Knowing that our twins were born nine months after our return to Australia, you might think that they had their origin in Paris. In fact they were conceived in a sterile, white room containing a doctor, nurse and embryologist. Steve was there too, but he was fully clothed. Yes, the babies were conceived by IVF, very much on Australian soil.
IVF isn’t a single injection, but involves a series of processes: blood tests every few days to establish the right point in a menstrual cycle to start treatment; stimulating the ovaries with self-administered injections of Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) at particular times of the day for some days; blood tests daily for another few days to monitor the levels of FSH; a ‘trigger’ injection to stimulate ovulation; egg collection under local anaesthetic; sperm collection from Steve; and finally insemination when the time is right, and a good embryo is available. All of this comprises one ‘cycle’ of treatment, and for a pregnancy to be initiated it could take many cycles.
It was the first time I had injected myself – right in the abdomen – and I am quite squeamish about needles. These injections had to occur at particular times, so I carried my refrigerated kit around with me to restaurants, out to dinner with friends and on visits interstate, injecting myself surreptitiously on the pretext of going to the bathroom. I felt like a junkie.
The nurses guided me through every stage of the process, ringing me at work to tell me the results of a particular phase or with instructions for what to do next. So as to maintain privacy they would leave a brief message with their name, saying that it was a personal call if a colleague answered. Now I felt even more like a junkie, or perhaps like a small-time criminal receiving messages in code.
I returned from lunch one day to a message that my colleague had taken: ‘Buffy [one of the nurses] called. Does she slay vampires?’
The blood tests and appointments, often two or three a week, were scheduled before work so there were few absences to explain.
I didn’t find any of this difficult, and in fact rather enjoyed the covert nature of the exercise. It required organisation and discipline and these are my strengths. It was hard to drink three litres of water a day for a week to minimise the risk of a potentially life-threatening condition, Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (you try it!). But perhaps harder still was the decision to go ahead with the process at all.
I had never imagined that I would need IVF, and, facing the prospect of it, my first response was to question whether I was ‘meant’ to have children. Maybe this was biology or destiny sending me a message. Many women don’t have children, and I had not necessarily expected to. It was only in recent years that I had even thought about it – and that was mainly because people were asking more and more often, now that I was in my 30s, whether I would. Perhaps I wouldn’t. Perhaps being an aunty and having friends with kids would be good enough. You could give them back, and all that.
We went to Bowral to get a second opinion from a gynaecologist. My operation for endometriosis two years earlier had not seemed to make me fertile, although it had successfully removed the endometriosis (which is associated with infertility) that was growing expansively in my uterus. The Bowral gynaecologist could not say why I still seemed to have a problem, but given my age (35) and the laws of probability, he warned us that IVF could be our only chance of conception. The situation forced me to decide whether I believed in predetermination or in a higher power marking the channel through which our lives will run. I had to confront the idea of God and decide what I really felt.
After much reflection and discussion with Steve, we decided that if I wasn’t pregnant by the time we returned to Australia, we would pursue IVF.
And that is how I came to be in that white room one Monday lunchtime, the 26th of October, 2009 to be precise, fitting in an insemination after a morning’s participation on an interview panel (be brief, please, I thought, I ‘m going to conceive in half an hour!) and before other meetings and deadlines on a busy day. Further work had been required on briefing for the Minister in a short turnaround time, and my boss had tried to call me on my work mobile. ‘I was at lunch,’ I said.
We ticked the box for just one embryo to be inserted, heeding the strong warnings of pregnancy risks for twins. Anyway, one would be plenty. One embryo was inserted, like a reverse pap smear, with the procedure beamed up via a projector so we could see the process as it happened. Another blood test and then we rang the nurse to hear whether the embryo had ‘taken’ two weeks later.
She looked through our file, and I felt like I did once back at school, anxiously waiting for the results of my fourth grade piano exam to be conveyed over the phone while my teacher leafed through her student file. Shouldn’t they know? Why so slow to say? Are they putting off the moment of telling me bad news? But no, the test was positive, and I was pregnant.
Steve told his sister the good news. She had just given birth to a little girl, so when our baby was born, the cousins would be nine months apart in age. ‘We haven’t named it yet,’ joked Steve.
Then how did there come to be two of them, you ask? Only one embryo was inserted. You are quite right, we had twins because the embryo split.
The first IVF baby in Australia has recently celebrated her thirtieth birthday. She was reported as saying that the best thing about being an IVF baby was that she felt loved and wanted well before she was even conceived.
I hope our babies feel that way when they grow up. Both of them. Two wasn’t what we expected, but I couldn’t be happier now that they have been born.
More about that later.
