“At least you’ll have loads of fun trying!”

I met my now wife Kate in 2011 and I was smitten instantly. She was beautiful, funny, intelligent and well-travelled. I actually couldn’t believe I’d managed to convince her to come out for a drink with me. I had though, because as most of you blokes will know, personality and persistence always wins in the end. Everything and I mean everything was great. As the story so often goes, we met, fell in love, moved in together and in 2016 got married. We enjoyed married life for a little while without thinking about children because we knew that when we were ready, we would do the business, get pregnant and nine months later, hey presto our little angel would be born.

Ha! Wrong. Life was about to give us a harsh lesson that sometimes it just isn’t fair. See our story went like this. Met, fell in love, moved in together, got married, FUCKING INFERTILITY!

We started trying to conceive in 2017. I had heard the old comedic “at least you’ll have fun trying” thrown about before and if I’m honest I thought it would be great. Who doesn’t think loads of sex would be great? At first it was but when we didn’t get pregnant, we began to worry that something was wrong. That’s when sex stopped being about sex and became being solely about getting pregnant. This brings me to pep talk number one;

SEX WILL LOSE ITS APPEAL WHEN TRYING TO CONCEIVE.

Don’t feel guilty about this. This doesn’t mean that you have lost your appeal and it doesn’t mean that your partner has lost their appeal. Tracking ovulation, being told you have to perform ‘right now’, Pre shower, post big meal is not sexy. Coming in from work and having to have sex straight out of your work clothes might be spontaneous and extremely sexy as a one off and in the moment. However, doing it regularly is not sexy. Trying to fit sex in before you go out somewhere and often (let’s not hold back here, if we are sharing let’s go all in) having to use lube to get ‘the job done’ IS NOT SEXY. This does not mean that you are not sexy. Don’t feel guilty, don’t feel too down that sex isn’t the same anymore, sex is the first casualty of trying to conceive.

So, back to my story. We had been trying (and I mean trying) for a while, the whole 9 yards. Tracking ovulation, diet changes, exercising and nothing was happening. It felt like literally everyone we knew was getting pregnant. People who hadn’t planned to get pregnant – pregnant before us. People who had started trying a long time after us – pregnant before us. People who had only known each other a short time – pregnant before us. It was so hard to see and seemed so unfair, we managed a smile though and a congratulations to all of them but as we learned later on in our journey, this would become a lot harder to do. This brings me on to pep talk number two;

YOU CAN BE HAPPY FOR SOMEONE ELSE AND SAD FOR YOURSELF.

This is something that will pop up again a little bit later in the blog but it is something that is so difficult to grasp at first. There is a feeling of guilt that comes with feeling sadness when something like a pregnancy is announced. Don’t feel guilty. The way you’re feeling is natural. Just because you are sad it doesn’t mean that you are a bad person. I will go into more detail on this later on as it becomes harder and harder to deal with other people’s pregnancy announcements.

After two years of trying Kate became concerned enough to make a doctor’s appointment. We attended and he talked us through what would happen, what tests Kate would have, what I was expected to do, If I’m being honest at first I didn’t really understand what the process was and even after the doctor’s visit all I knew was that at some point I would have to have a wank. This is partly because I didn’t really think that there would be an issue and genuinely thought that it was just taking us longer and mostly because I didn’t understand the medical jargon. I didn’t understand my wife’s cycle; I didn’t fully understand ovulation. Up until this point in my life I had been blissfully unaware of what some people have to go through to get pregnant. After the appointment we were booked in to attend the hospital a month or two later. We had prepared ourselves for the appointment as much as we could have and had started to accept that this was going to be the route that we had to take to have our baby. On the day of the appointment I met Kate at the hospital from work. The waiting room was full of pregnant women and women with children. I remember saying to Kate at the time how strange and insensitive it was to share the fertility centre with what clearly seemed like some kind of pre and post pregnancy centre but if I’m being honest, I didn’t really think anything further than that. Our name was called and we went up to the reception desk. It soon became apparent that we had not been referred to the fertility centre. We had been referred to a normal gynaecology unit by mistake. We were given the number for the correct place and told to call them to arrange an appointment.

We were so disappointed and deflated. How could this have happened so early on. We had built ourselves up for nothing. We were both really frustrated and upset. We had to start again and book another appointment with the correct place. We managed to do this and luckily got ‘fast tracked’ but this still meant waiting another few weeks before our first appointment at a fertility centre with an expert.