I love speaking into the silence, and one of those silences is the crushing reality of infertility for very many people and couples who embark on having a baby and are shattered by their experiences.
It’s best to give a trigger warning at this point; what follows may distress some people. But it’s our story.
After trying for three years without success, we embarked on our IVF journey in 2011. At that year’s beginning we braced ourselves. The specialists helped us each step of the way, but it’s a month by month, trial by error process, and we had so many ups and downs that year.
Hopes would rise like you’re in the lottery and then dreams would be dashed in a moment.
Early on we discovered that we needed a particular special intervention, and as I look back it was 10 years ago last week. It took us four months of trial and error before we became eligible for it.
Once this procedure was done, we had a set number of blastocysts. Six opportunities to have the precious baby we sought.
The very first transfer was a pregnancy, and our hopes soared immensely. We had three weeks of experiencing that nervous expectation that having a baby could just be less than a year away.
It’s such a nervous time waiting for the ‘safer’ time after 13 weeks, and so those weeks between finding out and then seem to move so slowly. We went for a scan at 7 weeks and discovered to our horror that our little girl had no heartbeat. We were devastated.
A week later, Sarah had a curette and though the procedure went well, we both grieved. We had good friends marry that weekend and Sarah was the official photographer.
This wouldn’t be the only time she’d shoot a wedding in deep grief—one friend’s wedding Sarah did we’d only received the diagnosis for Nathanael two days before. My wife’s got a lot of guts.
What followed was a waiting time before we were cleared to do another transfer. This is when it became really heartbreaking. Four strikes in a row. Four failed attempts where the blastocysts didn’t attach to the uterus wall or didn’t hatch.
We were on our final round—last chance—when we visited Sarah’s old home church (which happens to be our present church). The associate pastor there—a person with prophetic gifting—took us aside and boldly told us that we would soon have our baby. We believed by faith. (Only later did we recognise the burden that our friend had borne in sharing what God gave her to share—what if she were wrong? Fortunately, she was faithful and delivered God’s message for us to us.)
With our last blastocyst at implantation, we noticed something different about it. The blastocyst was already hatching. We called him “the Hatcher.” We waited patiently yet again. This was about mid-2012.
I was doing my postgraduate year of counselling at the time when some in my cohort who knew our journey curiously enquired. On my 45th birthday, I was able to confirm (quietly) that Sarah was pregnant.
Amazingly, these next few months were the best months of our married lives to that point. I was thriving in counselling training, Sarah was pregnant, we were in a strong church, and finally on October 30, 2012 (exactly two years before Nathanael’s stillbirth) I met with our senior pastor to begin the process of me becoming associate pastor of our home church.
Those months of July 2012 to March 2013 were surreal as we watch our baby grow and thrive in the womb. It had been an 18-month journey for us, and we know others who have done double that time. But I suppose the whole journey of infertility was about 5 years.
Month after month on the infertility journey is tough—as I read that I recognise it’s a massive understatement. As we look back, our journey was worth it. Our journey has connected us with many others who have travelled the same worn road of grief and tragedy, many of whom like us experienced the exhilaration of successful childbirth.
PS. I would hasten to add that we’ve been blessed to have had only ONE natural conception (Nathanael), facing infertility on the other side of him for another five years of trying. We’re well acquainted with the rock and roll of fertility loss.
Image of Sarah and I at the time we announced our successful pregnancy on September 30, 2012.
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