In Vitro Fertility Goddess

About

When I suffered my first miscarriage after fifteen months of trying to get pregnant it took me entirely by surprise. This is despite having worked for thirteen years in the airline industry which is dominated by women in their prime reproductive years, I'd never heard of anyone having one.

Let me stress at this point that ‘Telegraph, Telephone, Tell-a-Flight-Attendant' were the quickest ways to transmit information at the time. And it was due to these highly efficient communication channels that I involuntarily knew everything from who had the most episiotomy stitches and the longest labour to who gave birth to the heaviest baby and how much it weighed (a leg-crossing eleven and a half pounds for the record).

So, presuming that none of these women had been through what I'd just experienced, I began to research it and was astounded to find 20% of known pregnancies ended in miscarriage. Presumably then, there were plenty of work colleagues who were simply harbouring secrets. Women just don't talk about these things - it's taboo, like telling a female friend her bum looks big in those pants. So I took the cue from this and sought support and comfort from my immediate family. And my mother's reassurances that ‘Oh well it was meant to be,' or ‘Lots of women have one,' to my husband insisting that I would be fine next time worked well. I was sad but optimistic.

But when, almost a year later, I experienced a miscarriage for the second time these assurances did not have the same effect. They just sounded hollow. This was "The Next Time" and still it wasn't right. And to make matters worse, in order to hurry things along, I'd been armed with a laparoscopy to clear my endometriosis and Chlomid tablets and the same thing had happened.

If you have any pressing questions after two miscariages, don't count on ‘The Sisterhood' for answers. You see, the sisterhood doesn't exist when it comes to acknowledging female flaws, only female strengths. That's why, at work, there was a flourishing Mother's Club, to be a member of which you had to be a Fertility Goddess (‘Oh, I fell on the first try' -giggle, giggle) and preferably a Birthing Martyr (able to push a baby out for forty-eight hours straight and receive one hundred and eighty stitches without anaesthetic) too, in order to be all smug in a Helen Reddy ‘I am Woman, Hear Me Roar' way. Those of us with a faulty reproductive system need not apply, we just hang in the shadows like fringe dwellers, flashing fake grins at news of another birth or pregnancy before rushing to a toilet to burst into tears.

Don't count on doctors for answers either. As a rule they won't even investigate possible causes until you are ‘officially recurrent', meaning after 3 miscarriages. Until then all you can expect is a ‘Relax and try again', which, of course, makes you so tense it takes days before you can begin to unclench your jaw or your fists let alone open your legs.

What is it, why don't we talk about it? It's like there's a hidden code of silence or something. What was wrong with women that they felt so ashamed to talk about their reproductive failings and so compelled to flaunt their fertility to each other? Why can women happily occupy themselves for an hour at a time discussing their cellulite but not their polycystic ovaries?

It's these very questions that prompted me to write In Vitro Fertility Goddess. My aim is to help to empower, with humour, women everywhere who are going through what I went through, to stop feeling like we should be embarrassed or worse, ashamed.

Embrace everything that is available to you, no matter how silly or undignified, as most of it assuredly is and, if you are lucky enough to have a child as a result, even if, like myself you have a dramatic and troubled pregnancy, remember that when one day your child asks every parent's most dreaded question - ‘How did I get here?', there's every chance you can say, like me: ‘ Well, see, there was this herbalist, and energy healer, let me see, then there was the doctor and the psychiatrist, the gynaecologist and the anaesthetist and the laboratory dish, did I forget someone? Oh yes, Daddy and the jar…' Has all the makings of a 21st century fairy tale, don't you think?

Jodi Panayotov

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