Being diagnosed with endometriosis at 35, trying IUI and IVF without success
Sue: I was about maybe 35 and I’ve always had issues with my menstrual cycle, and I eventually went and saw a gynaecologist and had a laparoscopy and he said that I had endometriosis. I think you take for granted your fertility. I thought, ‘Well, I suppose I’m at the wrong end of the fertility age and I should do something about it sooner rather than later,’ and that is what started.
I’d always wanted to have kids, but life gets in the road and partners and relationships and all that. I was in a relatively new relationship at the time, and we decided we’d try and have kids together.
We had actually already spoken about kids and she already had children, so that was – well, it really didn’t stop anything, it more or less made us go full steam ahead. Rather than, “Okay. We’ll do this in a year or six months or 12 months”, it was, “Well, we’d better get on to this straight away.”
We did IVF together and that was unsuccessful. Anyway, down the track, I think that ended up being – I suppose it was over a span of about a year. With the unsuccessful insemination [IUI] and the unsuccessful IVF, I think we just went our own way. It was all too hard. So went our own way and I thought, ‘Well, that’s it. I’m too old. There’s no point in going any further.’ Yeah, I put it to bed really.
Becoming pregnant in a new relationship via home insemination
So then I was in another relationship and sort of six months into it, we discussed how in the past when we had tried to have children, both of us independently, and it hadn’t been successful and we just started to talk again about the possibility of doing it and my partner, who is still my current partner, is a couple of years older than me so we decided that I would possibly be the right person to try and yeah, we were successful.
Interviewer: Once you’d decided that it would be you that tried it, are you able to describe what actually happened, so how you chose the clinic and what process you went through, all of that sort of thing?
Sue: That was with a friend, with a known donor and yeah, my partner inseminated me and that was all really very quick. It happened almost instantly and I was 40.
Interviewer: Given that you sort of had concluded that maybe you couldn’t have children, what was it that made you decide to try one more time?
Sue: I think it was that we just decided to throw caution to the wind, I guess in a sense, you know, it was just we had a known donor and it was just, “Well, why not?”
Interviewer: And I suppose home insemination was obviously a lot easier than going through IVF?
Sue: Oh yeah!
You didn’t have to rush out from work for the 12 o’clock appointment.
We did the home insemination together and then I still had embryos left from the first round of IVF.
Becoming pregnant via IVF using previous embryos
And I hadn’t decided – I wasn’t sure what to do with them, I suppose because I’d come to that resolution that I wasn’t going to conceive. The embryos were in storage and we just decided we should try – after the first one was successful, we thought we’d try with the embryos and we were successful with one of the embryos.
Interviewer: So how did that feel, it not having worked previously and then having two out of two successes?
Sue: Well, that was a little bit mind-blowing really because I think I’d taken it for granted that I wasn’t going to have kids and then to have two just literally dumped on me – it was good. I was really happy. I had ideal pregnancies, even though I’d had dreadful menstrual cycles. My pregnancies were perfect. They were textbook.
No success with trying for a third child via IVF
We actually did a round of IVF after the second child was born too, so I would have been 43. But the eggs that they took weren’t successful. When they defrosted, they didn’t last.
It was just soul-destroying because I think we’d had two successful pregnancies, two different ways of becoming pregnant and I think we took it for granted that the second round of IVF would be successful as well and we were absolutely blown away that it didn’t. We had taken it for granted and it was just, it was really sad.
Interviewer: Yeah, that’s right. And you didn’t try again? You decided because the eggs were not…
Sue: Yeah. They weren’t viable. I just felt that that was enough. Clearly, we were only supposed to have two children and that was it.
