Rach

I love dearly every member of my family and my sister Rachael is no exception. Picture a 5-foot tattoo covered, beer loving, Harley Davidson owner. Everyone that meets her instantly loves Rach. I have always been jealous of her for that. We live our lives by a totally different set of rules. She has none and I have many! Loving our family has been about the only thing we have had in common until she knocked on my door one day over 9 years ago to tell me she was pregnant. I remember jumping up and down and squeezing her tight, I was so excited then I saw the look of panic on her face “ I am on my way to tell mum… will you come with me?” She was 23yrs old.

I remember sitting in a room nearby with my brother falling all over ourselves with laughter as she told her. Not nearly as sympathetic as we should be.

                                                   

Madison was born on the 12^th May and it just happened to be Mother’s Day that year.

I was there, down the business end, when she was born. The vision of her face as her head pushed through is as clear in my mind as the Easter egg I ate 5 minutes ago. I often think of this day. The bond I have with my niece is a constant reminder of why I will try everything I possibly can to have a family of my own.

A few years ago Madison and my Mum were accompanying me to an IVF ultrasound and as a curious 6 year old would, she needed to understand what was going on. Now for as long as she has been born Foo and I have been trying to get pregnant. During that time we have endured two ectopic pregnancies, eight surgeries and 19 failed IVF cycles. So we have had a lot of explaining to do to Madison over the years as to why Aunty Ange is sick or sore or in hospital.

“So, Aunty Angie and Nanny how will the Dr help you make a baby?” My first thought was, oh no! How can we fudge this one? She is way too young to understand, it took Foo almost 5 years to work it out. Then with the wisdom of being a mother for 34 years, my Mum explained the process to her in 6-year-old terms. Now, when I ask Madison how we are going to make a baby she says “Aunty Angie has an eggie in her tummy and Uncle Foo has a big Tadpole in his tummy. The doctor makes a little cut in their bellybuttons and takes them out and puts them together in a dish in the hospital. Then when they stick together they put the baby back in Aunty Angie’s tummy, Hopefully it grows but if it doesn’t that just means that the baby was too sick to grow.” She is now a nine year old with a better understanding of how to make babies the infertile way than most adults do.

Alternative Therapies

I love a therapy or two.

Naturopathics,Homeopathy, Cupping, Reiki, Reflexology, Cohen’s Fertility Diet, Gonzo’s special Meds, Massage, Angel Cards, Hypnosis, Chinese Herbs just to name a few. Acupunture is about the only therapy Fertility Specialists will recommend, so what the hell a few pin pricks is a small price to pay if I get a baby out of it.

Cupping ..ouch

After 6 months of Acupunture I was feeling pretty confident going in to our next cycle. The day of egg collection came around and we retrieved 7 eggs, our best haul ever, we were pretty excited. It never ceased to amaze me how we drew the positivity out of ourselves for our next cycle after so many failures. IVF is a constant rollercoaster of emotions and this cycle was no exception. The morning after egg collection is usually followed by a phone call from the clinics embryologist to advise you how many of the eggs fertilised. When our phone call came I was surprised to hear Dr Bill’s voice on the other end, this can’t be good. ….no eggs had fertilized.

Every failed cycle was devastating but this was worse. I had read that these cycles we especially hard to cope with and I wasn’t really prepared for it.

My eggs were just not going to cut it. So much for alternative therapies….

TASIVF

We were nicely settled back in Tassie, no seminars and IVF to occupy our time.  I was physically and emotionally feeling so much better.

I had recently been to see our resident Gyno about having all my girlie bits removed, IVF leaves some nasty long lasting effects on your body and I had had enough, I figured if we were adopting then I didn’t need them anymore. Dr J suggested that we just remove the ovary that was giving me trouble and then if things don’t settle down we would do a full hysterectomy. I was Ok with that.

Left ovary with precancerous cyst removed, phew that was lucky.

One morning about 6 months later I woke in tears after dreaming of giving birth to a baby, I remember feeling distraught for days. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. Have you ever had a really vivid dream that just stays with you every minute of the day?

There was no hope that the adoption was going to happen anytime soon and I began feeling like we needed to keep all of our bases covered.

We had always known that going back to IVF was an option whilst we were still young. These thoughts were starting to creep back in to my days. Mum was also very keen for us to try again. Love you Mum xx

The success rate of IVF for couples under 30yrs is approximately 25%, this figure rapidly declines after the age of 35. I was in my early 30’s and didn’t have time to waste. Besides, I don’t want just one baby, I want lots J. Our last IVF Dr in WA had told us it was unlikely after 5 attempts that we would get pregnant, so we made an appointment to see Dr Bill in Hobart…just to see what he has to say.

