The funny thing about advice is that when I give it, I give it whole heartedly and genuinely believing in it. I wear my heart on my sleeve but also am very open with my thinking and my logic behind my rationale. Yes sometimes it’s absolutely off and bonkers, but when I’m giving advice, I seem to be quite thorough and thought out (or at least I have been told).
Unfortunately when giving the advice to others, it seems to apply to them alone – and is not something I grant myself the generosity of believing if I am also put in that situation. This has really hit me lately, because I’ve confided in a friend recently about our struggles with fertility. The same friend who had her own struggles, who I listened to cry several times on the phone, as I tried my best to help even though I was two states away.
At the time, I listened as best I could and I comforted her by telling her that it would all be ok in the end – she knew she would get pregnant, one way or another, and that in a years time we’d be thinking about this and it would seem as if no time had passed. She’d be blessed with a new bub, excel at being the absolutely incredible mother she had been the first time round, and completely forget how hopeless and lost she felt at this point in time.
Guess what? It happened. She had bub number two and now it seems like these tears and conversations were so long ago, almost in a different lifetime. Now, she’s repeating the same thing to me, and as much as I believed it when I was telling her, I really don’t think I’m going to be that lucky.
Fertility is such a unique beast of its own. It’s something I think quite unique to women, although I’m sure men may experience similar emotions, perhaps I just haven’t been privy to them. I’ve been avoiding writing my thoughts and feelings on this matter for a while, as I’m almost finished my book, but it’s getting too raw and too hard for me to bottle it all up, so here we go. Let’s take a trip down my Fallopian tubes and into the wild world of fertility, my fertility or lack thereof.
When I was much younger, a teenager, I would tell anyone who cared that I never wanted children. To be fair, I’d helped raised my younger siblings for more of my life than I had enjoyed being a kid myself, so the thought of doing it all over again was a nightmare. Then as I got older and a tad more promiscuous, I was super cautious with protection in most instances because there was no way in hell I’d bring a child into the world with me as the mother – I couldn’t imagine a more horrible thing to bestow on a child.
The funny thing is, when I was about 20 I was diagnosed with endometriosis. I had a surgery where they burnt out what they could find, but I was devastated for a long time. I had just been told that my chances of naturally conceiving were considerably diminished. Sure I might not have wanted kids, but as a woman, it felt like the only thing I was really biologically put onto this planet to do, was something I probably couldn’t even do.
I had the voice of my mother in my head again and again. I couldn’t even make a fucking baby, what good was I? What was my purpose? What use was I to any future man if I couldn’t give him his spawn? My depression was rampant during the months after finding out this information, my purpose for living was at an all time low and I don’t think I have ever really gotten over that feeling of utter uselessness as an ovary bearer.
Over the years, any serious boyfriend I have had, I’ve told them early on that I might not be able to have children or would most likely have to resort to IVF. I’ve always been open to adoption and actually would prefer this in many ways – after all there are more needy children out there that need homes and love, and added one more child to the already overpopulated world, just didn’t seem to make sense to me. This is all well and good, until you actually meet someone you want to have babies with, who really wants to be a biological father first.
It’s always plagued our relationship, my fear that when we were finally ready to make children, I wouldn’t be able to pull my weight, anatomically speaking. It reached a peak a few years ago, when I was first told I had a miscarriage, spent several days moping around depressed even though we weren’t trying for a baby and it probably was not a great time. Only to be back in hospital a few days later with severe abdominal pain, and told there were complications. When I woke up, they informed me I hadn’t had a miscarriage, but my internal scans had shown fluid on my right ovary. This could have been anything from a cyst to something more nasty relating to cancer.
Great – I went from having a miscarriage to possibly having cancer. Not good for someone who is already a hypochondriac, but also who has to explain that to her boyfriend without sounding like she’s going crazy and misreading what the doctors are saying. So more tests, and several weeks off work, I get told I have three to four times the normal amount of follicles on my right ovary and that it’s most likely poly cystic ovary syndrome and there’s not much if anything that can be done to relieve the pain from these cysts rupturing whenever they feel like it. They added in that PCOS once again reduces fertility by a fair chunk so might be worth investigating IVF sooner rather than later…. The icing on the cake – was, “oh by the way, the reason you’ve put on weight and its much harder to lose, that’s from this also… so … congrats?”
