IVF and eggs

An oeuf is an oeuf

Well it looks as if Marty is going to have to learn to write pretty soon just to sign autographs.

Yup, we appear to have become famous, or at least far more famous than we ever were... which wasn’t difficult on account of us not being famous at all.

It all boils down to the wonders of IVF and egg white. Not content with just being the base ingredient of the culinary wonder that is meringue, eggs have branched out into the medical world and become the prime component in the creation of young Marty, or ‘Chicken boy’ as I might start to call him.

It all started when we tried, and failed, to have a baby. So we tried a bit more... and failed a bit more. So we had some tests and, sadly, these came back with the most damning verdict of all; ‘unknown infertility’. This was bad because it wasn’t an answer; I was fertile, Leanne was fertile, it should be working for us but it wasn’t and no one knew why.

So what do you do? If they’d told me:

‘Look, your balls have fallen off, we're all dreadfully sorry about it but we can’t find them anywhere so we're afraid you can’t have kids’

At least I’d have had a definite answer and we’d have had to move on in our lives.

After all, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of people in the world, we still had each other and, if the worst came to the worst, we could always borrow a niece or nephew to look after us in our dotage.

But a diagnosis of ‘unknown’ just leaves you with frustrated hope and, with something as emotively primal as having a baby, you can’t just turn your back on this hope.

So we tried IVF and were shocked when it failed. So we tried again and were utterly devastated when that also failed. So Leanne hit Google and started to find out as much as she could about the subject and what came up time after time was ‘immunology issues’, specifically the book by Alan E. Beer "Is your body baby friendly". Sadly Mr Beer is no longer with us, but Marty and many other youngsters are here because of him.

So off we went to the experts at CARE and we were told that this was an area they were currently working on and we could have some ‘Chicago tests’ if we wanted. So we did the tests and they came back saying that Leanne and I shared some common genes that might make it more difficult for the embryo to defend itself in the womb. On top of this Leanne also had a very active immune system and that would make it still harder for the embryo to win through.

Finally! We had some definite causes and, hopefully, a solution that wouldn’t require us to remortgage the house.

And this is where the egg white came in; apparently it works by helping to suppress the body’s immune system and, almost as importantly, it achieves this cheaply and with few, if any, adverse reactions.

Well there we go; eat a couple of extra large omelettes, add a bit of mayo and finish with a baked Alaska for desert and Leanne would be pregnant before you could say ‘More please sir’.

Obviously it was a little more complicated than that... but not by much; Leanne had to have an ‘intralipid’ drip just before egg transfer and a second one once we knew she was pregnant.. and that was it! Bob’s your uncle, Marty’s your son.

The tale of our endeavours seems to have interested the press, with first our local newspaper, the ‘Grantham journal’, running a Mother’s Day story and now the Mail on-line taking an interest. And today we got a call from Central News asking if we’d like to be on the telly!

One of the other medical issues with all this is that, if Leanne had got pregnant naturally, there’s a good chance that her immune system would have started to attack the foetus and she’d have miscarried – or at least have been at high risk of a miscarriage.

Which makes me wonder if this is a possible treatment for some of those women who have had multiple miscarriages?

The first few months

Spot the difference

In the run up to Marty's arrival one of the joys of Leanne's life was to lie on the sofa of an evening and "Bump watch". This involved interrupting my TV viewing pleasure with constant nudges and cries of “Look, look, she’s moving” – for some inexplicable reason we had it in our head that “he” was a “she”. Only very rarely could I discern the difference between the ‘bump’ moving and Leanne passing wind, so I rapidly lost interest.

Then the big day arrived and ‘Bump’ became Marty and life became distinctly more interesting, and this was despite all my mates telling me that babies in the first six months were really boring.

To be honest I can see where they’re coming from; Marty’s conversation is at best limited, he can’t sing, he can’t dance and the less said about his social skills the better. All in all he’s an ideal candidate for X-Factor.

But there’s still a world of fascination about him. Over the last few weeks he’s learnt to go “goo, goo, goo” and generally gurgle with contentment in such as fashion as to melt the hardest of hearts.

After four weeks, if you tickled him under the chin you would be rewarded with a huge toothless grin and if you watched him when he was asleep you’d see him do the same thing; a slow, lopsided, smile slowly appear as he thought his baby thoughts – no doubt something along the lines of large breasts and milk.

In week six his eyes suddenly started to focus on me and he started to follow my face as I moved. I’ll grant you that it didn’t last for long and the ceiling would occasionally usurp me as an item of immense interest but he suddenly seemed ‘alive’. Before this he tended to just stare into space in a ‘the lights are on but nobody’s at home’ fashion. Now he seems to be engaging with the world and it makes such a huge difference.

Other little things gain enormous significance. When Marty was born he had a little chip out of his left ear and we’d put this down to the birth; after all it’s a tight squeeze at the best of times so it wouldn’t be that surprising if things had dropped off during an arduous delivery. As it turns out it’s hereditary! Yup, we popped down to Kent to see the rellies and Charlotte pointed out that she also had a chip out of her left ear, as did almost everyone in her family.

