The IVF Diaries: A Man’s View Of A Woman’s World
Part I
Life’s Most Frustrating Problem
Life can be frustrating.
Dropping your toast on the floor, butter side down. Cracking your head against the corner of an open cupboard door. Watching your football team spunk a 1–0 lead away from home to Plymouth Argyle in the 94th minute. Discovering, at that crucial point in time, there’s only one sheet of toilet paper left and, well, you know.
Life’s most frustrating problem, however?
Failing to get pregnant.
We’re taught, as blooming adolescents captive to stormy hormones and confusing complexions, that the mere act of sneezing on a member of the opposite sex without the use of a condom or other preventative measure will spawn an inevitable pregnancy.
Life: ruined. Don’t do it, you sex-crazed and porn-ravaged youngsters; always use the damn condom.
This notorious line of thinking, unfortunately, holds the human race hostage to a powerfully distorted view of pregnancy. While, for the most part, this is, of course, sage advice, it can, in later years, evoke feelings of confusion. Disorientation. Bafflement when, hold on, you can have all the sex you want, but there isn’t always such an unbreakable law as an inevitable pregnancy?
For all the talk of protection, safe sex, fertilisation, and periods and sperms and eggs and ovaries and ovulations, it isn’t always as clear-cut as the textbooks, secondary school teachers, and beautifully-animated cartoon series will have you know.
The act of sexual intercourse doesn’t always lead to a bountiful and endless supply of offspring.
It’s rammed down our throats that the scientific formula of ‘unprotected sex equals baby’ is irrefutable — every time. And, when the laws of the seemingly bulletproof biological processes don’t surface like you’re incessantly told — and shown — they should, you’re left questioning everything you’ve been taught.
The clandestine magic and mystery of reproduction, childbearing, and fertility is a complex issue.
One that Adam and Eve were clearly never taught on the bountiful plains of the Garden of Eden. One that 83% of couples take for granted. One that, as teenagers, we’re never taught, let alone potentially expect to surface in our very own lives. It’s never mentioned with the same gravitas and delicateness as teaching us how to put a condom on a banana.
Never has such an infallible and conclusive process been so fallible and inconclusive. Sex doesn’t always equal baby. It’s not that easy. Fertility isn’t straightforward.
Life’s most frustrating problem is failing to get pregnant.
Am I Doing The Sex Right?
They say you’re never ready. We were. When you want to get pregnant, you want to get pregnant. You’re set. You think it about it: Morning. Afternoon. Night. And then morning again. You secretly start thinking of potential names, how you’ll redecorate, whose old pram you’ll steal, and whether you’ll be the type of parents who let their kids watch YouTube at the dinner table.
I vividly remember whispering after the first time we intentionally tried, ‘Fuck, we could have a baby in nine months’ time.’
How little did I know.
We were both 30 when we started trying.
‘You have nothing to worry about; you’re young,’ we were incessantly told, as the weeks turned into months turned into years. That, in terms of medical science, may well have been; when every friend, family member, and dog cocooned in your social bubble is falling pregnant, however, you feel as if you’re being left behind in life’s ceaseless sprint towards first words, schools, Bar-Mitzvahs, and weddings.
Visions of walking alone along the beach in our eighties, enveloped in regret and disdain for the world at our burgeoning infertility frequently surfaced. Losing friends as their lives took different courses started to become a reality. Each passing moment when pregnancy didn’t occur became time wasted. While yes, we probably did have time, this supposed reassurance did little to remove the anxiety and dread we felt.
When you want to be pregnant now, you want it now.
The first time that period dutifully arrives (that’s ‘time of the month’ for those at the back of the class still preoccupied with the shame and humiliation at using the correct terminology) — and an indication procreation hasn’t occurred — you accept it with a knowing nod. You know, through word of mouth and folk tales of years gone by, it’s not always that straightforward.
The third time, however, you grow a little frustrated. The fifth, a tiny more. By the twelfth, you’re despondent. Bewildered. Angry. Sad.
What was the point in practicing putting the fucking condom on the banana if the banana had more chance of conceiving than you?
Still, you keep persevering.