We had heard great things about Dr Bill, I warmed to him immediately. He is a tall, redhead in his forties unlike his name suggests. We left his rooms, medication in hand, beginning our very next IVF cycle that day. He was very positive about helping us, such a stark contrast to our last Dr.

TASIVF and Dr Bill Watkins are fantastic and I would highly recommend them to anyone considering IVF in Tassie. It was because of their professionalism and personal service that we were able to continue on through many IVF cycles.

I was visiting Nan and Pop just the other day and they had watched an episode of “Inside your body” the night before. Pop looked at me in disbelief and said…”it is a miracle that anyone conceives a baby”.  This is so true, if you don’t know much about conception because one bonk got you pregnant then you should google it!

Nan & Pop xx

Unfortunately we moved through our next few cycles with very few eggs and no success.

We needed to look at other options.

Adoption

My feelings were bittersweet about our move, I was excited to be moving forward with our plans to have a family and I was also devastated to be leaving our beautiful family and friends.

No more all day shopping trips with my Mumma.

No more coffee and cake and lounging around with my besties.

No more Sunday dinners with our favourite King family.

No more weekend visits to the Prem to visit the family.

No more sleepovers for Madi Donnelly, Squibb , Elson

No more hot summer days

I was worried my special connection with my darling niece, Madison and our gorgeous god-daughter, Sian was going to disappear with the distance between us.

Sianny x

Madi xx

We did have a lot to look forward too. We have some very special families and friends in Tassie too.   It turns out our timing was impeccable, Foo’s Dad wasn’t well and would be spending a considerable amount of time travelling back and forth to hospital. Foo was going to be around just when his family needed him the most.

I was most looking forward to Tuesday lunches at Nan and Pops with Aunty Louie.

Anyone lucky enough to come on a Tuesday knows why.

My cousin Jemma and I are one and the same. We arrived Christmas Eve and were lucky enough to spend our first couple of months camped at her house until we got settled.

Love you Jembo xx

I found a wonderful place to work, full of very special ladies and friends I am sure to have for the rest of my life. These friends were going to be the ones to help me through the next part of our journey.

The adoption process begins with seminars designed to scare the bejesus out of you.

Not to be deterred, we moved on from one seminar to the other. In Tassie this process moves pretty quickly, I can’t imagine what it is like in other states when it takes 12 months before you can even attend an information seminar. For anyone considering Adoption as an option, this link may be of some assistance: http://www.adoptionaustralia.com.au/index.html

Some seminars we attended were thought provoking and others were just emotionally shattering. The head of adoptions at the time was a very matronly lady with no compassion for the stories that led people to attend these seminars. She barked orders at us about swapping all our music to Mozart and then followed up by saying the average wait now is 5 years and that if we weren’t prepared to wait that long we should leave now.

They drill in to you that this process is not about you, it is first and foremost about the children, which is exactly how it should be. But it’s not!

I have some pretty strong views on this, so bear with me…..

Local adoption in Australia is almost non-existent, some could argue this is a good thing. Then again, others that read the newspaper and watch the news might agree that the state of our country’s care for neglected and abused children living in dire situations is despicable.

Why are we giving these parents opportunity after opportunity to ruin these children’s lives? How can you say the best place for a child is amongst filth, starvation, sexual and physical abuse as long as they are with their biological parents. Yes, I believe we should all be given a second chance, but not a third, fourth, fifth and sixth.

There are approximately 6 million children across the world at any one time in desperate need of a family to love and care for them. They are sitting in orphanages, on rubbish dumps, in gutters and being taken advantage of.

6 years ago, Australia’s intercountry adoption count was somewhere around 500 children. Just last year these numbers dropped well below 100.

We send our troops in to fight for the rights of people in other countries, but we can’t send delegates to fight for the rights of these children who have potential families waiting to love and nurture them.

Instead we sign with the Hague Convention to protect these children from being adopted?????

Don’t get me wrong, I believe safety of the child is paramount, and the Hague convention is there to protect children from abduction and trafficking. But there has to be a better way than creating so much red tape that these truly orphaned children are left destitute.

There are many families out there that the adoption process has been a very fulfilling one for them. I may think differently if we were one of those families.

So we attended all the seminars, and met with our case worker over several weeks, completed our home study and our Ethiopian application and were approved on the 6^th September, just 6 months after attending our first seminar. All we could do now was wait……and listen to Mozart. This was four years ago.

What they don't tell you....

Some of the things they don’t tell you about IVF that they should:

• The medication will make you feel positively pregnant.
• If the medication doesn’t make you fat then your constant hormonal cravings will.
• Not all medication is taken orally or subcutaneously!!
• If you don’t ask, they won’t tell.
• If you are going to put it out there and tell everyone, be prepared for plenty of assvice from well meaning people.
• Don’t plan social events anywhere near the time of your pregnancy test.
• Oprah and chocolate will always make you feel better.

