Second miracle baby for infertile mum

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10 April 2012

They say lightning never strikes twice. The fact that it ever struck at all in my case was a miracle.

Having spent three years at the frontline of fertility treatment undergoing every medical procedure known to modern man — including more than 1,000 injections and a total change of white blood cells — I managed by some fluke to get pregnant on my own (although I was on Chinese herbs at the time).

The doctors were shocked. My husband was stunned and I was totally delighted.

And now four years on, with our miracle baby Allegra now at school and all the odds still firmly stacked against me (aged 41, I am very much in the "maternal crone" category), I have somehow managed to do it again.

Without drugs, pills or jabs, I am six-months' pregnant and can't believe it.

This time around my husband dropped his toolbox when I told him and needed a sit down. My doctor asked for early scan photos just to prove I wasn't lying.

Well, you can hardly blame them. Having undergone at least £10,000-worth of private IVF, ICSI (when they take individual sperm to fertilise the egg), artificial insemination twice and courses of Clomid fertility pills, as well as steroids, progesterone jabs, blood thinners and an IVIG (an eight-hour white blood cell transfusion) I was not an obvious candidate for a natural conception — particularly this late in the game.

Not that I hadn't thought or even fantasised about having another baby. I had. Often. But I had just kept very quiet about it, batting away questions at children's parties when nosy acquaintances would ask: "D'you want to have another?" the way they do when they run out of conversation after discussing mortgages and schools.

To which I always lied: "Oh no, I am happy with one." Before giving my best stiff smile and getting a stiff drink.

Truth is, I'd reasoned that I was happy with one. One is easy. You can travel with one. You can take one out to lunch. You can give one your undivided attention. And with both parents in work you can more or less provide for one.

They are a little bit spoilt, a little bit clingy and little bit precocious — but one makes sense. Or so I would try to convince myself.

Yet there was always the lurking longing for another. It is almost like your family isn't really complete unless you have more than one.

You're "playing" at being mummy, you've dipped your toe in the water but you haven't really plunged in and embraced the total chaos of parenthood.

I'd sit and watch with envy at groups of siblings crashing into each other in the park.

I'd feel a twinge of jealousy as friends ditched their nippy runaround for a bigger car as number two or even three were on their way.

Girlfriends would gently pat their fat fecund bellies and say something along the lines that this one was just another glorious mistake.

But my glorious mistake just wasn't happening. And truth be told I hadn't moved on.

Four years later, I was still unable to throw away the sacks of baby clothes gathering dust in my loft.

Secondary infertility (or SI) is one of those taboo subjects that women are not really supposed to talk about, let alone admit to.

It affects one in five couples and is, according to all sources, on the increase as the average age of women giving birth has risen over the years to 29.3 and more women over 40 are giving birth than ever before, up more than five per cent in the past two years.

We are leaving it later and later and thereby narrowing our options and our margin for error, so our fertility rates are often in deep decline by the time we get around to thinking about going for a second.

And if you have IVF once, you are more likely to have to resort to it again the second time around.

Not that the NHS is sympathetic to your cause. It is rare, if not impossible, to get a second child on the National Health, should you ever be brave enough to go down that route a second time.

And I have to say I just wasn't. I'd thought about it long and hard and I found myself incapable of opening Pandora's box a second time.

I am not sure if it was the insane hormone surges that put me off, the hot flushes as I crashed through a chemically induced menopause, or the bad temper and the constant weeping.

Perhaps it was the desperate two-week hiatus between procedures and waiting for the predictably negative pregnancy test. Or just the memory of those hours spent sitting in waiting rooms, furtively staring at the sad faces of other infertile women, that made me think I just couldn't go through with it.

How I remember the terrible irony of being forced to look at the "success" photos of bonny babies that lined the walls of the consultant's room — like they were some sort of serving suggestion — if you fed the voracious credit card machine in the hall long enough you too could go home with one of these.

Even when I did get pregnant, it took heparin, steroids, progesterone jabs and IVIG to keep her.

I soon realised I was much more scarred by the whole experience than I'd thought.

Having had acupuncture almost every week for three years while trying to get pregnant, I have never been able to face it again.

If anyone mentions reflexology or Chinese herbs I actually feel my heart race a little faster.

It took me a whole year after I had given birth to get rid of the yellow "sharps" bins full of used needles that I had stacked up in my bedroom.

And when I did finally hand them into my local St Charles' Hospital, I surprised myself by collapsing on the pavement into a heap of sobbing tears as I left the building.

So here I am, with my own fat belly full of glorious mistake, unbelievably conceived like most babies after a bottle of wine and a big night out.

But having finally seen the thin blue line, the question was should I do all the drugs that I'd done before to keep her? The heparin blood thinner? The progesterone jabs in the backside? The eight-hour blood plasma transfusion? Or should I go it alone?

In the end, my consultant at St Mary's Paddington suggested that this was a baby conceived naturally and I should treat it like any other. So no drugs and no jabs and what will be, will be.

Sanguine advice, I grant you, but enough to make you panic at every twinge and wake up gasping for air in the middle of the night, wondering if you'd done the right thing.

But not so long ago I handed over the results of my 20-week scan to my consultant's secretary. "Congratulations," she said sounding surprised.

"We didn't expect you to get this far." She is not the only one. I am now 25 weeks, crossing my fingers and counting.

Wedding Babylon, by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous, is out now, published by Bantam Press (£14.99).

Second miracle baby for infertile mum

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