“When are you going to have kids?” It’s a question that’s haunted me for years. A flippant remark thrown out at Easter, at Christmas, sometimes in front of family members and friends who all gaze at you, waiting for your response. Because when you’ve been married for years, the obvious answer for many, who’ve never been on a fertility journey, is, you’re just career-focused and it’s time to crack on.
My husband and I have been that couple for years, dodging the uninvited inquiries to the point where we would even avoid certain social situations – while grappling with the highs and lows of infertility. Our journey started the same as many: a bit of trying, turned into timed ovulation, but after a year, the result we prayed for never came. Doctors’ appointments we hoped would provide a simple answer turned us towards IVF.
ABC Radio presenter Sharnelle Vella and husband Nicholas Koutrigaros
I remember the night we agreed to give it a go. I cried. I couldn’t believe this is where we had ended up. The IVF industry sells hope. I told myself, perhaps naively, “Sharnelle, you’ll do one round and a miracle baby will appear.” For some, that is absolutely the case. But for others, like me, it’s not. It’s round after round and before you know it – you’ve joined a secret club with a large membership.
Hiding in restaurant toilets to inject, carrying an Esky in your car to keep medications cool, running to acupuncture appointments on work hours, trying to get in and out of clinics without being seen because, for some reason, I now find silly, infertility felt shameful.
My husband and I fell pregnant on our third round of IVF. This was a high. We were elated. All the pain disappeared. The countless injections felt like a distant memory.
The low came weeks later, when a scan revealed our baby no longer had a heartbeat. As many women know, nothing prepares you for that level of grief, and for partners who have to watch on, feeling helpless, it truly is the darkest of days on this journey.
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But when you’re on this road, you pick yourself up and you go again because there is no other option. So we did. Multiple times. Injections, follicle scans, trigger shots, egg collections, transfers. Again and again and again. It wouldn’t work for us.
It was an off-chance conversation with a nurse that pushed me to ask for more tests. A simple blood test showed inflammation in my pelvis. I thought it could be my autoimmune disease. When my specialist suggested endometriosis, I wasn’t convinced. I don’t roll around in pain during periods, and surely if I had endo, it would’ve been found by now, right?
