My Story (Part 4) The Magic

 

I remember feeling triggered by everything.

If I saw someone struggling through round after round of IVF, I was jealous of them. At least the doctors wanted their money. How lucky they should know they were to be given the chance to keep trying, as hard as it is of course. A pregnant woman, a person with a child in a pram, movies, TV shows, even podcasts about IVF and their interview subjects, these people were actually retrieving eggs, they didn’t know my pain. There was no one I could look to in my situation and I felt deeply, deeply alone. It hurt to just be.

I would go so far as to say that if it weren’t for having really strong mental health before all of this, I do fear for what I could have done to myself. I certainly contemplated the worst. In hindsight I was in a deep state of depression and sometimes wouldn’t be aware of how dark my thoughts were, looping over and over until one would catch me by surprise.

I was offered a therapy session from the IVF clinics both times after my failed rounds, however I found them to be completely unhelpful and I was given no valid tools to deal with what I was going through. Being Covid era still, the sessions were done remotely on zoom and of course they are done by trained professionals, however the therapists have not experienced infertility first hand.

Infertility really is the ultimate example of - iykyk (if you know you know). However, if you don’t, you really do not have a clue how it feels and I honestly think 10 out of 10 people who have experienced infertility or pregnancy loss would agree with me that I don’t think you are equipped to help someone through it if you have not experienced it yourself, with or without the degree. Of course there are so many hardships in the world, it is not a competition and sure, there is ‘grief’ but it is not that simple and it is really hard to explain. At best, all I can say is, it feels like one of the cruelest jokes life can play on a person and that pain never leaves your side, forever shaping you and changing you.

Also there is quite literally nothing you can say to someone experiencing infertility that can help. Again, that is unless you know the pain yourself. It seems harsh to say but that was certainly the case for me. Mostly anything well-meaning felt like the opposite and is only a reminder of the all consuming pain you are already experiencing. I think it is important to share because it also lends some understanding as to why people often suffer in silence. Personally I believe it is less to do with the apparent shame and a lot more to do with protecting what remains of our broken hearts.

Thanks to some very brave people like Chloe Fisher, Lisa Messenger and Camille Charriere, you do hear a bit more about it nowadays. The strength they had to share their stories before any sign of things working out is incredibly commendable and helps so many people but this was not the case four years ago, there was no one.

So here I was, told to give up by every medical expert we had encountered, I was at the lowest point in my journey so far and not in a good state mentally or even physically. I was stressed, I looked stressed, you could see it on my skin and you could see the darkness behind my eyes. Despite all of this, I still felt with every essence of my core that it was my destiny to be a mother and I refused to give up.

To go against the advice of some of the top fertility experts in the country and still believe, took all of my energy. I just never let myself contemplate a life where this didn’t work out and I couldn’t have a child of my own but even my partner had started asking me to consider that possibility. Of course he should have, he was trying to help me adapt and he not crazy. He was there at every appointment and on every zoom follow-up consultation and heard everything that was said. Was I crazy to still believe? I didn’t care.

As the months went by I was in a state of deep mourning.

You hear a lot more nowadays about grief in relation to aspects of loss in ones life that are not directly linked to death but even in 2022 it felt like this sentiment was pretty uncommon and so I didn’t know that this is what was happening to me. I was grieving the life that had been stripped away from me, the life I had envisioned for myself and my partner.

I knew I should seek help as things were about as grim as they could be so I found another therapist who had over 30 years experience as an infertility ‘specialist’ and had worked at most of the big clinics in that time. She had so much experience, in fact that I was one of her last patients before she retired. My partner came along and said he felt she was ‘running the clock’. She really did not help me at all and it just felt traumatic to have to rehash everything every week and at one point she told me a really traumatic story about a woman who wanted a baby so bad that she had an entire nursery filled with baby things and clothes and could never have the baby. I thought about that poor woman for so long, I still do. The reason she said she told me about her was because I needed to ‘stop magical thinking’ like that woman.

I really tried to seek help but no one believed in me and it felt like a waste of my time, money and energy.

I had been seeing my integrative doctor who was extremely helpful and had kept it up throughout the journey so she knew the extent of what I was going through and so this time when I visited, she gave me a prescription, it was for REST and JOY.

Those two words were, for me, a circuit breaker, permission to grieve.

Like I had done growing up in the Perth hills, I walked in nature every day and it was only here, surrounded by the bush and close to the sea where little glimmers of light would start to emerge through the darkness that enveloped me daily.

