The three emotions of pregnancy after fertility challenges

Posted on 5 June, 2023

Content warning: This editorial discusses fertility challenges

When you decide you’re ready to try for a baby you have innumerable fantasies of the excitement you’ll feel when you succeed—when you get to tell people and when each milestone is reached. But when pregnancy doesn’t happen straight away, it can change the entire experience.

It was over two years ago when we said ‘Let’s have a baby!’. However, it wasn’t an easy process, with lots of fertility appointments, investigations, and some intervention.

During Covid, like many others, our wedding plans had to be postponed and that was when we decided we didn’t want to wait any longer to start our family.  I had been off The Pill for a year already so thought it would be easy peasy to get pregnant.

After six months of no success despite tracking my cycles diligently and following all my GP’s advice, I booked in to see a Fertility Specialist and that’s when the real tests began.

I was poked and prodded, I had blood tests weekly and I even had my tubes flushed to make sure there were no obstructions. But everything came back normal, so I was diagnosed with unexplained infertility.

The first step when it came to intervention was a medication that induced ovulation. I took the tablets as directed and when it came to the date of the scan to see if my body was responding I had Covid so that cycle was thrown out the window. Not long after that there was a succession of events that made it impossible to schedule another cycle—we had our wedding, our honeymoon and then we moved from Queensland back to Canberra.

As soon as I landed, I was straight into organising another specialist appointment and we picked up right where I had left off.

I took the tablets and waited a couple of weeks but when it came to my scan it didn’t look promising so, while we continued following the process, we looked towards the next cycle where we would trial a different medication that I would have to self-inject.

I bought all of the meds I would need and did the daunting training on self-injection, but the vials still live in my fridge because (it came as a surprise to us all) the cycle we had already written off had worked. We were finally pregnant.

Now that we are lucky enough to have a bun in the oven, the feelings I have experienced have been far from what I expected. These are the three emotions have been the most dominant.

Absolute disbelief

When the blue line finally appeared on the test, it didn’t feel real. I had peed on perhaps 100 of these sticks in the past and was so used to disappointment that when two lines slowly showed it felt surreal. That rush of excitement I always expected was nowhere to be seen.

16 weeks later and I still can’t quite grasp that it’s actually happening. Every appointment just feels like another appointment in the endless appointments I’ve been attending these past few years.

Gabi with husband Nev.

Fear

The longer your fertility journey goes on, the stronger the little voice in the back of your head grows. The one that tells you not to get your hopes up, the one that protects you from high expectations. That voice still warns me that the worst could still be imminent. Every time I go to the loo I prepare myself to see blood, every time there’s a minor cramp or pang in my pelvis the voice says ‘I told you it was too good to be true!’. It’s a self-preservation technique I’ve created over the past two years and she’s a tough one to silence.

Survivor’s Guilt

When going through infertility you bond with other women going through the same journey. You seek out that connection so you feel less alone, and you hope you can provide comfort for them as well.

However, when you are finally successful it is really hard to understand why you were so lucky. It’s devastating that these friends might not come to this next stage with you. Sometimes this means the end of that friendship for now because it’s too painful for your friends to watch, and I completely understand because I’ve been there, but it’s hard to not feel guilty or responsible for their pain.

Infertility is hard and the emotional journey doesn’t just stop because you’ve achieved your goal. I’m trying to give myself space to feel all the feelings with the hope excitement and joy will start to outgrow the rest.