You diligently calculate the peak time of ovulation, consulting the apps and calendars, and scheduling in sex like it’s another inconvenient Zoom meeting you have with your team at work. You become immune to talk of periods, spotting, blood, vulvas, and sperm.
Intercourse, dare I say, becomes a bit like to trying to dislodge a rather uncomfortable poo: it’s not something you really want to do — the pushing a bit painful, in fact — but you realise it’s a must to reach your desired outcome.
You brush off the fact you hadn’t booked that holiday because you thought you’d be pregnant by now, you start creating lists on the notes app on your phone showing gratitude for why you don’t have children (being able to nap ranking considerably high), and it suddenly dawns on you that your wife may well be borderline batshit crazy because she saw two fucking magpies in the garden and so arrived at the conclusion she must be pregnant this time.
You keep going, even through those frustrating times.
Innocently walking down the street and crossing paths with a pregnant woman safely nursing a bump that seems intent on chasing your every step, like your own personal Pac-Man ghost. Watching a TV show and being greeted with another pregnancy-based storyline. Getting ‘the call’ from friends who eagerly let you know they’re expecting. Opening Instagram and having to stare at what seems like the seventeenth pregnancy announcement in three days and spying (discreetly, of course) on a happy family playing in the park in the hope that you’ll experience such joy and comfort soon.
Please, soon.
Everywhere you turn, look, scroll, and gaze, there’s pregnancy and families and children and babies. You can’t escape it. When you can’t get pregnant, pregnancy is what the stars, spirits, screen-centric algorithms, and anything else out there in the big, wide world unduly decides your life should revolve around.
What once was annoyance at being greeted by a comment, situation, or observation about a baby soon shifts to nothing more than a resigned sigh. When the mere mention of an infant or child seeps into the conversation — whether with friends, work colleagues, or on the group WhatsApp — the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You hold your breath and wish the topic of conversation would change quicker than a pandemic-shattered government U-turn. You stay silent, hoping your glaring awkwardness doesn’t erupt and smack everyone present around the head.
You’re fed up. Exhausted and jaded. This kind of situation doesn’t happen to you, you think. You’re sure it will happen soon, won’t it?
And that’s what it turns into. Hope. You pray, like you’ve never prayed before, that this is finally the time the sperm and the egg will unite and the beauty of generative fertilisation takes place. That’s, unfortunately what it comes down to: using terms like generative fertilisation to describe a process that seems as straightforward as opening a can of tuna for everyone around you.
You, of course, start getting inventive with the sex. Legs in the air upon finishing. Trying positions you’re convinced were only reserved for that Pilates class you went to last week. Avoiding the post-sex wee (that one perhaps more frustrating for me). Trying in the morning. Trying more than the once-a-week.
You start booking random holidays just so you can ‘de-stress’ and ‘relax’ because someone once decided that ‘relaxing’ is the unassailable answer to all pregnancy issues.
God, I fucking hate the word relax.
You even Google ‘how to make a baby’ because you seriously consider the surreal possibility you missed the day they taught the exact methodological procedure at school and actually don’t know the intricacies of creating a baby.
Thank God, you are doing it right, but wait, you’re meant to last how long?
You start looking up possible explanations. You begin researching infertility. You dwell on everything that could be wrong with your body and explore every available option on how to possibly get pregnant.
Nothing — I repeat nothing — seems to help.
That point in time then arrives; a moment you never thought you’d have to cede to. After a year of banging away — often, quite literally — you finally acquiesce to seeking help or, at least, finding out what can be done to keep the dream alive. It turns out that reaching page 27 of Google’s search for, ‘What to do if you can’t get pregnant’, still isn’t enough.
You accept that, somewhere, there’s a glitch in the supposedly bulletproof procreative system, and pursuing the assistance and support of a professional may well be the only chance you have at getting pregnant. Your reproductive systems may well be faulty, and another read through the instruction manual is called for.
It’s a moment we never knew possible, let alone be relevant to our lives. Yet here we were.
What The Fuck Is IVF?
Our consultant, a softly spoken gentleman named Moses, sat across the desk, reeling off questions and statistics and names of medical procedures, bombarding me like he was playing one big game of Fertility Articulate.
