Twelfth Time Lucky

"I don't know why you're congratulating me; I haven't done anything"

This is typical of my wife: always downplaying her own hard work, her own sacrifices.

From a purely logical point of view, I get it. At the end of the day, all she's done is urinate on a stick.

Other than potential aim-related issues, it's not exactly a task worthy of Hercules.

But we both know, deep down, that she's talking shit. And the smile on her face betrays this.

While the act itself was easy, the journey it has taken to get here has been immense.

Unless you've been there yourself, it's hard to appreciate the mental and physical toll that IVF can take.

And it's not just the IVF. For most couples, IVF represents the continuation of a long, sad journey that started with such joy and excitement.

For us, it started on our honeymoon. 2021.

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It was a huge decision at the time, but we didn't appreciate it. Having a baby is just what you do after you're married, right?

It sounds quite a feckless comment, like we were having a baby for conformity's sake rather than an actual desire to create life.

Well, I can tell you that this mentality changed as soon as we had the first "not pregnant" test result.

Nobody wants a baby more than the couple that can't have one.

I don't know exactly how long it took for us to decide that something wasn't right. I'm an optimist by nature, but more than that, I know how statistics work. So, I wasn't quite as phased by the initial results as my wife.

But, over time, I caught up with her; something wasn't working. We decided to book a doctor's appointment.

I'm not going to go into what happened next. The long-drawn-out process of testing, form-filling, and the hundreds of drives across the city for yet another appointment were stressful and sad, but they aren't crucial to the story.

Let's just say that the doctors found nothing wrong with either of us, but agreed that there had to be an issue. They called it unexplained infertility.

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It's funny how infertility changes your reaction to sex. As a teenager, sex was the greatest possible thing you could imagine. Better than sport, better than booze, better than video games. For me, it was all I thought about.

There's that completely made-up statistic that men think about sex 19 times per day. But for me as a teenager, that sounded like an understatement.

If you'd told me at 17 that I'd be having sex with a woman so often that I'd become bored, I'd have laughed you out of the room.

But that's the case.

Not just boring, but frustrating, sad, almost humiliating. Like we were participating in a ritual that we knew didn't work. And we felt surrounded by people who had nailed it first time.

I'd never had an issue with erectile dysfunction in my life, but when you're on day 12 of having sex, it's a little hard to stay a little hard, if you know what I mean?

Finally, the NHS agreed that we qualified for IVF, and the chances of conception went up from 15% (for IUI) to 33% per round.

Again, I knew statistics, so I understood that 33% is no guarantee of success. But after our first round, my wife woke me up to a positive pregnancy test.

This was the greatest feeling of my life; it was literally better than sex.

I've never punched the air before, outside of a football pitch, but I punched the air until my shoulder burned.

Nothing would have made me happier than for this story to end here.

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We spent the rest of the day on a cloud. That evening I had a football match, and I was as terrible as ever, but felt like I'd bagged a hat-trick.

Then I got back to my car and checked my phone. Six missed calls and a text:

"I'm bleeding"

Now, there's a thing in pregnancy called spot bleeding, and it is NOT necessarily a bad sign. It can mean lots of things. And you'd better believe that for the next two weeks I read every god damn account on spot bleeding there is.

I managed to convince myself and my wife that everything was going to be okay. And between you and me, I almost believed it for a second.

But when our first scan found no heartbeat, I wasn't half as crushed as I had been reading the text by my car after football. I'd already known.

And that's it, right? Straight onto round two!

Oh God, how naive I was. Because no, that wasn't it. That was just the start. I'm not going to go into the medical complications that go with this sort of thing. It's not something that I want to dwell on again, and it's certainly not something that I want you, the reader, to dwell on.

But let's just say that round two was a long time coming. And that period of our lives broke us just a little.

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Round two was nowhere near as traumatic. It was over in seconds. Not pregnant. Move on, round three.

It's amazing how tough my wife can be. She's autistic and anxious, and can be overwhelmed when her bus is rerouted. So, the way she handled disappointment, the constant breaches of her dignity, and an endless wave of bad luck has been remarkable.

This story is titled 12th time lucky, so you're probably mentally prepared to hear several more versions of the same story. But that's not what happened. I chose the number 12 at random.

It could be the 112th or 400th time lucky if you include all the non-IVF or IUI attempts. But for us, when it came to IVF, it was the 3rd time lucky.

And here's the thing, I'm still not certain if we have been lucky. Our scan isn't for another week. All we know is that there's been no bleeding, and this feels right. In a way that none of the other attempts did.

Maybe this will be a failure too, but guess what? We'll go again, and again, for as long as my wife still wants to go. And maybe it will never happen, and that's our cross to bear, but so far all the signs point to it having worked, so I'm taking a moment to celebrate.

Peeing on a stick is nothing special, but when you consider the journey, I think you'll agree that my wife knocked it out of the fucking park.