Jessica: a long road to parenthood

Jessica had a long, challenging road to parenthood, lasting over 10 years, including multiple rounds of IVF. Katie Haylor spoke to Jessica about her experience...

Jessica - Like probably many young women out there, I’d been on the pill, the contraceptive injections, for sort of ten years or so. When things don’t happen it’s like oh, it can take a little while to get out of your system. For a long while we were unsure if we were just missing the fertility window. We perhaps left it later than we should have done. In hindsight, that’s one of my biggest regrets.

By the time I went to the doctor we’d probably been trying for over three years, at which point they ran some tests and discovered that I had polycystic ovary syndrome. It is quite a blow when you discover that it’s you that are causing the fertility problems in your relationship.

Katie - Jessica had various drug treatments to encourage ovulation in order to assist in natural conception, but these weren’t successful.

Jessica - I strangely enough, fell pregnant naturally - we couldn’t believe it. Unfortunately, we did suffer a late miscarriage which was a really difficult time and we had to delay thinking any further for a while because we couldn’t understand why we could get pregnant to then lose the baby as late as we did, I suppose. That was a really challenging time for us both people and as a relationship.

我们不是羞于说我们的确得到咨询d help at that time ready to go back and try again. On my third actual IVF treatment role we did get response. I was warned that because we were pushing my body really hard we’d probably have to freeze the embryos to give my body time to recover from the drugs used in the stimulation phase.

So we went to Australia for a few weeks to recover, so we then had one single embryo transferred after that. I did become pregnant but it suffered an early pregnancy loss. But we got straight back into it after having the two clear month cycles and we had two transferred after that, which I did become pregnant and we had a successful pregnancy with.

I joked, even when the contractions were every two minutes and I was trying to walk across the car park to get to the hospital, I still didn’t believe I was going to have a baby at the end of that. I was just like well, we’ll just have to see and so it was actually a massive shock when they said oh you know, you’ve got a little girl. They handed me this little girl and I just could not believe it had happened!