What if it goes wrong again?

Miracle of miracles, I did conceive in November 2010. But now, instead of being anxious about getting pregnant, we were petrified that something would go wrong again. I didn’t want to be faced with ending this pregnancy and I was really against doing any of the ultrasounds. I didn’t know how someone could go through it twice and not be destroyed by it. All I could think of was ‘If they find something wrong with the baby, I am going to punch the ultrasound technician, there is no way I am going to be able to take it.’ Or the alternative scenario: they find something wrong, I say thank you and excuse myself to go to the ladies, then find my way up to the top floor or the roof of the building, and just walk off the side. But I caved in and went for the ultrasound. It was fine. Our baby has no problems.

Limbo – uni friend dies; due date; fertility probs

We had our son on the Saturday. My husband went back to work on the Monday, and I went back to work two weeks later. We were shell-shocked, but trying to get on with things. The chaplain from the hospital wrote to us to let us know he had taken our baby’s funeral service and that his ashes had been scattered along with other babies in the cemetery next to the hospital. It makes me cry, but I am happy this kind man took the service. Why was I not there? I think we thought that it hadn’t been a ‘proper’ pregnancy, and because of the decision we’d taken, we didn’t have a right to be sad, upset or even grieve. It was a very mixed-up time.

We got the results of the post mortem two months later, but it showed little more than had been shown in the ultrasounds. At least it did relieve my lurking fear that at least they hadn’t made a mistake. It didn’t say ‘there was nothing wrong with this baby, what have you done?’ It did say that our boy had ‘dysmorphic features’ which is the medical term for looking quite strange, so at least I knew my instinct when looking at him had been correct.  Because our CVS had come back normal, we were advised that we had probably been unlucky and to give it another go.

We continued to try but nothing was happening and we were becoming increasingly stressed. I was becoming more agitated but trying to keep a lid on it. On the outside I went to work, did my job, laughed, smiled, but inside I was very depressed. It didn’t help that that summer we got a call from an old university friend. He told us that one of our other friends from our time at uni had been walking home from a nightclub in central London a couple of nights before. He had been beaten round the head and left for dead. He was put on lifesupport but they turned it off a couple of weeks later. I heard of his death on the radio before I left for work one morning. Now I hadn’t seen this guy in years. Normally I would have handled this as ok given I was by now really only an acquaintance. But now this had a very negative impact on my already-fragile morale.

Summer turned into autumn, and now I faced a double-whammy: my baby’s due date and mass redundancies at work. Now being upset at my baby’s due date was not something I was expecting. It seems silly looking back, but I’d had my baby back in May 2009, and so that was that, no? He’d been due end September/early October, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was a physical reaction just as much as an emotional one. I didn’t even need a calendar for me to tell that it was my due date, that was the weird thing. At the same time, at work, we were being called in one after the other to be told whether we were keeping our jobs. I kept mine, so why should I be bothered? But one day I came home and brushing my hair in the mirror, all of a sudden I noticed I could see patches of scalp that usually i couldn’t see. My hair was falling out. Now was the time to admit that I wasn’t handling any of this well at all.

I went to my GP, and she put me on sertraline, an anti-depressant also known as Zoloft. I’d been fighting going on anti-depressants for ages, but I couldn’t deny that I wasn’t right inside. Did it make any difference? I think so. Whether you say it was the placebo effect or the medication working, stepping out in front of the train on my way to work seemed less like a good idea. Things seemed a bit more bearable.

But we were still ‘trying’, and nothing was happening. A year after I had our baby, we were back at my GP, and she suggested a hormone blood test for me and that my husband should ask his GP for a sperm test. My hormone test came up as normal, but my husband’s sperm test showed poor motility and very poor morphology. This was quite a blow. As he’d had a varicocele that had been operated on in the past, he went back to the original urologist for advice. This consultant ordered another sperm test, and this showed the same issue, as indeed did a repeat test a few months later. We were told that if we should ever have to consider IVF, then we would have to do ICSI, where they select a sperm which looks good to inject straight into the egg. I really didn’t want to go down the IVF route. Why weren’t we conceiving?