Sobbing under the duvet in our bedroom, I shouted the words that had been whirling round my head for weeks.
‘You should go and find someone else,’ I wept. ‘Someone who can do this for you.’ By ‘this’, I meant have a baby – the thing my husband Lee and I yearned for more than anything else in the world but which hadn’t happened for us despite agonised years of trying. Not that Lee had made me feel that way: not once had my gorgeous, loving and supportive husband made me feel anything other than cherished and nurtured, and that we were on this terrible journey together.
Somehow though, my brain just couldn’t take that message on board, however often he told me. With my womb apparently unable to hold a pregnancy, I convinced myself I was faulty goods and that the fabulous man who had vowed to stand by me in sickness and in health when we exchanged our wedding vows deserved better.
I felt guilty. Guilty that I couldn’t give him a baby and guilty that he might feel stuck with this woman who couldn’t give him a family. A guilt frustratingly amplified by society’s narratives, which unhelpfully focus on women and biological clocks when it comes to matters of fertility. When, in fact, there are many, many more factors at play.
Those feelings lingered throughout the years in which Lee and I endured multiple treatments in varying forms, both traditional and experimental.
You name it, we’ve done it. I’ve been scanned, pumped full of hormone-altering drugs, operated on. We’ve travelled all over the world in search of an answer to our baby heartache. I’ve tried yoga, acupuncture, hypnotherapy and any other ‘therapy’ you care to think of in a desperate bid to help ‘cure’ my infertility and at times I’ve been seized by feelings of sadness and depression – not to mention failure – so profound that I’ve barely been able to get out of bed.
So no one is more surprised than me to tell you that today we’re the proud parents of a beautiful five-year-old girl, Jemima, conceived naturally and born in February 2019.
After years of being told that I would never be able to carry a baby of my own, she is nothing short of a miracle – although I struggle to use that word as I know the visceral heartache of being in the middle of something that feels like there might never be a happy ending.
Recent ONS data shows that fertility rates in England and Wales have dropped to an all time low, while the latest statistics reveal that, worldwide, one in six couples will have difficulties conceiving naturally and that sperm counts have halved in the past 50 years, with the pace of decline more than doubling since 2000.
The thing that unites us all is the sorrow of the journey – however it ends. That’s why I decided to write a book about it, to hopefully provide some company on that journey.
Its title, Desperate Rants And Magic Pants, is a nod to all those times I’ve sobbed on Lee’s shoulder – and sometimes he on mine. The Magic Pants refers to the time when, during a special yoga class aimed at boosting my fertility, I was told that wearing orange clothing (particularly knickers) would be helpful, because the fertility-related chakra is orange.
I’m a true yoga convert but at the time it seemed bizarre. I’d have laughed if you’d told the 33-year-old me that I’d be writing a book on this subject. That’s the age I was when Lee proposed, following a whirlwind five-month courtship; and when we married ten months later on a wintry New Year’s Day in a beautiful chapel on a Welsh country estate, I saw nothing but smooth sailing ahead.
We agreed to start trying for a family straight away and I had no expectation that my path to pregnancy would be anything other than straightforward. After all, my mum had had me when she was 34, with no problems at all and didn’t these things run in families? I remember thinking I’d better bargain for getting pregnant straight away and pondering what that might mean for my career as a news presenter on Welsh TV. It quickly emerged that there would be no immediate challenges on the work front.
Lee had played rugby for the British Lions and won 46 caps for Wales. Now, his rugby career took him to Clermont-Ferrand in France – meaning we were now not based in the same country. Six months went by. We both decided it might be sensible to get some help.
We opted for IUI – intrauterine insemination – a treatment that involves injecting sperm directly into the womb to help you get pregnant, thinking it might speed the process up a little.
But we didn’t get that far, because at an early scan I was given the devastating news that my womb lining was too thin for the procedure to be effective. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) did not recommend a transfer with a womb lining of less than 8mm thickness and mine was 4.5mm.
Even now, a decade on, I can remember the heartache I felt when I heard the news. At this point, I hadn’t immersed myself in the labyrinthine information on infertility that would become my daily diet but I did know that central to getting pregnant is having somewhere for the embryo to implant. In effect, we had the ingredients but my oven was broken – my words, not theirs.
I felt absolutely bereft: suddenly, everything I had planned for – specifically, a family – seemed to have been snatched away. And worse, it was because something was wrong with me. Again my words – Lee made it clear from that first distressing scan that this was an ‘us’ thing, not a ‘me’ thing.
