Читать книгу Best Day of My Life: True stories to inspire, move and entertain - Told by a cross-section of the UK's celebrities and courageous everyday people - Giles Vickers Jones - Страница 6

Teacher & Mother

I plan everything in my life. I always catch myself doing it and, when I do, it nearly always ends up not going the way it was supposed to. Even so, I still put a great deal of time and energy into organising things and people. I’m always prepared to work for things, and I love nothing more than putting a big tick on my long lists.

Meeting Ross was not planned. I was 23 and about to embark on my very grown-up life as a teacher. The last thing I needed in tow was a student. Ross was 19, a fresher, new to university life and played rugby. In fact, as I write this, it would be easy for me to make him sound unappealing, but he had a very endearing side which made me throw caution to the wind (very unlike me!) and take a chance on him.

Seven years later, Ross asked me to marry him. I instantly started planning what flowers I would have in my bouquet. By the time we were married, I was 30 and my biological clock was ticking very loudly. I knew Ross wanted children at some point but he wasn’t ready yet and I understood that.

In February 2004, on my birthday, Ross announced that he was ‘ready’. I was ecstatic. I was sure that in a few months’ time I’d be trying to think of reasons to give my friends to explain why I wasn’t drinking to conceal the early stages of my pregnancy. We planned weekends away and talked excitedly about preparing for a baby. When a few months passed, and I was not blooming, or even sprouting, I started recording the lengths of my cycles to see if I could determine roughly when I was at my most fertile. I found there was a pattern and so there was always a lot of activity around that particular time of the month.

After almost two years, we were very worried and decided to talk to our GP about running some tests. A couple of factors were suggested that could be affecting our chances, but no single cause could be identified. Each month was beginning to feel like an emotional rollercoaster: two weeks’ build-up until ovulation, a flurry of hopeful activity and then the bitter disappointment when I was not pregnant. It was draining, both physically and emotionally, and the frustration made Ross and me snappy and bad-tempered. We knew that the odds were not in our favour after two years of trying for a baby.

We were both becoming very despondent and I seemed to bump into pregnant women and babies everywhere I turned. This just reminded me of the fact that I didn’t have a baby of my own and didn’t know if I would ever have one. I smiled and celebrated with friends as they started their families but cried when no one was looking because I wanted that to be me. After a lot of soul searching, we decided to try IVF.

It is a long process: each IVF cycle involved sniffing one hormone to down-regulate my ovaries and numerous scans to determine when to start the hormone injections to restart the egg production. This was followed by two weeks of daily injections that I administered myself. More scans followed to monitor how my ovaries were responding to ensure that the eggs were collected at exactly the right time.

When the eggs were ready, I had to inject another hormone exactly 36 hours before the eggs were collected. The egg-collection process was very intrusive, carried out under sedation, and left me feeling very sore. The eggs were then placed with a sample of sperm to fertilise. After three to five days, some of the eggs had fertilised and developed into embryos. The two most established embryos were then transferred back into my uterus. On both our first two cycles, we reached this stage and then endured the two-week wait before we could do the pregnancy test. Both times the test was negative.

Ross and I struggled to stay positive, and the treatment made me tired, uncomfortable and extremely emotional. I could tell that Ross wanted to take my pain away but he felt helpless. After those first two failed attempts, we started to discuss how many more, if any, cycles we would try. I felt like a pincushion, and each unsuccessful attempt was exhausting, and unrewarding. But neither of us was prepared to give up so we decided to try once more.

Shortly after the embryo transfer during our third cycle, I felt sure that things had not worked out. I told Ross it was happening all over again and that we were not going to be having a baby. We did what we always do when we have to cope with something: Ross watched a lot of sport on TV and I cleaned and busied myself in the kitchen. Over the next few days, I didn’t say anything to Ross, but secretly I allowed myself to have a glimmer of hope – I couldn’t help it.

On the morning of the test, I went to the loo at 5 a.m. and came back to bed clutching the stick. This time there was a faint blue line on it. I turned all the lights on and just sat staring at it. Was I willing it to be there? Was I so desperate that I had started hallucinating? I woke Ross and he thought I had really gone mad as he had come to terms with the disappointment a few days earlier.

That day was bizarre; I bought another three tests on the way home from work and did them all. Every one was POSITIVE – I really was pregnant. A few days later, I did another two tests … oh my God, still pregnant! The next few days passed in a blur of glowing happiness. I felt like I was carrying around a very special secret that only Ross and I knew. Every morning when I woke up, I would touch my tummy, and smile to myself.

My pregnancy went really smoothly. I loved carrying my baby and felt like the luckiest girl alive. It was hard to believe that millions of women had done – and would do – this; it felt as if I was the only pregnant person in the world.

At 38 weeks (after a curry!), I woke up at four o’clock in the morning lying on a wet mattress. I turned to Ross, who is famous for his deep sleeps, and told him that I thought my waters had broken. He instantly jumped out of bed, scrabbled around for his glasses and started pulling on clothes in a wild frenzy. This was not at all how we had discussed he would react. After a call to the labour ward, Ross drove me in for a check-up. They confirmed that my waters had broken, and that I would ‘probably’ go into labour over the weekend. If not they would see me on Monday morning. We turned and headed back home, me squelching with every step and feeling like an incontinent old woman.

We sat looking at each other at 8.30 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Then I did some cleaning and Ross watched sport on TV, adopting our usual coping mechanisms. We watched a film – my choice (as you’d expect!), a romantic comedy and a real treat. Ross went for a run, went shopping for food and drink to take to hospital and we played scrabble. During the scrabble game, things began to happen, slowly at first, but soon my triple word scores were a distant memory. Ross decided he needed two watches, one to time each contraction and one to measure the time between them. He was also still trying hard to beat me at scrabble which I thought was slightly unfair given that I was bouncing, rolling and grimacing on the birthing ball at the time.

In the labour room, the midwife settled us in and told us to ‘make ourselves at home’. This room was the place least like my home I had ever been in. Ross still managed to find a comfy armchair and sat down for a rest as I fell to my knees with another contraction. ‘Get over here!’ I spat at him. That was the last even vaguely civil comment I made to him for the next few hours.

As my labour progressed, I could hear music and snippets of the conversations that Ross and the midwife were having, but, overall, I was totally high on the gas and air in the hope that it would alleviate the pain. Ross kept me going with Ribena from a straw and bore the brunt of my anger and pain. I swore A LOT but in general this was one of those rare occasions where everything went as I had planned.

Just after midnight, while ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay’ by Otis Redding was playing, I gave birth to our son, Noah Peter Mackean Agnew, weighing 7lb 4oz. I was elated, tired and very emotional. Ross was elated, tired and very hungry. So he opened a packet of pork scratchings and shared them with the midwife while I stared in amazement at what we had achieved. This was the beginning of a new life and a whole new chapter in ours.