Those few months were a fucking emotional roller coaster to say the least. And here men are just jizzing left right and centre, with their biggest concern being who or what they impregnate.. why don’t they get something like poly cystic testicle syndrome? endo-dick-triosis? monthly bleeds, bloating and crazy emotions? just something to even up the playing field a tad… instead of slamming it all on the women and their bits.
The latest whammy in this journey through my reproductive organs, is getting married. Now I know you don’t need to be married to have kids, but I’m a Type A control freak… I need things in order, I need things to happen the way I want, and it is nice to think we’d be adding a little one to the mix soon.
That’s all well and good, but this week marks one year since we’ve been trying. Which doesn’t seem that long, and is usually the minimum amount of time people need to try before seeing a specialist to discuss options. Fun fact, I got to see one early because my reproductive organs don’t like me. In fact, I was so lucky, I was booked in with a Colonel Sanders look alike, which I suppose is good? At least he has the whole chicken and egg thing down, which is pretty important. But he gave me even better good news. I’m probably not falling pregnant because I’m bat shit crazy.
Ok, not exactly, but essentially the medication I’m on is literally exploding my eggs.
Ok… also not 100% accurate.
What he did say was the dosage and type of antidepressant/anti-psycho-bitch medication I am on, causes infertility. So my ‘eggs’ or ‘follicles’ are cramping up in my ovaries and not being released… and as such, they’re becoming cysts and rupturing… so see.. my eggs are exploding because I’m a crazy bitch.
This is where I get serious now and confide in the keyboard as to how fucking shit this has made me feel.
You know in nature where an animal won’t mate with another animal because of a DNA Anomaly ? It can sense that that’s not the best partner to further the species. In fact many animals abandon their babies if they realize they’re weak or going to corrupt the survival of the fittest way of evolving…
That is how I feel. I think back to my mother, to everything that involved. Who she was, what this meant etc. and how that is probably passed all down to me. I have definitely struggled the hardest with the impacts of her schizophrenia from a medical standpoint – I know emotionally all of my siblings struggle from time to time, but medically speaking, I’m the one who has exhibited the strongest signs of PTSD and abondonment issues. My brain chemical structure is not great.. hence why I’m on some of the strongest and harshest drugs to try to assist with making every day life liveable, not just for me, but everyone who has to deal with me…
I’ve always secretly told myself, each time I get delivered further news that I probably can’t have children, that it was because I didn’t deserve it. Maybe it’s divine intervention. I’m not allowed to have children because it would be the worst thing for our species and therefore my body won’t allow it. I’ve thought long and hard about what I would pass on to my children, what I value and who I hoped they would be, but none of it matters as I’m probably not going to do so… or at least that’s how it feels.
So when Colonel Sanders told me I had to choose… go off my medication or have a baby, it put me in the toughest situation of my life. I told Peter and my parents that it wasn’t all bad news, they can ween me off my drugs, try hormone injections do a million and one things to try to make it possible. But inside, I was feeling like a complete and utter failure once again.
The problem is, if I go off my medication, change it or reduce it, I become a severe manic depressant again for all those around. I struggle sleeping, I sweat and get fevers and I genuinely struggle to want to live each and every day. What if the added hormones from being pregnant make me more depressed and suicidal? What if I completely push away and hurt every single important person in my life from the emotional craziness that is inherent with this disease… what if I end up with absolutely end of the line, post partum depression and my child never gets to know me? That’s my worst fear… leaving a child alone without a mother, because she couldn’t handle one more day. I have nightmares about it all the time.
The alternative is if I stay on my medication, I risk not ever having a baby naturally. Even with IVF it doesn’t necessarily mean it will work. I then might cause the baby to have a severe dependency on the anti depressants. It might completely fuck up their brain chemistry too, and I probably wouldn’t be able to breastfeed. So I essentially ruin or inhibit their life capacity before it’s even really started – how could I ever forgive myself?
So I now have to choose to give my husband the one thing any woman should be able to do naturally, at the risk of putting him through hell getting there, or I try, cost us a lot of money in the meantime and potentially ruin the brain of a child…
Is it even fair to look at these options? Right now, it feels like the best thing I could do would be to give Peter a chance to love someone else, to have a child with someone normal and stable rather than continue to subject him to the shittiness my mind and body seem to provide on a daily basis.
Because if this were as a simple as continuing a species, as simple as survival of the fittest, I would be left alone. I would be abandoned from a young age by my mother and not able to reproduce…
oh wait…
