The baby bait

I've never actually sat down and thought about having children, maybe because i'm not in a long term relationship, maybe because i'm enjoying dating, maybe because I spend my weekends sitting in pub gardens drinking pints with friends, maybe because I love travelling, maybe because I'm putting all of my focus into starting up a business. I'm just 27, I like those maybes. I have plenty of time before I tackle nappies and midnight feeds, right? Well wrong, i'm in cancer world now remember, chemotherapy significantly reduces or may even take away my chance of having a baby. So now this wasn't a maybe moment, do I delay treatment and get my eggs frozen, or do a steam ahead with treatment? My consultant, who by the way is amazing, is concerned with my long term plan and wants me to have the choice of having children. After two years of misdiagnosis, what's an extra two weeks of fertility treatment going to do. Even though children wasn't in my immediate plans, having that choice cruelly taken away from me isn't fair. Its my choice, not cancers, the interfering bastard.

So off to Kings College London I go for two weeks of treatment. The basic idea is to cram my ovaries with hormones and stimulate the growth of the follicles and once I have enough, the surgeons will go in, or up, with a fishing rod and see how many of the blighters they can catch. I joke, it involves a very long needle and piercing of some very sensitive skin, but that doesn't sound very friendly and makes me feel queasy so lets just pretend I'll have a surgeon sitting there with a bright yellow fisherman's hat on, a fishing rod and baby bait.

The two week treatment involves injecting myself (yes myself, ahhh!) two times a night, one needle to spur on those hormones and the other to stop me ovulating before my follicles were ready – i'd have regular scans to monitor the growth. The first night of injections was chaos, firstly because I have a bad habit of getting distracted and not paying attention to serious conversations, like conversations where nurses show you how to mix the medications and inject correctly, you know the kind of conversations you HAVE to pay attention to, and could not remember what I was told to do. And secondly because I couldn't stop freaking out about this massive needle I'm having to put into my body! But finally, after watching a youtube video explaining the procedure I have the needle prepped and ready in one hand, glass of red in the other, some woman's monotone voice on the youtube clip in the background. God knows what my housemates would have thought if they'd walked in on this sight!

Sometime later...

Right so trying to inject with one hand is near on impossible so I had to shot that glass of wine, pour another, shot that, and with not so steady hands and having repeatedly shouted at myself to 'just fucking do it already' – again my poor housemates, I did it, hip bloody hooray, and ahhh relief, and you know it wasn't as bad as I thought, all that fart arsing around was ridiculous. But I am now aware that after two weeks of injections, I will look like a pin cushion and with the amount of needles I have stashed in my room I will look like an addict with a serious drug problem but sod it, it's giving me that chance to have children. And having spoken to or read about other peoples cancer experiences it is clear that many of them couldn't have the option of fertility treatment because of their type or stage of cancer and I keep thinking how heartbreaking that must be for them, so right now I count myself very lucky. Very lucky indeed.