In Vitro Fertility Goddess

In Vitro We Trust

Jodi Panayotov's candid journal - kept during her quest to become pregnant - is now a tell-all book.

By Vicki Englund, Australian Parents Magazine Oct-Nov 2007

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If there's one word to describe Jodi Panayotov it's "determined". Against heartbreaking setbacks which would have seen many other women give up, she refused to relinquish her dream of becoming a mother. Another goal was to have the book she wrote about that challenging emotional and physical journey published. She will soon have the satisfaction of seeing the book, titled In Vitro Fertility Goddess, hit book strores nationally.

Jodi agrees that determination had to be a major part of her personality, otherwise her dreams of motherhood and of being a published author would not have come to fruition. "Absolutely," she says without hesitation. "I usually set something to do and in my own way find how to do it."

At the age of 37, Jodi suffered a miscarriage and picked herself up to try again. After a second miscarriage however, she started to think there might be more than bad luck behind the pregnancy losses and sought specialist medical advice. One by one, medical complications which arose threatened to end her and husband Michael's dreams of becoming parents. But one by one, they took on the challenges to overcome those hurdles.

"I had hyperthyroidism, endometriosis, and very irregular cycles thanks to my hormones being all out of whack," explains Jodi, now 44. "As well as that, I found out much later through the herbalist and naturopath, Ruth Sharkey (the much touted "baby maker" from Sharkey's Healing Centre on the Gold Coast), that I had abnormally high temperatures which would prevent conception."

Despite this difficult course of events which coincided with Jodi's biological clock starting to tick quite deafeningly, the book detailing her journey is not all doom and gloom - quite the opposite. Written in a Bridget Jones's Diary style with a similar amount of charm and wit, In Vitro Fertility Goddess offers many chuckles and irreverent humour a la Wendy Harmer or Kathy Lette. There are also the expected moving moments when Jodi lays herself emotionally bare.

The book's genesis was a personal journal which Jodi kept while alone with her thoughts as Michel, international producer with Radio National Breakfast, was out working nights. In the hope that a slower, more peaceful lifestyle might help towards achieving another pregnancy, Jodi had taken extended leave from her flight attendant's position, with the couple temporarily moving up to the Gold Coast away from city life in Sydney's Balmain. With no confidantes close by, Jodi tried to work through the emotional rollercoaster she was on via her writing.

"I kind of cut myself off and became very introspective trying to sort out what was going on for me," says Jodi. "I just needed to have this outpouring because you can't say some of that stuff to other people over the phone. You can't even say it to your husband."

The "stuff" she refers to are the sometimes homicidal thoughts she was having at the time towards pregnant women or mothers brandishing babies and young children. Jodi laughs as she recalls, "You can't really ring someone up and say, ‘I just saw some pregnant woman that I wanted to kill'. They'd think you were mad! And I was alienating people who I did try to speak to."

The leap from thinking the journal might be more than for personal catharsis and worth sharing with a readership came when Jodi found that there was a dearth of material in bookshops in which she could find solace. 

"There didn't seem to be any books that I could relate to. Or if there were, they were probably underground sorts of things, like from the U.S. or available only over the internet," explains Jodi. "Then during the waiting period for my IVF treatment, I was given a booklet about someone else's experience and I thought it was really bland and didn't actually deal with any of the real emotions. I looked back on my journal and thought that I could do something with it, with the idea being that I knew other people would be going through those things and maybe hadn't found anything that spoke their language."

While expressing herself via the journal was a healthy outlet, Jodi admits her characteristic determination transformed into something a little darker and unhealthy as she found herself becoming completely obsessed with anything and everything related to infertility issues. In the book, she details the relentless logging on to websites such as tryingtoconceive.com where equally obsessed women boasted of their success stories of eventual conception and swapped gruesome details about bodily functions.

A quote from the book about the site says, "TTC, as far as I can tell, is type of fetish club for females utterly preoccupied with vaginal mucous and basal temperatures, who use disturbing pet names for sex, their partners and their periods."

