Episode 1 : A Single Pink Line
I won’t go into the years before IVF in too much detail here. My aim in this blog is to outline the actual process and mechanisms of the (UK) healthcare system and procedures as it relates to IVF, as I feel that’s really what I was lacking going into my treatment. But here is a whistle-stop overview of how me and my partner ended up at the doors of a fertility clinic in early 2022.
We started trying to conceive naturally in May 2019 after some ill health in my partner’s family convinced us that there was no time like the present. Come July 2020 we were feeling a bit desperate but still hopeful and paid privately for some fertility tests (more detail to come later). These were by and large normal and we were encouraged to keep trying for three months. Three months later and still that persistent single pink line and I spoke to my GP about referral for fertility treatment in January 2021. A few drawn out phone calls and tests later (again, more to come) and our local hospital sent our referral to a private fertility clinic in October 2021, and we were finally ready to start treatment in March 2022.
If I reflect back on the time before IVF, I feel such a huge tangle of emotions I can scarcely make sense of it. They were desperate, sad times, but we somehow always had hope. If we didn’t fall pregnant naturally, we were heading for the panacea of IVF, so there always felt a way out, an end to the dilemma and the sadness. I also feel angry at how much time everything took. The fact that couples have to wait two years before they can even be considered for fertility treatment feels cruel. I have the strongest of body clocks and it never lets me forget that my child-bearing years are ticking on.
So, to the nitty gritty. I thought it might be useful to document mine and my partners’ experience of fertility testing, both private and NHS funded; the advice we were given, timescales for getting things done and what it was like to have the tests themselves. I appreciate that everyone will experience these things differently, depending on past experiences, pain threshold and all manner of other factors that can influence how we experience life and challenges. But the nuts and bolts are the same. The anatomy, the surgical instruments, the scanning probe are all alike and I knew very little about any of it before all this began.
The first set of fertility tests we had we decided to seek privately. As you’ll see from the dates above, this all straddled the Covid pandemic, so we felt putting more strain on the NHS when we could afford not to was a bit nonsensical, not least of all because of that ticking clock and my urge to get the ball rolling quickly. We paid for a couples fertility MOT, costing £450, and comprising semen analysis for my partner and AMH blood test plus internal ultrasound scan with antral follicular count for me, followed by a consultation with a doctor.
We were almost excited to get these appointments booked in, hoping it would give us some clues as to why we weren’t succeeding in conceiving and what we might be able to do about it. This is the beginning of the end, we thought. But for us, it was really just a continuation of the same, peppered with some interesting physical experiences along the way, as you’ll find out next time.
