A Bun in the Oven

One from the heart

This week’s newsletter doesn’t contain a recipe, but a personal story, so feel free to skip over this one if you just want the grub!

Those who know me well will know that, for the last decade or more, the only thing I’ve always known I’ve wanted to do was have a baby. This desire has been the force that has driven me for almost as long as my organs have been in such a state as for it to be biologically possible.

So when I met Charles, the person I knew I wanted to be the father of my children, my own internal race to conceive and meet our baby was on.

I don’t really know when this ambition began. I guess it could have existed ever since I held my newborn baby sister, just an hour after she was born. Maybe it was then, aged 5, that it was etched on my brain that to give birth was the meaning of life.

Sometimes I wonder if my desperation to be a Mum was something that grew out of a less joyful event. When my family lost our closest friend, Michele, my brother and sister’s primary school teacher, and my parents’ best friend. She had come with us on family holidays, painted my Dad’s toenails, hosted me and my siblings for sleepovers. Michele had lived with us when she was dying of ovarian cancer, and her death was the first I ever experienced, when I was 7 and she was just 32.

I suppose it’s possible this experience led to my pathological need to ensure my own ovaries would do what I needed them to before I myself reached age 32?

Or maybe it was when I was 20 and my Dad got very sick. I was forced to face the idea that he might not be around for much longer. And that I might not get the chance to give both my parents a grandchild. The only thing that had ever really mattered to me.

Perhaps it was all or none of these things. 

All I know is that my desire to have a baby has been a continuous and unwavering element of who I am. Is it any surprise my favourite PC videogame when I was 8 was called Babyz???

So I felt really quite insane when, for most of last year, I feared – every day – that I might not be able to have one.

‘Trying for a baby’ was never something I wanted to talk about, because it wasn’t something I wanted to do. I didn’t want to ‘try’. I just wanted it to happen. To try meant it would take time. To try meant it would not happen instantly, like it seemed to have for the few people who had told me how quickly they had conceived. 

Until the moment when we started to ‘try’ I had read absolutely nothing about fertility, or infertility. I avoided any newspaper article, blog or forum about the subject like the plague. I was blind to them. I now understand, I was too scared to find out more. I deliberately kept my knowledge of the subject limited, because for me, the only possible sequence of events was getting pregnant immediately. Learning about other people’s fertility journeys would be to learn about ways in which my getting pregnant might not go to plan. I was too afraid of that.

The only real thought I’d given to the process was that I had come off the pill 3 years prior, to clear my body of any hormones that might get in the way of nature taking its course. What a laugh!

When the pregnancy test showed only one line that first month in January 2023, I felt like a failure. Which is ridiculous, I now know. But conceiving first time had been the case for people I knew, and my Mum had had four kids, and her Mum before her. I was “from good breeding stock” as Mum so liked to tell me. But it didn’t mean that it would be that way for me. I tried to take comfort in the NHS statistic that it took on average 6 months for people my age. 

When it didn’t happen for the second, or the third month, though, I became increasingly nuts. And angry. I lost, at times, all sense of rationality. I didn’t talk to anyone about it. Unfairly, I asked Charles to keep silent on the matter also, which meant he had to bear my nutsness all on his own, without the support of friends. I didn’t want the pressure of anyone else’s expectations of my womb, my own were heavy enough. 

When we were into our fourth month of trying, I would do unhinged, superstitious things like wear the same necklace everyday for the entire month, or repeat positive mantras in my head when out exercising. Because maybe, with some luck, that would make it happen this time? Other months, I would decide to not go running at all, even though it has been a thing in my life that has only brought me joy for the last 4 years. I wouldn’t run for the bus, lest that should stop a baby implanting to my womb lining. I would force Charles and I to eat a handful of walnuts a day, every day for four weeks because it was meant to be good for the hormones. 

It was the hoping and hoping each new month that was the most crazy-making. Over analysing the tenderness of my boobs. Or being 2, 3 or 6 days late for my period and wholly convincing myself that this was my month! Maybe the pregnancy test was just wrong! That happened didn’t it? And then when it had had enough of teasing me for a week, the period would start, more painful and menacing than ever before.