But that’s how it felt. Anyone who has faced the anguish of infertility will recognise what we went through over the years that followed: the hours poring over the internet as Lee and I grappled for answers, scanning forums for people with similar issues. The multiple intrusive tests, the countless rounds of IVF, all conducted in the fervent hope that my womb would allow just one embryo to nest.
Meanwhile, all around us, people were starting families with heartbreaking ease. I was happy for them but sometimes, when a friend would announce their due date, I would have to hold back tears as I offered my congratulations.
More than once, when people brought their babies into work, I would go for a walk around the block because I couldn’t be in the same room. There were occasions when I would even shout at the TV when hearing of other people’s miracle baby stories because, in some part of my brain, it felt like there was only a certain amount of luck in the world and maybe this was taking some of mine.
Lee and I had both agreed not to talk too much about what we were going through, in part because I found it easier to keep that part of my world separate but there are times you can’t avoid it. On the occasions when people did ask directly, I cracked a joke, telling them I’d been told I could order one on Amazon Prime whenever I wanted.
There were times I wanted to scream out the truth. In 2014, I took a year’s leave to join Lee in France to focus on doing everything we could to get pregnant. Assuming I had gone to reap the rewards of life as the wife of an international sportsman, online trolls called me a gold-digger. They weren’t to know that behind the pictures of sunny skies and delicious food I posted on Instagram, I was navigating the intricacies of French fertility clinics. But it hurt.
More months went by – months in which more friends had babies and in which life threw us additional curve balls.
When we returned from France in 2015, it was to an annus horribilis: All Black Jerry Collins, one of Lee’s best friends, died with his wife Alana in a horrific car accident; a close family member was diagnosed with cancer; while a shoulder injury from which he could not properly recover forced Lee to give up the career he loved.
Underpinning all this, meanwhile, was the ongoing absence of a baby. It put us under huge strain. In particularly low moments, I would imagine Lee doing the thing I secretly dreaded – walking away from me – because it would almost be a relief: in effect, it would finally quiet that nagging voice inside my head that told me I wasn’t good enough for him. Even writing that now makes me well up because it’s such a disservice to my funny, loyal and kind husband.
But those are the lows that infertility brings you to. You are endlessly fantasising about your miracle and endlessly catastrophising about what will happen if it never comes. There were more lows to follow. In November 2017 we were elated to find two blue lines on a pregnancy test but at the eight-week scan we learned there was no heartbeat. It was a missed miscarriage.
There was just one more option. Having given up hope of ever being able to carry a pregnancy, we explored the possibility of finding a surrogate in the US. In Spring 2018, we travelled to San Diego to start treatment to produce good quality embryos for a surrogate. The clinic we used harvested three embryos and for the first time in a long time I allowed myself a glimmer of positivity.
Again, it wasn’t to be: in May 2018, as I readied myself to present that evening’s news bulletin, I received an email that brought that final fragile prospect crashing to the ground: none of the embryos were viable and we knew another try was not affordable.
It took all the strength I could muster to hold myself together, to patch over the tear streaks in my foundation, walk through the busy newsroom and on to the news set. Whatever conversation I was going to have with Lee would happen later, at home.
In fact, those ‘what ifs’ were banished for good: that night, as Lee and I cuddled on the sofa, we vowed to make our lives together work without a family, but by finding happiness in another way. ‘We’ll build a different life together,’ Lee told me and I realised that if we were to have any chance of surviving as a couple, I had to believe him.
How could either of us have imagined that just a few weeks later – without IVF – we would hear Jemima’s heartbeat? I’ll never know how that one lucky embryo managed to implant and cling on as it did. Consultant after consultant had come to the conclusion that our only option was surrogacy, so it shouldn’t have happened. But it did.
There’s no explanation except that somehow that month we must have got incredibly lucky with one tiny part of the lining being good enough. Eight months later, at 8.27pm on a cold February evening, our tiny, precious perfect baby came into the world.
In Hebrew, Jemima means ‘dove’: a symbol of peace, freedom and hope which seemed fitting after all we had been through. I’m grateful every day that she’s here but I’ll never forget the journey we went on and the toll it took.
That’s why I hope my book might bring some comfort to those who are still going through it now – and a message that however your journey ends, you are always, always good enough.
Desperate Rants And Magic Pants by Andrea Byrne, published by Y Lolfa, is out now. As told to Kathryn Knight
