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Addicted to Hope
| Date: |
26 November 2006 12:00 |
| Producer: |
Carol Albertyn Christie
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
[Text] In the beginning there was... um.... not a lot of action at all. For most people, having a child involves sex. They don't question that sex will do the trick. Until it doesn't!
Tertia Albertyn (Author): 'When you start trying for a baby and it doesn't work straight away, a lot of the spontaneity and fun gets taken out of sex.'
Derek Watts (Carte Blanche presenter): 'Bring on the science?'
Tertia: 'Bring on the science... Sex is so last season.'
'So Close' has been described as 'Bridget Jones meets' fertility treatment'. It is Tertia Albertyn's personal story of her gruelling five year journey to have the babies she so desperately wanted.
Tertia: 'Probably the most motivating thing people said to me was 'maybe it is not meant to be... maybe this is your fate?' I thought: Oh really? I will show you this is not my fate.'
Tertia admits that she is an instant gratification girl... now is just too late. She is a determined MBA graduate working at an IT company in Cape Town. Used to being in control of her environment, it came as a shock that she could not fall pregnant naturally.
But after trying for six months with no success, she and her husband went to see a fertility specialist who ran a battery of tests on them.
Tertia: 'Mine was a little bit of everything. I had a little bit of polysistic ovarian syndrome, a little bit of ovarian endometriosis and a whole lot of bad luck.'
And obviously Marko, Tertia's husband also had to be tested.
Marko Albertyn (Husband): 'It's not fun. Everyone thinks it is quite easy. You talk to other people and the women start giggling because they think it is quite funny. I suppose it is. You get your instructions, you get your little jar, and the pressure is on you. You have to perform because you don't have an alternative.'
Luckily there were no problems on Marko's side and their fertility specialist decided to see whether artificial insemination would do the trick.
Derek: 'After three tries of artificial insemination Tertia decided that the only option was to go for what she calls the 'big guns', in vitro fertilisation, or IVF.'
It is more commonly known as test tube babies... The eggs and sperm are fertilised in a Petri dish. These growing embryos are then placed back into the uterus, where they will hopefully implant and develop into a healthy baby.
Tertia's mother had no problem conceiving her four children. She was a vital support to Tertia and accompanied her on the first IVF cycle.
Josephine Loebenberg (Mother): 'And we were excited when we went for the first time. We thought: this is great, this is wonderful. Then she was in a room with about six people. The woman next to her was on her sixth IVF, and I thought: wait, it''s not quite as simple as it sounds.'
Derek: 'Life expectancy has changed a lot over the past century. Basically we are living longer, healthier lives. But what hasn't changed in the equation is that it isn't easier to conceive children the older you get.'
Dr. Antonio Rodrigues is one of our country's most eminent fertility specialists and he says that egg quality definitely diminishes with age.
Dr. Antonio Rodrigues (Gynaecologist): 'I think women need to be educated to review their lives; to start to think of babies in their 20s; change their corporate life and their professional life around that need. We need to re-educate because we often find women who get to a certain age and they say: why didn't anyone tell me?'
Although Tertia was only 31 at the time, her first two IVF cycles did not work.
Marko: 'When you get a negative result Tertia obviously took it very, very badly. It affected me quite badly as well, and then you just sort of think: is it all worth it? Then you just turn around and think of the goal you have set yourself and just do the next one.'
Tertia: 'I can feel myself getting more and more insular, more obsessed. I can think about nothing else. The yearning for a child is all-consuming. It is all I do, all I think about. Somehow the world out there is full of pregnant women and babies are everywhere. They are daily reminders of my failing.'
Tertia: 'You know, I felt guilty that my husband had married a dud. I used to say to him 'Maybe you should just leave me and go find a woman who can give you children'.'
Derek: 'Research shows that stress plays a vital part in infertility. Many of the women who struggle to fall pregnant are of a certain personality type.'
Dr. Rodrigues: 'They are all what we call 'time urgent perfectionists', which means that they worry about being perfect and they worry about time. If you manage time urgency perfectionist stress in a group of patients, compared to a group where you don't manage it... in the under 35- year-olds you will improve your fertility rates from 40 percent to 67 percent on the IVF program. It is dramatic.'
