When three ectopic pregnancies rendered her fallopian tubes useless, Erika was devastated. She had dreamed of being a mother since she was a child. Erika’s only option was IVF but her path to motherhood was pitted with grief following the ending of two important relationships, the loss of her younger brother and her own near death experience. But she never lost sight of her dream. IVF helped her realise her goal, along with a lot of soul searching and self-nurturing.
I was born to be a mother. When I was six years old, I used to strut to the shops in my yellow flares with my baby doll in a pram. I’d stop at the lights, waiting to cross the road fussing over my doll. I thought everyone in their cars was watching me and believed I had a real baby.
At 24 I was in a long-term relationship and fell pregnant. But my partner decided he wasn’t ready and my family also told me I wasn’t ready to be a mother. So I had a termination. When I came out of the anaesthetic, they said, “We didn’t get anything. There was nothing there. You’ve got to have an ultrasound.” The ultrasound showed an ectopic pregnancy. There was an embryo in one of my fallopian tubes and I had to go to hospital.
I woke up after the operation some time in the morning and everything seemed fine. But later that night, something went wrong. My stomach was contorted with cramps and I was deathly pale and sweaty. After checking me the doctors rushed me in for emergency surgery in the middle of the night. I haemorrhaged and lost almost half my blood and had to be given a transfusion.
I flat-lined and I remember seeing a white light. I felt like I was dying. Going towards the light, I felt euphoric, weightless and full of love. I thought, ‘This is incredible, this is how life should be’. But I questioned whether I was ready to go or not. I felt I had the power to choose life or death. The first person to come to my mind was my brother. I saw his face clearly. Then I thought of mum, dad and my partner and thought, ‘Oh, maybe I’m not quite ready.’ So I came back.
That experience made me respect life a lot more. It made me aware of the power of love and our choices. I was excited to have seen the light but also shattered that one of my fallopian tubes had been removed during the operation. Now with only one tube, my chances of becoming a mother easily had decreased.
My second pregnancy was six years later when I was 30. I was seeing a younger guy and having a child with him wasn’t a viable option. Obviously, I was concerned I might lose the second tube but my obstetrician assured me the technology had improved. He gave me a 99 percent guarantee I would have a usable fallopian tube at the end of the procedure. But something very tricky happened. A few cells from the embryo remained attached somewhere and my body thought it was still pregnant. I had to go in to hospital every second day for a fortnight to have chemotherapy to kill off those cells. It was pretty intense. I had a series of blood tests and each time the lab technicians would come back and say, “Sorry, it’s still registering as something there. We need to give you another jab.” Fortunately, I didn’t lose the second tube so I didn’t give myself too hard a time.
A couple of years later I was single again and in a new job in London. That’s where I met the man who asked me to marry him. He was a yoga teacher and sold musical instruments and arts and crafts from Asia. He supported orphanages and was an all-round decent guy. We decided to make a go of it.
We were working at an orphanage in Nepal when I got a phone call telling me my brother had killed himself in Sydney. I was gutted. We came back to Australia and dealt with the pain, sadness, mess and confusion. I also felt a guilty because I hadn’t been there for my brother during his darkest hours. I’ll always wonder if I’d been home whether I could have helped him.
Six weeks later, we found ourselves working at the Glastonbury Festival in England. We were stuck out in the middle of nowhere in a chaotic sea of tents and people and musicians. I thought I could lose myself in the mayhem and try to bury my grief. Then one day, I woke up and I couldn’t walk. I was in so much pain. I felt constipated, bloated, really sick and toxic. There was a constant beat of music from the Festival and I couldn’t find any peace. For two days I lay in the tent with a stream of people coming in to do Reiki on me. As soon as I got back to London I went straight to a doctor. I was still grieving for my brother and felt very disconnected from reality.
The doctor sent me off for a scan and sure enough it was another ectopic pregnancy. I was rushed by ambulance to hospital before it burst. I was in so much pain I could barely get off the bed. I was on all fours, screaming in agony. It was really horrible and very frightening, to be so far away from home, with no family around me. My partner adored me but I wanted the support of people I’d known all my life.
As I clenched the bar at the end of the hospital bed and cried with pain, I thought, ‘Why is God doing this to me? My brother’s just committed suicide. Do I have to deal with this as well?’ I was confused and angry and wondered. ‘Why me?’
I had emergency surgery and they just reefed my fallopian tube out. The doctor thought there was no point trying to salvage it. “There’s no way you’re keeping this one. You’ve already had one pregnancy in there,” he said. When I woke up I was devastated. Losing that fallopian tube had left me with a lot of scar tissue and pain.
I found English hospitals and nurses really scary. It was like something out of an old movie. There were long corridors of iron beds and severe looking nurses with their flapping, ‘flying nun’ hats. I was far from home and the hospital was miles from where we lived in London, making it hard for anyone to visit me. That’s when I finally fell to pieces. I hadn’t had a chance to tell my parents because it all happened so quickly. I thought, ‘My God, I’ve just been through this huge ordeal and my family don’t know anything about it’. That was the turning point.
I thought, ‘If we’ve got to do IVF, I want to do it in Australia’. Now the pressure was on my partner to come back to Australia with me. He had his business, his two dogs and his yoga and he wasn’t ready to move to Sydney to have a child he wasn’t sure he was ready for.
I arrived home, single, but still determined, one way or another to have a baby. I researched IVF by reading books and talking to doctors. Since my first ectopic pregnancy I’d always known IVF was an option.
