I stared at the pregnancy test. I could see the second line, but I didn’t trust my eyes, so I continued to stare.
On a certain level, I knew it was real and I knew I felt different.
However, after 15 unsuccessful years of trying to conceive, I couldn’t let my heart go there yet.
I needed a second set of eyes, so I showed my husband.
“Do you see a second line?” I asked him.
“I do,” he said hesitantly, and after a pause, “I’ll get the dogs from the back garden.”
He told me later that he couldn’t process what was happening and needed to go for a walk with the dogs.
I went to the local pharmacy and bought a digital pregnancy test.
Seeing the word ‘pregnant’ solidified it for me. That, and I had been feeling nauseous and exhausted for weeks. We started to hope.
A visit to my GP confirmed things. My human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) or hormone pregnancy levels were high.
She referred me to the early pregnancy unit in Cork University Maternity Hospital, and at the eight-week scan, we were told there was “a fine, strong heartbeat”.
My husband and I sobbed in the hospital corridor. Years of sadness, despair, and dashed hopes all melted away in that instant.
The road we’d travelled for years had been mentally exhausting, emotionally devastating, and deeply lonely.
When we got married at 27, we assumed that I would get pregnant straight away.
It didn’t happen, but we weren’t too concerned at this early stage. A year later, we made an appointment at a fertility clinic, where we were told everything looked normal.
And so we were diagnosed with unexplained infertility, a particularly frustrating diagnosis where no cause is found.
According to Sims IVF, between 10%-20% of couples who struggle to conceive are diagnosed with unexplained infertility. Two years later, when I still hadn’t become pregnant, we decided to start fertility treatment.
We began with intrauterine insemination, where the sperm is injected into the uterus at the time of ovulation. It’s not definitive, as each fertility clinic will have its own success rates, but intrauterine insemination has a success rate of between 10%-15%.
We did two cycles with no success.
As soon as you enter into the world of fertility, or rather infertility, you’re bombarded with a whole new language packed with shorthand.
The term I grew to hate most over the years of fertility treatment was ‘2WW’, which refers to the two-week wait after insemination or embryo transfer — so-called because you’re advised to wait two weeks before taking a pregnancy test. However, my period typically arrived before the two weeks were up. That’s another term I grew to hate: ‘AF’ or ‘Aunt Flow’ — your period.
Rather than do another intrauterine insemination cycle, we decided to move on to IVF.
At this stage, we’d been married for around five years. It felt like a dramatic decision at the time: It made everything more real, we needed to tell people other than our immediate family, and it was pricey — at around €5,000 per cycle. (The costs are similar today.)
Statistics are hard to come by in Ireland. Unlike other countries, we don’t produce figures for the number of couples undergoing IVF, rather the clinics report the number of “treatment cycles”.
There were 11,359 IVF treatment cycles in 2018. In 2020, there were 9,878 (the drop coincides with the pandemic).
Again, success rates are reported separately by each clinic: Between 2019 and 2021, Waterstone Clinic in Cork says its success rates for IVF/ICSI (including frozen embryo transfers) ranged from 60% for women under 35 to 20% for women over 42.
Going through IVF is unlike anything I experienced before or since. It’s overwhelming. I was somewhat used to the daily hormonal injections, but the egg retrieval process was all new.
For my first egg retrieval, they collected 21 eggs.
We moved on to the next stage where they fertilise the eggs. We were introduced to zygotes, cell division, blastocysts, and we held our breath on the daily calls with the lab. We ended up with seven good quality embryos — they would transfer two and freeze five.
At every stage, it felt positive and we felt good.
Our lives had changed so dramatically since we started this journey that it was difficult to look back.
When we got married, we were so excited to start a family. As the years went by, that excitement was replaced by despair and heartbreak. That first IVF felt like it might be a turning point, until shortly before the end of the ‘2WW’, and my ‘AF’ arrived.
We were devastated. I was overwhelmed by sadness, I had no room for anything else. My husband threw himself into work and looking after me. We knew we’d have to do it all again, so we had to build ourselves up again.
That’s the thing about fertility treatment: It’s incredibly difficult to decide to stop because the next cycle could be the one.
Two frozen embryo transfers, a second round of IVF, and another transfer, and the guts of €50,000 later, we had the conversation.
My husband was ready to stop. I wasn’t quite there yet, but I agreed to pause. At this stage, we’d been trying to conceive for our entire married life — 13 years. We needed to live our lives.
So we focused on living, on having fun, on travelling.
However, it was always there in the back of our minds as we congratulated family and friends on the births of their babies and attended christenings and kids’ birthday parties.
Daisy McArdle
After a year-and-a-half of living our lives, we re-started the conversation — mainly because I was coming up to my 42nd birthday — and it felt like time was very much against us.
With no degree of hope, we decided to do our final IVF treatment. We had two frozen embryos left.
A new doctor eased the nagging guilt I’d felt for a long time that this was somehow my fault. He helped me understand that nothing I was doing (or not doing) was having a negative impact. We left that appointment feeling re-energised and started preparing mentally for the transfer.
We had a lovely Christmas and were gearing up to travel to New York for a friend’s wedding. On New Year’s Eve, I felt sick and thought I’d come down with a tummy bug. The nausea lasted all the way through the wedding days later. By the middle of the following week, my expected period hadn’t arrived, and I still felt sick. Cut to me and the pregnancy test.
Somehow, we had conceived naturally. Was it that last burst of fertility that some women experience just before perimenopause?
Was it that we had relaxed a little?
In the absence of any real evidence, I put it down to two things: The doctor who explained how this was not my fault and my sister getting pregnant just eight weeks before me. Something had shifted in my brain.
And now here we are with a beautiful daughter aged five-and-three-quarters.
Five year old Daisy McArdle from Midleton pictured enjoying the sunshine on a family day out in Rostellan. Picture: Howard Crowdy
Impossible as she seems, she is here, going to school every day, looking at me with her father’s eyes, and making us feel like the luckiest people in the world.
