nokids

My treatment could start forthwith. I was prescribed various hormones – to switch off my menstrual cycle and then to control it from outside my body – ie control by the medical team rather than by the hypothalamus. You can get all the technical details from a million other sites. Given my age, I had to take an enormous amount, with the aim of stimulating my poor wizened ovaries to produce enough eggs to be “harvested” and then hopefully fertilised, outside my body, in a little glass dish – yes, with the aim of in vitro fertilisation, IVF as it’s known…

Harvesting - what a comforting and friendly concept that is, calling up images of rolling wheat fields and rosy cheeked buxom dairymaids!

The reality could not have been more different.

I booked myself into a small hotel near to Hyde Park. It was not shabby-chic – it was just shabby. And expensive.

I was both anxious and excited about what I was going to go through the following day. Somehow, in my heightened state, I decided that my alarm clock had stopped working and had lost an hour. I reset it, putting it to what I thought was the correct time, an hour on.

The next day, I arrived bright and early at the clinic, in good time for my appointment, for the clinic to collect my eggs. I was of course, one whole hour early! Luckily for me the clinic was open, but I did get to see some of the doctors and nurses arriving, (not all for me of course) which only made me feel more bizarre.

I always hate hanging about for scary things – I always aim to arrive no more than 5 minutes before a job interview for example, so this waiting was agony for me.

Eventually, the anaesthetist came and introduced himself to me. He was very nice, and explained, as he asked me to undress and put on a skimpy robe, leaving it untied at the back and me exposed, that there was nothing dignified about fertility treatment.

I shuffled into the operating room, (another elegantly wall-papered drawing-room), clambered up onto the couch, and the rest, mercifully, I do not remember.

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