Coming to terms with infertility

I am having a lazy Sunday reading O, the Oprah Magazine (SA version) and I come across a health news snippet – 40% of infertility issues are in men. This caught my attention and has prompted this post.

I probably make up one of the 60% women that suffer from infertility and I have never really seen it that way until today. Today I realised I am statistic. I’m one of those numbers that are graphically emphasised in graphs. I don’t feel good about this revelation, in fact I have avoided putting myself in this category until today.

The definition of infertility is the inability to conceive for a year with active effort to do so. Going by this definition I must be a secondary infertile, I mean I have been actively trying to get pregnant for the past 4 years with no results to show for it!

It started out with me saying, “oh well it didn’t happen this time, it will definitely happen the next, no pressure” and sure there was no pressure. Six months down the line, my worry wrinkles begin to develop, a small, distant but persistent voice tells me there could be something wrong and I need to have a check up. I also say to the voice, “not just me, my hubby too” – we are in this together after all and I really have no reason to think I have a problem and he hasn’t fathered a child elsewhere that I know of so realistically speaking the odds are against him. The small voice doesn’t respond, in fact if it had a face I am sure it was looking at me with pity – even before I knew what the problem was, I was already on the denial path.

I believe that we know about situations even before they happen, our human faculties alert us always but most of the times we ignore them. I seriously ‘see’ some things before they happen and I always have a feeling on how an event or issue will pan out. I don’t believe I am a psychic but I believe that we all have this ability, we just ignore it and therefore it is weaker in others and stronger in some.

It took me two years after that small voice to seek medical attention and get to the root of why others didn’t even need to try and they were already pregnant with babies they didn’t even want and me who was ready emotionally and financially couldn’t get pregnant. Thoughts flew in my mind, could it have been the contraceptives I had once used, or maybe I had a genetic defect somewhere – you see, it took my mother 4 years before she conceived me and even then I was born premature, stayed in a hospital incubator for almost a month before I could be taken home – so could those lights have played havoc on my reproductive system? Could my moms difficulties in conceiving also be manifesting in me? After I was born, it took my mom 10years to conceive again and even then after medical intervention. Unfortunately my little brother died when he was only a day old – he had a respiratory problem that doctors didn’t pick up at the time of his birth.

Even at ten, I remember that we all looked forward with excitement at the birth of the baby, my mom especially. When he died, I remember my mom cried for months. She didn’t conceive again after that. Thus I have an idea of what it means to want a child, to finally get it only for it to die.

I have asked this question several times – mostly in my private thoughts – which one is better, not to conceive at all or to conceive, give birth only for the baby to die? I have never had an answer to this, all seem like equal evils. But maybe they are not. I have only experienced one and have nothing to compare with.

I digressed a bit, but I am an Aquarius and we love to give lots of background. So I went and sought medical advice and succumbed to the medical procedure of poking and prodding. I was mighty uncomfortable and what probably took 5 minutes, seemed like hours. My Gynecologist is male and I trust him completely but the idea of touching me down there, poking instruments just didn’t go down well. With time though, I have become used, I am even a champion for pap smears where as before it took me six months after my due date to go for one.

So doctor did his thing, poked and prodded, all the while keeping his eyes on the tiny screen. This was my first ever ultrasound. When he was done and I breathed a sigh of immense relief, he said to me he didn’t see anything wrong with me through the ultrasound so he recommended I do a laparascopy which is a small, non invasive operation to check out my insides properly. It would cost money, lots of it and not all of it would be paid by my medical insurance.  Still on the path of denial, it took me another year to finally say, ok, maybe i do need to do the laparascopy thing afterall. I made an appointment and was scheduled for hospitalisation 2 days before my 31st birthday.

The operation went well, save from the side effects I got from the anesthesia, I was so nauseated and was vomiting all over the place like  a pregnant woman in the 1st trimester.

Doctor found that I had fibroids that might have been preventing me from conceiving. Thanks to modern technology, he removed them through laser. he also found that my left tube was blocked but my right one was perfect so that didn’t explain my lack of going the baby route when all things seemed equal. Hubby’s sperms were tested countless times and they were brilliant swimmers.

This was last year. Doctor was confident after he had done his thing with chasing the fibbys, I would soon be pregnant. I just needed to stop thinking about it and it would happen, from outta the blue. I waited. I went for my check-up to see if the Fibbys were not growing back and they were not. I waited still and got stress from the office, I forgot about getting pregnant but secretly, I was always looking forward to missing my dreaded periods and even when they were late for even just a day, I would skip a beat hoping that finally it had happened. But that killer-joy small voice would always warn me that no baby would be growing inside of me, atleast not this month, maybe the next one.

Its been a year and some days, I am still waiting. I have started a new job, enrolled to study and taken up more modules than usual and have been contributing articles to various online publications – so in a sense I haven’t thought about getting pregnant in sometime. This is the time it is meant to happen, but hubby and I have been apart for a month now so apart from hoping for immaculate conception, a pregnancy is really unrealistic.

As I wait for that day when a pregnancy test will read positive, I have kept these experiences of my infertility mainly to family and close friends. I look back at my selective disclosure and realise that I, too have been a victim of our culture, where a woman’s infertility even when unconfirmed is something to be ashamed of. It is something that somehow says a lot about how one is not woman enough – the insensitive remarks, comments and sometimes obvious questions often isolate infertile women. They mostly live a life being ridiculed and constantly feeling that they are not up to scratch, they do not deserve to identify with womanhood. Man infertility is just never discussed.

I have always thought of myself as a liberated woman, a woman who knows what she wants, who won’t be pulled down by stereotypes. So when it hit home that I was in fact a victim, an active one for that, of this type of labeling, I was dismayed.

I have hid my infertility and only spoke about it in very little words (I am one for many words!) and only to those that mattered to me. In the night I would ask questions of why me and why not and didn’t get answers. There have been times when I have cried myself to sleep; times when I visualised a baby growing in me hoping that this positive thinking would enforce that which I desired; times when I dreaded pregnant women because they fill me with heart-piercing envy; times I religiously took the concoction my grandmother gave me every evening until the last grain of powder and still nothing happened; there have even been times when I felt someone had bewitched me for whatever reason; times when I felt I had failed my husband, my marriage; and yes, most times I felt I wasn’t woman enough especially when all the women at gatherings where going into their third and fourth babies.

During this time my emotions see-sawed from one extreme to the other, my weight and moods were no exception. The only constant has always been my husband, he has been very supportive and I thank him, even though realistically speaking I don’t really expect anything less from him.

Today after reading that snippet, I realised that I have been too quiet about this and that there could be many others in the same boat as me but because I am enclosed in my shell, I can’t see them. Today I decided to challenge stereotypes and acknowledge that my infertility is nothing to be ashamed of, it is medical condition which at worst is inexplicable but nonetheless that affects people.

So as I wait for that day, with my French Champagne in tow, I will publicly talk about this hidden but existing problem. Statistics show that infertility has increased by 15% in the last few years and is becoming a common problem in developing nations. This alone indicates to the magnitude of the problem and the need for dialogue to mitigate it where possible. Follow me on my journey to reverse infertility – I do not yet have insight of what the outcome will be but I am hoping for the best. I don’t have much to wait, I am not getting any younger.

The life of an infertile woman, is a lonely, stressful and emotionally taxing one and only when you one, can you even begin to understand.