My Story (Part 3) The System
It is my hope that through reading this and connecting with me, someone out there never has to feel as alone as I once did. We are all pregnant with a new possibility each and every day.
If you’ve been reading along, you know the anticipation it took for us to get to this point in our fertility journey.
Over a year had passed, a surgery, a cancer scare, a cancer doctor who departed her post mid-treatment plan, two IVF doctors, one deplorable in her manner, the other took over a year until we could proceed with due to all the hurdles and finally we are days away from being treated by her after putting a plan in place in December 2021 to commence in the new year.
It is mid January 2022, we were as hopeful as we could possibly be, about to start our cycle as it is Day 1 of my bleed and my phone rings. On the other line is a male professor (let’s call him ‘heartless’, if you know, you know) who says he is in charge of the fertility clinic and that my doctor has left the practice and there is some sort of legal proceedings and that she will no longer be doing our IVF and that he would be, instead.
I had never heard of him or spoken to this person before and knowing full well that we had already paid the ~$11,000, he says to me that most likely our IVF won’t work. A. Day. Before. We. Started. For. The. First. Time. Ever!
That, because my ovarian reserve was so low (0.02), as low as someone who has already entered menopause, he claimed, most likely nothing will work but he could still go ahead with it if I really wanted to?
No I didn’t want him to, I wanted the god damn doctor we had been planning with for over a year to. Not only was this the most traumatic thing I could hear out of the blue, unprepared - luckily I was at home because you don’t just get on with your day after a phone call like that - but everything he was saying was also news to me and nothing like what had been discussed with my chosen doctor to date.
Now I understand these places need to protect themselves and manage expectations but there is a lot to be said for the power of positivity and when someone tells you that something that means so much to you, not to mention will cause you physical and mental hardship is not going to work out and you have no other choice than to give it your all anyway, well that doubt just stays in your head. Can it impact the results? Personally, I believe it can.
Everything ‘in the system’ is rather cut and dry but as you go through the motions, there is a lot to be said about the other side of life. The hopeful, more spiritual side that seems to have no place here and yet it is always there, meeting you where you are at. We were told to be pragmatic and at first, I tried but having experienced things in what felt like the harshest way imaginable, holding onto my hopes and dreams was all I had.
Why was no one considering the magic of it all? Because the system does not encourage it or even contemplate it, of course. I actually had a therapist who went on to tell me later to ‘stop magical thinking’ but that is one for another time.
These doctors do speak a little about miracle conceptions to patients like me, the ones who are quite literally fucked to begin with. Sometimes there’s a reference to the ‘never say never’s’ of it all, or the ‘it only takes one’ (good egg), however I am a strong believer that in order for a woman to create a LIFE inside of herself, magic is certainly required. And this may be where, no shade, it is hard for a man to truly understand what I mean when I say this, because they are not doing it and cannot.
So for a man to call me up out of the blue and tell me that there was likely no hope in something that takes all of the hope and magic one can conjure up with every morsel of their being to transpire, is such a sad and bizarre thing. No matter how much research or training or scientific backing a male professor has, no one can tell me what is possible or is not possible inside of my own body without even knowing or having ever met me before.
From that moment on, the wind was taken out of my sails and we still had not yet even begun.
Image caption: this is one of my more grim photos and was actually taken after being under general anaesthetic, hence the terribly dark circles under my eyes (not to mention all the crying). The stomach was not in good shape, feeling so bloated and very bruised from so many injections.
When you do IVF, you are constantly monitored in ultrasounds to see how many eggs have been stimulated and as your egg collection surgery day approaches they try to guess how many eggs will be collected. In my case it was looking like only one would be, maybe a couple at best but the kind nurses often said, ‘all you need is one.’
So my collection day came and I had my third general anaesthetic in the space of a few months because of my recent surgeries. Before I went under, they told me they would write the number of eggs they’d collected on my hand so when I woke up I could see it before having to wait for a doctor to come and tell me. So when I came to from being under and checked my hand and there was nothing written there, I was confused. I kept searching both hands, looking for something written on one, and then the other but there was nothing, on either. Why? I kept looking, scratching at my skin, no number, my skin was bare. What did it mean?
I genuinely hadn’t considered the possibility that nothing would be collected as there were eggs to collect, certainly one big one and they had printed a photo of the ultrasound with a big white egg on it that I took with me as I trotted down into surgery not long before this. Then the nurse walked over and as soon as I saw the look on her face, I knew instantly that something had gone horribly wrong. No eggs were retrieved. They were sorry. The doctor came out to tell me that they couldn’t get hold of it or maybe it had been flushed away, maybe it wouldn’t release from the follicle, they weren’t sure.
