Author: Stephanie Rodgers

Stephanie Rodgers is a campaigner, communicator, and commentator on New Zealand politics. She provides advice on messaging and communications strategy, media and social media, organisational culture and crisis management for progressive and community organisations.
Where the story goes next

Where the story goes next

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

So I’ve already written a lot about the IVF process we went through to get pregnant. The next obvious step is to talk about pregnancy. And that’s a topic that could (and will) fill a lot of blog posts. So I’m going to try to break it down in as logical a way as possible – and probably occasionally swerve back into the present day when there’s something I want to rant about (yesterday it was “people pushing kids’ faces into birthday cakes” because WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU).

Except it’s not a logical process, from the very beginning. The way pregnancy gets portrayed, in books and movies and TV and even in the pre-natal books you read for homework, it just happens (no IVF!) and then you get the test to find out (not multiple tests and scans and weeks of anxiety to confirm!) and then you (the joyful-despite-being-ridden-with-morning-sickness mother) break the news joyfully to the totally-oblivious dad, possibly involving some elaborate surprise like hiding the stick you just peed on in a can of his beer, and suddenly everyone knows and also in the very next scene the baby has arrived.

While we were trying, the scary algorithms that control YouTube marketing kept showing me an ad for ClearBlue pregnancy tests, which can, they say, tell you to the week how pregnant you are. They showed two nice normal skinny white ladies (the only people who can acceptably be pregnant in advertising) sitting together. One tells the other, “I’m pregnant.” “How far along???” her friend (I assume, pregnancy ads are usually aggressively heterosexual). “Two weeks!”

Who the hell is telling anyone when they’re two weeks pregnant was my main question.

Also … did they actually mean four weeks? Because at “two weeks pregnant”, you’re not actually pregnant. Pregnancy is timed from your last menstrual period, not the date of conception, because one of those is a lot easier to keep track of due to the, um, physical indications and extra laundry. At “two weeks” the best you can hope for is that your ovaries are in a good mood.

(This is why the recent Texas 6-week abortion ban is so ridiculously restrictive: even people with a clockwork 28-day menstrual cycle will have “only about one week before the “six-week” threshold to confirm pregnancy” before they’re out of time to seek abortion care, if they want or need to.)

It was very irritating, is what I’m saying.

The process of telling people wasn’t that tidy for us, by any means. When you’re doing IVF, a lot of people know, not just that you’re trying, but that there are very specific dates involved. Some of our closest family members knew very quickly, and thankfully, were very understanding that we didn’t want to go public or even really commit ourselves emotionally until more time had passed. If you’ve confided in a work colleague or supervisor, especially because you’re taking sick days for procedures like egg harvesting and embryo transfer, they have a pretty clear sense of whether you might have news or not.

The day of our successful embryo transfer, I’d already had a massage booked for weeks and figured it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to be nice and relaxed – and the therapist was already a very good friend – so I had to mention it to her, just for caution’s sake, before baby had even had a proper chance to implant. I was being a Wrong Mama again: you’re not meant to get massage during the first trimester, they say. But it wasn’t even the first trimester yet, was it?

The point is, she was literally the first person I told after I left the clinic and while I love her, that was not the plan.

When we went into COVID level 2 restrictions I needed to call my GP to see if my fleeting sore throat warranted getting a test, and felt it was something I should probably mention then, too.

My regular feminist book club / fight club / wine friends were always going to figure it out when I started ordering ginger beer instead of my usual sours and ciders. They were good enough not to ask but the big reveal lacked a bit of revelation given they’d all been sitting there staring at my glass for the whole evening.

What this all added up to was people finding out in a very higgledy-piggledy way, well before I was really comfortable with the idea. And for weeks afterwards I was trying to remember who knew, who I should call, who would have seen the Facebook post we eventually did.

I wish it had been easier. And I wish I could have been more comfortable telling people in those early days.

The main reason I think people don’t, is that there’s a huge cloud around losing pregnancy. We – I really mean Pākehā, I can’t speak for others! – aren’t comfortable with the grief, with the loss of such potential, the disappointment of such hopes and expectations, and on top of that we don’t have cultural mechanisms to process it well or even at all, probably coming from our fairly locked-down / patriarchal / Christian / British roots. So we don’t tell people until the “risky stage” is over, to save them from the grief and to save us from having to suffer it publicly. It’s a dark personal secret, and gets treated as a brave revelation when people talk about their experiences of miscarriage – because it is brave. It invites a huge additional emotional burden on top of everything you’re going through (and opens you up to abuse and judgement because that’s the nightmare society we live in).

Even when everything goes according to plan, there’s still that period of hunkering down and hoping and praying, without being able to reach out to other people to share the load.

For us, having kind-of lost our first attempt (I don’t really count it because it was so fleeting and I did, somehow, manage not to pin all my hopes and dreams on it) and having told a few people – the necessary ones – I really didn’t want to get anyone else’s hopes up on our behalf again. But I also wished for someone to share it with who wasn’t my partner, i.e. the other person going through the experience. Some perfect, detached, supportive being who wasn’t also weighed down with the what-ifs and the what-if-nots.

I don’t have a tidy answer (I almost never do). As with everything in pregnancy, I don’t think there is one. You’ll feel wrong if you tell people, like you’ve jinxed yourself, and if it all goes well you’ll feel wrong for worrying. You can only make the best decision for yourself – which isn’t the same thing as a comfortable decision.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Please. Get vaccinated.