Delivering the Ten Commandments also perhaps good practice for him handing over our similarly life-defining news.
The obligatory health questions rolled ominously from his mouth: Age? Drinker? Smoker? Sexually transmitted diseases?
Do I wear tight boxers? I don’t. Do I have hot baths? I don’t. If I’d ever been on steroids? Why, thank you, but I hadn’t.
Having devoured the results from my ejaculating into a cup (a highly-pressurised situation that, I’ll have you know, had me fumbling through the systems, settings, and privacy modes on my phone, as it quickly dawned on me explicit content from the internet on your phone fails to work if you’re not connected to the Wi-Fi), he proceeded to deliver his own principles, outcomes, and future ceremonies of biblical proportions surrounding our fertility chances.
Unfortunately, a combination of Emma potentially — but not explicitly — being low in the hormone progesterone, amongst other possible unexplained issues, and my total sperm count (listed as ‘concentration’ on the nicely put-together Semen Analysis pdf) being half of what the preferred amount per millilitre of semen should be, meant our chances of falling pregnant had dropped from about 80% to 40%.
While not impossible, it was evident the odds weren’t in our favour. I’ve run 20-team football accumulators with better chances than this, after all.
There was no clear-cut evidence as to why this wasn’t happening for us — a frustrating conclusion, admittedly — but it was palpable something unexplained was bubbling beneath the surface.
Should probably have taken the steroids anyway, I pondered.
Knowing this was a relief. Sad — and not necessarily surprising — but a relief. There was a reason we weren’t falling pregnant. It wasn’t just us, nor the embarrassing realisation we weren’t doing the sex right. Moses certainly wasn’t ruling out falling pregnant naturally; there was still a chance — albeit a small one — this could happen, and he — much to my fervour — strongly encouraged us to keep trying.
We listened intently as he started to effortlessly list our options, like reading from the menu at Pizza Express. He concluded his catalogue of choices, leaving us with one burning question:
‘What the fuck is IVF?’
Fertility treatment isn’t as simple as we’ve been led to believe. It’s not a case of simply marrying the egg and sperm in a lab — like putting the milk in your tea — letting science do its thing, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a crying, shitting, always-damn-hungry baby to nurture and tend to.
We’ll admit, we had no idea. Not to mention the naivety we shared around the numerous appointments, the relentless tests, the never-ending scans, the endless catalogue of drugs, the precisely-timed medical schedules, the overwhelming emotions, the painful costs, the excessive time taken off work, the heart-wrenching failings, and the exhausting and agonising three-and-a-half-year journey that would soon welcome us with open, albeit crushing, arms.
It also turns out Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection is, unfortunately, a lot more fucking expensive than a serving of dough balls.
A couple of options awaited us. The first — labelled Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) — would involve inserting millions of my sperm into Emma’s uterus at the time of ovulation (with the help of a catheter and a qualified doctor, it must be added) in the hope one would effortlessly swim into the fallopian tube and fertilise the waiting egg.
The second — Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) — seemed more pertinent. This refinement of the typical In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) technique — while more invasive, expensive, and apparently gruelling — would apparently suit our situation better.
Instead of millions of my sperm being mixed with the egg in a petri dish in the laboratory, my best, single healthy sperm would be extracted from my sample and injected directly into the egg to fertilise it. As not only would my most qualified, athletic, and unrivalled little man be selected for the job, but this particular procedure would bypass the other stages of early fertilisation and increase our chances of success. Of course, there was no guarantee, but it gave us a chance of something working.
We mulled over the decision, listing the pros and cons of undertaking a journey we, admittedly, had little knowledge of. These quandaries, of course, all paled in comparison with the desire to hold a newborn baby.
The decision was made: we’d plunge ourselves into the world of IVF.
We then went to Pizza Express for dinner.
This Is Our Story
Emma is a superstar. My superstar. Yes, there’s been tears. Enough tears to potentially assuage any future UK water shortage concerns and enough sad moments to fill fifth, sixth, and seventh Adele albums, but she’s a fucking superstar.
