Infertility wasn’t the end for me — so don’t lose hope
Anne-Marie Scully and other women trying to conceive, shouldn’t lose hope (Letters). In 2008, I was told I would never conceive naturally, my hormone levels showed I would enter the menopause early and my egg reserve was pathetic. My right ovary had stopped functioning completely and my left one was scarred from cysts which had bled. Still, we embarked on our first round of emotionally draining and physically painful IVF in 2009. after weeks of injections and a painful egg collection procedure, only three eggs were collected. Of those three precious eggs, only one was suitable. It was fertilised using intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) and placed in my womb. For the first two weeks, I didn’t move, I didn’t lift, I did very little except pray to God that my little bean would stick. Two weeks later I got a positive pregnancy test result. elated, I cried with happiness and, for a moment, the world was a glorious, wonderful place. The next morning I began to bleed heavily. I was devastated: it wasn’t to be. I bought some unopened daffodils and placed them on my father’s grave, hoping in some stupid way that my child, whom I would never meet, would be safe in my father’s arms. Months passed as I threw myself into work. neither my husband nor I brought up the idea of a second round of IVF. Meetings with a lovely doctor at the IVF clinic shed no light on why the pregnancy had failed, but he referred me to a miscarriage clinic, for which I can never thank him enough. Blood tests there showed I had something called antiphospholipid syndrome which could explain why the IVF pregnancy (and a few in my 20s, when I was obviously still fertile) had failed. In december 2009, with heavy hearts, we discussed going for our final attempt at IVF and in the Christmas sales I bought an ovulation test pack that came with a pregnancy test. The test never showed when I was ovulating. But on January 8, as I was getting ready to shower and was about to throw away the pregnancy test, I thought ‘why not?’ I used it — and it was positive. a faint pink line, barely there, but just visible. Shaken, I called my mum, who looked at the test and was as shocked as I was. The next day, I bought two more tests, then more before it sunk in — I was pregnant. I took 75mg of aspirin a day to prevent my blood from clotting, panicked constantly, and every twinge had me running to the assessment room at the hospital. I had 17 ultrasound scans, both private and NHS, to make sure my baby was OK and, on September 17, 2010, my daughter came into the world. She was, and is, my everything. doctors told me to cherish her, as there was unlikely to be another baby. They couldn’t explain how I had managed to conceive my daughter, but said it definitely wouldn’t happen again. as I type this, my five-month-old son is sitting in his walker, chewing a toy, while my two-year-old daughter is writing on every piece of paper in the room. The pregnancies were hard, the labours even harder — I got gestational diabetes with my son and both were born by emergency C-section. But I would do it all again in a heartbeat. Infertility isn’t the end, doctors aren’t always right, nature will find a way. CAROLINE MAGHANGA,
Bickerstaffe, Lancs.