I spent a lot of time trying to have a baby. A plethora of doctors on multiple continents. 35 rounds of different treatments. Five surgeries. A very painful loss.

This took a great toll on me, and almost certainly on everyone around me. I was a total shithead during some (most) of it. A complete mess. Sometimes so removed from actual reality it was like I was living in a parallel universe which primarily existed around whether I was able to procreate or not. And I wasn’t. My self esteem was in the gutter and sometimes I rolled around blind drunk in it.

I briefly touched on the comfort eating. But one thing that stood out for me during the eight and a half years of trying was the constant dieting that I was doing. Eat salt, don’t eat salt. Eat Gluten, don’t eat gluten. Only eat organic, organic isn’t so important right now. Along with a brief period where I was taking so many supplements that I was ingesting 79 capsules a day, on a very strict regime (some of which conversely ended up being detrimental to my reproductive health – message here is to ignore quackery, believe in science people). Irrespective of the fullness of my digestive system with all of these supplements, food was a blanket of comfort. For obvious reasons.

I took all kinds of drugs to try and have a baby. I will never forget a conversation with a doctor with went loosely along the lines of: “This is going to sound crazy. But there’s an off-label use of a prostate cancer medication which has shown promise with helping women produce eggs”. So down the hatch the meds went. didn’t work of course. Neither did the breast cancer drugs (which do something weird to your oestrogen production). And the drugs and doses got stronger and stronger. After one cycle of treatment I spent four weeks in bed because my immune system sent a giant “up yours” to me and I was just “ill”. They called it an immune crisis. I suspect I was also really fucking depressed.

It becomes this obsession. The trying. There were points where I didn’t even know if I wanted a child any more, but it just seemed like we were so far along a path that it was impossible to turn back. Blinkered to everything other than this seemingly unattainable goal. By the end, we started talking about the possibility of not having a child. And what that would mean for us as a couple. Many times I offered him a divorce, given my barren uterus might not have been enough.

The first complete and full round of IVF we did, we lost a baby. It’s been seven years now, and I still struggle to talk about it. I still don’t particularly want to hold babies. It makes me think about the baby I wanted so much and lost. It forms a huge part of what triggers my PTSD. My body did a weird thing during the miscarriage where it still thought it was pregnant so we spent almost four weeks in limbo, with scans saying there wasn’t a heartbeat, but every other sign telling the doctors that there was still a life growing inside of me. And then I had to have a surgery to remove “products of pregnancy”. That was the phrase on the pathology report. I will never forget sobbing as I went under the anaesthetic that morning. The room was sombre and Mr D, the anaesthetist, rubbed my head to comfort me. Neither will I forget the nurse on the ward who held my hand for over an hour as I cried.

All throughout the aftermath of this, I just kept repeating the same spiel to everyone, “onwards and upwards”, “got to keep looking forward and not look back” and the classic “it wasn’t meant to be”. All of these things said to make others feel better and so they would stop asking me how I felt. Because I didn’t even know. If felt like the world had ended. I was very grateful for amazing friends who rallied in their way. In particular the amazing S&J who let me consume gin in abundance and cry in the safety of their home without judgement on many occasions.

But life does continue. It took three more rounds of IVF and two more surgeries for the beatific beast to be born. She’s the rainbowest of babies and the coolest person I’ve ever met, even with her penchant for nudity at inappropriate times.

And like me, a bit of a dick. All part of the charm though eh?