Bibi Lynch
‘The problem is’, my consultant said to me over her shoulder as she typed notes about me into the north London hospital’s system, ‘the problem is me and my husband have to be really careful about contraception because I fall pregnant so easily.’
We could ignore the inappropriate, unprofessional, TMI-ness of her words. We could also ignore the fact that I didn’t give a toss about her fertility and hadn’t asked about it. But what we can’t ignore is why I was in the stuffy over-Dettol’d room in the first place: BECAUSE I WAS HAVING TESTS TO SEE IF I WAS STILL ABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN.
I write and talk for a living. But, in that moment, I couldn’t drag up a response. I wouldn’t suit an ankle-tag, so probably for the best.
Let me tell you my sorry tale.
Am the eldest of seven children and always thought I’d have kids. Actually, that’s not true: always thought I’d have one. ‘Frankie’. But I had obviously been a horror in previous lives because this one wasn’t playing ball.
Despite meeting - and ‘dating’* - many fantastic men, I was never in a romance long enough or serious enough to consider making Frankie with them. ‘Social infertility’, they call it. Hot. Fertile and physically able to have children, but never met the partner to have them with.
So I just kept hoping. And hearing stories of miracle babies. I remember reading about actor Halle Berry being pregnant at 41 and, born in the same year as me, that kept the Frankie fires burning.
But then, in 2008, the same year Berry had her first baby (she had another child when she was 47), my dad died. Cancer. You know how people often want to create when someone dies - art… the career they always wanted… a baby… - well that happened to me: I had that ‘it’s now or never’ slap around the face — and so I decided to see where 42-year-old me was at, baby-wise.
And as Consultant of the Year said to me in her office as she looked at my test results, ‘I don’t see anything positive here’. No sugar-coating — and definitely no care. When, obviously needing to absorb my fate, I half-joked that I might write about all of this’, she shut me down with ‘People are already doing that’. Her bedside manner was as savage as the ‘You’re probably too old to get pregnant’ news.
There’s more. A few weeks before this appointment, one of the male gynaecologists at the same hospital was incredibly brusque. Utterly charmless with snapping, short responses. Like half-naked me was irritating him. So I complained.
I didn’t get a response to my email — until I saw the consultant. ‘I was going to reply to you today’, she said. ‘What were you going to say?’, I asked. ‘That we all have bad days’, she replied. ‘Even patients.
And there’s more. When I was having blood and hormone tests at the same hospital, a nurse walked me to the room with the syringes. ‘At least you’ve had your babies’, she small-talked at me as she read my age on the forms. WTF? She couldn’t read the next line? Which probably said why I was having tests.
‘I haven’t’, I said.
She, mercifully, shut up.
(FYI She collected me from the ‘people seeing if they can have babies’ waiting room which was RIGHT NEXT TO the antenatal waiting room. So you’ve got people waiting for the worst news of their life sitting next to pregnant people growing the best of theirs.)
I wrote to the Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) about the waiting area set-up immediately - money and space issue, apparently - but it took me a year to complain about the consultant. I think I felt I had to ‘let it go’ - especially when I was reeling from Dad and ‘probably no babies’ grief - but then I got angry. That wait was a mistake: I was told I’d left it too long to write to them.
But not too long to write and share these experiences with you: especially during World Childless Week — of which I’m an Ambassador and where one of the themes is Childless Health Care.
(That’s right. Childless. I didn’t get pregnant. I was told there were no more NHS options for tax-paying-but-old me. So I went private. For about a week. Then the recession hit and I couldn’t afford anything other than follicle-tracking to see if my eggs were scrambling, and sperm that I bought and kept frozen for years and quietly cried when I finally let thaw. I never got to try IVF. I still mourn the chance. Told you, I was some POS in a former life.)
Me and my blood pressure are dreading reading the Childless Health Care stories — because I know one of those words is cruelly ironic. Inside - and outside - the medical world, childless grief isn’t comforted or soothed — it’s barely even recognised. And that causes very real pain.
According to the Office for National Statistics, almost one in five women will reach 45 childless — and that will be a cause of heartbreak for many of them/us. Our grief not mattering - or not even recognised - is the rancid icing on an already shitty cake. It’s bad enough that we don’t matter to politicians (‘Hard-working families’, anyone?), or that society puts us in our ‘as a mother’ place, but our healthcare system? When we’re probably at our most vulnerable? Hearing the words we’ve dreaded? Needing to be really looked after? We need the kindest care; not ignorance.
But on it goes.
A therapist of mine, when I cried about how much I’d wanted a baby, saying ‘It could be worse: you could’ve had a baby that died.’
And another male gynae who, pre-examination when asking preliminary questions, said: ‘So, how many children have you had?’
Me: ‘Seriously?’
Him: ‘Er…’
Me: *left the room*
The grief of not having children - we’re always told there’s no love like it - is brutal. And such carelessness on top of it? Against your oath, doctors, this ignorance does real harm.
*I employ the ‘’ because apart from one relationship - which lasted four years and ended the day after Princess Diana died (1997, Google fans) - my love-life has been a series of situationships, one-night stands or three-month collapses