It sounds daft but it’s things like that that truly brought home to me that Marty was ours; a product of me and Leanne and everyone else in our family. Bearing in mind that I studied genetics I guess it shouldn’t have been that surprising, but there’s a huge gap between ‘knowing’ and ‘realising’; actually living the event rather than just studying it.

Of course I get told that he looks like me all the time but I think this is more of a social norm than a statement of reality: I’m much taller, he has more hair; I have wrinkles, he has skin so perfect you can’t even see the pores. There are lots and lots of telling differences between us. I’ll grant you that I have been known to lie sprawled upon a sofa with dribble running down my chin but I can’t imagine that I ever managed it with quite the natural grace of young Marty.

Just to prove our differences, Marty appears to be an adept in the martial arts - something that I never got involved with. If you make any kind of noise when he's asleep his arms will suddenly shoot into the air, fingers spread wide apart, in what is clearly a Ninja "Hands of death" stance. Quite what sort of damage an 11 pound Ninja baby could do to you is debatable, but its good to see that the attitude is there.

All in all, yes he will probably become more and more engaging as he gets older, but boring? No it’s been far from boring.

Birth

Having experienced the dubious ‘joys’ of childbirth from the spectators point of view I think it’s fair to say that God is a man and, what’s more, he’s a man with a fairly bizarre sense of humour. That the child should exit via the route it does is enough to warrant a bemused shaking of the head but that the mother-to-be has to wait until the child has first developed a head the size of a cannon ball is, quite frankly, a joke too far.

Mind you, the shock of realising that God and Frankie Boyle share the same sense of humour is nothing compared to the astonishing realisation that women will still line up to go through it all! That they might opt for it once is vaguely understandable; they are after all being swamped by hormones and bedazzled by newborn babies. What I truly can’t understand though is why on earth they would choose to go through it all again. Yet they do!

Apparently we had a fairly easy time of labour, in fact I barely raised a sweat. It all started about 1am in the morning - I woke up about 5am - and we were both fully expecting to be back from hospital in time for lunch and nappies. Sadly, that time table proved far too optimistic and it wasn’t until 10pm that evening that the lure of “gas & air” finally persuaded Leanne to head into hospital.

My wife had set her heart on using the birthing pool and that all seemed to work quite well for the first few hours. Then she was given a choice between the pool or better pain killers. I’m sure I’ve seen people make faster decisions but I can’t recall any and we were out of the pool, onto a table and away with the fairies faster than you could say Pethidine.

Finally, at 5:40am the baby arrived, much to everyone’s relief.

Leanne was of the opinion that knowing the sex of the baby beforehand was going to take away some of the joy of the moment, so my first real task of note was to sex the child.

I had imagined that this would be a hit and miss affair but as it turned out it was fairly straightforward, largely on account of our little baby boy possessing testicles the size of dinner plates – at least by comparison with his size. Thank God our proportions change as we grow to adulthood, if they didn’t men would be walking around the streets carrying their balls in wheelbarrows and women would have headed for the hills long ago.

So, having established that he was a he, my next task was to cut the cord. I can’t say I’d been looking forward to this, in fact, to be brutally honest, I’d have been perfectly happy pacing the hospital corridors and smoking the occasional cigar, suitably distanced from the gory details. Sadly, this is regarded as very old fashioned and, whether we like it or not, the man is now obliged to remain in close proximity for the entire event, no matter how gruesome it gets.

As it turned out the cord cutting wasn’t that bad. It was just like cutting through a bit of gristle, although I felt strangly obliged to mumble “God bless this ship and all who sail in her”.

And there we had it, one child expertly delivered after 30 odd hours of shouts and screams and umpteen cylinders of nitrous oxide.

Parenthood

For many, the act of conception involves soft lighting, softer music and copious quantities of sparkling wine. For ourselves it involved test tubes, microscopes and the occasional Petri dish. It is a sad reality but IVF brings with it all the whimsical romance that you'd normally associate with an outbreak of cholera... without the exotic locations. This is hardly their fault but it does take away something, especially for the bloke who is often made to feel like a pork saugage at a Jewish wedding. Everyone there knows that you have a role but you can't help but feel that that fact is regarded as an annoyance and that there are scientists beavering away in the lab determined to circumvent you altogether.

Fortunately the IVF was ultimately sucessful, although it took 3 attempts and played merry hell with our emotions, but after seven years of trying, it finally kicked in and Leanne fell pregnant.

I must confess that I found the whole pregnancy lark distinctly underwhelming. The scans were all very interesting and watching Leanne get bigger and bigger until she started walking like a duck was a source of mild amusement but the rest was all a bit too intangible for me; a moving bump and a noise that sounds like a wet heart beat are all well and good but it was hardly going to set my world on fire.

Leanne on the other hand seemed to love it. She was perfectly happy to spend an entire evening sitting on the sofa watching her belly move up and down as the baby moved and couldn’t understand why I was failing to grasp the joy and wonder of it all. I tried to point out that, from the outside, it just looked as if she had really bad wind, but apparently that was just me being an unimaginative grump.

Anyway, the big day arrived... then it went. Apparently this is nothing unusual and sure enough, 4 days after the due date Leanne started getting contractions.