By round eight I’d stopped telling so many friends. I’d even stopped telling myself I was going to become a mum.
I was sure that the gargantuan decision to become a solo mum by choice was going to be the most difficult part of my journey to motherhood.
I mean, I was grieving the absence of a potential father for my unborn child. That decision announced, I felt confident to go on and tell everyone I knew – ‘Now it’s in the hands of the doctors. No doubt, I’ll be pregnant soon.’
No doubt.
I was sure it’d be a case of ‘one round and done.’ With science on my side, and at the not-too-old-yet age of thirty-eight, falling pregnant would be easy. Right? I wasn’t infertile, as such. It was just the absence of a partner that categorised me as socially infertile in medical terms.
Socially infertile. But fertile, nonetheless.
I went into round one like a bull at a gate.
The gate being my dream of motherhood. I bounded forward.
Sourcing donor sperm. Enduring medical fertility tests. I had it all under control. Then came the injections that I readily plunged into myself daily for a fortnight, all in the name of future motherhood. I told my friends, ‘This is the hard part. I’ll be a mum soon.’
The scans. Horrible. ‘You have eight follicles,’ the nurse told me. Eight? That didn’t seem like many. Still, Google told me eight was quite good. So, I went with it, just excited I was getting closer to meeting my impending baby.
My fertility doctor retrieved eight eggs
Eight chances to become a mum that slipped to five overnight when three eggs failed to fertilise. Then:
‘I’m afraid all five embryos are untransferable.’
What? Staring into my doctor’s eyes, I tried to absorb his words. ‘All five? But I...’
He pulled out an A4 piece of paper strewn with statistics and facts about my five embryos. The ones that were supposed to be making me a mother. They had all been sent for genetic testing, and not one of them passed. I sat numb. Frozen.
But I’m not infertile. Just socially infertile. How did this happen?
Round two ended with me sitting in a gutter at the back of my workplace, listening to the voice of a nurse on speakerphone annunciating the word ‘Unfortunately.’ As in, ‘Unfortunately, you are not pregnant this round.’
But I’m not infertile. I should be pregnant by now.
By round eight I’d stopped telling so many friends
I’d even stopped telling myself I was going to become a mum. This is the way I protected myself, by moving forward quietly step-by-step. Putting my head down, alone, and continuing to move on, round after round. More needles. More big fat negative pregnancy tests. More ‘Unfortunately we have bad news for you,’ phone calls.
After four long years, it became increasingly obvious that I was, in fact, very much infertile. Not just socially. At forty-three, I was now well beyond the lower age cut-off of being classed as a geriatric pregnancy.
My eggs were aging along with me, and there was nothing I could do about it.
New doctor, new hope, new protocol. This was going to be it!
‘I’m sorry, Lorena but your eggs just weren’t mature.’ What? My eggs aren’t mature because my body’s too old? That doesn’t even make sense!
Another year slipped by
I was up to IVF round thirteen when my doctor gave me an appointment for free. I knew this couldn’t be good, because what doctor does that? ‘I’ve never had a live birth over the age of forty-four, Lorena.’
I collapsed in my chair. ‘What are you saying?’
Somehow, the notion of becoming a mother never loosened. Somehow, I kept driving forward through the ‘unfortunately-s’, past all the single lines on pregnancy tests, beyond the heavy doses of reality at each disappointing egg pick-up.
Somehow, I still felt in the game.
It took one round with donor eggs for me to see my first positive pregnancy test
That solidified everything I had reluctantly learned, enduring so many failures: that I was indeed infertile. Socially infertile, yes, a solo mum by choice in-the-making fits that pigeonhole. But the bigger reality was that my eggs were never going to come to the table. I was as infertile as a person could be.
Yet still, I went on and became a mum using donor eggs. And quite honestly? Even after everything? I wouldn’t change a thing.
Would I give another future mum in a similar position any advice? Yes!
Going into IVF is not a quick fix. Be ready for the long haul. Find support. Gather a small but sturdy network. And then? Prepare for a marathon. Who knows – at best you may get away with just a quick sprint. And I really hope that’s how it is for you!
