My Seven Year Labour To Motherhood

My husband and I got married in August of 2002. A couple of months after our honeymoon, I became ill and after a visit with our Dr, it was confirmed that I had an ear infection. I was treated with antibiotics but just never felt better. I struggled for weeks with bouts of nausea and dizziness. After a return visit to the Dr, we were astounded to discover that I was 8 weeks pregnant!

A honeymoon baby, what a special and incredible blessing.

I couldn’t believe we were so blessed. I remember being beyond excited, I literally went home and phoned everyone we knew! Little did I know, the joy would so quickly turn to horror.

Five days later, I woke in the early hours of the morning with incredible cramps and lying in a pool of my own blood. A trip to the emergency confirmed my worst fear, I was having a miscarriage. I can’t ever begin to describe the overwhelming grief I felt at the loss of this whisper/promise baby. Our little honeymoon miracle was gone.

What followed turned out to be my worst nightmare, my greatest trial. A defining period in my life that would forever change who I am as a person.

For 7 years after my miscarriage we struggled with infertility and recurrent pregnancy loss.

I would go on to suffer through another 6 first trimester miscarriages, be under the care of a team of gynaecologists and two fertility specialists. Nobody could ever explain why I kept miscarrying my pregnancies. I would have 3 investigative surgeries which included having 3 orange sized fibroids removed from my uterus, a uterine polyp removed and my one fallopian tube removed, none of which made any difference to my ability to carry a pregnancy to term.

We would also have countless timed and medicated conception cycles, 5 artificial inseminations and 5 invitro fertilizations, 1 of which included genetic testing which further stumped the Dr’s responsible for our care as almost all of our embryo’s had what is called Trisomy 13 and we’d had extensive genetic testing done on both of us where nothing out of the ordinary was picked up.

2009 Was Our Year Of Reckoning

We decided to have 1 more round of IVF, because both the financial and emotional cost was just becoming to high and honestly, I’d started believing I’d never be a mother. We started our cycle in March of 2009 and everything went perfectly, I was 37 years old and they got a MASSIVE egg harvest from me, 17 eggs were retrieved which is HUGE for a more “mature” fertility patient. But two days later disaster struck, when I woke up and could not get out of bed from the pain in my abdomen. My stomach had swelled up and I looked 9 months pregnant, I was in excruciating pain to the point where I could hardly breathe. Yet another visit to the Dr confirmed that I had Ovarian Hyper stimulation Syndrome it was then that I knew this round of IVF was doomed to fail. My ovaries, which are usually the size of a thumb, were swollen to the size of grapefruits and I had free flowing fluid in my abdomen. I was given two choices, either be admitted to hospital and cancel the IVF or go home, on strict bed rest for 5 days and hope that the swelling went down enough for embryo transfer to occur.

I chose the latter as somehow in my idiot brain, I was still hopeful. The embryo transfer went ahead but less than 10 days later, I started bleeding and we knew the cycle had failed. I was just thankful that we still had 7 embryos that we’d decided to freeze.

Six months later, I felt ready enough to have one last go. My embryos were thawed and we transferred 3, 10 days later it was confirmed, I was pregnant again. This was my 7^th pregnancy. But once again, the joy and elation would be short lived as within two days the lab’s confirmed that my repeat blood tests were showing that my pregnancy hormones were not doubling as they should. We decided to ride it out and see what happened. As six weeks of pregnancy I had my 7^th miscarriage.

And I was completely done.

But then something incredible happened. A fellow infertile friend, whom I have never met, we just offered each other support online, and who was on the adoption journey, got the call of her baby’s placement. I looked at her photos and knew we had to give adoption a try, I wasn’t so down and out that I had lost all hope.

We contacted the social worker in October and she set up an appointment to start the screening on the 23^rd of November. I was cautiously optimistic.

At our appointment, the social worker told us that the waiting period could be as short as one day or as long as 5 years, 2 days later, she called us back to say that there was a birth mom she had been counselling who hadn’t felt a connection with any of the adoption profiles and that the social worker believed we were the right couple for this birth mother.

What followed was a whirlwind!

Two weeks later, our social worker phoned us to ask us to come to Cape Town to meet the birth mother, she had chosen us. We flew to Cape Town 5 days later and met our incredible birth mom, that night, after our meeting, she went into labour and gave birth to our daughter, Ava-Grace, the following day.

My 7 year labour was finally over!

My 7 years of infertility and recurrent  pregnancy loss have forever changed me, in some ways I’m much more determined and compassionate towards others suffering because of my own experience but I also find that there is a level of bitterness and intolerance too. I find it very hard to not lose my patience with women who describe having their children as a struggle when it took them less than a year or they required minimal medical intervention, but I’ve learned to try and let it go because my truth and my reference is different than others and at the end of the day…..

I am here, I am a mother and nothing else matters!

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