The end of 2007 saw me a shell of my former self; depressed, worn-out and incapable of working full-time for the time being (we planned on my taking just one year off work, as that was all we could afford). I was still very low over the Christmas/New Year period of 2007 moving into 2008 but I also felt soooooo relieved that I no longer had to engage with the public world of work and clients. I no longer had to play the exhausting game of pretending I was ok and everything was ok. The cold and dark days of winter were naturally a time for hibernating in any event and I spent a very cosy January just pottering around our house with our dog, once DH and the rest of the World returned to work in the New Year. I also started a little medical experiment of my own which I hoped may result in a miracle natural pregnancy. I had previously been diagnosed with high levels of 'natural killer cells' after a trip to The Miscarriage Clinic in Harley Street, London and for all of my IVF cycles was prescribed a cortisone steroid called prednisolone, which was meant to naturally suppress my immune system. I had a few bottles of these steroids left over from previous failed IVF cycles and decided to start taking them for a three month period to see whether I might fall pregnant on our own. The theory is that not only can abnormally high killer cells cause miscarriage but they may also prevent pregnancy each month by blocking a naturally fertilised egg from implanting in the uterus. The killer cells recognise an embryo as a foreign growth and attack it as they normally would diseased cells. As a result of my self-prescribed steroid use, I developed an abnormally bloated-looking moon face and found myself with lots of energy. Never have I spring-cleaned, cooked and organised as much in my life as whilst I was on prednisolone. I became a model house-wife. For me, the steroids served as a kind of high (I recalled my mother being on them to shrink her multiple brain tumours just after she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She told her doctors that she was feeling good, all things considered, after her devastating diagnosis and was told, 'that is probably the steroids that are making you feel good').
In addition to my prednisolone experiment, I also treated nutrition and a fertility boosting diet as a sort of full-time job. I continued to attend weekly acupuncture and got serious again about boiling up my stinky concoctions of Chinese herbs. I also tried to do yoga for relaxation. I continued to take my anti-depressants and consciously put on some weight, as it had been suggested to me that my BMI was a little too low. We attended SIMS again early in 2008 for a post-IVF follow-up. I was terrified they would send me packing and tell me that they were not prepared to allow such a hopeless case as myself to undertake any more IVF at their clinic. We were both pleasantly surprised, in that although they discussed their new Ukranian egg donation scheme with us, they also agreed to let us try again with my own eggs. It was pointed out to us however that couples like us struggled to give up on IVF after experiencing success with it on one occasion but then losing the pregnancy; it was like a warning to us. Like, ok we will let you try one more time but you need to start preparing yourselves for reality....So I threw myself into preparing for our fifth and next cycle at SIMS. It was such a relief for it to be the only thing in my life which I had to worry about, rather than sneaking around doing IVF whilst also trying to hold down a demanding full-time job. But we had calcuated that I could only really afford to not work for about a year, so I knew I had to make the most of my 'year off'. We scheduled egg collection for June, so I had about 4-5 months to get my ovaries in prime condition. Mid-March 2008, when our third baby was due to be born came and went. An Australian friend in Ireland who had been in the exact same week of pregnancy as me had her baby around this time.
I decided to make the most of my time and go and visit The Zita West Clinic in Harley Street in London. I had read Zita West's guide to getting pregnant and knew that she was credited by a lot of women with their natural 'miracle' pregnancies after a lot of hard-luck in IVF. I was particularly interested in hypnotherapy; partially because well-meaning, but naive friends and family members suggested that my infertility was all in my head (because I had fallen pregnant naturally before) and also because I wondered whether my body was holding back on me and refusing to get pregnant because of some unconscious trauma that was unresolved from my two miscarriages. Maybe my body did not want to be exposed to the risk of miscarriage again? So I booked into a hypnotherapy session with a lovely South African woman at Zita West's Clinic. Before she hypnotised me, she took a full history from me and I described the previous few years. She told me that I was very strong and resourceful to have done all I had to date and that I should be proud of myself for not giving up. We talked about what I wanted from the session and set some goals, such as 'turning down' my natural killer cells and reducing/lowering my follicle stimulating hormone (FSH). She thought that I needed to restore my confidence in my body and my ability to nurture a pregnancy and deliver a baby. We also talked about trying to let go of pent-up grief and healing over the loss of my unborn babies. She asked whether I might consider making a memorial to those babies and also said that she thought I had a strong relationship with my husband that we had coped so well thus far. And finally, I told her that I wanted to try very hard to let go of the bitterness that I increasingly felt in my everyday life towards mothers of new borns and the world around me generally. The session was very helpful; I was able to be hypnotised easily and the therapist said that I was in a state of very deep relaxation as evidenced by my rapid eye movement. We talked about all the goals I had whilst I was in a trance state and I recall all of the session. I left the Clinic with a hypnotherapy CD (which I still use to this day - it is like taking a Valium listening to it!) and the name of a book; "Conquering Infertility" by Alice Domar.
