Science writer Veronika Meduna thought she never wanted to have children, but in her late thirties, she changes her mind.

Veronika Meduna was born in the Czech Republic but has lived in New Zealand for 25 years. She is an award-winning journalist and author with two decades of experience in radio, print and digital storytelling. She has previously produced and hosted a weekly science programme for RNZ, written seven books, and contributed to local and international media including The NZ Listener, NZ Geographic, New Scientist and Deutsche Welle. She is currently the NZ Editor of The Conversation, a global not-for-profit media organisation. Veronika works with academics and researchers to publish evidence-based analysis and news. 

This story originally aired on Nov. 9, 2018, in an episode titled “Pregnancy“.

Story Transcript

When I was in my twenties, I knew as surely as you could that I was never going to have kids.  It wasn’t even a dilemma.  It was just not anywhere on my horizon. 

And I had a close friend, my best friend at the time.  She felt the same.  We were both in relationships that felt like they’d last but having children just wasn’t in our plans.  It didn’t shift when the friends around us all started first announcing their pregnancies and then announcing the birth of their children. 

A few years after that, Andy and I, my husband, Andy and I moved to the other side of the world to New Zealand, but my friend and I stayed close.  We maybe didn’t talk often.  We might just catch up once or twice a year but we were still really good friends.  It’s one of those friendships that you might only catch up infrequently but it feels like nothing has changed in between.  It’s just the same. 

So Andy and I are setting up our new life.  We’re establishing new friendships.  We’re starting in a new place.  Then it happens again.  The new people around us, we’re now in our mid-thirties, thirty-five, it happens again one after the other.  They announce first their pregnancies and then the birth of their children.  I was a little less sure by this stage but still at a distance from it all. 

Then I get an email, just a short note from my friend to say that she had a chat with her man and they kind of felt that it was the other one who didn’t want children.  They talked about it and found they do.  In a few weeks, they were expecting the birth of their daughter. 

This cut right through me.  It’s one of those feelings like the floor goes out under you.  I was stunned.  I didn’t know what to say, what to think.  I was angry, even furious.  Just complete anger.  Rather than feeling joy for her or being happy for her, I was angry. 

And I’m going on this tailspin, just a deep dive confrontation with whatever it is, this thing that keeps me at a distance, doesn’t even allow me to come near.  So I’m starting to work through some of that barrier. 

As I’m starting to imagine this child in the future, I find myself going back to this child in the past.  This child that’s me.  This childhood that somewhere, what is it in there?  I don't actually find anything huge, anything awful, anything obviously traumatizing or anything like that.  It’s just a string of a lot of small things.  My parents being teenagers when they had me, lots of shifting in place and circumstances, my dad becoming seriously unwell when he was actually quite a young man, my brother being born when I was a teenager, me doing a lot of proxy parenting way too early.  A lot of things that taught me a lot what I didn’t want to do.

But I didn’t have much at all, in fact, nothing at all that could show me my idea of being a good parent.  I couldn’t see that.

So I’m working through this.  I feel like I’m inching my way closer to something but I’m thirty-eight at this point, so I was also going to see my GP just to kind of find out where I am physically. 

My GP takes me through something that is called an egg reserve test.  It’s essentially a suite of blood tests that measures all the hormones involved in my cycles in my fertility.  It gives you a snapshot of where you are.  And it comes back looking just fine, just good.  Except for one hormone.  Prolactin.  That’s way off the chart.  Completely out there. 

And my GP has his suspicions so he sends me off to have a brain scan.  The next time I come back to an appointment with him he says, “Well, you've got a tumor on your pituitary gland.  It’s a benign growth so nothing to worry about, but your prolactin is way out there.  And prolactin is a hormone that’s normally only produced during breastfeeding.” 

So my body is confused.  It’s not going to become pregnant easily.  I need help. 

This is quickly turning into an immense upheaval inside.  To me, it feels like I’m turning myself inside out, but I’m not actually letting any of this out.  I’m not talking to friends.  I’m not talking to Andy.  I’m not talking to anybody.  Nothing.  None of this comes out and I’m a pretty horrid person to be with during that time. 

And I’m wrestling this thing so hard that, eventually, it all implodes and we break up.  Then I break down.  This is the point where I’m just about there, the resolution, and then there's nothing left.  Everything is a mess. 

Then we go through nearly five years of a crazy no-man’s/no-woman’s land.  We’re not together anymore, neither are we apart.  We've got lots of friends who try and support us, but it drives them spare.  It drives us crazy. 

Then Andy decides to leave the country and we don’t talk for a year.  But then we do.  And it feels tentative but it feels like a new, different thing.  And it feels like something that now includes the idea of us becoming parents. 

Except that by now I’m forty-two and he's about to move to Delhi for a year for his work.  But then I've got nothing to lose so I take a year off from work and I travel to Delhi to meet him, in Delhi, India. 

Neither of us has ever been to India and we get there and we’re just absolutely overwhelmed.  Crazy place. 

We had no idea what we’re doing.  Where do we even start?  So we Googled ‘fertility clinics in Delhi’ and there are a few. 

Not long after that, we’re walking up the steps for our first waiting room.  This room is full of women, mostly women, some of them alone, some of them supported by other women, some of them supported by men.  Everybody is huddled into themselves.  Everybody was looking down, nobody is making any eye contact.  Everybody is quiet, hunched into themselves.  But the walls of this room are plastered with huge posters of cute, smiling babies.

And we sit there for hours.  Everybody waits for hours until they get to see this consultant.  It’s awkward.  It’s hugely uncomfortable.  It just does not feel right.  By the time we get to see the consultant, I’m really worried, feeling almost unwell. 

