This is an outline of our journey through infertility over the past five and a half years. We are sharing it for a number of reasons; that others would understand a little more about infertility and be able to support those they know going through it, or take comfort themselves knowing that someone understands, but more than anything else we hope that as we share our experiences of God in the midst of our suffering that you might come to realise as we did the goodness of God in all things and that He, and nothing less than Him, is our very great reward. The goal of life is God, the gospel, is that you get God, there is no greater gift than the gift of Himself. We want God to get the glory.
The situation
After a general period of a few years considering it and around four months praying seriously about it, we then began trying . We had been married for 3 years at this point. Our main concern was that our children would know God and the confirmation he gave was clear from the bible, again and again that our children would know Him.
We were not ignorant about infertility as I had members of my family who had faced this issue, not least my mam who was told she couldn’t have children (my brother and I are testimony that God hears and answers prayer). As part of our pre-marital counselling we had been asked how we would respond to it and had considered it then, but if we are honest we didn’t expect it to be an issue we’d have to face.
Most people knew we had intended to start a family at around 3 years of marriage so we made a decision that, while we wouldn’t actively tell people, if they asked we’d tell them the truth. After a few months of trying and one month where we had really got our hopes up only to be let down, we realised how tough it was already becoming and we shared with a few people so that they could be praying for us. We knew it could take up to a year even for a perfectly healthy couple to conceive so we kept going.
After a year couples are advised to see a GP which we did and we were referred straight away to the ‘assisted reproduction unit’ at the hospital. The initial appointments were terrible, not least because pregnancy and infertility were in the same area and waiting times were well over an hour! However, the doctor was lovely and he referred us for various tests. My husband had the easy part of this whilst I faced some nasty testing. All of the tests came back and everything was not only fine but very good. It is estimated that as many as one in four couples will face a period of infertility of over one year. We were diagnosed with ‘unexplained infertility’ which accounts for around 20% of all infertility cases. While on one hand it was great to know we had no obvious problems it also meant that they still didn’t know the problem and likely never would, therefore it couldn’t be treated. We were set 3 months worth of a fertility drug known as Chlomid designed to boost fertility.
The drugs made me feel fairly nauseous at times and I lost a lot of appetite, struggling to eat at times and so lost some weight. The drugs didn’t help so we were given a new appointment with the consultant at the hospital. The consultant had now changed and a new assisted reproduction unit at the hospital had been opened. We were aware of the IVF (in-Vitro fertilisation) procedure and at this point we had ruled it out on ethical grounds as well as on grounds of the emotional investment it would require. The doctors suggested we try a procedure called IUI (intra-uterine insemination) so we went away to pray about it before we decided for definite, it would also involve taking more Chlomid, scans and a self administered injection.
We decided to go ahead with the IUI and ended up having four rounds in total, the doctor also added us to the IVF waiting list (which was a year long at the time) in case we changed our mind. Each IUI cycle failed and each one was harder with more side-effects. The last planned IUI was early 2009, we had now been struggling with infertility for over 3 years.
We were advised to consider IVF as we had less than a 5% chance of conceiving by this point so we spent time seriously praying about it. We started with the ethical issues we had initially had based on the fact that embryo’s are often discarded during the process. As Christians we don’t want to discard a life precious to God, though for many the definition of life comes at different points, for us we considered life to be from the moment of conception. Our mind was quickly put at ease by the embryologist who agreed to store any unused embryos for us regardless of their quality. Our remaining issue was with the emotional investment involved and we prayed for around a year about this before feeling happy to go ahead.
Our first attempt was over before it started due to hormone levels. Our second attempt was changed to an ‘antagonist protocol’ (which I was very pleased about since it was much shorter and had fewer side effects) it was abandoned just before surgery due to a poor response. We prayed about trying again and went ahead with another round just after Easter 2010. We went through the whole procedure but sadly the embryos didn’t survive, nor did the embryos we had stored, 6 in total. Another attempt at the end of the year was also abandoned the day before surgery due to poor response. The IVF surgery was very painful and I was very apprehensive about going through it again. After a lot more prayer we felt happy to go ahead with another round which we did just before Easter 2011.
Part 2 tomorrow...
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