I returned to Dublin from London and a few months later commenced fertility drugs for IVF. The first few ultrasounds were positive and the nurses joked to me that maybe all their patients should take time off work like I was doing as they could see 'antreal follicles' on my scans - for the first time ever. Antreal follicles are tiny pre-follicles waiting to grow and this was a good sign. However egg retrieval was a disappointment. I had been hoping for my best cycle ever, but we only got 2 eggs, of which only 1 fertilised. We were hoping that it would continue to grow and survive for a day 5 blastocyst transfer. I prayed and meditated all weekend willing the embryo on but we received a telephone call from a very regretful embryologist on day 3 to say that it had stopped growing and was not viable. So no embryo transfer. I angrily gathered up all my meds and dumped them into our wheelie bin and had a large glass of wine that night. The next day when DH was at work I cut off all my hair. (Why do women cut their hair off? Usually they do it when they are mad or have been dumped by a boyfriend). I guess I felt mad and fed-up and wanted a change; something that signified that I was through with IVF. I felt like it had dumped me, let me down and I was saying 'screw you anyway'. But DH got upset when he came home and saw what I had done and thought it was an indication that I was losing the plot. He told me that he was worried about me.
I threw myself into a decoration project for a friend, who had a house that was badly in need of a major make-over. It was a Victorian red-brick in inner Dublin that had not been decorated since the 1960s in some areas. It was a much-needed distraction; I used a sledge-hammer to demolish and strip out old wardrobes, ripped up old carpet with my bare hands and even ripped up weeds in the front and back gardens. Every morning when I woke, I had some task to do, whether that was meeting painters, measuring for curtains or racing to the hardware store for more wallpaper glue. DH also helped me out from time to time. Without a task like that, I might have fallen into a deep depression, as it was high summer time and all the mothers and children were out on the road in our cul-de-sac playing and chatting amongst themselves til late each evening. I was no longer in the paid world of work but was not a mummy either. A few times I went down to the local shopping mall near our house during the day but the number of prams and young mothers that I encountered no matter where I looked was too upsetting. I puzzled over how I never noticed women with babies everywhere in my student days in my early 20s, when I was free to wander around the places mothers visited during the day. I started timing my trips to the grocery store to those times when women with babies or small children were least likely to be there; I would go later in the evenings when office workers might be going their shop and little people were fast asleep in their beds at home.
After the decorating project was finished, I had already been away from working full-time for 9 months and the Global Financial Crisis was now in full-swing. We knew I would have to try and return to work in early 2009 (if a job were even available), so I decided to take an opportunity that might not arise again ever to go home to Australia for a few months. I had always pictured that I would get to go home for a few months and catch up with family and friends whilst I was on maternity leave from a job in Ireland, but this seemed a long way off ever happening. When I had left Brisbane in July 2000, I had thought that I would go back-packing for a year or so and never left with the idea that I would never be going back to resume my life. It was also hard to come to terms with the fact that my mother was gone for good when I left home weeks after her death and only ever returned home for short trips of 2 weeks. I felt strangely dislocated; when I returned to Brisbane I was home, where everything was familiar and it seemed like she was just temporarily absent, and would show up one day again. DH had to stay in Ireland and work, now more than ever, and so we prepared to be apart for 3 months.
In retrospect, I think the three months I had in Australia were good for me and good for DH after everything we had been through in the previous few years. My theory is that couples do not often individually grieve over miscarriage and infertility openly because when you are in a relationship, you have to buoy the other up and put on a brave face (although I am sure DH probably though I was always grief stricken at the time). The last thing you want to do is slip into the murk and drag the person you love most in the world down with you. In Brisbane, I stayed in an apartment by myself and started to keep strange hours. Staying up into the early hours of the morning and sleeping late; like in student days. But more than anything I had the space and quiet to contemplate things and to grieve. I read Alice Domar and summarised all my conflicting emotions. In a nutshell, I felt crappy due to:
- the guilt I felt over failure to make DH a father
- the thought of losing my genetic connection to my mother forever (and ever) by never being able to have her grandchild
- premature ovarian failure, which killed my libido, made me feel old and like my youth was over (I also fixated on whether I would now die young like my mother had)
- feeling isolated from my friends/peers who all had started families and socialised with one another with their babies
- being homesick; I wanted to move home to Australia but felt I could not possibly ever ask DH to make this sacrifice for me particularly when I could not make him a father and I had no parental home/ready made family (mother-in-law) to welcome him to Australia. How could I ask him to move to a country where he had no family and where I could never create a family for him? How could I ever feel like Ireland was my home when I would never be able to create my own family in Ireland with DH?
- feeling that my career as a lawyer had been ruined/stymied by my concentrating all my efforts on becoming a mother (and people knowing that this was my priority) and feeling like I wasted years and years studying when I could have gotten pregnant at a younger age (i.e. younger than 28) and things might have worked out
- fed-up with the lack of open discussion, understanding and support for couples undergoing IVF in Ireland and the stigma created by the Catholic Church that was associated with it; and
- grief for my unborn babies...
I think a person needs silence and isolation to truly grieve. Back home in Australia I grieved for my mother, for my unborn babies and for the genetic children that it seemed certain I would never ever have. And I thought more about egg donation. Previously egg donation had never seemed a solution to me, but rather an acceptance of the worst case scenario - it represented giving up on my dreams of having MY OWN baby. But I guess you really do start to consider all options when one door is closing to you. The possibility of my younger sister donating eggs narrowed in 2008, as her circumstances in life had changed dramatically since we first talked about the idea. She had married at the end of 2007 and she now felt the pressure to begin her own family as soon as possible due to the chance that she might also have premature ovarian failure. DH and I discussed egg donation more as 2008 came to a close and we thought that it was probably something that we would explore in 2009. We had heard and read alot of positive things about Spanish egg donation programmes and I started researching these and also had discussions with other family members. Certainly, by the end of 2008 I/we felt ready to give up on my ovaries, or at least we thought we were.
