Episode 3 : Ended Before We’ve Begun
January 2021 rolled round and, as advised by the private consultant, having not conceived in the few months since the HyCoSy procedure, I approached my GP about a referral for fertility treatment. After a brief phone call he agreed to send a referral to the local hospital trust, who would then complete a referral to one of the private clinics contracted by the trust to provide the actual treatment. A telephone consultation appointment with a member of the gynae team came through very quickly, giving me a ray of hope that we might get some help and answers quite soon.
I had to take this call at work, so secreted myself away in an empty office and went through a long list of questions with a junior doctor about mine and my partner’s health and lifestyle, including smoking status, familial health conditions and BMI. She was unsure whether the trust could accept the private tests we had had done a few months before and so it was left that she would arrange a call with the consultant. Another six weeks later, I spoke to the consultant. She advised that they could not accept tests done privately and that the ultrasound, AMH blood test and semen analysis would all need to be redone within the NHS trust. She also advised that, due to the post-covid backlog that the overrun health service was trying to deal with, the likelihood was that it would take six to eight months to get through to the fertility clinic.
Meanwhile, we had taken the decision to get the SpermComet test done in addition to the standard tests, to give ourselves peace of mind that we had covered all bases. We were sitting in the spare room come home office, my other half finishing off some outstanding tasks from the day, me cuddling the dog on the bean bag having been out at work for the day. The email came through to Matt’s laptop and our normal, relaxed evening flipped in the time it takes to open an attachment. The results of the SpermComet test were in. The company sent a comprehensive report, complete with graphs and tables charting norms against Matt’s results. The headlines: high levels of DNA fragmentation; chances of standard IVF being successful, low; chances of IVF plus ICSI being successful, low to middling. It hit us both like a ton of bricks and I started crying instantly. According to this result, the chance of us conceiving by any means was highly unlikely.
I was spiralling. Now we were looking at a six to eight month wait (on top of the previous two years) to speak to the specialists, and the very real prospect that even when we did get to them, the treatment wouldn’t work anyway. I became a bit frantic, looking at options for going private for treatment so that we could get started asap. By our brief calculations, depending on what exactly was recommended, we could be looking at anything from £10,000 up to £20,000 for a cycle of treatment. We emailed our mortgage advisor about extending our mortgage to cover this, but were terrified about the prospect of taking on bigger monthly payments for something that looked like it could be a road to nowhere. I felt broken, I felt like this was the end of our journey and the grief hit me like a comet.