I can’t tell you how many times I was waiting for Foo to come home from work so I could tell him we were going to sell up and move to Africa to build a school for the poor. If I wasn’t going to be a Mum then I was sure going to do something else meaningful with my life.

 

Breaking Point

Cycle number 5 was breaking point for us, well for me anyway. Just a little tip for those viewing at home: if you find yourself driving yourself to hospital in the wee hours of the morning convinced you are having a heart attack…..several times a week, then it may be time to pop a valium, sleep for 2 days and then have a really good look at what is happening in your life. So after a myriad of heart and lung tests at the local emergency room that is exactly what we did.

At the time, we had just moved into our new home in a beautiful new subdivision full of young families, just the kind of place you see a father and son kicking the footy at the local park and a procession of young mums pushing their babies in prams along the footpath.  Foo and I were out for an afternoon walk with our little white fluffball,  when it dawned on us….we needed to take back control. By then end of our walk it was decided. Our house was going on the market, we were moving back to Tassie and giving IVF the flick. We were going to find a new way to create a family and we were going to start the adoption process.



"Our little Fluffball Oscar"







IVF

Our first IVF cycle was to be the most successful of our 19 cycles.  I don’t think I could recount each and every cycle if I tried. You’d think something so massive would stick in your mind forever.

We encountered many nurses and doctors over the years. Sometimes it felt like we were guinea pigs for a new treatment and then other times like we were passing through a toll booth behind many others travelling the same route.

Our first few cycles gave us some rather traumatic experiences.

 I recall sitting outside the clinic with my beautiful Mum and husband waiting for embryo transfer.

The waiting room inside was full of patients including a lady recovering from her anaesthetic. The theatre was running 3 hours behind time. Trying to hold your bladder for that long and keep yourself relaxed is quite a challenge.  Then try staying relaxed with your legs up in the air surrounded by 5 strangers in a room the size of a broom cupboard. Oh and did I mention the 1 ply serviette they placed across my bits to defend my dignity.

One of the clinics we sought treatment at was housed at a women’s and neo-natal specialist hospital in the centre of Perth. There were always lots of pregnant women hanging out at the entrance to the hospital, fag in one hand, drip in the other. Foo often recounts the story and you all know how much he loves a story,of peering out the hospital window and seeing a heavily pregnant woman and her 6 kids leaving the hospital, only to find that their 2 door mini was boxed in by another car, the 4 little kids jumped in the back, mum behind the steering wheel, the 2 big kids pushing from the front and then raced around the back and pushed the matchbox car down the road, they all seemed to know their place like they had done it a million times before.

I came across a website very early on in our IVF journey: www.essentialbaby.com.au

It’s forums are full of many amazing stories of egg donation, sperm donation and embryo donation. There are stories of men and women whom have endured multiple failed IVF cycles. My tears have flowed through many tales of negative pregnancy tests, chemical pregnancies, miscarriages, stillbirths and the anxieties of those that fear they may never be parents. Although my tears flow just as fast when I read about positive pregnancy tests, hearing their baby’s heartbeat for the first time, morning sickness replacing the nausea and pain of IVF medications. The only difference is I have a beaming smile on my face and it gives me hope that just maybe the next cycle will be the one,

This website is amazing and the wonderful people that contribute to the forums have taught me how important it is to be your own advocate when it comes to your health. I learnt that the more you know and understand about your condition and the different avenues available to you then the more in control you feel.

The diagnosis

“......T-shaped Uterus with septum, Long cervix with two tracks one leading to uterus and one ending in blind, presence of endometriosis, left ovary adhered to pelvic wall, dye spurting from tear in uterus...”   Oh my god, Foo’s head was about to spin off it’s axis!

Dr Loftus was still positive he could help us, his exact words were “We shouldn’t have a too much trouble getting you pregnant, however, you may have a problem carrying a baby due to the shape of your uterus, this condition can result in several miscarriages before reaching full-term”

Not exactly the results we had hoped for.

I can’t really remember how I felt back then, I think I always had a feeling this wasn’t going to come as easy to me as it does to most.

Bring on IVF cycle number one:

5 Embryos, 100% fertilization rate, 1x  A-grade embryo transferred and 4 Frosties. Sounds awesome right? I felt bloated, tired and excited at the same time. Self injecting luckily wasn’t a problem for me, the same can’t be said for Foo, he couldn’t watch me even remove the syringe from the packaging. Yeah, yeah I know..poor Foo.