Please. Get vaccinated.

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 1 Comment

This week, a parent with a baby in the NICU at Auckland City Hospital tested positive for COVID 19. The next day, a newborn tested positive at North Shore hospital after being visited by their father, who then tested positive.

It’s pretty much every family’s nightmare.

I don’t think I have to tell anyone what COVID 19 is. It’s serious. It’s killed over four and a half million people across the world – and that’s likely to be an undercount – and caused ongoing health issues even for people who survive. It impacts everyone who needs healthcare because if the hospitals are full of COVID patients, other people aren’t able to get care.

Our littlest ones can’t get vaccinated against COVID 19 (and a lot of adults either can’t, because of severe allergic reactions, or if they can, aren’t able to build as strong an immune response). That’s one reason it’s our responsibility as parents to get vaccinated: for them. The more people in their community who are vaccinated, the less likely it is COVID can get a foothold and break out in that community.

If you’re pregnant, or breastfeeding baby (or feeding them your expressed milk via bottle) the other reasons are really practical: there’s evidence that getting vaccinated means your immune system creates antibodies which pass on to baby either in the womb or through breastmilk. It’s not going to be as strong as vaccination, but every little bit helps.

And circling back to the first reason: getting immunized, in turn, makes it safer for babies whose parents aren’t able to breastfeed.

Vaccines are the reason we don’t have smallpox any more. We’ve all but eradicated polio in most countries, because of vaccination. In Aotearoa, we already immunise our babies against a lot of things like measles, whooping cough and pneumococcal disease, to stop them getting sick and to stop those diseases spreading in our communities and whānau. We’ve been really, really good at locking down and staying home and washing our hands to stop COVID running rampant through our neighbourhoods; getting vaccinated is another sensible, important step, to take care of each other and to be able to relax our public health measures.

Please. Get vaccinated.

~

After I drafted this post, Marama Davidson (queen, icon, wahine toa) made a really important Twitter thread about convincing members of her whānau to get vaccinated. If you think that thread, or even this post, might help convince someone – share it far and wide.

Photo by Marisol Benitez on Unsplash

Being a wrong mama

Being a wrong mama

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

In an almost too-perfect turn of events, the first version of this post got lost to posterity. Maybe it was in a random Word document that didn’t get saved when I shut down the computer too late at night after too little sleep. Maybe it’s hiding in some bizarre folder. Maybe I accidentally posted the whole thing to Facebook already?

Anyway!

I’m Stephanie, a Pākehā, feminist, brand-new mother-of-one from Wellington, Aotearoa. I’m a word nerd at heart, and I’ve always been a writer, and I definitely love to overthink things. So of course I took a lot of notes during pregnancy and the early days of parenting and decided – eventually – to share those with the world. On the one hand, I thought, we probably don’t need yet another mummy blog (worst phrase ever); on the other, I rebutted, we might need one like this.

The title of this blog comes from the overwhelmingly dominant feeling I had in the early weeks of Baby’s life: that I was doing everything wrong (I even messed up giving birth to her). Making every choice poorly (Formula? Pacifiers? Disposable nappies!). Doing the worst things I possibly could and thus ruining my daughter before she even had a chance to prove herself.

I know a lot of mamas and other parents feel the same way. And I know it’s infinitely easier to deal with when you can talk to each other and reaffirm, as often as possible, that you’re not alone. It’s also easy to forget as soon as you have a rough day or your routine gets thrown out the window – which is a universal feature of parenting.

So here we are. A place for to share and commiserate and remind each other that there’s nothing wrong with being a Wrong Mama – and making less-than-perfect choices for your bub is a long way off from actually harming or neglecting them.

There’s a few posts up already, from another blog I write which is more ranty and political (of course there’s nothing to get ranty and political about when it comes to parenting, right?). Those talk about the journey (I kind of hate that word too but it’s the best we’ve found so far) my partner and I had going through IVF. The road to pregnancy and having your child can be just as difficult and even harrowing as everything afterwards. And you definitely feel like you’re doing it wrong when you have to turn to science to make your baby.

It’s tough to make commitments with a wee bub on the hip, but I’m going to aim for a weekly post here. Even if it’s just a bit of fun. And who knows what else might develop? If you have any suggections, let me know in the comments below! You can also subscribe to get posts delivered to your email. And don’t follow me on Twitter. It’s mostly just yelling about NZ politics and science fiction.

See you next time!

Photo by Tetiana SHYSHKINA on Unsplash

And then, the good news

And then, the good news

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 1 Comment

I hate curtain patterns that don’t repeat in a nice orderly fashion. Something about them makes my brain twitch, and I don’t like to think how much of my life I’ve spent staring at drapes (or wallpaper) trying to find the nice clean border where everything starts all over again.

It feels like I should draw some deep-and-meaningful lesson from that but I can’t think what it is.

The curtains in the little rooms – more like cubicles – in the old Fertility Associates office in Wellington did not repeat. They were an obnoxious mess of green and blue and orange and yellow, squares and swirls and stripes, and oh, what a relief for my brain it was to have that chaotic vomit to focus on instead of what was ahead: our second embryo transfer, with the spare, frozen blastocyst from our first round of egg harvesting.

The clinic was busy that day and I could hear parts of murmured conversations in the neighbouring cubicles. It felt very isolating, and not just because I was on my own for this one. The thing is, you and every other person in there is in exactly the same boat – nobody else in the world knows as well as they do what you’re going through at that exact moment – but you’re separated, by literal walls and also social ones. This isn’t a waiting room where you make eye contact and smile at other people, much less strike up a conversation. You don’t know what stage they’re at – what news they’re here to hear – but you know exactly what the worst case scenario is.

