‘The Holiday’

So, we decided that we needed some time away. After our first embryo didn’t stick I couldn’t face going back to work straight away. The truth is I couldn’t face anyone, or anything. I didn’t want to leave the house and have to listen to other people, to listen to their problems which, rightly or wrongly just seemed trivial to me. I couldn’t bare the thought of putting a brave face on. We managed to get a great deal on an amazing hotel in Corfu for the week later. Pep talk number 7 –

DO NOT FEEL LIKE YOU HAVE TO FALL BACK INTO A ROUTINE, OR THAT YOU HAVE TO RUSH BACK TO LIFE TO SUIT ANYONE ELSE AFTER A FAILED TRANSFER.

This embryo was your life. It carried all your hopes and dreams. You had invested everything into it emotionally, physically and financially. When you lost it you lost all of those things. Allow yourself to grieve. Validate your feelings. You are grieving a loss and to expect yourself to go straight back to normal life is unfair and ultimately will damage you further.

We went on our holiday and spent a week together. Just the two of us drinking whatever we wanted and eating whatever we wanted. (believe me it was a lot!) When we wanted to, we spoke about our lost embryo and our sadness and when we didn’t want to we simply didn’t. We found some fun again. In amongst all of the sadness and strain and guilt we found a little bit of fun and a little bit of the old us. I mention guilt and although it is completely irrational you feel guilty. You question if there is anything that you did that contributed to the loss of your embryo. Was it wrong to convince my wife to get that takeaway? Should we have gone away on a trip to feed the penguins? Should I have moaned about the dishes in the sink? Did I do anything to stress my wife out? Honestly, none of it was mine or my wife’s fault, it was just a sad thing that happened to us. It doesn’t stop the questions or the feeling of guilt though. We came home from our holiday a little more ready to face the world. Although we were unsure of whether we could face the pain of a second round of IVF. The next couple of months were tough. Life was gradually going on, as it must, and we had gone back to work. The family where supportive which was a massive help. It meant that neither one of us had to carry our sadness alone. However, I was struggling. I was struggling to talk about how I was feeling. I didn’t really have any friends who had gone through infertility or IVF. It felt like all the flowers we received were really for my wife and that my name was just on the card for a token gesture, I know this wasn’t the case but it’s how I felt. I wasn’t being invited out to the pub by any of my mates for a pint and a chat like my wife was. It is worth mentioning here that my friends and family are great and I love them but I grew up in a house of 4 blokes and my mum. All of my friends are ‘blokey lads’ I think they genuinely just didn’t know how to handle the situation. Apart from my wife, who was amazing to me and supported me and made me feel like I could speak to her about anything, I really didn’t fee like anyone close to me got how down I was. I know that they knew I was upset and going through a rough time. But I don’t think they knew how rough and how hard I was finding life.

 ******MASSIVE PLUG INCOMING******

I was sat alone one Saturday, my wife had been taken out by her mum and her sisters for the day and I was left with my own thoughts. One of those thoughts was. “I can’t be alone. Surely I’m not the only man who is going through this.”

That’s when I decided to set up an Instagram page

@Infertilitybloke ß(that was the massive plug) To reach out and it worked. I have felt so much comfort and support within this online community. If you are reading this and you are worried about your partner. If you are worried that he feels alone or isn’t talking enough try to convince him to set up a page, an anonymous page just so he has access to this community.

The page gave me the courage to start talking about my grief and sadness more openly. It allowed me to tell people how I was feeling and explain why I might not be my old self at times.  

Kate and I had spoken more about our plans and being the warrior that she is, she decided that she wasn’t ready to give up. We still had four frozen embryos. We decided that we wanted to try again. In June 2019 we had our second transfer. Our little fighter had survived being thawed out and our frozen transfer happened. We were PUPO once again.

                                                “I THINK ITS TWO LINES!”

We didn’t do much for the TWW this time round. Kate relaxed a lot more. She had tweaked her diet and we had changed a few things that we thought might help. We didn’t manage to wait as long during this TWW before testing. Eventually (quite a few days before our official test date) we tested.

I think I’ll remember the moment until the day I die. I came home from work on a Thursday, the sun was shining, and I’d finished for the weekend life felt good, it felt like a day for a miracle. We weren’t supposed to test until the following Monday, but some first response tests had arrived from Amazon. Kate was mid-way through cooking tea and I said to her.

“Why don’t you just do one now?”

Initially she wasn’t going to, but I could tell that she really wanted to. We decided that she would do one and if it was negative, we wouldn’t be down about it and put it down to being too early to test. 

She went upstairs to do the test and I sat on the sofa. To be honest I half forgot that she had gone to do it because my expectations were so low. About five minutes later she came into the living room holding the test. This wasn’t unusual. When she had done others, she had brought them back in for us to wait and look at together. This time was different though. She walked in with a look on her face. A look of disbelief and confusion. It was as if someone had just convinced her that her name wasn’t Kate and she had come to check with me even though she knows that it obviously is. She said to me,

“I think it’s two lines.”

I looked and it was clearly two lines. I was in shock. We both were, I don’t think either of us wanted to say that it was two lines or say the words at first in case we jinxed it. The truth is I can’t remember who said it first but eventually we did, we allowed ourselves to believe it and to say the words. 

