Miraculous pregnancies: when they don’t happen to you

About six weeks have passed since my last failed IVF and my decision to stop treatment. I have slowly managed to get nearly back to my old self, happy, positive, engaged in life and looking forward to tackling new projects – probably thanks to the intensity of my sadness, of getting it out of my system in a watershed, not repressing anything. I thought that perhaps the worst was over. I am not the kind to get hugely upset by seeing pregnant women on the street, or babies in the supermarket – a little bit, maybe, but not enough to put me in a horrible mood. A sting of pain, yes, but I distract myself, or take comfort in a now “shoulder-to-shoulder” embrace with my “little” one.

But something happened on Sunday that is making me cry as I type. My dear friend, a beautiful, wonderful woman that I care about so much, came to visit me with her boyfriend of four months. She is 32 and about two months ago underwent an operation to help correct her extensive endometriosis. She was told that both of her Fallopian tubes were blocked, and that they had to remove quite large portions of her affected ovaries. She emailed me while I was in the Czech Republic awaiting my embryo transfer to say that she, too, would probably carry on in my footsteps, as the doctors told her that she would probably need IVF to conceive. As a result of this information, she and her new partner stopped using protection, whole two months ago.

She is now, against all medical odds, seven weeks pregnant, and announced it with joy but also some trepidation when they both came to see us on Sunday – she knew well about our plight, and is a great and compassionate friend to both of us. It stunned me. She got pregnant immediately, without any trying and effort. I am thrilled for her because she worried she would never be a mother, and doubly thrilled because she has a wonderful man by her side, so in spite of the short duration of their courtship I have great hopes for them to work out perfectly fine. I am genuinely happy for them both. But happy for them as I may be, I am all the more devastated for us. This case only highlights the crazy randomness of conception, which has not been favourable to us, even though we’ve done everything we could to help things along and summoned the best technology and medical advancements, several times over. It drove home the horrible unfairness of it all. I watched them, freshly in love, knowing how these news would transform their relationship, and thought of the fact that my husband will never get to experience his child growing inside me, that we will never create life together, and it hurt beyond words. I couldn’t sleep after they left, and spent the night thrown back into the black hole I thought I had climbed out of.

I was surprised by how easily this pain comes back. I had grieved in the past, lots – my parents, my previous marriage. So I know grief comes in waves. Some days are fine, some days it hits you like a ton of bricks. I just hope that it will hurt a bit less as the months and years go by. It would be so easy if we could just leave the “baby world” behind, and embrace fully the adolescent and adult world. I am able to move my mind onto other things, for the most part – there is so much in the world to think about and do, thankfully. But events like these, happening to close friends who are parts of our lives and whom I wouldn’t want to lose because of some “baby jealousy”, strip the plaster off the carefully concealed wound, exposing flesh that is still pretty raw. I hope I will manage to be a good and supportive friend through it all. I hope that one day I will not feel that we have been cruelly cheated – or at least, acknowledge it without having a breakdown. For the moment, though, I can just sit with my feeling of emptiness and loss, and watch. Nowhere to run away from myself – that is the hardest part of grieving.