The clinic is obviously aware of this dynamic, so there’s a sign on the cubicle wall for their Facebook group. Here, it says, here’s a safe place to make those connections. We never joined. I don’t like sharing my grief in the moment (she says, on her public blog), I don’t even know how to contain it within myself, it just felt too hard to push it onto others or have theirs pushed onto me.

Once again, it was a quick, clean procedure. Almost too much so. There’s nothing big and scary like sedation or a waiting period to focus your anxiety, so it all goes onto the next week-and-a-bit waiting for the next pregnancy test; and in my case, on work. I was at Parliament while we went through this, and our second transfer happened at the end of July; only six weeks before Parliament dissolved and I lost every scrap of job security.

They say there’s never a good time to have a baby, but I still feel like we chose a particularly terrible one;* on the other hand, it wasn’t a choice. It was a need.

And then the results came in.

And we won the lottery.

I’d spent the whole month, since our first transfer failed, telling myself over and over that someone has to beat the odds. That’s the ironic thing about what I mentioned in the last post, about the idea that every infertility story has a happy ending. When you’re going through it, it feels like everyone you talk to has an unhappy ending. Or tried and tried and tried and tried again and maybe, finally, through sheer force of will and luck and persistence, it happened.

I don’t think I know anyone who got as lucky as we did.

J was home when I got the phone call, so he found out almost as soon as I did; and in true J fashion, his first question was whether there was something performative he was supposed to do. I told him jewellery, or a car.

It was the happiest day of my life, and yet … it’s the same story I feel I’ve told already. Every bit of success on this path just opens up more avenues for failure and anxiety. This blood test was good. But there was another only days away. Three weeks after that, the “early scan”. More appointments in the diary to get good news, or the worst.

I just assumed these early days are when there’s the highest risk of losing a pregnancy. But no one ever said it. I guess you don’t need one more thing to worry about.

Probably the worst bit was having to keep up the damn pessaries. I was looking forward to having clean underwear again.

And on top of all that we had J’s contract at work ending, the election another week closer, and at some point we had thought about moving house before we had a baby, and …. how???

I’m almost happier now, reflecting back, than I was on that day. Because now I’m free of those worries (found plenty of new ones, have no fear). I know that the Wednesday blood test will be strong again, and the early scan will be the first time I see my baby’s heart beating, and everything, everything will work out. Hindsight is great like that.

~

*Four days after the pregnancy test, four cases of COVID-19 were found in Auckland, which went into a level 3 lockdown, the rest of the country to level 2. Great timing, like I said.

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

The bad news

The bad news

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This is pretty much the verbatim post I wrote, on 11 June 2020, when it was confirmed our first embryo transfer hadn’t taken. I still find it upsetting to read, and it gets sweary, so, approach at your own discretion.

(Content note: infertility, pregnancy loss)

I was pretty sure what the result would be. I thought I’d been pretty chill. Not getting my hopes up, and not setting any expectations, reminding myself it’s all just a coin toss and no one knows why it does or doesn’t take. But there was too much blood, and it was too red, and so it wasn’t a surprise when they called with the blood test results. Negative. No baby this time. And I cried anyway. For a moment. But I was at work – my first day back after the COVID lockdown, what fun – so I pulled my shit together and powered through the next four hours, with just a tiny catch in my throat when I called J to let him know.

It’s always really awful to realise you have no idea what’s going on in your own head. Because I thought I had it together. Like I said: no expectations. No telling myself the stars were aligned, the odds were in our favour. I think a core part of me just assumed we’d fail, like so many of our friends failed, again and again and again. I hoped, but I didn’t stake my mental wellbeing on hope. I thought.

It’s so fucking hard to cry and not have any idea why. To not be able to pin down the frustration, the source of the pain. I didn’t think of our embryo as a baby, not yet. I kept telling myself the odds were bad. But – as J kept reinforcing to me because he’s wonderful – it’s still a loss. It’s still a disappointment. And whether you’re thinking about it or not, whether you think you’ve got closure on it or not, there’s all the years of disappointment that suddenly crystallize into one point in your mind and demand emotional release.

The TLDR is I just cried a lot. Without having anything to say, which is unusual for me.

I decided to vent everything by drinking a whole bottle of prosecco. It wasn’t as satisfying as I thought. J had his friends over for their usual game night so I stayed in the study, trying to find something on Steam that would give me the right mix of mindless, violent entertainment without requiring any skill or coordination, which is not in any way my usual gaming taste. I watched some random YouTube videos. I wrote angry tweets about Black Lives Matter and explained in cold, crystal terms why JK Rowling was a confirmed transphobe in Facebook comments. I daydreamed about shouting at people I’d never be allowed to shout at.

It’s almost cliche that when I’m upset, my brain turns to the political injustice of the situation. It’s too painful to dwell on my own frustrated need to be a mother. It’s too hard to reflect on whether I already did think of our doomed little embryo as a baby, a future child. I hadn’t picked a name. But I had picked the name I wanted to pick if the test were positive. But that’s not the same. Unless it is.

Fuck all that. It was so much easier to sink into a rant – to myself, to my non-operational webcam – about fat politics, about our fucked up health system’s racist fatphobia which just happens to impact some white women like me.