Tertia's third IVF did not work either; she had an ectopic pregnancy that had to be terminated.
Tertia: 'I know that it is only an embryo... a few cells, but this embryo is my child, my baby.'
Tertia did three more IVFs with no success; the only solace she seemed to find was researching on the internet and joining forums of people also struggling with fertility issues.
Tertia: 'My best friend Mel invited me to a braai... My sister will be there with her baby, as well a woman with her newborn. I told her I won't be coming, I can't be around babies right now.'
Melany Bartok (Friend): 'There were points where she was not herself, where she was completely obsessed 24/7.'
Her inability to fall pregnant left Tertia in an extreme depression. At her family's insistence she went to a therapist who suggested anti-depressants. They made a significant difference.
Tertia: 'Marko is smiling from ear to ear because, for the first time in a long time, I feel like having sex again. Many people say that anti-depressants dampen your libido. Hell no!'
Tertia said that she tried everything to maximise her chances of falling pregnant, including acupuncture. According to Vicky Hindmarch, who sees many patients suffering from infertility, acupuncture can increase the blood flow to the ovaries and uterus.
Derek: 'What has your research shown when it comes to IVF?'
Vicky Hindmarch (Acupuncturist): 'It shows that we can increase the success rate of an IVF process. There was a German study done in 2002 where they had two separate sets of women and, [for] the women who had acupuncture alongside IVF, very specific needle points were used. And those patients had a 40 percent increased success rate.'
Tertia fell pregnant with her seventh IVF and for the first time felt that she was qualified to buy baby magazines. But her euphoria was short lived.
Soon after losing her baby on her seventh IVF, Tertia found out that her sister Mel [has] fallen pregnant naturally within months of coming off the pill.
Melanie Noritzkas (Sister): 'All of a sudden the things that were different about us came down to: you're fertile, I'm infertile. Instead of being her best friend and the person who loved her the most, I was probably her biggest enemy.'
Even with all of the forces conspiring against her Tertia refused to give up.
Dr. Rodrigues: 'Obsession amongst patients that are infertile - especially on the female side - it is so critical to have a baby. Most women have this intense need to have a child and it is hard to get rid of it.'
Tertia fell pregnant again on her eighth IVF. Although she spent five weeks in bed rest, her son Ben was born at 26 weeks, weighing only 920 grams. They did not think he would survive.
Tertia: 'Here we were in theatre - and it is supposed to be a happy time - and he came out and he was so tiny and he made this like a meow like a kitten. Markos started sobbing and I just lost it.'
Nine days after he was born Ben had a brain haemorrhage and the doctors told them he was clinically brain dead, with no chance of recovery. The Albertyn's had to make a difficult decision.
Markos: 'It was one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make. We have made the right decision. He was brain dead. We had to let him go. There was no other option.'
Tertia: 'And I held Ben. I hugged him and I kissed him and I drank in his smell. It was the first time I had held him.'
Markos: 'I have never cried so much in my life for that day.'
From the depths of despair, a year later Tertia and Marko became proud parents to Kate and Adam.
Markos: 'It was a completely different day to Ben's birth, obviously. To see these two normal- sized babies come out was just so overwhelming. It was absolutely amazing and we were overwhelmed.'
Tertia: 'People ask me: was it worth it? It is a very difficult question for me to answer. Was anything worth Ben's dying? No, nothing would ever be worth me losing my son. Are my kids Adam and Kate worth everything? They are worth it - and ten times more. Motherhood and mother love is way more than I ever expected it to be. That immense love... there is nothing like it in the whole world. This is what I instinctively knew that I would have one day.'
Tertia's book was based on her own personal blog site. It is the most frequented blog in the country and she deals with many issues, infertility being one of them.
Tertia: 'Not everybody likes to call themselves infertile, but I stand up and say 'I am infertile'. I am proud of what I went through; I stuck with it. I am proud that there is science out there that helped me to do it, and I am not ashamed. I tell everybody... if they say those are beautiful twins, I say 'They are IVF babies'.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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