I understood I needed to get right onto my pre-conception care. That meant addressing my diet, taking supplements, giving up cigarettes and party drugs and cutting back on drinking. And then I met Jonathon. We’d known each other for a long time, but hadn’t seen each other for eight years. For the first time we were back in the same city, at the same time, without partners. All of a sudden, we realised there was a lot more chemistry between us than we’d previously acknowledged. I told him about my brother’s death and the drama with my fallopian tubes. But I didn’t tell him about my burning desire to have a baby – I didn’t want to scare him off!
We fell in love and stayed together. About two years into the relationship, he looked at me one night over dinner and said, “Let’s have a baby. Let’s go for it. Let’s sign up for IVF.” I was primed and ready to go.
We went to the clinic and he went off into one of the little rooms and did his business and came out with his offering. It’s bizarre for the men because while we women sit out in the waiting room we know exactly what they’re up to in their little cubicles. It’s all so clinical, in a way.
First, I took the nasal spray, because I’m not a big needle fan. But the spray irritated my nose and I was worried I’d sneeze everything out. I thought, ‘There is no way I can do this three times a day for six weeks.’ So I went back in the next day and got the injections. Initially, Jonathan did them, but I realised he wasn’t going to be around for all of them, so I had to get a handle on it quickly.
Before injecting, I used to think about the baby to give me courage. It became a beautiful daily ritual. I visualised being pregnant and having a baby in my arms, which I’d dreamed of since I was three. Those dreams were closer to coming true and I didn’t fear an ectopic pregnancy anymore.
The day before the egg harvest, I found it really painful walking to yoga. Both my ovaries were so full of eggs. I felt puffy and sick from the treatment. I was working in a massage clinic in the city and had lots of lymphatic drainage to ease the bloating and puffiness. At the same time, I felt full of the ability to have life inside me and I tried to embrace the process as positively as possible.
The next day I went to the IVF clinic and had the egg extraction under general anaesthetic. When I woke up they said, “Look at the number we’ve written on your right hand and it’ll tell you how many eggs we got.” I looked at my hand and it had 22 written on it. Twenty-two eggs! No wonder I couldn’t walk the day before. They said, “Well done! That’s fantastic!”
Sixteen of the 22 eggs fertilised, which meant we had plenty to play with. I felt proud and excited. Then we had to decide whether to have one, two or three transferred into me as soon as they’d fertilised or choose to wait five days until they became multi-celled blastocysts. They said the success rate was greater with a fertilised egg if it had survived five days in the petri dish. So we opted to wait and have one blastocyst transferred.
I felt battered and bruised from having my ovaries pierced 22 times with large needles. My insides felt swollen and tender, even violated. I looked pregnant, but I was just puffed up from the drugs and procedures. I tried to carry on my regular life but it was difficult.
Those two weeks waiting for the results of the pregnancy test were among the worst of my life. I was massaging in the city on the day the results were due. Jonathon rang every half hour to find out the results. There was so much pressure waiting for that phone call. It was nerve wracking. It was like waiting to see if I’d won Lotto.
Finally the clinic called to say it hadn’t worked and I wasn’t pregnant. I rang Jonathon and then had to go straight in and massage a regular client. I was crying and trying not to make any noise while the tears streamed down my cheeks.
There and then, I decided I was not ready for another round of IVF. I needed a break. Taking the fertility drugs and making and harvesting all those eggs had taken its toll. The added pressure of being pregnant straight on top of that would have been too much. I needed to get back to myself. I decided to store the other embryos, which was the best move. I thought, ‘Why would a little embryo want to implant itself in here, when it’s raw and tender from all those drugs and hormones? I don’t blame it for not wanting to make this its home.’
For the next six months I worked on myself and tried to make my uterus a beautiful, welcoming and warm place where a little embryo would want to live and grow. I did yoga, meditation and ate a clean macrobiotic diet, had early nights and lots of love in my life. Finally, I felt ready.
We thawed out two embryos. It was beautiful looking through the microscope and saying hello to them before they put them inside me.
When I came out of the clinic, I bashed the car into a pole in the car park. I thought, ‘That’s so not me. Something’s changed. I must be pregnant.’ Two days later, Jonathon said, “You’re like a hot water bottle. Your body temperature has gone through the roof.” We had a little chuckle. We both knew I was pregnant. We were so happy, so over the moon. We did a batch of home pregnancy tests and they all read, “Yes, yes, yes!”
At my 37th birthday party at home, we announced we were having a baby. It was wonderful. There was so much happiness, enthusiasm and joy because everyone knew the roller coaster journey I’d been on over the years.
I’d held a lot of babies, but I’d never held a newborn. Seeing Gus for the first time was surreal. He was so little and slippery, yet so strong. It was one of those moments where you think, ‘Far out! This is what being alive is all about.’ This is an amazing rite of passage and I feel privileged to have been able to do it. “Bring it on! I want to do that all over again! As soon as possible!” Because it was just wonderful, I loved it.
I would say to anyone considering IVF, to focus on their pre-conception care. It’s important for both partners to have healthy minds and bodies before conceiving. Sperm counts in the success rate of pregnancy too. Good food and regular exercise benefits you tenfold on a spiritual, emotional and mental level to deal with the IVF process. I’d also advise women to see professionals in the field, not just take potluck and read a few books. It’s also important to embrace the treatment with as much positive attitude as you can muster. Don’t resent or fear it, because it’s hopefully going to bring you a beautiful baby.
Extract from ‘Making Babies – Personal IVF Stories’ by Theresa Miller