We could have been trying this five years ago (when the odds are incrementally better) if the Ministry of Health didn’t use fucking BMI to ration healthcare. If we’re doomed to not have children, if that’s something I’m going to have to accept and work through, we could have been and gone through that fucking trauma already, and have a plan to age disgracefully through our 40s and 50s instead of still being stuck at the trying, and failing, and having no fucking idea stage.

I keep yelling at the mirror: I do (well, before COVID, did) eight hours of dance class a week. Our infertility isn’t anything to do with my health or my size. Yet my size is used, was used, continues to be used to deny us the chance to have children without forking out tens of thousands of dollars.

How the fuck am I supposed to succeed with that stress hanging over my head?

Addendum

The funny thing is, there’s been some conversation on Twitter recently about how every infertility story you hear has a happy ending. The accepted, appropriate narrative to share is one that ends with miracles and sunshine. And let’s be honest: that’s what these posts are. I know I only feel comfortable sharing my outpouring of grief and frustration *because* there’s a baby-shaped pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

And that sucks. It was something I felt really strongly when we were in the middle of this process, and a big part of me was convinced we were going to fail anyway. And aren’t I now just contributing to that narrative by only posting these posts with the hindsight of a positive outcome?

The thing is, whatever the outcome, the process is a gruelling, alienating one. And a lot of it gets glossed over even in the happy-ending narratives (probably because comparing your vaginal discharge to candle wax is a little TMI for most people. But not me!). There are few enough raw, nitty-gritty accounts of what it’s like to go through IVF – certainly I couldn’t find many when I needed them – and from other experiences I’ve had since baby was born I’ve really appreciated the power of a personal account with those little details you just don’t get from a fertility clinic webpage or a human interest news article. The feedback from members of our family, who knew we did IVF but had no idea what that really entailed on a day-to-day basis, and the sheer number of people I know, who’ve now told me they did IVF but never mentioned it before, tells me this has value.

For those who have tried, or are trying, or stopped, for whatever reason, I know that it’s only a matter of sheer bastard luck that I’m not in your shoes. And that’s so unfair. And your stories deserve to be told too.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

First transfer

First transfer

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

(Content note: this one involves my vagina, like, a lot. Also blood. And that whole infertility/anxiety thing.)

Of our four fertilised eggs, two were deemed high-quality enough to proceed to the next stage, embryo transfer. The old days of putting multiple embryos back into your uterus to increase the chances of pregnancy are gone, apparently, so we were able to keep one, and freeze one as a backup. That provided a lot of reassurance, and even a tiny sliver of hope that we could think about having a second baby one day, without having to go through all this rigmarole again.

But first: the pessaries.

Between egg collection and embryo transfer the clinic gave me progesterone pessaries. “Luteal support” they call it. It’s great for maintaining a soft cushy lining in your uterus, and also for getting SUPER FAMILIAR with your own vagina.

I was on two pessaries, three times a day. You insert them much like a tampon, except it’s a small plasticky ball bearing (indeed, two small ball bearings) going right up to the edge or your cervix – and sometimes the little sods WILL try to follow your finger back out and sit uncomfortably like an over-full tampon right at the opening.

They warn you, “You’ll get some waxy discharge.” The pessaries are mostly made of vegetable oil, and that’s the part that doesn’t get sucked up your cervix. So it makes sense something’s going to come back out. Except you’re thinking “vegetable oil” and not “it will look like someone’s literally ground the end of a candle into your knickers”. It’s white. It’s solid. Bits WILL fall out of your labia or off your loo paper and float on the surface of the toilet like cut-price fake snow.

It is a deeply weird process.

My top tip? Set your timer ten minutes early. Use that time to cue up a podcast, get into your pyjamas (obviously for the last-thing-at-night round, but maybe also for the other two as well?) and go to the toilet, after turning the bathroom tap on to warm.

I was doing this as winter was threatening, and there is nothing that’s going to make this routine worse than washing your hands in icy cold water before they go up your snatch.

The transfer

Every other stage of the process has a heavy sense of ceremony, even though what’s happening is invisible. The daily injections. The close monitoring of your ovaries. The drugged-out ritual of egg collection.

Embryo transfer was simultaneously the most important thing we ever did, and the most trivial. No sedation, no long waiting period; you walk into the room under your own steam and lie down on the same bed, but fully aware of everything; you try to make out the shape of your own uterus on the ultrasound; and then there’s a long needle, a twinge, and a tiny white speck seems to float up into your body.

And that’s it. Get up, off you go. The paperwork is reassuring: literally, “don’t worry, your embryo won’t fall out”. They are very good at knowing what you’re afraid of. But I was already an overthinker before we started all this and after weeks of hyper-focusing on every little detail, worrying that anything could be The One Thing That Makes Or Breaks This – am I timing the injections properly? When do I need to stop eating? Are the pessaries in far enough? Have I lain down for long enough? Don’t forget you can’t lie down all the time, some exercise is good! But what kind of exercise? – having that microscopic dot so full of potential and hope sitting back inside your body really does feel like the one thing you cannot fuck up.

I’d seen it. It was really there, even if I couldn’t feel it. And everything rested on whether or not it would find a home in the lining of my uterus. I was the closest I had ever been to being pregnant, but things were still completely out of my control.

There was nothing to do but wait for the blood test that would seal my fate. (You could probably take an over-the-counter test but God, why do that to yourself?)

The wait.