“We’re pregnant.” 

We sat on the sofa not really speaking for a while, both of us just looking at each other and laughing or smiling! I had pictured this scenario in my head thousands of times, planned it over and played it through. I honestly thought that I would break down into tears at the news, but I didn’t. I’ve never cried happy tears, only sad. So, we sat laughing like lunatics. We managed to eat our tea somehow in between going back and to looking at the test to make sure it was still showing two lines. 

We knew that we would be telling both sets of parents, Kates sisters and my brothers because they knew where we were up to with the IVF and they would be waiting on our official test day on the Monday to find out if the test was positive or not. We decided that we would tell them as soon as possible, to surprise them with the news and get to see the look on their faces. We had spent the time before our first transfer planning how we would do it, what fun way we would tell them all that they were going to be nans and granddads. Aunties and uncles but that wasn’t to be, our first little Embaby didn’t stick so when the time came, we were just too excited to plan anything. We went to Kates sisters first, then my mum and dad then Kates mum and dad then my brothers all within the space of a couple of days and told them. It was everything I had hoped it would be it was emotional and beautiful, and everyone was so happy. We went to my brother’s party on the Saturday knowing that Kate was pregnant. A lot of my friends were there with their children and babies. This usually made it hard to go to parties like this but not this time. This time I was looking at them all and thinking about my baby, my little poppy seed my wife was carrying and thinking, in nine months’ time my little one will be here, and I’ll be a dad like my friends. Over the weekend we must have done around nine tests, six first response and two cheap tests and they were all positive. We did one clear blue which was showing as negative which worried us, but we thought rationally that eight positive tests couldn’t be wrong and that it must have still been too early for the clear blue. We were in a bubble a happy, dream bubble me my wife and our little baby. Monday came around quite quickly and Kate tested with a first response again it was positive, and she rung the hospital. The nurse on the phone was rude and insensitive and simply said.

“We only go off clear blue you’ll have to do a clear blue test first thing tomorrow and let us know the result.”

Obviously with having our only negative result from a clear blue Kate explained that we had around ten positives from different tests, but the nurse simply replied.

“If clear blue says negative, we go off that and discount any others.”

Well this was a slow puncture in our happy bubble. Are we even pregnant? Could all the other tests be wrong? We had to wait a full day to test and our anxiety was through the roof. Tuesday morning came around and Kate tested with a clear blue digital – PREGNANT! That was it, confirmed. Our dreams had come true. Kate got to make that phone call to the hospital to tell them that she was pregnant, and they booked us in for a scan. It was like every Christmas had come at once. I couldn’t believe that I was going to be a dad and Kate was going to be a mum! It was an incredible feeling that I’ll never forget. I was off work and we spent the next couple of days in our bubble enjoying being pregnant and planning on how to tell the rest of our close family who knew we were supposed to be testing soon. On the Thursday a week after getting the first positive test Kate became worried, she didn’t feel pregnant and she did another test while I was still asleep in bed. One line. Kate phoned the hospital and begged them to do her bloods as she couldn’t bare the uncertainty. Kate woke me and told me what had happened, and we went straight to the hospital. The whole thing was done in an hour or so and we were sent home to await the phone call with the results. We tried to keep busy, we went for breakfast and did the garden but neither of us could really talk about what was happening. I think we both hoped that this was just another slow puncture that was easily repairable but deep down I think we both knew that it wasn’t going to be. Then the phone call from the hospital came. Another moment I know I’ll remember until the day I die. I could see Kates face; I could hear it in her voice but I still had a glimmer of hope. It wasn’t until she hung up the phone and looked at me that I knew. Our baby was gone. We held each other and sobbed. Every emotion flowed through me. Sadness, anger, worry, jealousy. Every single one. Our bubble had burst, and all of the pain of the world could get to us again. We had to tell our family that their niece or nephew, granddaughter or grandson was gone. This was one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do. To deliver such sadness to someone else is heart-breaking. The days passed and the grief got worse as it began to sink in. It literally felt like someone had reached into my chest and was squeezing my heart and they wouldn’t let go. The pain now felt real, it felt physical and it was amplified each time I looked at my wife. We leaned on each other though, we confided in each other and needed each other and formed a new bubble. A bubble that was filled with sadness but also love, love for each other, love for our family and love for our baby. Neither of us are over this loss. The truth is I don’t think I ever will be. With time the hurt may lessen, the pain may subside and the sadness may get easier to deal with but I’ll never get over it. I find myself daydreaming of who my baby would have been, what they would have achieved, how they would have looked. Daydreaming about this as an escape from the mundane reality of life, as a way of escaping people talking to me, people getting on with their lives as though nothing has happened. But life does go on. It has to. My relationship with Kate has become stronger after this and I believe it is because we can talk to each other and we’re honest with each other on our bad days.

This will be my last blog for a while. I found this one the most difficult to write. I hope, in the nicest possible way, that I do not have to write another one. That my final post on this blog (whenever it may be) will be a sort of ‘The End’ post. That I will be writing about how we are pregnant and that we have had our scan and seen our baby and that all of this was worth it. For now though, I have nothing else to say. We are at a point in our journey where we don’t know what the future holds. I have nothing that I can tell you at this moment in time other than, we are going to try again very soon and that as long as there is the smallest chance we wont give up.