We’ve shared moments darker than the depths of an oil-ravaged BP explosion and enough days and weeks that have been about as enjoyable as repeatedly sticking my knob in a light socket. But she’s a superstar. An unrivalled, exceptional superstar who deserves all the credit and celebration and hugs in the world.
If you’ve ever roamed through the desolate terrains of the IVF world — whether in a same-sex relationship or simply as a single mother — you, too, deserve all the credit and celebration and hugs in the world. It can be nothing short of life-changing to desperately want to carry and grow another human inside you, only to — repeatedly — fail in that quest. And not in a good way.
My pain pales in comparison.
For every whiff of anguish and discouragement I experienced, Emma’s was a whole fuck-tonne more than that. There were breakdowns in the middle of Asda car parks; there were meltdowns after phone calls with pharmacies and clinics; there were nights spent sobbing as the relentless nature took its toll on her mental health; there were weeks when paranoia and depression undoubtedly took hold.
It’s no secret there exists an innate female drive to be a mother (individual differences aside), and Emma, throughout the last three-and-half-years, has battled with that genetic disposition through thick and thicker.
I have no reservations: the IVF world is a woman’s world.
The tests, the drugs, the injections, the tablets, the research, the ongoing reading, the forums, the podcasts, the dealing with clinics and doctors and nurses, the mental scarring, the emotions, the sticking suppositories up your bum; it all falls on the woman.
As much as Emma tried to convince me to try that last one.
Men are left to pick up the pieces of this emotionally incinerated world. To act as a sounding board, to serve as counsellor, therapist, and punchbag; to try and understand the difference between a womb and uterus for the seventy-seventh time.
To haplessly float around the edges looking for something to do, only to sit on the touchline as you watch your wife/girlfriend/partner stick another injection in their stomach and break down at the end of another evening out as, through the uncontrollable tears, they tell you they can’t do this anymore.
I felt it right, therefore, to put down our journey onto paper. Not just that, but through my eyes. What the man sees and feels and does — which, admittedly, isn’t a lot at times. To help you better understand what an ever-growing assemblage of women must endure to reach their one goal in life.
This is the man’s view of a woman’s world.
And, while the story and the words you’ll read are articulated using my limited descriptive vocabulary and through a very large masculine and penis-shaped lens, it’s important not to forget it’s also the aggregation of both our emotions, feelings, opinions, judgments, and comments. It’s the account of endless conversations, numerous discussions, and shared experiences.
It’s the retelling of a collective story that must be told.
Of course, our infertility story isn’t exceptional. There have been people who’ve tried longer than us. Struggled more than us. There have been those who’ve had more — and different — procedures than us. Had contrasting problems and issues and predicaments to us.
There will have been people who’ve breezed through moments we found challenging and people who’ve struggled with moments we found a breeze. There will be people who have dealt with their emotions differently from us and people who’ve undergone a different kind of turmoil.
There’ll also have been people who won’t have been so stupid enough to decide to write a fucking 15,000-word article on the journey, either.
I do know, however, that we’ve all shared the same confusion, heartbreak, and longing that only those weathering the infertility storm can comprehend.
I firmly believe there exists some form of infertility epidemic seizing hold of the world today. Whether it be unhealthy lifestyles, pollution, plastics, oral contraceptives, or TikTok users, I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that sperm count rates are plummeting, ovulation problems are rising, and infertility is slowly becoming an issue bubbling beneath the surface of a potential existential crisis.
Of course, these are mere assumptions, based on nothing but speculation, rumours, and personal experience, but the dystopian science fiction stories of childless civilisations don’t seem as fanciful as once assumed.
I don’t think this important issue is silently slipping away anytime soon.
I, therefore, think it important we all peer through the keyhole at the secret and often confidential world of IVF and understand what the world of infertility encompasses. To learn what actually happens behind the scenes. To grasp the complexity of it all, to accept the struggles of those who’ve undergone the journey, to fathom the emotional distress and turmoil experienced.
To break the taboo around talk of infertility, sex, blood, IVF, and pregnancy loss and to finally bring light onto a subject that deserves to be talked about.
To, when it comes to infertility, ultimately, do better.
