MY OTHER PROJECT • by Lauren Fennemore
Despite spending the majority of my twenties petrified that I might accidentally become pregnant via some unfathomable contraceptive loophole, I found myself - aged 27 - sat beside my husband in a doctor’s office being told that pregnancy just wasn’t going to happen for us the “traditional” way. Our year or so of excruciatingly timed intercourse, ovulation sticks, pre-conception vitamins and ooooh-maybe-that-might’ve-done-the-trick romancing had been futile. The issue: sperm mobility (read: immobility), the proposed course of action: IVF.
Like any other true millennial, I had derived all my prior knowledge of IVF from a single episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S during which Phoebe is seen talking to a Petri dish of embryos one minute and announcing a triple pregnancy the next. It took some time for me to learn of the gaping holes in that storyline... sorry to break it to you but 90’s sitcoms don’t always showcase realistic fertility treatment outcomes (I KNOW! Could we BE any more misled?) What the show glosses over are the weeks and months of painful waiting, the endless medication, the mix-your-own-at-home injections, the scary surgeries and the invasive procedures required to even have a shot at there being just one, single embryo in a Petri dish for you to send your best wishes to.
As my husband and I found out, sometimes you can do all of the above (and more) and still come out the other side with nothing to show for your efforts other than one battered and bruised tummy and two very fragile hearts. Our first round of IVF ended, heartbreakingly, without any embryos to transfer. And our second, which we threw everything and the kitchen sink into a year later, resulted in a negative pregnancy test and just one embryo good enough to freeze. One. It turns out that no matter how frequently you’re told by doctors that you’re “young, fit and healthy”, “a great candidate for IVF” with “excellent odds of IVF success” - nobody can actually predict how your body might respond to supplementary hormones. Sometimes, for no particular reason, some women just do not respond well to the IVF drugs. So this was us - unable to procreate naturally, unable to respond sufficiently to assisted reproductive intervention. But we had one shot left.
It took nearly a year of further tests and backwards steps before we we were physically and emotionally able to move forward and try our luck with that one, remaining embryo - the one that had been sitting patiently in a freezer in London waiting for us, the one that every last shred of hope we had left in us was pinned on. And trust my luck and impeccable timing to finally decide to press ahead and go for it at the very same moment a pandemic swept across the globe, throwing everything in its wake into complete chaos.
In the two weeks between having the embryo transferred and my official test date, the world changed beyond all recognition. The UK entered a nation-wide lockdown and I found myself hibernating indoors, petrified that if my wildest dreams were to come true then I might end up giving birth in the middle of a pandemic, without my husband by my side, in a face mask, surrounded by PPE clad midwives who look like something fresh out of an extraterrestrial movie. Still, I hoped...
And 8 long and nauseous weeks later, in the most surreal and magical moment of my life, I saw a perfect little human wriggling away on a screen. With a brain and a heart and arms and legs and all the things you’d expect a tiny baby to have. A baby. My baby. Words that - even now - I can’t believe I’m typing. I stared in disbelief at the ultrasound of a little person that had been cryogenically frozen for so many months and dreamed of for so many more, who I’d seen as a speck on another ultrasound image a few weeks earlier and hoped beyond all hope would grow into exactly this. That one embryo was THE ONE.
After 4 years of trying to make it happen, 4 medicated cycles, 2 invasive procedures, countless appointments, blood tests, needles, pills, pessaries, an unspeakable number of pennies and bucket loads of tears; after 2 rounds of IVF, 1 failed transfer, 1 fresh transfer and, finally, 1 frozen embryo transfer, at long last, our much longed for miracle baby was happily growing inside me, blissfully unaware of the madness of the world beyond my womb.
At the time of writing this, I am in the final 8 days of a pregnancy that has kept me in a bubble of impenetrable happiness and gratitude for the whole 9 months, acutely aware of how lucky we’ve been and embracing every ache and pain and bout of sickness. This may well be the one and only time I have the privilege of experiencing pregnancy, thanks to the one and only embryo determined enough to see us all the way to the finish line.... which I’m told on good authority is in fact the start line of a whole other challenging and magical chapter of life... as a family of 3.