French for infertility: Part 1

How I'd spent most of my life desperately trying not to get pregnant, finding a fertility doctor, the testing phase and discovering that we'd been trying at the wrong time for six months...

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Tears pooled up in my eyes as I tentatively hit publish on the Reels video Victor and I made during a weekend in Burgundy. After rewriting the caption countless times, I was finally announcing the news to my followers on Instagram that I'd waited three years to share: I was pregnant! As the likes and comments of congratulations started streaming in, those tears turned into rivers pouring down my face and my initial hesitation transformed into a huge sense of relief and release.

One of the reasons I hesitated was that I had found it triggering watching others I followed on social media announce their pregnancies, especially when I was on a cocktail of hormones. I therefore wanted to be as sensitive as possible to those deep in the IVF trenches, still while celebrating our happy news.

Besides sharing a couple of photos on Instagram Stories over the years alluding to an operation or that I was going through a tough time - I hid it from my audience. In doing so, I felt like I wasn’t being true to myself or my followers, but I wasn’t ready to talk about it publicly until we had good news. Not ever knowing if the news would come. I’ve seen others courageously reveal every step of their IVF journey and cannot help but think how pressured they must have felt to continue doing so, even in the depths of despair. I’m just so deeply grateful for this healthy pregnancy and that I can finally talk about it!

Upon announcing my muscles relaxed, emotion poured out of me and I suddenly felt like I’d let go of three years of tension.

Now having shared our news, I would like to tell my story. As you can imagine, it’s not an easy subject to write about and I’ve been working on this article for a long time. But having wished there’d been more stories about the process and its repercussions, I feel like it’s my duty to share what I went through. I’m sure it will also be cathartic releasing my words into the world.

IVF takes you down dark roads. It’s brutal, destabilising and requires a lot of mental strength and grit to keep going and stay hopeful when the rounds and transfers don’t work. Plus, unsurprisingly it takes a toll on your physical and mental health - it brought out the worst in me. The experience magnified my fears and exposed parts of myself I hardly recognized. It also puts an enormous strain on your relationship and it tested our love in numerous ways. Thankfully the experience has made us closer; we often reminded ourselves that if we could get through this, we could get through anything!

Now, on the other side, I hope that writing about my IVF experience might educate others, offer some solace, and above all - bring hope!

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I'm sure like many of you reading this, I spent most of my life desperately trying not to get pregnant. When I became sexually active with my first boyfriend at the age of 17, I was already on the pill (to help manage painful periods and acne breakouts), but the idea of falling pregnant terrified me so much that I also made him wear condoms. There was no way those little swimmers were going to get to my eggs! I didn’t want to be the 1% that got pregnant on the pill. I also went to an all-girls school and watched as one by one, five girls in my year between the ages of 15-17 fell pregnant and kept their babies. It left a lasting impression.

Like many of my generation (I started secondary school in 1994), I was taught that getting pregnant was one of the worst things I could do. And I believed this all through university and throughout my 20s. Having a baby = life ruined. So I was always extremely careful. Perhaps more so than most. When there was a rare accident, I marched myself down to the pharmacy and requested the morning after pill, even demanded it on a few occasions when, due to the time I was in my cycle, was told it was highly unlikely that I could get pregnant. But I didn’t want to take the risk, believing that I could get pregnant easily.

Little did I know just how hard it would be. (Just one of the many gaps in our reproductive education growing up!).

I was 38 and Victor 37 when we started trying for a family. It was the beginning of 2022 and we had been together for just over a year. We’d talked about it and knew that we both wanted to have children - together. I had finally found my person. We were also aware of my ticking biological clock and that we should probably get on with it. I knew that due to my age, my chances might be low for conceiving naturally and that I’d probably have to go through IVF, but that didn’t stop me feeling disappointed every time I got my period for those first few months. I’d convinced myself that I would be pregnant within three. Despite my age, some part of me was still persuaded that it might be easy.

Of course it wasn’t.

By July, we began looking into IVF as we didn’t want to waste any more time. Friends had just started working with a fertility doctor at Hôpital Bichat in the 18th arrondissement and passed on her details. We got an appointment within two weeks. We probably should have taken that as a red flag, as it usually takes longer to secure one, but we were eager to get the ball rolling.

Hôpital Bichat is not a place you want to spend much time in. It’s old, shabby and depressing; it wouldn’t look out of place in the former soviet union. Having little experience with hospitals outside of the UK, I didn’t question it. I was just glad to start investigating why I wasn’t pregnant yet. But the place was disorganised, the staff unfriendly and our doctor was the opposite of what I presumed a fertility specialist might be: warm, compassionate and caring.

Our appointments were in French, through masks (this was at the tail-end of the Covid-era), and our doctor spoke quickly and unclearly. I struggled to understand her and felt overwhelmed and frustrated; my feelings began to overflow and I cried in every appointment. She reminded me of it too, noting at each visit that I’d cried the last time: Madame Cox, vous avez pleuré la derniere fois. I felt belittled. She also kept emphasising how slim my chances were of falling pregnant at my age. I left each appointment emotionally drained and less hopeful than the last.

It was a truly awful experience. Had I known what I know now, I would have tried to change doctors immediately, but I was emotional and vulnerable, and just came to believe that this was what fertility treatment was like, having had no experience of it before. And so we ploughed on.

As protocol demands, she prescribed me a long list of tests before I could undertake a round of IVF. After various blood tests to examine my hormones, a pelvic scan revealed mild endometriosis, as well as adenomyosis (when the lining of your womb grows into the muscle). I’d never heard of it. I was told that it wasn’t severe enough to prevent me from having children, but it could help explain why I wasn’t getting pregnant. An MRI confirmed no further complications, but it took all my strength to keep my eyes closed and not have a panic attack - the deafening whirring noise of the machine was claustrophobic and terrifying.

That first diagnosis also revealed a crucial mistake: what I thought was the start of my period each month was actually bleeding from the adenomyosis. We had been trying to conceive at the wrong time in my cycle for six months. It also meant that the very first round of tests and hormone injections prescribed by a private gynecologist in March to boost my fertility had been a useless exercise. Fertility was starting to feel like some sort of code that I couldn’t crack.

Next I had a mammogram (uncomfortable, but manageable), followed by a hysterosalpingogram - a procedure to check whether my fallopian tubes were blocked by injecting dye through a catheter. I’d read that it could be really painful and as I have a low pain threshold, I asked if Victor could come into the room with me to hold my hand, but he wasn’t allowed. The nurses were brusque, the setting clinical and cold - I had to lay down on a metal table with no cushion for comfort, and the pain was excruciating. I nearly passed out and was still so unwell the next day (I started to faint every time I stood up) that I went to A&E, convinced something had gone wrong and that they’d ruptured a tube. Luckily they hadn’t, but the trauma lingered.

The silver lining: I still had eggs and my follicle count was good for my age. Whether they were viable was another question.

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I’ll finish this part there for now. As you can see I have a lot to unpack! So I’m splitting my experience into several parts. My IVF story will remain free for everyone to read, but please give it a like or share it with anyone who might need it. And if this speaks to you, I hope to hear from you in the comments section! A bientôt, Marissa xx