My Story
Content Warning: This post discusses pregnancy, resulting both in live births and in multiple losses including a second trimester miscarriage. Please be mindful of your own relationship to such content and avoid if necessary.
My partner and I the day we found out we were pregnant with the wonderful human who would turn out to be our son.
When our fertility journey started, I used to joke that given that ours was a relationship involving two uteruses, we were basically set to have as large a family as we wanted. It wasn’t long before I started to realize just how wrong I was. When we decided to start trying, the Regional Fertility Clinic in Edmonton had a years long wait list and the two private clinics now open in the area were not yet in operation. Our only option was a single OBGYN operating in a small clinic hours away from our city. We tried for four cycles of IUI with donor sperm without any success.
When a clinic opened in Edmonton, a mere fifteen minutes from our apartment, it seemed like the answer to all our frustrations. I learned that I had PCOS and was completely anovulatory, so we began monitored, medicated cycles. Sure enough, on the first cycle at the new clinic, I fell pregnant.
The whole time I had felt like something was wrong, especially given the bouts of unexplained bleeding I experienced on multiple occasions. However, once we saw a heartbeat at seven weeks (at which point the risk of miscarriage drops significantly), I tried my best to put away my anxieties and ignore that gnawing feeling in my gut. We made plans. We told our delighted families. My began to transform one of the rooms in our two bedroom apartment into a nursery. Even after a terrifying subchorionic hemorrhage on my twenty-ninth birthday, our baby seemed to be hanging on, so I tried to do the same.
And then we went for a routine appointment with our midwife at sixteen weeks. They couldn’t find a heartbeat, they said. We were sent to another facility for an ultrasound later that afternoon. That particular company did not allow partners in the examination room during the actual scan, so I was alone when I saw the look on the technician’s face. I remember vividly wanting to tell them to stop my partner from coming in. I wanted to give her just a few more minutes of hope that our baby, our precious Peach (referred to this way because at this point in my pregnancy the fetus should have been roughly the size of a peach), wasn’t really gone.
They were gone. Their loss tore through us, like no pain we had ever experienced before. For months I lived two lives. The first was rooted in the often grim reality of healing from the D&E and undergoing testing to try to find answers that didn’t seem to exist. In the second, I imagined what we would be doing at any given second if Peach had lived.
Luckily (and after all we’ve been through I don’t fool myself believing there isn’t a heck of a lot of luck involved in fertility), we got pregnant only two cycles after our loss. I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. And I exhaled. At this point, my job was over. My partner, who was actually far more excited about the pregnancy part of things than I had ever been, would carry any subsequent children we wished to have. Unlike me, whose PCOS and family history had suggested potential issues with conceiving and carrying, my partner had no risk factors. No worrying history. Nothing to suggest we would be in for anything but a smooth ride the rest of the way. And hadn’t we earned that, we told ourselves?
When our son was about two, we started trying. Sure enough, my partner became pregnant after her very first IUI.
Only her betas—a blood test measuring the levels of the pregnancy hormone, HCG—were not rising very quickly. At this stage, they like to see the numbers rise by at least 50% every two days. They sent her in for another test. And another. Each time we waited by the phone the whole day, waiting to receive the good news we felt owed at this point.
It didn’t come. My partner miscarried on Christmas Eve, and this turned out to be the ‘better’ outcome; at a certain point, our clinic had begun to worry the pregnancy might be ectopic. I’d been given a terrifying list of signs to watch for, all of which meant I would need to rush her to the hospital immediately. We told my parents we were pregnant, not for the joyous reasons we’d imagined, but because we would need them to be on call to watch our son in the case that my partner was hospitalized.
Thankfully, she miscarried without any need for medical intervention. However, this first cycle ended up setting the stage for what was to come. We experienced another early loss with IUI and decided to move on to IVF. The cost was huge both financially and medically, but we felt optimistic as we started the process, certain that now would finally be our time to add to our family.
IVF turned out to be one of the most trying experiences our family has gone through. The first retrieval was extremely painful for my partner, and though a high number of eggs were retrieved, almost none of the embryos made it in good enough shape to freeze. We tried different drug protocols; we used an anesthesiologist for the next retrieval; we asked a million questions about why, over and over again, the same thing would happen: implantation, slow rising betas, followed by a loss. No one could answer.
We found out about one of the impending losses when we were traveling to get our family’s new dog. We had been more than a little optimistic about this particular attempt. The first blood draw came back with better numbers than usual, my partner was experiencing more symptoms than she ever had, everything just felt right. She went for another draw, just to confirm, and we got the numbers back the night before we went to pick Daisy up. Same old story. I was surprised, I remember, by how much the same series of events could continue to hurt, and actually hurt worse the more times it happened. It was as if the pain of every subsequent loss was building and building upon each itself like a tower of grief constantly threatening to topple over and bring us down with it.
Eventually, we decided that the right move for our family was for me to try to get pregnant again, and I did end up becoming pregnant with our daughter after only two medicated IUI cycles. It was a bittersweet experience. I am forever grateful that our son has a sibling, and that I was able to bring our wonderful girl into the world. But it was not an uncomplicated joy. I felt a huge amount of guilt. Looking back I should have advocated more, and better, for my partner to get more care, further investigations into the causes of her repeated losses. And even though there were other factors that caused us to make the decision we did (money, the pandemic, the growing gap between our current child and a future child), I also felt like I had stolen something from my partner. She had wanted to be pregnant for much of her life. And here I was, someone who really struggled with the pregnancy part of things, and I’d managed to do for a second time with with comparatively little effort. It simply wasn’t fair.
It still isn’t fair, of course. Many parts of our story will never be fair, just like a lot of journeys faced by people we have since encountered in the fertility and infertility communities. Eventually, though, I realized that one way I could work through those experiences was to give back to those who had faced circumstances like ours. I had been an adult educator for my entire professional life, and during the course of our fertility journey I had amassed a wealth of knowledge, both practical and personal. I had done hours of research. I had advocated for myself and my partner. And I had been on both sides of the table, as a patient and a support person. I felt uniquely equipped to support others undergoing the truly wild ride that is trying to grow a family, especially those who are often made to feel like outsiders to the process due to their body types, gender/sexual identities, or diagnoses.
And so Choice Fertility was born. Much like our bio-children, it is a labour borne out of love, and also out of grief. I am proud to share this company with you, and to work with individuals and couples as they try to grow their families. Unfortunately, there are no promises in fertility treatment, but I believe it can be a better process—one that is more humane, more inclusive, and more holistic. I look forward to helping build that experience for you and your family.