Nine days later, I was 90% sure my period had started. But I didn’t want to think about that, so I ignored it, telling myself again and again that what mattered was the blood test, the phone call, the certainty of a clinician’s voice on the line, not my own total inability to determine if the smear on my pad was actually red (bad) instead of reddish brown (possibly good).

Some brownish spotting is normal, you are told. Or at least they phrase it, “some women do have brown spotting before a positive pregnancy test” but they don’t give you the exact numbers because like every other stage of this process it’s really just magic. It happens or it doesn’t. No one knows why.

Of course, for me and many other people who menstruate, brownish spotting is ALSO perfectly normal immediately before my period properly starts. So the past 24 hours was really fun: checking the paper every time I wipe, is that brown? Brownish? Is there a bit more pink than last time? Inserting pessaries becomes a whole new world of miniature gore when you get to pull out your finger and assess what’s trapped under your fingernail. Definitely brown. Reddish but brown. Definitely.

Don’t worry, part of me definitely wonders if this is Too Much Information. But I really do wish I’d known about some of this in advance. I wish I’d spoken to my friends who have also gone through IVF about these small mucky details – but that’s a whole other difficult topic. The point is, what the clinic are going to tell you is the cool, clinical (sorry) details. However compassionate they are, there are just details you don’t hear about and have no way of anticipating.

The literature they give you is full of reassurance. It’s normal to overthink things. It’s normal to worry, or cry, or take a day off work. Normal normal normal.

But when it’s your first time, nothing is normal. And every abdominal twinge, every damp feeling in your knickers, is either a sure sign you’re pregnant and it’s wonderful OR a definite sign you’re not and you’ve failed again, and you swing between the two on an endless painful oscillation that only ends with time.

The phone call came. And it was not good news.

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

The eggs, the lube, the triggering

The eggs, the lube, the triggering

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Just as the self-injection routine started to get good and routine, and I wasn’t having a total emotional break on a daily basis, came the sharp reminder that this was only one stage in a massive project, and things had to be kept on track. At this point, that meant an ultrasound, and not the television-friendly wand-on-the-tum kind. The question was: were my ovaries responding properly to the hormones, and growing a whole bunch of eggs?

They were.

I got to see the swollen follicles myself, gaping black voids on the surface, a definitely upsetting experience for anyone with trypophobia (the fear of lots of little holes). They were measured and found to be sufficient in quantity and size by the doctor – who was not my usual consultant; and a bit of warning might have been nice, given he was a man.

A note on lube

Now, I have nothing against cis men – like Cher, I love dessert – but there’s a distinct difference when it’s a guy controlling the plastic wand going up your groin. On the social conditioning side of things it just feels very very awkward to be giving guidance like “a bit lower; no, that’s too hard; yep, that’s it” to someone I have zero, possibly even negative, sexual interest in.

On the physical side of things, there’s lube.

I’m just going to put it like this. If you are a medical professional who does not now have, and never has had, a vagina, and your work involves putting things in other people’s vaginas, you need to lube that wand like it’s going up your own butt.

IVF is a process that involved a lot of vaginal ultrasounds so I can definitively say, from the other side of it, I would rather have to wipe some excess gel out of my labia afterwards than feel like screaming “what’s wrong with a kiss, boy?” in my best John Cleese at a thoroughly professional clinician.

Anyway.

Things looked pretty good, so I was sent home with more drugs, ready for the next stage.

And there was not much to do but sit at home and be consumed with ~feelings~. It’s a paradox: after so incredibly long, thinking about nothing but wanting this and trying for this and counting days and degrees and becoming an expert on one’s own cervical mucus, we’d overcome one of the big hurdles … and I wanted things to slow down.

From deciding to go private to the first consultation was only a few weeks (longer than usual due to COVID); from consultation to first injection was only a week after that, thanks to a well-timed menstrual cycle.

Then it’s one more week, and you’re on the doorstep of egg collection and insemination (and handing over another couple of thousand dollars) and a whole new cycle of waiting and hoping and not being able to do anything to affect the outcome, until you get told if you’ve been lucky, if there’s an embryo, if they can try to plant something back into you that might become the baby you’ve ached for and you have no idea what you’ll do if you can’t make a home for it inside yourself.

It feels impossible that everything can move so quickly after it’s taken so long to get here. It feels unthinkable to process it all in just a few weeks – when you couldn’t even start to process the idea of being infertile for a decade.

Triggering

There’s an obvious internet-discourse joke to be made here. I will refrain.

Once the ovaries were signed off and the blood tests were checked, we were on a rigid timeline. The New Injection, Ovidrel, had to go in at 9pm sharp. It’s a “trigger” injection that tells your eggs to get ready to rumble after they’ve been hanging out on your ovaries, refusing to go anywhere. That was the easy bit after a week of practice with Gonal-F: same pen shape, same needle tip.

Then put 36 hours on the clock for egg collection. It’s a weird time span to think about. Doing something 24 hours beforehand? Easy, that’s how time works. Doing something this evening to prepare for the morning after tomorrow morning is confusing as hell. I don’t know how many times I checked the instructions and the calendar and the time – yes, Stephanie, today is TUESDAY so the after tomorrow is THURSDAY and you are taking the drugs at the right time, that’s why the text message from the clinic says TONIGHT, just like that, in all caps.

They’re used to these kinds of meltdowns.

On Wednesday, do not eat after midnight (and make a Gremlins joke). On Thursday morning, clear liquids only and three paracetamol.

