Getting Pregnant The Hard Way: Surviving Subfertility & IVF

Getting Pregnant The Hard Way

Surviving Subfertility & IVF

Hannah Machluf

ahmachluf@gmail.com

Copyright ©2014 Hannah Machluf

Smashwords Edition

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

17th NOVEMBER 2009

2002 HAPPY DAYS

2003

2004

2005

BE DETERMINED

2006

2007

DON’T ACCEPT DEFEAT

2008

2009

TRUST IN FATE

POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE

LIFE IS FOR LIVING

2010

WHAT’S MEANT TO BE WILL ALWAYS FIND A WAY

LIFE IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

(John Lennon)

Pour Noa et Lotem, vous êtes ma joie de vivre et ma raison d’être.

17th NOVEMBER 2009

It was my thirty fourth birthday. I sat on my bed in a south London Hospital feeling horribly exposed. I wore one of those thin hospital gowns that tie up at the back, there was nothing on underneath so I put my thick blue dressing gown over the top and tied it up tight, that felt a little better. I was waiting to talk to Mr K my consultant, my stomach churned with nerves and I felt sick at the thought of what was going to happen to me shortly. I needed to ask him to make sure he removed both of my fallopian tubes when he performed my laparoscopy or key hole surgery in an hour or so. This may sound odd to you coming from a person desperate to conceive because what I was asking him to do was to basically sterilise me, but I could not be back in this situation again. I had to make some sort of change and I needed to go forward. This was the only way I knew how.

It had taken a lot of time and an awful lot of heart ache and thought to reach this conclusion, I'd lost count of how many hospital appointments I'd attended and how many times I'd been wheeled down to the operating theatre on a trolley bed, each time hoping that whatever procedure I was about to go through would work and I'd get pregnant. And I knew this one wouldn't be the end of it either, there would still be more to come after this operation if my dream of giving birth to my own child was to come true. But I had to go through with this, however afraid I was. And I felt the fact that this operation had been scheduled for my birthday was a very good sign, it was meant to be, all part of the plan.

FATE

The following is a true story, remembered as best as possible from memory, from my hospital notes and from my partially kept journal. It tells of what led me to make the difficult decision to ask the surgeon to remove my fallopian tubes and what happened after that eventful day.

Firstly I will tell you how I met Asher, the one who I'd always been looking for and knew was out there somewhere.

♥

2002 HAPPY DAYS

It was winter in New Zealand, I'd already spent one year on a working holiday visa seeing parts of Australia and I was now into my tenth month doing the same thing in New Zealand. My visa was nearly finished and I didn't want to go home, back to England, not yet. I had been working in a really lively bar but was now doing admin in an office and I was bored. My brother Phil who had decided to come and travel with me was fed up of the cold days in Christchurch so he'd booked a flight to Bangkok. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to go with him and it would delay my return home so I said goodbye to my boyfriend of the moment, guiltily promising to return to him in a few months’ time after exploring south east Asia with Phil.

We spent three months backpacking through Thailand, Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam. I loved the villages and towns I saw, it was such a different way of life to anything I had seen or done before. Although so much poorer than the places I had spent all of my life in, these countries had a different energy and pace of life. Whole families lived close together and communities were just that.

Phil and I were waiting for a bus early one balmy morning in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. When it turned up we climbed on board and sat down next to each other. The bus didn't seem to be going anywhere quickly, the reason for the delay soon became apparent. Two guys were slowly making their way to the bus, they carried their backpacks and one had a guitar slung over his shoulder. They got on and ambled to the back seats. Finally the bus pulled out of the city and we drove north through winding hilly roads to a town called Dalat. This was a tourist bus and once it had stopped all the backpackers got out and agreed with the touts waiting at the bus stop which hotel they were going to. Phil and I got into the same minivan as the two late comers from the bus. They introduced themselves as Nati and Asher. After dropping our bags off in our rooms and having a quick shower we all went out for a cold beer and something to eat together. An hour or so later I felt tired, I made my excuses and headed back to my room for a good night’s sleep. I heard knocking on my bedroom door in the morning, it was Asher standing there asking me if I wanted to get some breakfast together. I accompanied him to the dining room where over coffee he suddenly blurted out that he was attracted to me. Sparks flew after that conversation and nothing was to be the same again (not that I knew that then). Thoughts of my kiwi boyfriend flew out of the window and I decided I wouldn't be returning to New Zealand after all. Asher and his best friend Nati were from Israel. I'd already formed a bad impression of Israelis, they seemed rude and arrogant and just tended to hang out in large exclusive groups. But Asher and Nati were different, they didn't like just one large group, they liked to mix with everyone. I later learnt I was wrong about Israelis in general, they just say what they think which is actually very refreshing and you always know where you are with them. We explored towns and beaches by day and in the evenings we drank beer, discussed the day’s events and smoked a little pot, Nati would play his guitar and sing Beatles songs to us. We spent six weeks all together travelling by bus and train from the south of Vietnam to the north, we trekked in the green terraced hillsides of Sapa and then after the hustle and bustle of Hanoi we took a bus to Vientiane the capital of Laos. From there we wondered around the beautiful temples and villages of the surrounding area. It was a fun and carefree time and even though my feelings grew stronger for Asher, neither of us believed it could be more than a holiday romance.

