Trying... to write a newsletter for 2 months

This week marks two months since I began this newsletter. Happy birthday to us, our Trying community. Whatever drew you here - an interest in trying in life generally or specifically for a baby - thank you for coming. And staying. And I hope, sharing with others.

I marked the launch of this newsletter with a candid article in The Times. Above is the cover of that week’s magazine. I actually wrote the piece a few weeks earlier, not long after our miscarriage - head thick with grief, confusion and rage. I thought I would mark our two month milestone by re-printing it here - as many of you have asked to read it in full:

History is written by the victors, including on the fertility battlefield. Stories about IVF are usually told by women like me, for whom it has worked. In public, the gruelling journey almost always leads to the happy arrival of a baby.

That was my experience over nearly three hazy years. We tried for a baby and couldn’t conceive. That led to me being diagnosed with the painful menstrual condition endometriosis. Then we had a round of IVF that miraculously gave us our son four years ago, after I had all but given up.

I spoke publicly about our difficulties, but only after we got what we wanted. That felt uncomfortable at the time, and now it feels unsustainable.

We so rarely get to hear about the IVF that doesn't deliver. What of those people’s lives? What do they do next? How do they know when to stop? How do they continue? We need to hear about these experiences while they are actually happening, not afterwards.

So, loathing hypocrisy and as the presenter of the longest-running women’s programme in the world, deep breath, here goes: over the last 18 months I have been struggling with secondary infertility. I have had five rounds of IVF, one miscarriage and more internal examinations than I care to recall. There is still no second baby.

My womb is definitely empty and I am reporting to you live from the frontlines of failure in the hope that it may be helpful and to be honest.

Undergoing IVF treatment when you already have a child is a totally different experience to the first time round. Of course it is. You can hug your actual child while nursing a broken heart that your latest embryo didn’t implant and somehow disappeared, even after you have seen it on-screen after your doctor carefully placed it in your womb.

I know there will be people reading this, women and men, who will be thinking: you have a child, what more do you want? I agree, up to a point, and nearly didn’t write this as a result. I remember being childless and resenting people like me. Especially the couple who we once saw bring their baby into the IVF clinic.

But I’ve learned that secondary infertility is very real and traumatic too. I am not looking for sympathy or pity; I am sharing my story in hope it will help more people understand and to explore what motivates us to keep trying.

It is very hard to come by figures which show the average number of IVF rounds a woman has and NHS provision is criticised as a lottery. Three rounds is often the recommended number. The average cost of a round privately, if NHS treatment cannot be accessed or all goes have been used, varies clinic by clinic from around £3,500 to upwards of £7,000 depending on the services recommended. You get the gist though - it ain’t cheap by any metric. We also know IVF success rates have tripled over the last 20 years in the UK, with almost a third of all embryo transfers in women under 35 resulting in a baby, according to the fertility regulator. But of course many women are older too.

On Woman’s Hour I recently interviewed the author Marian Keyes. She explained how years ago she never went in for IVF when she could not get pregnant because she felt she already had too much. She had been waiting for something bad to happen because life was almost too good; she was sober, happily married, and her books were starting to be published. The Catholic guilt in her thought she shouldn’t push her luck. And while she doesn’t regret her decision, she did have to grieve.

I’m sure this type of thinking will be familiar to many women. We don’t let ourselves want too much, or take up too much space. I have worried that it is plain greedy to want a second child. But I have come to realise that this is a toxic idea. The effortlessly fertile rarely have to justify their desire to have as many children as they see fit.

After we had our son I also didn’t feel I was in a position to speak out. I didn’t deserve the microphone anymore on this topic because I had already won.

But once you have experienced infertility, you are changed. Humbled, grateful, angered and saddened by it all.

Beginning IVF can be like walking into a high-stakes casino. From the moment you first stake a bet, submitting those first bloods or semen samples, you are hooked. Excitement, hope, long odds and largely well-meaning croupiers in white coats keeps you coming back for more. A tweak of meds here, a change of the diet there, the rush of the pregnancy test after weeks of needles and pills, and then the massive low of the single blue line, it all leaves you vowing you will never, ever, gamble again.

But the lure of chasing your losses is strong. One more roll of the dice could change everything.

And just like in Las Vegas, there is no limit. Genuinely saying ‘enough is enough’ is rare and usually comes when there is nothing left in the financial, physical, or emotional bank, or all three.

It is unbelievable what people desperate to conceive will consent to and what becomes ‘normal’. For me it has meant attending hospital every morning at 5.55am for blood tests ahead of the morning news meeting at Woman’s Hour and getting it together to present the 75th special edition of the programme, having just found out I’d lost another embryo.

But you have to get on with it, in silence. There are many reasons why women, both fertile and infertile, do not talk about trying to get pregnant in the workplace, but one of the main ones is fear for our jobs.

The campaign group ‘Fertility Matters At Work’ commissioned some research which shows fertility issues affect as many as 1 in 7 people, all of who are working age. The study also reveals 69.5 per cent took sick leave during fertility treatment rather than ask for time off and 36 per cent of those undergoing assisted conception actually consider leaving their jobs.

Of course there is also a desire for privacy and the need for work and other social spaces to act as escapes from the fertility mind-warp. You are drained and are doing everything you can to keep the show on the road, so expending the energy to start talking about the most painful part of your life is not high up on the priority list. People are also understandably wary or superstitious about jinxing things.

