Infertility:  Jane and Ian 

As a midwife, Jane had shared the joy of childbirth everyday at work. Her new job, running research trials in women’s health and infertility, was quite a shock. “I realised that getting pregnant wasn’t as easy as it seemed and, at 34 myself, thought Ian and I had better get started”.

Jane’s job was to coordinate research trials within the Obstetrics & Gynaecology department at The University of Auckland. One of these, the ‘Flush’ study, aimed to improve fertility by flushing the fallopian tubes with lipiodol. Whilst Jane ‘quizzed’ potential recruits, they shared their frustration and sadness at having spent years trying to conceive.

Jane felt a rising sense of dread as each month passed without falling pregnant herself. The irony of her situation was not lost on her and she empathised deeply with the women she talked with in her work. She and Ian visited their GP and had blood tests, a laporoscopy and sperm tests. “We jumped on any slight anomaly, hoping we’d found the cause. I suppose we were disappointed to be told that there was nothing wrong and no reason for us not conceiving”.

We saw a fertility naturopath and dutifully drank the powders, even after being told they worked by ‘magic’. We ate healthily, exercised and cut out alcohol and caffeine. We learned to finely-tune the timing of sex and quite enjoyed falling asleep to the self-hypnosis tape that told us to “imagine the heat travelling up through your vagina”. Still nothing happened, yet it seemed everyone we knew became pregnant by merely holding hands.

“Recruitment to the Flush trial really took off when we had some pregnancies, which seemed to prove that it worked”, says Jane. As a result of the trial, the procedure was approved and Jane arranged to be ‘flushed’ herself. One month later, she was pregnant. Six weeks on, she miscarried, and two more months later she was pregnant again. “Edward was born nine months later weighing nine pounds and may never know what we went through!”

To read more about the Lipiodol Flush trial, click here