Near the end of our time together Asher's grandmother was taken very ill and he decided he must fly home to be with her. He said goodbye to me and took a bus from the tiny village next to the chocolate milkshake river where we stayed in Laos. There were shell cases for fence posts, families of skinny chickens running under the wooden houses and water buffalo tied up ready for work. Laos is the country that time forgot, it doesn't seem to exist there. It had been horribly scarred by the American Vietnam war, having the grim reputation of being the most bombed country ever, but it is incredibly beautiful and so are its inhabitants.

Asher had been gone for a day or two when realisation hit me, I must find him and see him before he flew home from Bangkok. I missed him crazily and couldn't let him just leave without telling him so. It took me nearly a week of bumping over rutted roads in the back of pickup trucks, waiting for the landslides that blocked the roads to be cleared by hand by the men in the queues of buses and trucks and then sitting for two days on a hard wooden bench on a slow boat up the Mekong River to the Thai border. When I finally got off the boat the border had just closed, I had to find a room for the night and wait until the next day for the border to reopen. It was a long night. I think I was the first person queuing for a boat to cross the river that would let me step into Thailand in the morning. As soon as I had climbed up the other side of the river bank and been through the little customs office I jumped onto a waiting minibus that would take me to Chang Mai and the hostel Asher was staying in. We were dropped off in the centre of the city and I asked directions from a little bar and set off at a brisk walk. After the long journey I walked towards his hostel with butterflies in my stomach, I was finally going to see the man who had consumed all my waking thoughts this last week. The desire to see him by now was immense. But I was too late. The receptionist informed me he'd already checked out. I turned around the way I'd come, trudging off and lugging my backpack with tears streaming down my face. I felt gutted, I didn't know if I would ever see Asher again. I wondered around feeling sorry for myself and not knowing what to do now. A little later after finding myself a room I sat down in an internet cafe to email him goodbye, I'd tried to see him and I hadn't made it in time. For no reason at all I suddenly glanced up and out of the window and had to do a double take, there he was, walking straight passed me. In a city of 170,000 people what were the chances of just bumping into each other like that? His head was down, he was lost in thoughts of his beloved grandmother who had just died. I jumped up and yelled at him through the door, seeing the deep sorrow and grief in his eyes and then we fell into each other’s arms. I couldn't believe I had found him. We walked back to his hostel where he'd left his bags, then we collected mine from my room and that evening we flew together to Bangkok airport. From there he tried without success to get on a standby flight to Israel. Selfishly I was so very happy, we had a little more time to spend together.

We lazed on beautiful Thai beaches until I eventually ran out of money and had to return to England in August and Asher finally got a flight to his home in Israel. We spoke on the telephone and emailed often. It seemed we were both missing each other terribly, too much to say it was only a holiday romance so we decided on a rendezvous to see how the land lay when we clapped eyes on each other again. In October we arranged to meet in Holland for a weekend. It felt so right as I jumped into his arms in the arrivals hall at Schiphol airport, it was like coming home. We danced together at a nightclub in Amsterdam and I told him I had finally found the one for me, I knew he was it. In November he flew to England for a week to celebrate my birthday with me and met my family who liked him straight away, it's hard not to like Asher, he has a big heart and what you see is what you get, there is no pretence. We couldn't live apart any longer so after Christmas he came to England permanently and we moved into my friend Susie’s spare room.

2003

It was hard going straight from holiday romance to living together, I was working and he wasn't and he didn't know anyone apart from me and Phil. Somehow we kept it together and in May we moved back into the little flat I used to share with my brother and that helped, we needed the space and privacy to know each other in real life, not just on holiday. We started to make plans for another trip travelling together, we were still young and carefree with minimal responsibilities and our wanderlust had grown stronger after our last trip, we worked hard and we saved hard. And we started a partnership that would become very strong, we didn't realise then how much we would need that strength in the years to come.