Flushed away, like my spirit.
In that moment, I felt pain, like I never had before. It broke a small piece of me, never to be repaired. The heartache was savage. The resentment I felt afterwards was harsh. It then goes on to being called a ‘cancelled cycle’ and that’s it, it’s over. Do you pay less, no sir. Being in covid era, visitors weren’t allowed into the hospital at the time and I didn’t even know this until later but they felt so sorry for me that they broke the rules and let my partner in so we could lay in my hospital room together and cry.
After that ill-fated unsuccessful first round, we had to have a chat again with the horrid professor about how it had gone. You guessed it, the prognosis was not positive. He told me I was ‘in menopause’ and we should strongly consider an egg donor straight away if we wanted to have a baby. He said having an egg donor early was better. Your friends are younger (maybe I could convince one to give me an egg of theirs) as are you to raise the child etc. He also said I should keep an eye on my estrogen levels as I would soon show signs of ageing, loss of bone mass etc.. I had just turned 37 years old and he spoke to me like I was 55+. It was deflating. He told us there was no point doing any more IVF as the hormones just did not work on me but that if we were adamant to try something, we were better off doing triggered tracking cycles and that is all he would offer.
A quick sidebar here to say that just because I hadn’t yet considered an egg donor as an option for us, it isn’t to say I don’t feel it is one of the most beautiful and incredible blessings afforded to us in modern society. I truly believe that your spirit baby will find you and come through in whatever way this takes shape for each of us, however we were still in shock and I think the way it was first presented to me didn’t help. The more it was suggested, the more I was against it (for us) because I still felt we had not yet really had the proper chance to try.
So we did ‘tracked trying’. More blood tests, more trigger injections and a hell of a lot of ‘trying’ when the hormones said it was time and nothing worked. We did this for months. There were daily blood tests and hormone tracking, ultrasounds every other day where they put a cold probe inside of you as a nurse would share their opinions on your uterus that day. The more ultrasounds I had, a pattern was emerging and it appeared as though my right uterus was inactive and they would say this to me over and over, no activity on the right and it would just appear dark. Only the left side showed signs of activity, reminding me how the woman who did my first scan described my ovaries as being ‘quiet’. I hated every moment of every day doing it.
The professor had said in his usual uninspiring manner that we could try the trying with hormone tracking and trigger injections and eventually we would get sick of it or when we couldn’t handle it anymore, we could stop. He was right, yet again. I was the most stressed I had ever been and after months of ‘tracked trying’ it felt like about the best way to kill the joy and spontaneity in any loving sexual relationship with your partner imaginable, it was awful and so we stopped.
In this time, whilst struggling greatly, I was seeing an integrative doctor who taught me about holistic health and I started trying every supplement I could get my hands on that wouldn’t mess with my hormones too much as well as every modality imaginable. One of them was NAD+ which required a nurse come to my house and administer an IV drip intravenously to give me this apparent youth serum that could possibly improve my egg quality. It cost $1,500 for 3 sessions and was meant to make you feel amazing afterwards. It did the opposite to me and each time I was bedridden for two days and felt horrendous, which they had said was apparently unheard of.
Ironically the best thing to come out of it was this lovely nurse who I struck up a bit of a friendship with as it took two hours per session to have the drip slowly release the NAD+ without making you feel too sick. While we were chatting she told me about a quantum healer she had heard of because her parents lived in Portugal and this person was their neighbour. She worked with clients who needed healing of the heart, and well that sounded just like me. I had never done anything like it before but I got in touch and booked a session. I did not know anything about it or what to expect.
It was riveting. Her work was done remotely where she apparently accessed my aura and knowing the time she would commence, I was instructed to relax on my bed laying down. Within seconds I saw in my mind’s eye a flip book type moving visual of what felt like a thousand lifetimes, all different people in all different scenarios and it went so far back in time I could see someone in chain mail like Joan of Arc type garb and the POV was me, I was there. It made no sense and it sounds insane but I just went with it and I didn’t question it. I fell asleep that night and woke to her email and a voice memo in the morning. She told me she had gone through every past life I had ever had. That something had transpired along the way where I had made a pact with myself to never have a child in any lifetime thereafter. She also mentioned different symbols that were blocking parts of my body and it was all very strange and like something you would need to listen to over and over to really take much from in a comprehensive way, it was so abstract.
One thing that really stood out though and I found so shocking was she said that she had seen (in this quantum field) a big dark shadow over the right side of my uterus and it was being blocked by old trauma from childhood in my masculine and that she had cleared it. I hadn’t told her about my right ovaries and that the nurses could never see any activity in every scan I had ever had on the right until that day.