I remember the trip back home after our embryo transfer, we were thinking “this is easy I don’t know what the big deal is and why people don’t just keep going until they get pregnant”...these words have come back to haunt us many a time over.

8 cell embryo ( 3 days old )

Our beautiful Squibbie family was over on holidays at the time. Mandurah is a beautiful place to live, feels like you are on holiday every day of the week....that is unless you have to make the hour drive to Perth to work for the day.

Everyone was joining in the excitement, including Uncle Nige, his highlight I’m sure was his first nursing duty injecting a 2 inch needle into my butt. Thanks Uncle Nige x

The Squibbies xx

I felt pregnant. That 2 week wait to find out is excruciating.

“No , I’m sorry you are not pregnant.”

“I have pain...”

“Yes, you may be pregnant.”

“More pain and nausea.”

“No, you are not pregnant”.

“You have an infection.”

“Do something!”

4 weeks later I am back in surgery.

The day of surgery was a long one. Foo remembers sitting in the hospital room overlooking the Swan River with his form guide and the races on TV all day. He was getting used to this hospital stuff.  It was 3pm and I hadn’t eaten since 8pm the night before, I was starving and you all know that is not a good look on me!!

It was a relief to finally be wheeled away to the operating room.

That relief soon disappeared as we received the results of my surgery:

“.......we had to remove the other fallopian tube...ectopic pregnancy”

Are you serious? .. I knew what that meant straight away. No fallopian tubes =  no midnight rendezvous for my eggs and Foo’s sperm.

The news hit Foo pretty hard on the way home from the hospital late at night

My reality is that I can’t make babies.  No racy lingerie, knee trembling sex or relaxing island getaway is going to change that.

The beginning

28 days on the dot.... from the time I was 11years of age. Then out of the blue about 6 months before our wedding it all changed. I was 26 years old. Little did I know the love hate relationship I was about to develop with Aunt Flo.

I have issues; there is absolutely no doubt about that. I have no chance of being a supermodel at 5 feet tall. I will never play pro basketball but that’s not really my thing anyway.  I have spent the last 8.5 years married to a wonderful, albeit slightly alcoholic husband. But I think if I had to be married to me I would have more than one unhealthy addiction. So fair play to him.

We had decided that we were eager to start a family once we were married. We both come from large families and love spending time with them. So when my cycle started to go haywire I went to the Doc and was diagnosed with PCOS ( cysts on the ovaries causing hormonal imbalances )... so, I think .. no biggie, my sister has the same thing and she gave birth to one of the most extraordinary little girls I know.. but that’s a story for later on.

Not one to do things in halves We were straight into it J . Five months went by and nothing, Impatient as I am, next month I went out and bought some ovulation predictor kits... best thing ever..Bang! Preggers! We couldn’t contain our excitement and blabbed our little secret as fast as we could.

Within days things started to go pear shaped. The pain was building and I was starting to bleed.  After several trips to emergency aided by a very special caring friend, an ultrasound showed there was a sac but it was too early to see a heartbeat....all was not lost..yet.  Panadeine Forte became my new best friend for the next month. Then it was time to see a specialist, overnight he had an answer for me. My HCG levels were rising and dropping and it was likely I had an ectopic pregnancy.  Foo dropped me at the hospital at 8am the next morning, strangely enough I was in no pain whatsoever...turns out the tube had ruptured and I was bleeding internally. I returned home a few days later minus a fallopian tube....again...no biggie – you only need one to get pregnant.

Not for the faint hearted... Uterus surrounded in blood from rupture

Ectopic fallopian tube - purple mass in the middle

I was now more than ever determined to get pregnant.  3 months before we can start trying again...what to do? Take the overseas holiday we had been promising ourselves.  We had a fantastic time travelling through Europe and I am so pleased we did it, although in hindsight I think I was feeling more emotional than I thought and we should have waited a little longer before we went.

12 months of Baby dancing and no double lines on that stick. 

I have two amazing friends Svet and Marnie and without them the next part of our journey would have been so much harder to cope with. I love you guys xx.

Svet suggested we see a fertility specialist, we had been trying for 18 months and I only had one fallopian tube, surely we qualify.

It felt exciting to be actively doing something (other than the obvious) to try and realise our dream. I am a very impatient person ( just ask Foo)  and the 6 week wait til our appointment with the specialist felt like forever. 

Our FS was great and by the end of our consultation he had a pretty good idea what was wrong and he just needed to do exploratory surgery to confirm it.

Where to Begin?

I've been thinking,where do I start our story, Will our story be interesting enough that someone will read it? One of my favourite people always has her head buried in the latest must read and her advice on purchasing books is to read the first page and if the page captures your attention then it will be a great tale. So I will take my time and come back with a story that will grab your attention.