Off to the lab. Local anaesthetic. Sedation. Prepping for a needle to go all the way into my ovaries and burst those little black bubbles – so huge on the monitor but only 2cm across in reality. Which may or may not be huge in the context of an ovary. I don’t even know how big an ovary is. Call myself a feminist!

And hopefully, the bubbles contain eggs, which the clinic pulls out of me and introduces to J’s elite swim team; and Mum picks me up and takes me home and I sink into an indulgent haze of tea and biscuits and awful television.

That was the plan, and clearly everything went according to it, but I simply don’t remember. It’s like having your wisdom teeth out: I have such a vivid memory of the dentist telling my mother, “I’ll give you the instructions because she won’t remember”, and I scoffed, and after that … nothing.

I took a very bleary selfie in the prep area. I stared at the bizarre curtain patterns. I walked myself into the procedure room, very proud of not being the slightest bit dizzy, and then … not a freaking clue. I don’t even know if I got tea and biscuits.

End result: four eggs, which didn’t feel great. From that, four fertilised eggs, which felt miraculous.

And then we waited, to see how many would survive the first five days, and be viable to be implanted back into me.

It always comes back to waiting.

Photo by Natalie Rhea on Unsplash

The needles

The needles

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

(Content note: infertility, IVF, injections)

I definitely didn’t plan it this way, but here we are carrying on with the anniversaries: because it was a year ago today that I found myself wandering down Victoria Street carrying five thousands dollars’ worth of the less fun kind of drugs.

The first big piece of the IVF puzzle is the eggs. You need to stimulate the ovaries to produce as many as possible, then collect them so they can be fertilised in the lab. And that means playing with hormones – which is exactly what you need on top of all the emotional and psychological pressure of nearly a decade of trying and failing to have a baby.

Put it this way: I needed to start taking the first set of jabs on day 1 of my menstrual cycle. And as everyone with a period tracking app knows, day 1 is counted from when you get full or “normal” flow – for your typical cycle – before noon.

So when my period started at 12:30 on a Saturday, I naturally had a minor breakdown about how to count days, and also time. Did that count? Was it day one??? How heavy was a normal period for me anyway????

J gave me a very firm look and said “It’s full flow before noon. That means day one is tomorrow.”

On the plus side, I impressed the Fertility Associates nurse with my quick command of popping a needle onto the drug pen and jabbing it into a weird beige eight-by-five centimetre piece of demonstration “belly” skin. It felt like a weird magical ritual, and also too easy, but also the most difficult thing in the world. At least I knew that my feelings were very normal, based on how many times the nurse reassured me that I definitely wasn’t going to screw it all up.

I didn’t. My hands didn’t even shake. But that didn’t stop at least some part of my brain from freaking out anyway; I spent the rest of the evening walking around with incredibly tensed posture, like my belly was made of porcelain and any movement might shatter it. Porcelain with a very very sharp little mosquito bite in it.

My medication plan involved taking the injection (Gonal-F) for a week, and on day 6 adding another one (which hurt like hell) to make my ovaries hold on tight to all those precious eggs they were (hopefully) prepping.

When it came to it, I once again forgot what counted as day 1 of my cycle, and/or how to count to 6, and ended up calling the clinic just to double-triple check the very clear instructions I had already been given verbally and in writing.

They are very, very accustomed to those kinds of phone calls and were very, very kind about it. It didn’t stop me feeling bloody silly. How on earth was I qualified to have a baby if I couldn’t manage something this simple?

You’d think that by day seven it becomes old hat, nothing to worry about, you’ve nailed this process. You’ve got your little prep ritual ready, with a comfortable place to sit and a cup of peppermint tea at the ready to stave off the nausea.

But with IVF there’s always the next step in the process to worry about. And the next step was an ultrasound scan to see if my ovaries were cooperating. Something I could not see or control or have any sense about until it happened.

No pressure.

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

My first Mother’s Day

My first Mother’s Day

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

(Content note: infertility, mental health, motherhood)

A bouquet of bright red flowers on a wooden table

Mother’s Day has never been the most problematic artificially-hyped-to-sell-stuff-parental-celebration holiday for me. I grew up ~without a father~ (he bailed; his loss) so it was always the unthinking way we/marketing departments assume that everyone has A Dad to celebrate, and the consequent erasure of dudes who play an amazing role in kids’ lives, which irked me on an annual basis.

But once we’d started trying to have a baby, and the years of it just-not-happening ticked over, Mother’s Day took on a more personal impact. I wanted to be a mum, and it felt further and further away every year, which was only added to by the doom-and-gloom messages that are constantly around about Women’s Fertility Crashing And Burning Further And Further Every Day You Age Past 35 27 23 18 your own birth.

(This cropped up again last week when TVNZ Breakfast were doing a series of stories on infertility, which were really important but also managed to screen each morning at exactly the time I was feeding the baby and trying to find something to watch on TV. Here’s the thing: the “at 35 your fertility dies” trope is not exactly scientific and we need to have way better conversations about why people actually delay having kids – even if you don’t have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for fertility treatment.)

A part of me assumed I would just never be a mother. Even once we had the resources to do IVF, the odds felt too great. If the grand narrative of my life was going to go one way, it just felt far more likely I’d end up with She Desperately Wanted Children But Could Not Conceive than the Hallmark/Lifetime/TLC movie After Years And Against All Odds, A Miracle.