I joined a closed community for ‘soft and spacious career and business development’ called ‘Off’, which involved listening to some spiritual healers and one of them blew me away. Her name was Kat Dawes of ‘Nowism’ and I joined her weekly zoom sessions which I started playing back almost daily throughout the week until a new one would come out every Sunday. She shared a quote by one of her own spiritual gurus, Michael B. Beckwith. “Pain pushes you until your vision pulls you.” She talked about finding the gift in the shit and how no matter what you are going through, that you are waking up in a friendly universe and that everything is working for you, no thing is against you…

Now this can be a hard pill to swallow for some of the atrocities people go through in this life, and certainly there are many worse than mine, however she taught me that we can always find a gift here. In the pain, in the turmoil, what is happening through you is happening for you and if you choose to look very closely, you will find purpose. You are being guided to your dharma, if you will only listen.

The truth is my pain led me back to nature. It took me home.

It was so simple and it was there all along.

In nature, I could feel myself returning to my essence. Everything I had been running from my whole life, my hippy upbringing amongst the chickens and garden patch veggies. All of a sudden, I could feel that nature was the answer to everything and every way I could absorb it into my life, I would. I started eating only seasonal organic foods and trying every wellness modality imaginable. I removed as many toxins from my lifestyle as humanly possible, I grounded in nature and immersed myself in daily rituals of self care, allowing the joy to return, little by little.

The vision for Naturel Haus was already taking shape behind the scenes, I was learning so much every day and the more I learnt and unpacked, the more I wanted to share.

In one of Kat’s sessions she spoke about ‘stopping the ache’ because you don’t get what you want, you get what you are being. It was hard to hear but as someone who finds things very hard to let go of and always wants to be in control, I realised, I was clutching onto that ache with every inch of me. It was exactly what I needed to do. To try to let go of my grip on this pain. Be to become, she said. Become the mother, be nurturing, be the energy of the answer.

I went on a hunt to reclaim my vitality. I started doing ballet again, something that brought me immense joy as a child. I became obsessed with wellness, but as in true wellbeing, finding that inner spark we all deserve to feel and have shine through us. I was doing tarot one day from some cards my best friend had gifted me and one of them said '“If a wildflower can bloom even in the harshest conditions, so can you.” I decided in that moment that I would bloom. I would find a way.

It was 2023 now and in April the World Health Organisation came out and said that based on a new report, one in six people globally would experience infertility in their lifetime. This was a riveting finding and these numbers were staggering, people started talking a bit more about infertility.

It was a new year and I had heard about a witch doctor type woman who practiced Chinese medicine and having been stuck in the system so long, I was never able to try anything like herbs because they can thin the blood and mess with the very hormones these fertility doctors are tampering with, so it’s not encouraged at all. I had heard about a family friend who had tried everything for 7 years and fell pregnant under this woman’s guidance, in a few short months. I didn’t know if it was true but not long after hearing this I was at my local green grocer and just so happened to run into her mother for the first time in a decade so I asked her about it and she said yes, I should go see her.

They call her ‘The Baby Maker.’

She is based in Guildford and from the moment I met her, I loved her. She checked my pulse, had a look at my tongue and from these small acts, seemed to know me. It was wild. I was looking older than usual (stress does that to you) and after being treated by her every few weeks for 7 months, I left looking 10 years younger. She never said one way or another whether she thought there was a chance for me to fall pregnant but she told me she would not have treated me if she didn’t think it was worth trying. This was better than I could hope for at the time, someone willing to try to help me. I took up to 150 tablets a day, for 7 months. She warmed me up at certain times in my cycle and cooled me down in others and after trying everything, she too said it may be best we move on and leave it as nothing was working. It wasn’t what she had hoped but she didn’t think she could help me anymore.

Every time I felt ‘given up on’ I would return to my holistic GP who had a great way of giving me perspective and calming me. To my surprise, this time she said that she had consulted some of her industry peers (one was a very experienced naturopath and wellness founder of 30 years and the other was a midwife turned acupuncturist with incredible experience in women’s health). She said they collectively did not agree that I should give up trying for a baby. She had been charting my hormones and as a peri-menopause and women’s health expert herself, said she felt that my prognosis had been wrongly labeled. She was the ONLY person who still believed in me and as a medical professional, told me she supported me to keep trying.

She had already told me about two other ‘alternative’ fertility doctors who apparently helped end of the line type people like me but I hadn’t been interested until now because it would mean going back ‘into the system’ which triggered me to no end. However almost a year had gone by, I had detoxed as much as I possibly could and had done 7 months of Chinese herbs to no avail, so I felt ready to book at least one appointment.

The doctor I decided on was a ‘holistic’ fertility specialist and his practices were definitely outside of what other clinics I knew of or had visited myself, were doing. He spoke about the benefits of eating organic and certain spices and overall health and wellbeing and a lot of his patients were women who had experienced recurrent miscarriages but judging from the number of photos of babies on his wall, I gathered his methods were somewhat effective. It still felt awful going back to a clinic for fertility after the way I had been treated, we had no idea what he would say or do.