Jodi laughs as she remembers that low time when she knew she'd become unhealthily preoccupied but couldn't help herself. "I used to work as an occupational therapist in the psychiatric field and was familiar with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. And I thought, ‘God, checking temperatures and other bodily signs all the time - I'm getting like one of those people who keep coming home to make sure they haven't left the iron on.'

"And then you wonder how you'll get back out of the obsession because you're not interested in anything else. All I could cope with watching on TV was Big Brother which, in a normal state of mind, I'd have to switch off after two minutes. And I totally lost interest in reading books. The only thing I wanted to read about was if any celebrities had had miscarriages."

Such disarming and unflinching honesty is evident in some of the book's passages where Jodi rails at the unfairness of her infertility problems. Here she was doing everything possible for good reproductive health while around her (or so it seemed),  overweight women were shoving fast food into their mouths, smoking and drinking copious amounts of alcohol, while a tribe of bedraggled children hung off them. 

Meanwhile, Michel was trying to keep it together and give unending support to his increasingly frazzled wife. "He was aware of what was happening to me but he didn't have any control over it," Jodi muses about the turbulent time. "He just rode along with whatever I was doing, and I'd say, ‘Okay, we've got to go off and sign up for IVF'. He really didn't have a large part in those decisions. He was just at the point where he thought that if anything would have got me out of the state I was in, he would have followed it, even if I'd joined the Branch Davidians! Anything to try and get the normal wife back that he used to have."

Luckily, Jodi has always been able to see the funny side of life and thinks it's important to find the absurdity in what was an undoubtedly traumatic period. When realising she and Michel had missed having sex at the right time of the month after going all the way to Paris for a so-called conception holiday, she writes, "Unfortunately, think it was here 700 km away and under the relaxing influence of numerous vodkas that I ovulated on the dance floor of a gay club in Soho." [while Michael was in Paris]

On having her first injection for an IVF cycle: "Next day had to face horror of M giving me first injection, which I know was relief for him to insert needle rather than penis."

The good news for the couple was that IVF worked for them and they now have five year-old daughter, Nina. (Three IVF attempts since Nina's birth were unsuccessful, but they've come to terms with that and realise their good fortune in at least having one healthy child.)  However, even when Jodi was carrying Nina, she suffered from a condition called placenta praevia - a low-lying placenta - which caused her to haemorrhage at thirty-three weeks, threatening a very premature birth. That's why In Vitro Fertility Goddess not only deals with the conception difficulties and associated anxieties but also traces the pregnancy right up until the birth. As Jodi says, "People who have a lot of infertility problems before getting pregnant tend to have a lot of problems during their pregnancy too. It's like if a part of you is dysfunctional, it will keep on causing trouble."

Jodi is well aware that her two-and-a-half year journey is relatively short compared with some women's tales of being on the IVF treadmill for a decade or more, some never achieving their dream of parenthood. She talks in the book about the unknown dark place in the future had a baby not materialised, and expresses doubt that she would have put her journal forward for publication if she hadn't had her baby. She feels it's important to have hope at the end of the book so it offers encouragement and solace for others in a similar position.

After toning down the "gory bits" thanks to her agent's insistence - who felt the descriptions of bodily functions would be a case of too much information for some - Jodi had her story published by Blink Press, a boutique publisher in her hometown of Brisbane, where she and Michael returned to live when Nina was a baby. They've since secured a major Sydney distributor so that In Vitro Fertility Goddess will hit stores Australia-wide in September - another birth of sorts to celebrate.

A further book is also in the works, with Jodi already putting the finishing touches to it. It's another non-fiction piece about her time as a flight attendant with the now-defunct ANSETT - she feels she has a unique insight into the airline which had its unexpected, spectacular demise while she was on leave trying to fall pregnant. As a taste of the book, there are numerous amusing and not altogether complimentary anecdotes and quips about her former flying colleagues in In Vitro Fertility Goddess - "Now who's the Cabin Manager? Oh good, she's about ninety years old, must be local (they come to the sub-tropics to die)."

It turns out she's also got an old novel she wrote in the bottom drawer which she's planning on dusting off and revisiting. You get the feeling that if she's set her mind to it, it too will be hitting bookstores in the not-too-distant future.

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