And so, despite all our reservations, in a way that when it came to it, almost seemed inevitable (we couldn’t not….), we made the decision to go again. After the issues we’d had with our previous clinic, we decided to transfer our care to another clinic that we trusted. 

And, after an initial consultation, in which I basically told them that I’d like to do pretty much a carbon copy of what we’d done before — same protocol, same drugs (minus the bit where my old clinic failed to check to see if I was ovulating), we were back on the familiar path of injections and scans and blood tests and waiting…

It was all the same, but different. As well as fitting things around work, I had to fit them around childcare, my living, breathing proof that this really could work. But I was painfully aware of that privilege, of knowing that while we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t want it to work, we were so damn lucky that we already had the child that we did have. 

(And here I’m probably going to offend a bunch of people, and as I’ve said before, I don’t believe that ranking misery helps anyone, but can we just take a minute to dispel the idea that secondary infertility — or struggling to conceive when you already have a child — is “just as bad” as infertility. It’s not, it’s not, it’s just not the same thing at all, and I think it’s really offensive to people who are dealing with infertility to suggest that it is comparable. I can see how it’s painful, I can absolutely see how distressing it is to think that you’re not able to give your child a sibling, to feel that they will miss out on the life that you wanted for them, and that you will miss out on being a parent to more than one child. But it’s not the same as the stark binary status that is either being a parent or not being a parent, and I just needed to have a small rant about that.) 

On one occasion, for complicated reasons, I had to take the baby’s car seat on public transport to the clinic with me and so I asked the receptionist if she could hide it somewhere so I didn’t have to take it into the waiting room. I didn’t want to flaunt my good fortune in front of people who were literally sitting in the place I’d been sitting a few years ago.

So yes, it was the same but different. In so many ways. And it made me realise how far I’d come. Back when I threw a party for my 40th and plied my friends with champagne, nobody but a select few knew that it was actually Appletiser in my own glass because I was trying to get pregnant at the time. Flash forward six years and yet again I’m faking boozing at my 46th birthday party, because yet again I’m trying to get pregnant. Only this time around, I’m not single and trying to get pregnant with an anonymous donor’s sperm, and I already have one much-tried-for child who is with his aunt, having a whale of a time. (I feel like at this point I should spout something profound about what I’ve learnt. But actually I’m not sure it’s about learning anything that I didn’t know already. Sometimes shit happens, sometimes you get lucky, and when you’re in the middle of what seems like a load of shit, it’s impossible to have proper perspective on it.)