He asked us to do more bloodwork which was routine and when we met him, he had already read my email and had seen all my results, a good first sign. His first instruction was for both of us to go on a course of antibiotics to treat something called 'Ureaplasma Parvum'. We were surprised but he explained it is a common bacteria that can be sexually transmitted but is not seen as an STI or STD because it can also be naturally occurring in the human body. Treatment may only be needed if a symptomatic issue arises, such as infertility and a vast majority of the population have it and have no idea or ill effects. So we took the antibiotics for two weeks at the same time as each other, it was so easy we didn’t think much of it.

He had also booked me in for something called a ‘HyCoSy’ which is like a flushing of the uterus to identify any tubal blockages or abnormalities but we were due to go on holiday so it would have to happen when we got back. We did the antibiotics before we left and flew to Byron Bay and then onto the Daintree Rainforest and Port Douglas after that. We had booked the trip because just before Covid we had flights to travel to LA and for some reason Virgin Airlines would only let us use our credits for domestic travel. I had been to Far North Queensland before and found it so beautiful and was also very keen to visit Byron due to my recent obsession with everything organic and natural.

The holiday was incredible, we had been on a few trips south and loads of staycations but nowhere on a plane together since our Europe trip in 2018. I found a lovely AirBnb right on Wategos Beach in Byron Bay and we ate at Raes and swam and walked and relaxed. We were only in Byron for 3 nights because we had to cut it short to stay near the airport in Cairns because the next leg of our trip was traveling by hire car into the middle of the Daintree Rainforest which had to be done at daylight where we stayed completely off grid for 5 days.

It was truly magical, we had our own watering hole on the five acres of land, a bath on the veranda undercover right next to the garden. I was in heaven. Surrounded by nature.

I had started feeling more positive in my everyday life, a lot easier of course when you are on holiday. I was meditating, bathing in nature, quite literally and figuratively at this point and was leaning heavily into all my spiritual work. I was so committed to eating only organic that I found an organic supermarket close to Cairns airport and we bought all our supplies for the next 5 days off grid from there. It is a commitment to health as it is basically double the cost but I always say - if health is wealth, then spend your money on good produce!

On the trip, I kept thinking about how going through a true transformation is nothing like all the wellness podcasts would have you think, in fact it is more like a violent, gut wrenching experience that chews you up and spits you out on the other side but eventually you rebirth and grow and hopefully you grow wings strong enough to fly. This was my mission, to fly.

 In the Daintree I started seeing Ulysses everywhere, the beautiful big blue butterflies you can find in this part of Australia. I would start filming a video on my phone in the watering hole we had on the property and one would turn up on camera. I got in the bath and realised there was one in a picture frame that had been stating at me the entire time. I would look out the window and see a motel with a big statue of a blue butterfly on it whilst driving past, it felt like they were following me. When I googled the meaning of them I had to laugh out loud - a symbol of transformation, self discovery and growth. I was getting nod after nod from the universe.

The love heart signs had peaked on this holiday too. It felt like if an inanimate object was near me and had the ability to take form, a heart shape would instantly appear and I was now seeing them in the double digits daily.

I started my bleed the night before arriving in the Daintree and having had cycles all over the place, it was light and I could still swim and wasn’t bothered by it. Being in the middle of one of the oldest rainforests in the world was truly enchanting.

Before embarking on this journey with me, my partner was the opposite of woo woo and would often roll his eyes at some of the things I would say or tell him about with my discoveries of manifesting or views on the universe. I wouldn’t say he transformed his beliefs entirely after these four years but it got to the stage where the love heart signs could not be denied and there was something about being off grid in the middle of the Daintree that really connected him to the land and his essence too.

Being September, it rained a lot but it was so incredibly beautiful, bathing outside in the warm bath water, trips to the kettle to keep it toasty warm, sandalwood incense from Karratha smoking while we sipped on hot cups of cacao and sometimes I would add petals and camomile magnesium salts.

One afternoon as the sun was setting, rain trickling, we ran down to the watering hole and swam naked, cleansing our spirit in nature’s cold plunge before running back to jump in the bath water and warm up. It was so beautiful we did it a few times and as we ran naked in the rain, enchanted by our sacred surroundings, I finally decided to let the universe take over. I let go. I handed it over. I said it out loud. What will be will be. It wasn’t giving up, it was my surrender. Finally.

It took four long years to get to this moment and quite literally everything changed in that instant. Magic has a funny way of doing that, changing everything on a dime and this is exactly what happened to us. We were yet to find out how but within 48 hours our lives changed forever, we just didn’t know it yet.