Something that had always bothered me but I'd done nothing about was the fact that I had very irregular periods, sometimes only two or three a year. In some ways it was nice not to have to bother with it every month but in the back of my mind I was worried, something must be wrong with me because it wasn't normal to have such few periods. Even though we were a very long way from planning a family I decided to visit my GP. His advice to me was to go for a transvaginal ultrasound scan to confirm his diagnosis of polycystic ovaries. The scan would enable the person doing it to look at my reproductive organs, womb, ovaries and cervix and see if there was anything amiss. He thought if that's what I did have then it might just take a little longer to get pregnant than the average person when the time came for us to start trying. I knew the ultrasound scan would be internal and I couldn't face taking my clothes off in front of a stranger and exposing myself like that. This seems silly now looking back at it, but I was very self-conscious at the time. I was a prude, I didn't even like undressing in communal dressing rooms at the sports centre. I remember ringing to postpone the appointment every time a new letter was sent out.

2004

I buried my head in the sand and put my fertility concerns out of my mind and concentrated on only the fun things in my life, like organising our trip to go travelling.

In March our dream was realised and we flew to Delhi to begin a year visiting different countries around the world. I never went for the ultrasound scan and didn't give it any more thought, it wasn't hard to do as we were now doing what we loved most, exploring new places and cultures together. On our two year anniversary we found ourselves back on the beautiful Thai islands. We went out for dinner after a day of scuba diving in the warm clear waters around Ko Tao and Asher proposed to me. I'd had a feeling that he would do it that night as we'd picked out a diamond ring in the huge MBK shopping centre in Bangkok a few weeks before. I was extremely happy, I am an old fashioned girl at heart and all I ever wanted to do was find the right man to settle down with, we'd have children together and live happily ever after, the end. We had a wonderful year out seeing parts of Asia, New Zealand and South America and our relationship grew and strengthened, we felt totally comfortable spending twenty four hours a day together, it never got boring.

2005

Of course our freedom couldn't last forever, but after we'd finished our year travelling around the world we still had a little time and money left before we had to start work again and our tenants moved out of our flat so we flew to Israel for five weeks to spend some time with Asher's family. It was spring and warm and sunny there and the trees were in full blossom, the scents gently perfuming the night air. We drove to Tel Aviv to visit the British Embassy to see what Asher needed to do in terms of visas to live permanently in the U.K. The easiest way they told us was to go back married. No problem, we wanted to get married anyway and neither of us wanted a big do, the only thing I really wanted was a blue sky and a sunny day to set my wedding to and that would definitely not be guaranteed in England. As I am not Jewish we weren't allowed to marry in the state of Israel so Asher hastily organised a civil ceremony at a registry office in Agia Napa, Cyprus for the following weekend.

It was a bright blue, warm and sunny April day when we boarded the forty five minute flight to Cyprus. We were accompanied by Asher's mum Helen, his sister Michal, her husband Amir and their three children Yamit, Daniel & Raz, his sister Aimely, her two children Maya and Rotem and his youngest sister Etty. Not bad for a last minute wedding! My brother met us outside the registry office in the town, he had got a last minute flight from Gatwick. I wore a simple white dress with strappy silver high heels and carried a stem of pink orchids that my parents had bought for me. Asher wore a smart white shirt and black trousers. It was a very quick ceremony but we didn't care, we just wanted to be married, that was all that mattered to us, to be husband and wife. We all went to a Greek restaurant for lunch afterwards and Asher and I spent the rest of our weekend in Cyprus lazing by the pool or on the beach outside the hotel. Life was peachy.

So I had bagged my man, now it was time to get serious, earn some money, eventually put some roots down somewhere and build a life together.

It was hard saying goodbye to Asher's family after spending so long with them but finally we had to return to real life and we flew back to England together in May. I got a job in a payroll department even though the thought of returning to office life was not exactly an exciting one and Asher worked for a friend of a friend’s family business. After six months of winging it (I couldn't really remember much about payroll, which is what I'd done before my travels) the company went into liquidation and I got a small pay out. It was just enough to start our own business. Asher would continue his job part time and would also help me to set up and run a sandwich round. This idea had come to me during our travels as I'd sat on a Brazilian beach sunning myself and a local lady had sold her sandwiches to the sunbathers. I can do that, is the thought that had sprung to mind. I'd worked in a sandwich shop years before and we both loved cooking food and eating it, it seemed an ideal and potentially enjoyable way to earn some money if it worked out.

