For the last hour I have been watching a wonderful documentary on the BBC following Stephen Fry as he discovers the various personal stories of people with HIV over the last 20 years.
I was particularly struck by a family at the end of tonight’s programme - the husband was a haemophilliac, and had an accident in 1983, requiring a blood transfusion. He later discovered he had become HIV positive, and had Hepititus C.
In the closing titles of the programme, the man’s wife admitted that when the BBC programme had first contacted them she had thought “no way” - and that it had been him that had convinced her it was a good thing to do - for the benefit of people who might see the programme who were in a similar situation.
I couldn’t help drawing parallels with myself.
After we had been married for a couple of years we started thinking about having a family - and after trying to “make things happen” for a few months, wondered if there might be something wrong.
One day, while visiting an internet forum about fertility, a television researcher happened upon us and invited us to take part in a national television programme about fertility - with all the available tests carried out. After being placed on all number of waiting lists, we jumped at the chance to get some answers at last.
After doing the various scenes for the television programme, we all broke for lunch, and then came back for the afternoon filming. Before starting, the results of our morning tests were up for discussion.
It was me.
Unknown to all the tests I had been subjected to thus far, when looked at through an electron microscope, it turned out I had a genetic fault. In the same manner as your eyes might be brown or blue, I had a missing enzyme that caused a problem in us being able to have children (I won’t go into the mechanics of it in a blog post).
We were immediately asked by the doctor if we wanted to stop filming at this point, and give the editors some work to do in wrapping up the television programme. Our first instinct - above and beyond what we had discovered - was to carry on. We wanted others to know that there was a reason for our problems, and that doing the tests had told us exactly what was going on - so others should consider it.
We even carried on to appear live on breakfast television in the UK. Sure, our results were not the fairytale story, but we knew what the future held.
The following couple of years of IVF failed, but if they hadn’t we wouldn’t find ourselves now approved to adopt children and looking forward to finding out about the children we might be able to give a another chance - the children who might call us Mum and Dad, and who we will pour our energies, experiences and love into.