I’ve had anxiety and depression all of my adult life, so the horrible little voices at the back of my brain telling me I’m doomed are so familiar it’s almost comfortable. And they just got louder every time the TV filled with images of blissful mums-and-bubs and saccharine time lapses of The Most Important Relationship You’ll Ever Have.

(Shout out to the current Pandora jewellery campaign for casting a mother and daughter so close in age appearance that I still can’t quite parse the timeline of your ads!)

Often it felt like a grand signal from the universe to just give up. Because the odds are so against you. Because the obstacles are so real and so high. Because if it doesn’t happen – especially after putting yourself through the ordeal of IVF – haven’t you just wasted years, and money, that could have gone to something better, something more productive?

(I still haven’t even begun to unpack the way my brain obsesses about “productivity”.)

I have many friends who did exactly this. Drew the line in the sand and said, enough. But always with a huge amount of sorrow. That was why we struck that deal with ourselves: three rounds. Enough to say we tried, we gave it our best shot, but it wasn’t meant to be and let’s now focus on what the rest of our lives look like without children.

I honestly don’t know right now if I would have been able to stick to it, or how long it would have taken me to let go, if I could even let go. I didn’t have to find out. We got very, very lucky.

So this year, I celebrate my first Mother’s Day. But not just that: it’s my mother’s first Mother’s Day as a grandmother. My grandmother’s first Mother’s Day as a great-grandmother. As horribly commercial and transparent as it is, that feels very important. At the same time, it brings up everything I’ve been through not just over the past year, but all the years of trying before that, and all the years of wanting and hoping before we could even try. I’m an only child: if I didn’t have a baby, my mother would never be a grandmother. I’m the eldest of my cousins and none of them seem to be interested in having kids any time soon: would we ever have gotten that gorgeous four-generations-in-one-photo?

(And again: let’s talk about how saddling young people with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, in order to get jobs with no long-term security or career path, while housing prices skyrocket, might have the teensiest impact on why millennials and zoomers keep Putting Off Having Children, yeah?)

It should feel like a happy ending. It does. But at the same time I don’t know when I’ll ever stop being just a little bit in mourning for all the grief and stress and painful, painful absence that this day represented for me for so long.

So this one goes to all the people who are still there. Who want to be mums, and can’t for whatever reason, and have to deal with the unthinking assumptions of our culture not just on this day but every other day of the year. It sucks. It doesn’t necessarily get better. I know there’s nothing that can really soothe that hurt because even holding onto hope feels like self-harm sometimes. Look after yourself.

I wrote the above a few days ago. Today, Michelle Duff published an incredibly important article about the Corrections department’s practice of shackling and handcuffing prisoners as they are giving birth, or breastfeeding.

It was probably a mistake to read that on my phone, with baby in arms, right after a feed.

Like I said on Twitter: everyone involved in this – the officers in the room, their direct supervisors, their direct supervisors, and anyone else who had knowledge of this and did nothing to stop it – needs to be fired, possibly into the sun.

It is simply unacceptable that we keep getting these stories coming out of Corrections. It is simply unacceptable that Corrections, and its Minister depending on where we are in the media cycle of any given scandal, thinks they can treat the public like marks who’ll swallow any horror if it has the phrase “security concerns” slapped on it.

This practice is against Corrections’ own stated policy and yet, AND YET,

Children’s Commissioner OPCAT inspectors found prison officers had varying interpretations of when prisoners were “pregnant” or “giving birth”.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

The officers involved in these situations are either ignorant of the basics of their own jobs, or know they’re doing the wrong thing. Either way, they have no place holding those jobs. And their senior leaders, including Kelvin Davis as the Minister responsible, need to stop pretending there’s some third option where oopsie, well-meaning people with the best of intentions just accidentally did a human rights violation oh well let’s commission another review to tell us what we already know: Corrections is not fit for purpose. It is not keeping New Zealanders safe by repeatedly and deliberately brutalising prisoners and lying about it to the public. It is not delivering care to the people it laughably euphemises as such. When pregnant, labouring people are shackled like animals and bullied in their most sensitive moments, Corrections is actively undermining any chance for those people and their families to rehabilitate, to build positive relationships, to feel like they can be a part of our communities.

This cannot be reformed without drastic and immediate action. Call it some kind of transformation rooted in kindness and strengthening the Māori-Crown partnership.

So, Kelvin?

Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis was not available for an interview.

Oh.

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

A year ago today

A year ago today

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

(Content note: infertility, IVF, fatphobia)

A year ago today, my partner and I “properly” began the journey to become parents. We’d been on the path for a very long time: first trying, and trying, and trying, and failing, then trying to get help, and facing some pretty gross obstacles to that; and finally being in a position to overcome those (with money, which tells you how unnecessary those obstacles were in the first place) and then having incredible good luck and at long last, after wanting and hoping and waiting and longing, just over a month ago, she arrived. Our baby. The tiny helpless bean who has completely turned our lives upside down. (Sorry, spoiler alert: this one has a happy ending.)

Of course, I wrote it all down. Even the bits I don’t even want to look at, myself, because they’re too raw. But there are parts I do want to share, and thus my blog is getting resurrected because I’m too much of an old school millennial to do Substack even if they weren’t currently tanking as a platform after pandering to transphobes.

(Yes, even in the posts about how much I love my baby, there will always be politics. You know where you are, right?)

As for the timing: I couldn’t bring myself to post this stuff earlier, unlike my good mate Dave who had the incredible courage-slash-lack-of-filter to write about his and Kim’s journey as it was happening. On top of all the other layers of anxiety we were going through, it just felt like it would be unlucky; or at the very least, it might force us to reveal things we weren’t ready to, even if just by the lack of posting at a critical moment.