I had read by this stage a lot about assisted fertility.  I knew the risks.  I knew about the chances.  I knew all those stories.  So I’m starting this conversation with saying, “Is this the right thing for us?  Is this something we should even do?” 

And in response, we get this big smile from this man and he says, “Oh, don’t worry.  Nothing to worry because, just last week, one of my patients, a 56-year-old woman had twins.  We can do this.” 

And I go like, “That’s not what we wanted to hear at all.” 

So we’re starting to extract ourselves from the place and kind of peel back from the whole idea of doing this, thinking it’s not going to be for us. 

But then serendipity kicks in.  Just by complete coincidence, I meet a fellow writer who just happens to be in Delhi on a placement.  His wife is there too, also on a placement.  She's a gynecologist.  She's working with an Indian doctor who’s setting up and IVF clinic in Delhi’s biggest hospital, Moolchand Hospital, so we make an appointment. 

When we get there, we meet Kaberi Banerjee and she turns out to be the most amazing person you could have on your side while you're contemplating fertility treatment.  She's a mother, for starters, a working mother.  Two kids, lots of stories about pregnancy and miscarriage, parenting.  She listens.  She's got everything we need to go through this. 

Almost.  There's no sperm lab at Moolchand Hospital.  For his part, Andy will have to go somewhere else in Delhi. 

And so we go and check out this sperm laboratory and it’s in a completely different part of the big city, crazy city.  It’s in the busy street in a back block behind shops, and it’s really just a room with a long bench and there's these guys behind the bench wearing aprons looking at us, smiling at us as if we’d come to buy a beautiful Indian carpet or something. 

I never get to go beyond this bench because this is men’s territory.  Only Andy gets to go through there.  He ends up paying quite a few visits to this place.  And every time he leaves, these guys give him a little vial to hold and he has to hop on his bike and cycle through the crazy traffic in Delhi to the hospital where I’m already waiting, ready in stirrups. 

We did this a few times but this more gentle approach did nothing for us, so eventually we graduate to full-blown IVF.  It’s a  radical process.  At the time, the methods used or the procedures used were still very high doses of hormones.  The drugs completely take over my cycle. 

It’s radical  in the sense that it pushes my body so hard to produce as many eggs as I possibly can.  And out of this basket of eggs we have three embryos and they look good under the microscope.  So all three of them are returned to my womb and then we have to wait for Day 14.  This is the earliest after treatment - this is the earliest point where you can have a pregnancy test, the earliest point where you know whether this has worked or not. 

Day 14 comes around, we have a test and it’s positive.  Then we wait for another two weeks for the first scan.  And we can see and we’re told that one of the embryos has indeed implanted, and we hear the heartbeat.  Another two weeks later we come back for the next scan, but the heartbeat is gone. 

A few days after, I’m back in hospital.  I have to have everything removed and I just remember emerging from the anesthetic after this procedure and a nurse coming in with a little pottle and she tells me, “Here, this is your product of conception.” 

We do this again.  And again.  Then our time in India is up and we come back to New Zealand thinking we can’t keep doing this for much longer.  We've got to get ourselves off this.  Somehow this is all too much, but let’s just do it one more time.  Just one more time.  The last time we’re going to try this. 

So we’re back in a waiting room soon after this.  Again, the walls are full of pictures of happy children and babies.  Again, it feels a little bit more like a business transaction really.  But we’re thinking, okay, this is going to be the last time.  It will be fine.  We can do this one more time. 

And so we start another cycle.  Halfway into it, the consultant tells us that he's got to go off to a conference and he might have to take the eggs out two days earlier than planned. 

This is our last chance.  This is the last time we’re doing this, I’m thinking, but I can’t get the words out. 

So eggs are removed and early the morning after, the embryologist rings us to say that, yes, they did get five eggs but only one of them is mature enough to do anything with.  Which they will.  And if we did have an embryo from it, they would return it as quickly as possible to my womb, because it’s the best place for it. 

We do have an embryo and it does come back quickly.  And then we have to wait again for Day 14.  By now we know people around us who go through the same thing and some of them would get friends and family around on Day 14 just to have the support that they might need whatever the outcome.  For us, we decide to book a nice place out of town and just to get away from it all. 

So we are driving.  Andy is driving.  I’m curled up in the passenger seat.  The phone is between us and we know that sometime on this day the phone will ring and they will tell us what the outcome is.  When it rings, none of us can pick it up.  We just let it go to message.  I’m curling up even more.  Andy just keeps driving, keeps driving.  And we do this, we just keep going, keep going, neither of us can pick up the phone.  We just can’t do it. 

We do this for quite a long time until, eventually I still can’t do it but Andy can, so we stop and he picks up the phone, listens to the message.  I’m now tight as a spring in the passenger seat.  I don't really want to know but, at the same time, I’m eavesdropping on the phone from the other side.  I just got to figure out what on earth it’s saying.  I’m watching his face for any hint of any information. 

And it’s positive.  Another positive pregnancy test.  We know we are at this point again. 

For the fertility clinic we've now become a success statistic.  And it’s not long after this point that they actually discharge us, release us.  You get a folder of papers of all the stuff, all the tests and everything that’s happened through this process, everything that they’ve gathered up, all information.  And in this folder is a picture of this embryo when it’s only six cells old. 

It’s thanks to the Indian doctor who has seen us through these previous cycles and thanks to friends back home that we now have a plan in place, what to do with medical support to actually see this pregnancy through to term. 

And this last good egg is now nine years old, at home with his dad and, hopefully, sound asleep now.