party.
To be continued 🫶🏻
Crazy Fertility Queen 