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Let’s Talk About Fertility is a series sponsored by Vhi Healthcare that deconstructs the stigma around infertility, inspired by the stories of couples who have experienced it and the doctors and counsellors who help them every day.

Here, Olivia* shares her story. 

THROUGHOUT MY TWENTIES, I was in a committed relationship I always believed would lead to the fairy tale of marriage and children. When that relationship ended, I was 29. I met my husband a year later, and felt I still had my whole life ahead of me.

We married three years later and started trying to conceive what we then thought would be the first of a few children. I had several suspected early miscarriages, and we began seeking medical help in 2009. We ended up in a fertility clinic and I found the doctor very unsympathetic.

It took us some time to truly comprehend the facts of our situation, but we were not likely to succeed without medical intervention. We soon began IVF treatment. We became pregnant, and were ecstatic, but terrified. Sadly, that pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at around eight weeks. We were devastated, but also encouraged.

‘I felt like a shell of a woman’

We did a further five cycles over the following few years. We were living one month to the next, not knowing when we would be starting treatment again, as it was all based on my hormone levels, which were different every month. It was impossible to plan anything, everything was in limbo for a very long time.

By the time of our last cycle, we were injecting me with blood thinners, intralipids and intramuscular progesterone, in addition to fertility drugs. Between my bruised and swollen abdomen and the huge, painful, black lumps on my backside, I felt like a shell of a woman.

Throughout all of this, we were not just dealing with our infertility and grieving; there was a lot of additional related stress. My husband bought a home for us in 2007, just before the market crashed. Our home fell deeper into negative equity and my husband’s earnings dropped.

I found that I could not work a steady job and continue to do fertility treatment. I was trying to coordinate job interviews over an hour away, alongside clinic appointments and other therapies, all the while attempting to balance the side effects of treatment. And I felt I couldn’t talk about my situation to prospective employers.

‘A sort of half-life’

My husband and I did not furnish our home. We did not complete renovations needed in our second hand house that were planned in the beginning. We did not take holidays. We were living a very restricted kind of life, a sort of half-life – trying to cope with the financial costs of affording fertility treatment on one income, while also adhering to a very restricted lifestyle, recommended to us by the experts.

At one stage my husband was working two jobs – his normal nine-to-five job six days a week, and then Friday and Saturday nights he used to work in a bar in a nightclub, getting home about 4am. He did that for about a year just to get extra money. We probably spent close to sixty grand over the time.

We saw ourselves drawing away from the world around us. We weren’t talking about our situation, and when we would get together with friends and family and they would ask about us, we never knew what to say. We both became disconnected, depressed and eventually needed counselling… Another cost.

After six failed cycles, we found ourselves utterly empty and depleted of every resource. We were broke; financially, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. We were even questioning the future of our marriage. Fertility treatments had put a huge strain on us.

‘It was like I could breathe again’

We still felt very isolated in our grief. So, we started looking for a support group. The first few meetings we attended were overwrought with emotion. I remember feeling so relieved to be in that room with other couples, other women, who knew how I felt. It was like I could breathe again.

After realising how difficult it is to adopt in Ireland, we instead started planning for our tandem cycle, abroad. This method of treatment, not offered in Ireland, meant that we were going to use my eggs, donor eggs, my husband’s sperm, and donor sperm. We wanted to give ourselves one last chance.

In order to give ourselves the best possible chance of a baby, we transferred donor eggs fertilised with both my husband’s and a donor’s sperm, and we now have an amazing two-year-old. None of this would have been possible without the help and support we found in the support group. We were falling apart at the time and the connections we made enabled us to begin to heal and move forward.

Infertility is a disease, and it can be a debilitating one in so many ways. There is no part of life that it doesn’t impact. Of  course, we were very happy to finally have our baby. But I think the harder thing to admit is that it was really hard, after what we went through. In our forties, we were so exhausted and depleted of energy going into it. Keeping up with the demands of parenting a premature baby with medical needs was overwhelming.

Our son is our world, testament to a difficult life together and the sacrifices we have made, but we would not change it for anything. When he was a baby, the only thing that ever calmed him was when I sang You Are My Sunshine to him, and there are no truer words.

*Names have been changed.

Let’s talk about fertility and plan ahead with Vhi Healthcare’s new range of fertility benefits. Vhi Healthcare’s fertility benefits are designed to help you at every stage of your journey, from initial investigations and advice, to counselling and fertility treatment including IVF. For more information, visit vhi.ie/fertility. 

Read the rest of our Let’s Talk About Fertility series here>