In Vitro Fertility Goddess.
Hi, I'm Jodi's husband Michel Panayotov.
The hardest thing for me in all this was the sheer sense of powerlessness. Not to mention the feeling of isolation. After all, it's not the kind of topic a man freely talks about with his mates.
There was also the injustice of it all. Here we were, healthy gym goers, eaters of all things green and lean but somehow unable to fulfil what comes naturally to so many: having children. And it wasn't as if our baby-making plans just came out of the blue. They started a long time ago. Like many young couples, we decided to get ahead financially before starting a family. We were under the impression that beginning a conception journey later in life would work out fine. After all, there seemed to be an endless stream of older Hollywood celebrities who managed to pop out children on cue later in life, so why not us?
The only thing I could really do (bar hanging upside down from a beam in the bedroom on a leafy green tea and brazil nut diet while wearing specific support underwear) was to try and chip away at the odds that were stacking up against us. So I engineered a transfer from my inner city job to the coast where we could both enjoy the benefits of a healthy beachside lifestyle.
But as we hit more problems, I was quietly sinking into a despair of my own as I watched Jodi trawl obscure Internet infertility sites while warning me that if I laid eyes on them, I would be numb from the waist down for ever more, thereby curtailing any future reproduction ability. As if the little white clinic rooms manned by nurses, complete with jars and used magazines weren't already leading to that.
I must say that my saviour (and Jodi's) really came from the diary she was keeping at the time which turned into her book In Vitro Fertility Goddess » As we both sat contemplating the unthinkable of a future without children, she used to read me what she had written that day and we'd both cry…laughing!
I'm no medical expert but if there is one bit of advice I'd like to share with couples who might have the misfortune of going through what we did is to try and focus of the positives no matter how hopeless the situation may seem. I'm convinced it was laughter that got us through in the end and gave us a beautiful (and good humoured) little daughter.
Laughter is truly one of life's most effective medicines.
Michel Panayotov
