Real Stories | Alex Matthews: How on earth did we get here?

Do you remember the first time you ‘tried’?

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The first time you didn’t use contraception on purpose? I remember ours well - it felt exciting, it felt right and it felt, well, a bit naughty after 15 years of trying my utmost NOT to get pregnant... But most of all, it was an adventure we were embarking on together - an adventure that would be fun, exciting and end in the ultimate  happiness, if less sleep than we were accustomed to.

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I look back on the newly contraception-free me of 2018 with envy, but also with compassion, because how little she knew, how naive she was about how it could - would - all turn out. As it happened, the adventure was only fun for a little while, and somewhere along the way it has turned into something more resembling The Lord of the Rings than Knocked Up: challenges, fighting, determination, blood and gore, and learning valuable lessons about ourselves along the way.

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Let me start at the beginning. My husband and I met in 2013. He’s a maths teacher, I’m a marketer and we live in south London with our rescue dog. We got married in 2017 and went a bit rogue for our honeymoon, deciding on trekking in South America instead of more traditional destinations, meaning that we had to wait for a while to start trying for a baby due to the risk of Zika. I had my contraceptive coil removed in July 2018, and we got cracking with the fun bit of ‘TTC’. And it was fun - even when we didn’t get pregnant in the first few months, we knew that it could take even healthy, relatively young couples like us a while to get lucky. We were both 32: it would be fine.

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Somewhere in early 2019, we started to feel a little irked that we hadn’t had a glimmer of a line or even a late period, so we asked our GP to do some tests. Officially, we shouldn’t have qualified for tests on the NHS for a few more months, but I think my doctor could see we were anxious. Everything looked good for me, but my husband’s semen analysis revealed that he had poor sperm morphology; in one doctor’s words, they were shaped like hammerhead sharks, so could only butt against my eggs rather than penetrate them. It was a blow, but we were referred for IVF without any further ado. In an aside, it has since occurred to me that male infertility is the only condition for which someone other than the sufferer is treated - perhaps a topic for a future post! Although the cause of my husband’s issue was later investigated separately to our infertility and found to be a varicocele - it’s always worth investigating! 

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The consultant at our fertility clinic assured us that, with IVF plus ICSI, it would be a straightforward problem to overcome. He even said that,...