On better days I would listen to It’s Going to Happen! by the Undertones over and over when doing laps of our local park. I’d try to let it override my increasingly illogical fatalism. “Happens all the time! It’s going to happen, happen, ‘til you change your miiiind.” Its refrain perfectly summed up my mental precarity: a staunch optimist facing my biggest fear in the world possibly coming true. I was a woman on the verge of a conception breakdown.

By the sixth month, I went to the doctor. I wasn’t about to waste any time becoming gradually more and more frustrated with my body and its inability to do the only thing I had ever wanted it to do. We have been trying for six months, I told them, and by the way my periods are becoming increasingly heavy and irregular, and often my cycles are 40 days or more. I had been enjoying intense and painful acne on one side of my jaw-line for months now too. A tell-tale sign that something was going on with my reproductive organs. Until then I had belittled it, and explained it away as stress. But the big sore signs were there.

The doctor sent me for an internal scan, which I didn’t think would show anything because as I’ve already mentioned, it is my coping mechanism not to entertain thoughts of ‘the worst’. A few weeks later, when I was at the office, I got a call from my GP, who told me that the scan had found a ‘uterine polyp’. I closed the door. A what? A ‘growth in the inner lining of the uterus’. She had referred me to a gynecologist, as they recommended I have a biopsy. I had never heard of a ‘uterine polyp’. I couldn’t even spell it. What was it? A growth in the lining of my uterus sounded terrifyingly like womb cancer to me. A biopsy meant a test for cancer, let’s get real. I sobbed those fat sobs that make you gasp for breath.

When I had my breath back, I tried not to panic. I was better when I had a task that needed to be done anyway. And in a way, this was easier than the previous months of waiting and wondering. For the next few weeks, I played a game of ping-pong, calling my doctor’s surgery and the hospital I’d been referred to, to try and find out how long it might be before I could see the gynecologist. When I eventually got through to someone who knew, in August 2023, I was told my appointment was unlikely to be before January 2024, 5 months later. They said I could call every day until then to see if there had been a cancellation, but that these didn’t come up very often. 

I rang private doctors to find out how much a polyp biopsy would cost. I was told it’s better to have a hysteroscopy and a polypectomy – a polyp removal – if needed. And that this would cost well over £1000. I was lucky to have family and support who helped us pay for this. So at the end of August, we traveled to a sinister little place on Harley Street, and I had my uterine polyp removed, with tools I don’t want to describe to you, on local anaesthetic (general would have cost £4000). That private clinic now represents both evil and salvation to me. Mostly evil. It was the most painful pain I’ve ever experienced, but I felt very lucky to have had it sorted and to have found the root cause of the problem. Of our infertility. I still feel so scared of that word, of ever having to associate with it. But that was what it was. A baby couldn’t implant because this big, stupid polyp was in the way. A whole 3cm of it.

After that, my womb needed some time to get back to normal, after being invaded with foreign objects. The biopsy came back with no cancer. Then it was October. And still no two lines. Then November passed too. We moved house, and my period followed us. Christmas came and went.

Now it was 2024, and it had now been an entire year of being tormented by my menstrual cycle. 2023 had been the hardest year of my life. The year I learnt I couldn’t make my body do what I wanted it to do with sheer will power.

So it wasn’t until I was on day 46 of my cycle, in January this year, that I felt brave enough to take a test again. I suppose we were definitely well and truly late now. I guess I did carry a Dominos for a mile back to our house, because my need for junk food was so strong (and the collection prices too good to beat). And I did think the skin on my face was looking a little darker… a little too tanned for January. So we did the peeing in the cup and the dipping of the stick. For maybe the 8th time in 12 months.

I walked away, as usual. Turned it upside down. Waited the five minutes.

And then we turned it over. And the line was there twice. 

And I’ve never had a happier day in my life.

Why am I telling you all this? Because 2023 was the year in which I felt more afraid, more alone, more embarrassed and more like a failure than at any time in my life. I was desperate, and I was not myself. I had spoken briefly to a select few people about what I was going through, but it wasn’t really something I wanted to share while I was in it, because until I knew I was going to get out of it, that thought was too scary.

So I wanted to write this now, as something to share with anybody who has had, or is having, a similar experience. Who has been through the exquisite pain of having your hopes dashed repeatedly once a month, every month. For a year, or two or five or more. And my thoughts will forever be with those experiencing the cruelty of not being able to conceive at all. 

I understand now why they talk about babies like they are miracles. And I am so grateful for the one in my belly.