The long term plan was to leave England and find our own place in the sun somewhere, the sandwich round if it worked would be a stop gap, a way out of the office for me and a chance to learn how to run a small business. Before we left we'd have to save up again, our bank balance was about zero now, we'd need some money to start something of our own somewhere else.

Asher and I wanted to start our family straight away we'd always talked about having at least three or four children. I was officially broody but we'd stopped using contraception when we got married and nothing was happening so I figured I'd better swallow my pride and have that ultrasound scan.

We went to the hospital early on a damp October morning, Asher drove. I was a little hung over from the leaving party we'd had at the pub after work the night before, which did nothing to help my nervous state. I could hardly talk to Asher on the way. Once there after a short wait a lady called me in to her room, making sure I'd been to the toilet and emptied my bladder first. I went in alone as the last thing I needed was for Asher to see me in that position. Thankfully it wasn't as bad as I'd imagined it to be. I had to take off my jeans and knickers and wrap a large sheet of paper around my waist. I got up on the chair, bent my knees and put my feet in the dreaded stirrups and mercifully the lights were dimmed so I didn't feel too exposed. The sonographer was a lady and this made me feel slightly more at ease. I told her how nervous and embarrassed I felt and she reassured me that this was quite normal, most of her patients felt the same way. She made me laugh by telling me a story about a lady who'd come to her for a scan and had asked if she found it a bit weird seeing other women's fannies all day long. This thought had crossed my mind too, but what I realised is this, the people who work in gynaecology are there to help people like me, they're just doing a job in a subject that interests them (and it is a fascinating one) and are not really interested in what your own personal fanny looks like. She covered the long, narrow, plastic ultrasound probe with a condom and put some lubricant on it and asked me if I wanted to insert it, she handed it over and I did so. It's not a pleasant experience but it is not painful or very uncomfortable. It only lasted a few minutes. She probed and pushed it around whilst looking at the pictures it sent back of my ovaries, womb and fallopian tubes to her computer screen. She didn't say too much to me but I learnt I did indeed have poly cystic ovaries and might have a large cyst on one of my ovaries. It also showed my fallopian tubes were enlarged and appeared to be filled with fluid.

I was very quiet on the way home, I didn't know what all this meant but I had a bad feeling about it. I wasn't surprised, I always knew something wasn't quite right with my reproductive system but this all felt a bit hazy and unreal. Asher was very supportive and told me to try not to worry, he is always a very positive person. He was quite sure everything would be ok. I was not. The worrying and the journey into the unknown had begun.

The following week I went to my GP to discuss the results of the ultrasound. This doctor was very nice but did nothing to allay my fears. She was a locum and had a gynaecological background and asked if she could do an internal examination. I agreed and whilst she was doing it she told me that she could feel a large swelling on my right ovary. She thought it was a dermoid cyst and she thought I had a hydrosalpinx in one of my fallopian tubes. She recommended that I be referred to my local hospital for a laparoscopy. This is where a tiny camera is inserted through a small incision in your tummy to see what is going on inside. And I would also need a hysterosalpingogram or HSG which is an x-ray dye test that looks inside the uterus and can see if the fallopian tubes are blocked. I walked the few minutes home feeling dazed and shell shocked, I didn't know what was wrong with me, but clearly something was that would need more than a course of tablets to treat. Shortly after I got in Mum popped by to see how it went. I burst into tears as soon as I saw her. This really was not part of the plan, yes I thought it may be a little harder to conceive, but to actually have to go to hospital and have a general anaesthetic and an operation – no surely this could not be happening to me. I was never ill, I never got sick, I was always healthy, it was inconceivable to think that something could be wrong with me. To be facing the possibility of not being able to have children or needing help in getting pregnant was totally unbelievable. That was something I read about in magazines or heard about happening to other people. Not to me. Impossible.

Later when I'd calmed down I googled my potential problems to try to understand more. I do not recommend ever googling health matters, it will only scare the hell out of you. You mostly read horror stories and worse case scenarios and then you are unable to sleep for thinking. And worry as I learnt, can only have a negative effect on you. I discovered that a dermoid cyst contains structures such as hair, teeth, fluid or skin glands and apparently you are born with them, it sounded gross. And a hydrosalpinx is fluid in a fallopian tube, it occurs when the tube has been damaged and then blocks at one end, it fills with liquid making it impossible for the egg to travel down the tube from the ovary to meet the sperm. The causes are normally long term untreated infection in the fallopian tubes such as Pelvic Inflammatory Disease as a consequence of chlamydia or gonorrhoea or a ruptured appendix. I immediately started asking myself how I had come to have this problem, I'd never had a sexually transmitted disease