Meanwhile seven months had passed and I stayed in touch with my original doctor and eventually she could practice on her own at a new clinic, the 6 months due to legal reasons was up. She agreed, as initially planned, now almost two years ago, to try a few rounds and see where it got us. Having access to all my results so far, she now told us that of all the patients she had ever seen, she could count on one hand the people who had chances as slim as ours but who she’d tried to help and she drew the top of an arrow in front of us and around the very tip, she drew a circle. She said that the dot at the tip of the apex was our chances of anything working out but that she would give it a shot.
So we did another round of IVF.
Image caption: getting up so early feeling smug that this time you would surely beat the queue to get your bloods done first, only to arrive at the steps and realise you were 6th in line.
Navigating the world of IVF felt like stumbling into a secret society, masked faces everywhere, success rates shrouded in mystery. Hope seemed like a distant dream. This time it was winter and the blood tests were done at the same place as the doctor’s office but most of the nurses were still pretty un-confident taking blood and it was an ongoing daily struggle. I basically had track marks like a junkie. I would wake up early to try and beat the queue and as day had barely broken, I found myself seated amongst a dozen other women on the cold steps, sitting silently with our beanies on, waiting for the roller doors to go up, masks to be worn and blood to be drawn.
I wore masks religiously at this time because we couldn’t take any risks, it was also mandatory in all IVF clinics and if you contracted covid mid-way through a cycle you were screwed. Would you get a refund? No, sir. The stress of contracting something weighed on me heavily throughout the entire four year journey and definitely contributed to my isolation. It was just easier to be in solitude. I still worked when I could, styling campaigns and TV commercials which is tiring stuff with lots of risks of catching something. I hosted an event for Ralph Lauren only a few days before commencing this next IVF cycle, playing happy Marcia and telling no one, wracked with worry.
The IVF cycle again was a longer one with more hormones than most go through in a normal round and more daily injections. I went in for my egg collection and again one main egg visible on the ultrasound, eager to meet her and a few smaller ones.
I went under general, excited and hopeful, only to wake up and yet again discover that nothing was written on my hand because nothing was retrieved, all I saw was the sorry face of the nurse at the end of my bed. The surgeon who usually doesn’t see the patients afterwards, came out to tell me how sorry she was and that she just couldn’t grab it. She drew me a picture of what she had seen. The egg was weak and not mature enough, maybe it was something to do with my decrepit ovarian reserve, they weren’t sure.
The next day the embryologist called me on the phone to have a chat because they felt so bad about how it had all transpired, so pitifully. He said they just couldn’t extract the egg from my right ovary. Sorry what? The right? I asked. Yes the egg collection and the eggs we were trying to get this time were from the right side. Was he sure? I had thought the nurses had said during my ultrasounds that we were looking at the left again. No, it was definitely the right, he was in surgery and was there watching it all take place, this was his domain. It blew my mind. I have actual medical records with ultrasound scans where I was medically told in writing and multiple times in person that my right ovary was ‘inactive’ and now all of a sudden we were doing an egg collection with my only eggs produced that cycle on the right side. Wow. Holy shit. I guess quantum healing is legit…. Obviously I was still heartbroken but this was just another incredible twist in my journey, bending my beliefs in the unknown.
At this point we were still thinking we would keep trying with a few more rounds as we had committed to three IVF cycles with our doctor and while it hurt me so much to experience another failed round, I was still eager to keep going. What other choice did we have? I refused to imagine a life where this was not going to work out.
Our doctor called me the next day, I was still stone white from the anaesthetic and to my complete and utter shock, she said we would not be proceeding with any more IVF. The drugs don’t work. We were beyond help. IVF was no longer an option for me and there was no point in continuing. No amount of money in the world would help us conceive a baby. They didn’t want to even take our money anymore. She actually said that maybe if I was in my early 20’s and had tried, that I could maybe have had a baby of my own at that age but unfortunately, I would never conceive my own child now.
It feels wild to type that, that someone would actually say this and yet those were her words. I am sure if asked, she wouldn’t admit it now but alas, it is fact and it was brutal. I think she ended with something along the lines of, she loves to hear about miracles but likely, indeed, yeah, not happening, so sorry.
Sayonara. The end. The system said no.
My earth shattered.
I had been looking at a gold necklace with a tiny heart on it a few days prior and even though you sign a form that you’re not meant to make any financial decisions or decent purchases in the 24 hours after a general anaesthetic, I got out my credit card, made the call and bought myself the damn necklace.