But, overwhelmingly, women stay quiet about fertility because we fear being overlooked for opportunities; not being seen as dependable, seeming weak. Like we aren’t committed to what we do. But, of course, if you are taking fertility medicine, chances are you need to keep your job more than ever to fund your expensive new drug habit.

So I am taking a risk by sharing this. That meeting I have coming up about a potential new TV opportunity? I hope it will still go ahead and, if it does, I hope the executive knows women don’t simply disappear if they are lucky enough to get pregnant.

I hope writing this isn’t as risky as it feels. If you can’t take one for the team when presenting Woman’s Hour, well, when can you?

I can only speak for myself, but work has been a salvation during this time. It has also been a huge help while trying to live with the extraordinary pain of my periods, courtesy of the invisible terror that is endometriosis. As long as I can heave myself into a chair, read reams of notes, talk to my producers and then speak into the microphone to our listeners and viewers, I am at peace. I am fortunate in many ways; not least that I have a job that is stimulating and is able to fund the high price of IVF.

And during this time, while on some pretty potent drugs, Woman’s Hour has become BBC Sounds’ most downloaded show, and I was named interviewer of the year at the Press Gazette Awards. I don’t bring these things up to brag (as much as it may sound that way) but as proof that working women don’t disintegrate when trying for a baby.

Even women wearing hormone patches on their thighs and with tummies the colour of blueberries because of daily injections - we can and do still function in a professional setting. (Although I must stress that I do know women who for a variety of reasons need to take time away, or change their role for a while. Stress is the last thing you need when trying to conceive. I do not seek to ignore this experience; I am only able to report my own experiences, which I also know chimes with others’.)

I have also been lucky that the unusual hours I work for Woman’s Hour allowed me to go along with the awkward logistics of assisted conception. This is a point that badly needs addressing, because right now women and men having medical help to make their families have no rights to take time for such appointments - appointments which are constant, essential and at non-negotiable hours. Campaigners like the aforementioned ‘Fertility Matters At Work’ are doing some powerful work on this front, so that the same rights that allow pregnant women to take time away from work for scans and other assistance are available to people undergoing IVF.

Because the fact is that in the workplace, and indeed in all settings, telling people you are trying for a baby remains taboo. I am not proposing everyone tells their boss or colleagues, or even their friends and family, the moment they embark on the conception road. But if a woman does want to take the plunge and disclose this in the work setting, it shouldn’t be viewed as one of the most frightening conversations she ever thought of having.

Infertility is defined as a disease of the reproductive system but, unlike many other medical conditions, there isn’t the space to talk about it. Even if you don’t broadcast the information, having some hand-picked honest relationships has been crucial. 

Photo by Allison Archer on Unsplash

There has been one extraordinary friendship in particular I must pay tribute to. Down the road from me lives a miraculous woman who is also going through the fertility mill. We march out on long night-time walks of rage and sorrow, indulge in drinking sessions after the single blue line appears again, and sometimes just sob together. We text each other most days with two opening words: “checking in”, and off we go exploring a terrain only few understand. Back in 2016 when trying to conceive our son I also had an ‘IVF fairy’, as I called her. A woman I randomly met and confided in at an evening event the first night I injected myself - who used to send me texts cheering me on and offering tidbits of advice here and there. Now somewhat of a veteran myself, I have three women I am IVF fairy-ing for -whom I don’t know that well but feel I understand so deeply. It is something I am only too happy to do in an attempt to share wisdom and pass on some comfort I was so grateful to receive, especially in the wee hours of the morning when the mind races.

While I am still close to my old friends, they can’t be expected to fully get it. Fertile people cannot comfort infertile people, not really. Certainly not while they are pregnant or cradling their newborns, their second or third, in some of my pals’ cases.

For one moment, just before Christmas, it looked like I might finally join them. After four failed rounds, back to back, two blue lines showed up. (At the same time the Omicron Covid variant surged and the world was willing against the double line result; the irony wasn’t lost on me.) I was utterly dumbfounded that Sunday morning as I was convinced I wasn’t pregnant. I had experienced strong cramps in the run up to test day during the dreadful two-week wait that follows each embryo transfer, a time when I personally keep as busy as possible to stop my mind from constantly wondering whether our embryo has checked in or out.

A miscarriage followed nine weeks later.

As someone who asks questions for a living, I have been asking myself only one ever since: why?

No one replies and there is no one to hold to account.

And yet, despite an abiding sadness and my pin-cushion stomach having only recently recovered, we are planning to try again. We know it may never work.

This act of ‘trying’ fascinates me more and more - the art of it, the concept and psychology of ‘trying’ - not just a few times but again and again and again… expecting, or at least hoping for, a different result.

That is why I am going to try to put some of our trying into words in a newsletter, called, you guessed it, ‘Trying’. It won’t only be about trying for a life; I will explore trying across life. What gets people back into the ring?  How do they know when to stop or carry on?

What are those things along the way that make the difference? What is more trying that it ought to be?

Casting my mind back, I used to read those stories of women who had been able to endure and afford six, seven, or eight rounds of IVF and think how on earth could they keep going? That question is front of mind as I potentially embark on what will be our 7th turn on the IVF merry-go-round. 

I only hope that perhaps sharing my experience while it is happening may have helped someone else trying; failing and trying again, in whatever walk of life.