Infertility

Maggie: We’d been trying for about a year, and friends through, throughout that year had started to get pregnant. And I think then a shadow of doubt started to creep in for both of us, for both myself and my husband. We started to wonder, you know, “Should something have happened for us?”

Naomi: It wasn’t so much a shock, it was gradual. It happened, you know, every month my period would turn up. I would be, two days before it was due I would be feeling the dragging pains in my stomach.

Maggie: I just thought there would be something simple that we had overlooked. There wasn’t, and, and they said we needed to see a specialist. Which was very very scary. I remember at that point, I think this was the first of my bursting in to tears in doctors’ waiting rooms, the first of many I have to say. I think the shock of it, and also it felt very serious all of a sudden. If we were seeing a specialist, a fertility specialist, then there was a problem with our fertility.

Brian: A complete kick in the teeth I think. You know, it’s, it’s as I said before you’re born into thinking, you know, you’re here on this earth to do what you do and you have children and you pass on your name. You pass on your bloodline and all that rubbish really. But it’s just that because it’s, it’s, no one ever says to you, but it might not happen.

Catherine: Because I think that’s the, that’s one of the most difficult things about it really. You do feel that you are not the same as everyone else, that you’ve kind of failed as a woman somehow. Everyone else seems to be able to do this thing so easily, and you just grow up expecting that you’ll be able to have children if you want to. And discovering that you can’t, it’s really hard to describe how much that affects you actually, how much it affects the way you see yourself and how you feel about yourself.

Martha: I had no idea what it entailed at all. And I think, I think it is this thing that is kind of thrown around and people always just assume that there is an option and first of all they assume that without any real understanding of how often it doesn’t work, you know for one thing and just the physical and emotional toll it takes on you.