It was 11.30pm and I was sitting at my desk at a law firm in the city, getting another deal over the line, when it dawned on me… What was the point?
Here I was again working into the early hours, and for what?
Aged 35, I was newly married and felt like I was wasting precious time when what I really wanted was to have a family. Something had to change.
My periods had been hit and miss for months. A combination of stress, long hours and pushing my body to its limits to hit work targets was taking its toll on both my health and I.
I was having 35-day cycles, which was unusual for me and everything was out of sync.
Even though my husband and I had started trying to get pregnant three months before, it just wasn’t working.
Every month and every period was torture. There’s nothing worse than throwing a negative pregnancy test in the bin – all of that hope and then sadness wrapped up together.
The most logical first step for me was to leave my job, which I did in July 2019.
That same month, I got pregnant. Subconsciously, I think that my body didn’t feel I was in a safe environment to carry a child until then.
My pregnancy had been good, it was ‘normal’ I guess, but I felt confident that everything was OK.
When my baby arrived in 2020, I realised that nothing else actually mattered in the world – not careers, weddings, travel or any of the things that I had wanted to do before conceiving.
Not long after she was born, I knew I wanted a second baby. In the December, I decided to test my fertility using an at-home hormone and fertility testing kit from Hertility.
I wanted there to be a bit of an age gap between my baby and a sibling, but I also wanted the security of knowing that I could afford to wait.
The test I took included 10 hormone panels, it didn’t just test AMH, which identifies the number of eggs, instead it was tailored to my personal wellbeing.
I felt reassured and we planned to wait for at least a year, maybe two, before trying for a second baby.
I panicked as I desperately wanted another baby, but my firstborn was just six months old
However, something inside me told me to test again – I think it’s the lawyer in me who needs solid facts – as the website suggests testing a couple of times a year.
I did another one in February and my fertility had dropped significantly. My AMH – which is the highest indicator of my egg reserve – had plummeted.
I spoke to a specialist from Hertility about my results and was shocked to find out that this rate of decline is actually completely normal.
It wasn’t unusual for my fertility to have declined – because I was 36. Yes, it was quick, but ovaries all age in different ways, just like we do – realising that was a groundbreaking moment for me.
My decline in fertility is what I would have expected across a year, not two months. I panicked as I desperately wanted another baby, but my firstborn was just six months old.
It didn’t make sense to me – my sister got pregnant quickly and I was from a big family so I had never imagined a day when I couldn’t have children.
My period still hadn’t returned after giving birth to my first child, but I assumed that my hormones were out of whack.
Looking back, I realise that I hadn’t been thinking about my physical state and that I took it all for granted.
I was due to get married and the focus was my wedding and I had been exercising in preparation for it every day.
I was underweight and – although you could argue that I was at the peak of my fitness – the reality was that my body was in fight or flight mode, and that’s what had been messing up my periods.
Knowing that I would struggle to have children if I left it much later, my partner and I decided to start trying again. We figured that it would take a while but that we could be carefully uncautious.
As luck would have it, I got pregnant straight away.
On the one hand, we were elated, as we were concerned about the low rate of my fertility.
We thought we would be able to pick and choose when to try again
However, the big worry was the timing. My first baby was nine months old and I was pregnant again – but there would never have been a good time.
My partner is a lawyer too, and we both have very involved jobs (I started a business with my sister). There was no time to slow down, to wait, to pause, to think.
We were definitely naïve before we took the test. We thought we would be able to pick and choose when to try again, to wait until after the event, the holiday, the promotion – but it just doesn’t happen that way. It’s not the way biology works.
In November 2022 I had my second child, another girl, Annie. I think she’s the most amazing person in the world.
And it makes me wonder, what if more people were put in the now or never place? If people were armed with real knowledge about their fertility, what would they do?
As women, we’re used to tracking our weight, our sleep, and our blood pressure but we’re not tracking our reproductive health. Reproductive health is a never-ending state, what’s happening in our bodies shouldn’t be a surprise to us, and yet it is.
One of the single greatest things that we have is information. My advice would be to check your reproductive health, check in, and arm yourself with the knowledge.
If you don’t want to know, that’s fine – but if you think maybe you want to have children, then you can take away the dice and make an informed decision based on your own biology.
Getting my fertility and hormones tested changed the course of my life. If I didn’t do that second test, I would be in a completely different place; if I had waited, Annie might not be here.
Having two kids under two and running a business is absolute chaos, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.
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