Six years, 15 rounds of IVF, £80k and countless tears but TV’s Hannah Vaughan Jones and her husband are having a baby at long last
WITH sickness, hunger pangs and exhaustion, pregnancy can be a long, hard slog. But for CNN presenter Hannah Vaughan Jones, 38, every second is a blessing.
She and husband Lewis have been through a punishing FIFTEEN rounds of IVF. The news anchor, now 15 weeks pregnant, shares the highs and lows of their journey towards parenthood.
“I’m pregnant.” I wonder when it becomes normal to write that down, let alone say it out loud.
I found myself the other day whispering it in a hospital maternity unit for fear of someone jumping up behind me and telling me I’ve been pranked.
But the fact is that after six years, 15 rounds of treatment and thousands of injections, I finally get to join a club I feared might forever elude me — Pregnancy. Not Motherhood, I’m definitely not there yet.
Over the years, I’ve learned the power in sharing experiences. It shifts the shame from your own shoulders and shifts the stigma of infertility in society at large — I know there are millions of others who feel cut off, traumatised and like they’ve been dealt the worst hand.
I hope my story might offer a glimmer of hope to women (and men) still chasing their parenting dream.
In late 2015, just a few months after our wedding and several invasive procedures later, we began our first IVF.
We decided to try for a family even before our engagement. Both coming from small families, we longed for a big clan of our own and never in a million years thought it would be such a trial.
When that inevitable challenge hit home, I was stunned not to be able to conceive naturally — but we quickly shifted mindset to being excited at the prospect of our IVF babies. It’s a miracle science after all, and we were going to be the recipients of such a miracle.
Our first treatment was the only cycle offered to us on the NHS. I was naive and brimming with positivity. A decent harvest of eggs, a few select swimmers to hopefully meet said eggs, and after a few days we had one embryo.
“One beautiful embryo,” said the embryologist, beaming at me through the small hatch window as I lay, legs akimbo, womb eagerly awaiting the arrival of this two-day-old beauty.
My first two-week wait was spent largely horizontal, asking Dr Google to diagnose every tweak and twinge. On my official test date I dutifully peed on a stick and got my big fat negative.
We were shell-shocked. We picked ourselves up, went on honeymoon and sought expensive advice on the lessons to be learnt from Round One.
MENTAL BRUISING
By early 2016, we were signed up with a private clinic and raring to go. It’s a struggle to remember every round in detail — the wounds of the inevitable highs and lows are forever printed in my mind but the details have largely been wiped from my memory.
Nevertheless the following three treatments all involved ICSI (one sperm injected into one egg), high doses of injectable drugs, one diagnosis of polycystic ovaries, and, sadly, very low fertilisation rates.
Clearly our problem was in creating viable embryos. Although we did have to factor in that my uterus is retroverted and bicornuate — it’s basically tilted backwards and heart-shaped, which is apparently not an ideal environment for nesting babies.
We moved on. New clinic, new attitude, new year . . . we were now in 2017. I had become accustomed to being a human pin-cushion — the daily injections, weight gain and bruising. Not to mention the mental bruising.
IVF is all-consuming, with mood swings and demanding drug schedules. It leaves no time for spontaneity or youthful joy, no matter how old you are or how determined you are to remain the same as before.
Given the physical and emotional shifts taking place, we started to tell friends and family. IVF hits you in your head, your heart and your wallet. We needed support for all three, so we started to talk.
Crucially we talked openly with each other. It’s sometimes hard to recognise the person you’ve become, the dark places your mind wanders to — if womanhood and motherhood go hand-in-hand, does that make me a failed woman?
I’ve never been very good at being left out or worse still, “found wanting” so this internal debate was a daily hammer blow to my self-esteem.
I’d waited years to hear the nurse say, ‘You’re pregnant’ and remember collapsing on the stairs in tears
As for our relationship, we never imagined we would be tested to such an extent so early on in our marriage. We’ve argued, laughed and cried together — on many occasions!
I think if you struggle to recognise and like yourself it seems a bit of a stretch to expect anyone else to like you, let alone love you.
But we always say we love each other more today than we did yesterday and less than we will tomorrow. I guess I’m just lucky to have married my favourite human.