But she’s here now, and she’s as close to perfect as she needs to be, and even though I still have that fretful voice in the back of my mind telling me not to count my baby chicken even though she’s already hatched, I think it’s the right time to start pulling all these scattered drafts and notes together – not to mention an essential outlet for my brain as I’m at home on paid parental leave, desperately trying to work out what my life looks like now I’m a mother, and feel almost incapable of considering myself having any other role in the world.

So here’s (most of) what I wrote after that first “proper” consultation – the one where you go to Fertility Associates with a lot of money and say “help us make a baby”. With a few editorial comments from Stephanie-Of-The-Future.

The first consultation is like an infomercial which demands your most intimate details. But wait, if you throw in even MORE money we can take time-lapse photos of the embryo to make sure its legs are on properly. And there are lots of options for freezing the eggs we HARVEST OUT OF YOUR BODY after an unspecified course of drugs and scans that get right up ya.

And all of that costs more money on top of the money you’re already putting in. And will it increase your chances of success? Those chances which are already worse than a coin flip? I could see the value for people who know they have specific genetic conditions, who have already tried and failed a few times – but when it’s your first turn on the carousel it feels like cynical upselling, and in a way, it hurts that early relationship with your doctor, because they’re not just there for you, y’know?

J hates every bit of it and I can’t really blame him. He’s “the problem”. The reason we couldn’t just make a baby the fun way.

And this never stopped being incredibly difficult for both of us.

And the money. Everyone says oh there’ll never be a good time to spend all this money – whether you have to have All The Medical Assistance or even if it just pops out of its own accord, babies are expensive – but it’s so difficult to pull the trigger when maybe if we just wait until THIS contract renews or THIS job offer arrives or THIS chunk of the mortgage is paid off … and of course the Clock Is Ticking and that stupid dotted line on that stupid fucking Probability Of Success Based On Age of Woman graph keeps edging down and down and down.

I will always wish we’d been able to do this sooner. I will always wish that we were in a situation to do it again, to consider having a second baby. What I can tell myself – now, in 2021, with my actual baby coma’d out in the living room after a healthy feed – is that things happen for a reason and if things had happened differently maybe we wouldn’t be here at all.

I’m the problem too, of course. The Aging Woman who didn’t chop her leg off five years ago to qualify for public funding – because that would have been fine, you see. It’s not actually relevant how big my belly is, it makes no difference to the chances of success. BMI is literally just picking one variable – fatness – out of the hat in order to “ration” public healthcare. The best bit is it’s completely fucking racist but our society is so comfortable with openly hating fat people we can get away with pretending it’s not a hatred fundamentally rooted in racism, classism, and body-hating white supremacy.

I could have lost a limb in a terrible accident and the health system would say oh okay, you’re obviously Healthy Enough to have a baby on us.

I could have starved myself, vomited every meal, taken amphetamines, and it would have meant we could have a baby, sooner, and cheaper, and without anyone questioning how it happened – because losing weight when you’re fat is Always A Good Thing.

Jarrod interrupted the doctor to say that I’m a pole dance teacher. I was annoyed. I don’t need to fucking prove my fitness to her. It wouldn’t matter if I’d just won a marathon. Fertility Associates are getting the money one way or the other.

So this is going to be a pretty major theme. Our health system, wonderful and public as it is (except for GP appointments and many prescriptions and don’t start me on access to contraception and abortion services even AFTER we supposedly decriminalized) uses the unscientific quackery that is BMI to ration access to fertility services, which is baseless, harmful and transparently racist. This was not our first visit to Fertility Associates, not even the fifth – this was just the first one where we were allowed to progress past the basic tests into actually doing something towards making a baby.

Because despite being the picture of health – perfect blood pressure, non-smoker, and, yes, being literally paid to perform and teach pole dancing and being able to bust out twelve burpees in a minute at one particularly energetic cardio class – my weight, alone, divorced of context or nuance was the reason we couldn’t get public assistance for our infertility. The only advice? Lose weight.

But how? It’s a post for another day, but let me simply assert a simple fact at this point: diets don’t work. Not predictably, not sustainably, not healthily. And not if you call them “lifestyle changes” or pretend that counting “points” isn’t the same as counting “calories”. And even if they did, I want to be really clear: no one at the District Health Board (adios) or the Ministry of Health was going to check how I lost the weight, if I did.

And that’s why I wrote that, a year ago: I could have lost a limb and as far as a health system, using BMI to ration services, is concerned, that would have been enough to get public funding for our IVF. The numbers have nothing to do with health or probability of success or anything except using our society’s hatred of fat people as an excuse to cut costs.

So.

That was a whole extra mindf*ck to take going into a process which already carried so much emotional and psychological baggage. With such low odds of success regardless of my dress size. And we knew so many people who had gone through it, and failed, and failed again and again, and seen the toll it took. So I just had to keep reminding myself, as we left the clinic that day filled with a mixture of hope and dread:

Three rounds. That’s the deal. Even though we probably can’t get the lootbox deal (pay for three rounds now, and get a refund if they all fail – or lose it all if you succeed first time). I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I don’t even want to be doing it now.

And that’s why I waited a year to write this. Because there’s been a lot of strife and plenty of tears but at the end of the road, we got her.

If you like this post, feel free to spot me a virtual coffee.