Pregnancy, Baby & You magazine

A version of the following appeared in the June issue of Pregnancy, Baby & You magazine in the My Story section. The July issue is on sale now...


“No kids?” other couples would ask. “No kids,” we’d reply, cool as cucumbers, non-plussed, unconcerned. If it happened, it happened, that was our attitude. And as the years passed, five, six, seven of them, people just stopped asking. Yet our easy-going attitude held true: until, that is, we went to the doctor, just to make sure.

It was only when we were told that we couldn’t have children that our minds became focused. In fact, after that, having a child was all we could think of.

We wanted a baby. That much we now knew. And we found out that one in seven couples, according to NHS Direct, experience the need for assisted conception. With IVF, there is an average success record of 15 percent. In our case, the Doctor handed us this statistic sharp end first: we had an 85 percent chance of failure. The numbers were bamboozling.

The words, which should have made sense of the numbers, only served to complicate matters further. First came “motility”. This new word, combined with plain old “low”, denoted that my sperm didn’t move very well. Combined with Karen’s age – we were just north of the “optimal” 39 mark, our chances of success now shrunk to “around” two percent. Sad-eyed shrugs and impeccable bedside manner did little to help either.

Action was the only solution. Go ahead with the procedure, give it one go, as futile as it is, and, if we make it to 80, we won’t look back and regret that we never tried. And so, pretending that everything was normal, we carried on planning our big, annual Christmas party.

Some friends showed up and announced their pregnancy. We fought a raging internal battle to be truly and genuinely happy for them. A battle, I’m pleased to say, that we won. To have added bitterness to despair would have been to dig a whole too deep to ever have clambered out of again.

After Christmas, the numbers and the words turned into a blizzard. Hycosy (a detailed examination of the womb); Progesterone injections (seven of them);
A fibroid – one of them, benign, as it turned out.

Our friends would ask: “How’s all it going?” We’d pause. In that pause we’d review the feelings of alienation, of invasion, of inadequacy at being unable to partake in the simple animal imperative of reproduction. “Oh, fine,” we’d reply, “fine…”

My mate Pete May, a West Ham nut, often says of being a West Ham supporter: “The despair I can handle: it’s the hope that kills me.” And indeed, the despair threw us together. And we stuck, tighter than ever before. Long walks, tears and talks of the unthinkable dominated that winter. I quoted Pete on one of our long rambling walks. “But there has to be hope,” said Karen. “Without hope, there’s…” At this point we turned a corner and slap bang in front of us was a pub. Its name? The Hope. We both laughed: there was Hope after all. “If we ever have a baby girl,” said Karen, “we’ll call her Hope…”

Another number came next: two. The number of eggs taken from Karen for fertilisation. Two is a low yield. But the word used by the nurse to describe them gave us hope: “magnificent”. Magnificent eggs. We dreamt immediately of twins – I know now that we both did – but at the time we each took a deep breath and looked the other way. Having been made to stare down the barrel of a scant chance for so long, this flake of good news was almost overwhelming amongst all the pain.

A funny thing, pain. If I asked you to describe your last toothache in precise and vivid detail, you couldn’t do it. Go on, try. Sore? Inadequate, isn’t it. Agony? Still doesn’t cover it. Anyway, now that it’s better, it doesn’t seem to matter, does it? Our IVF story is the same. The idea of the pain of IVF and potential childlessness haunts us still. But the news that one of the eggs had “taken”, that Karen – that we – were pregnant, delivered in an anonymous room in a corner of south east London, wiped all the months of pain away in a moment.

Are we grateful? Too small a word. But it’s impossible to live a life at such a high emotional pitch. We said we’d never complain if she woke us up in the middle of the night… but of course, we do. Besides, the pressure on Isobella to live up to the hefty billing of Miracle Baby is just too much for any person. But sometimes – the first time I fed her, the first time she waved, when she started laughing and then began to crawl – that miraculous feeling surges through us like delirium.

It turns out that Karen was right: There is Hope. Isobella Hope Scott-Goulding. She’s 10 months old now. And we still can’t believe she’s here.