Round Five in our new clinic ended with much the same result as before. No embryo transfer because there was no embryo to transfer. I switched to steroids to quieten down my immune system and Round Six resulted in a chemical pregnancy (a miscarriage before the fifth week of gestation).
SHEER UNFAIRNESS
I’d waited years to hear the nurse say, “You’re pregnant” and remember collapsing on the stairs in tears. That was a high. The low came two days later when a blood test revealed my pregnancy hormone level had dropped.
I remember collecting my neighbour’s kids from school and waiting in the playground as my period arrived.
Before IVF, I’d never felt anything but happiness for pregnant friends or those with kids. But IVF can make you crazy.
The all-consuming nature of it brought out facets of my character I’d never recognised before. The anger, jealousy and sheer unfairness of it all. The “why not me?” comparisons — often with complete strangers — became increasingly tough to contain.
Still, we stared down Round Seven, keen to move on to our first frozen embryo transfer. Negative. I was floored. We “came out” publicly in the Press and decided to document what IVF is really like. Round Eight featured in Our IVF Diary on YouTube.
By this point, on top of the high-dose stimulation drugs and steroids, I was having immunotherapy treatment in case my body was rejecting embryos.
We’d spent a fortune on blood tests and every result had been normal. But when you’re desperate and a doctor is telling you this might be the missing ingredient, you’ll try anything. Unbelievably, I got pregnant. We thought we’d finally cracked it.
But that delirious hope blurred our grasp of reality. Soon everything started to crumble. Hormone levels were increasing but at the wrong rate, an ectopic pregnancy was suspected, symptoms were coming and going, no heartbeat was found, then later detected but at a worryingly slow rate.
Three unsuccessful transfers later and we were once again emotionally and financially drained
A sober Christmas was spent full of hope, only to end in miscarriage at ten weeks.
2018 was going to be our year though. We had five frozen embryos and surely one of them had to stick! Three unsuccessful transfers later and we were once again emotionally and financially drained.
After some time off to live and breathe again, we signed up with another new clinic and a new (Welsh!) doctor.
We knew all the hurdles we were up against and were now only interested in honest advice and proven scientific fact.
HONEST ADVICE
We decided to try genetically screening any embryos created to see if any were chromosomally normal. The fresh cycles that followed produced low numbers of eggs and poor fertilisation rates.
Every embryo biopsied for Pre-Implantation Genetic Screening (PGS) came back “abnormal”. I started to see the end of the line for our IVF dream.
With that realisation, the weight of expectation started to ease and my head and heart began to shift.
By March of this year, we had both decided we would move on to donor conception — using donated eggs and sperm.
Having a family was the goal and if we needed to shift the goal posts to get there, then so be it. Still, before we could completely move on there was the question of two frozen embryos from a previous cycle that had been of such low-grade quality they hadn’t even been PGS-tested.
We assumed they were destined to fail but our clinic advised us to use them. After all, you never know. So we did.
When I read the positive result on the pregnancy test I refused to believe it.
I carried on brushing my teeth and hit the gym.
I hope with every fibre of my being that it shapes me to be the best mother possible to the life growing inside me
My experience had made even the reality in front of me so unlikely that I couldn’t allow my fragile heart to fall for it. Yet here I am.
Through the 12 weeks, in the safe hands of the NHS, cradling my growing belly.
It has cost us more than £80,000 and untold heartache along the way.
Obviously not everyone would be able to afford that but we were lucky that we both have good jobs and generous families.
I’ve stressed before that I’m not a fan of the “Never Give Up” brigade. It’s never about giving up, but rather moving on.
Only you can know when you might draw a line under treatment.
IVF is an unpredictable science and success or failure can just boil down to luck. I’m acutely aware of the pain a story like mine might provoke.
I know those feelings of guilt, envy and anguish — they were mine. If this is you, don’t fight it.
MOST READ IN FABULOUS
You are not a bad person. You are on your own path and comparison is not your friend right now.
Ultimately, infertility is a trauma you never recover from. It has shaped and moulded me as a friend, a daughter and a wife.
And I hope with every fibre of my being that it shapes me to be the best mother possible to the life growing inside me.
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