I thought it might be about time I started to tell the story of why we are adopting children.
Here goes…
When W and I first got married, we always said that whether or not we had our own children, we would probably like to adopt. We also agreed that we would have a couple of years to ourselves after getting married before trying to start a family - and that’s exactly what we did. We went on great holidays, spent oodles of time together, and basically had fun.
Near the end of that couple of years, we were sat eating dinner one evening (we try to eat dinner together at the table every night and swap the story of each other’s day), and the subject of children cropped up. Maybe it was time to start trying.
The exciting first few weeks turned into months, and we finally went to see the doctor. We had all the normal fertility checks, and they could find nothing wrong, so booked appointments for us to see specialists. After repeating the tests and waiting perhaps two months to see an NHS (National Health Service for those of you in the US) specialist, we ended up with a 10 minute conversation where they were going to dose us up with fertility drugs, and were told that a follow up appointment would be organised.
W broke down and cried when the appointment came through - we were going to have to wait 6 months. The same afternoon I called several private clinics and arranged for us to visit within days (isn’t it amazing what you can do if you pay through the nose for it).
At about the same time, W had been talking to various other couples in similar situations on internet discussion forums - trying to find out about the various forms of IVF, and what other tests we might need to go through. At the same time as this was happening, one of our national television stations was scouting around for a suitable couple to base a breakfast television “special interest” segment on to kick off a week of programmes about fertility problems. They read W’s forum posts.
A couple of weeks later we found ourselves being filmed by the television cameras. We visited a private health clinic in Birmingham to have all the various tests done and paid for by the television company. Towards the end of the day, the main doctor involved, Dr Gillian Lockwood, saw us privately to deliver the results of the tests.
It was me. I was the reason we were not conceiving. It was a huge shock at the time, but then I knew it had to be one of us. It turned out that I have a genetic fault - a missing enzyme in my body, and it was the cause of all our problems. It was also the reason the problem had not been picked up - you needed an electron microscope to find it.
I could give you a very detailed description of the mechanics of human reproductive chemistry, but I’ll save that for another day. You’re probably eating your lunch anyway…
The next question was “do you want the TV crew to know?” - and I had an immediate answer. Yes.
In the same way that we had spent months wondering what was wrong with us, and no tests turning up an answer, there could well have been thousands of other couples that were going to see the program in the same boat. We had an answer, and we wanted other’s to know that they could find answers too.
We ended up on live television about a week later - talking to the host of the show about our experiences, and finding out what it’s like to be in front of the cameras. It was incredibly draining, but it felt like we were doing something valuable - something to help others.
So there you go - that’s how the journey started. The next step for us was IVF, which I promise to write about soon. It very nearly worked…