After a Year of Trying as a Single Dad, I’m Finally Pregnant Again

I have no scientific evidence that my body “dislikes” frozen embryo transfers (FETs), but it feels true. Believing this helps me understand the early miscarriage I experienced at the start of 2021 after a transfer, followed by a straightforward failed FET attempt. I do not have infertility, and the embryos were “high grade.” FET should have been a slam dunk, and yet I experienced what felt like not just failure, but emphatic rejection by my body. Again, no scientific evidence, but I imagined it like an immune response. Like my uterus saying, “Excuse me, what is this, and why is it here without my express permission?”

After the second FET failed, I had what could be described as a mid–fertility treatment crisis. April marked a whole year off testosterone, and I had nothing to show for it. It felt like life was on hold, and I was enduring a daily onslaught of gender dysphoria for no good reason. So I did what any basic, middle-class, white dad would do: I bought a camper van. 

I’m not usually one for impulsive decisions. At 34, I’d never before owned a vehicle nor paid for a foreign holiday that didn’t double up as study abroad. But the saga of fertility treatment does weird things to a person; any person. When that second FET failed, snapping up a bargain van a friend had tipped me off to felt like the only solution. That grand gesture alone would silence the cacophony of, I’m suffering existentially and watching life pass me by in my head. 

I didn’t buy the van alone. I “co-invested” in a micro camper van with my parents—you know, like a proper grown-up. The plan was to share use and, at other times, to rent it out via the camper van equivalent of AirBnB. So, before long, it would hopefully provide a little extra income. 

I had saved for my share of this investment for a few years, having long harbored a van-life fantasy. It was primarily these savings I was so afraid of my fertility treatment eating into or gobbling up entirely. Of course, I wanted to complete my family, as I imagined it, but I also wanted to continue pursuing the full life I imagined beyond that. I wanted to be able to give my already-here kid, SJ, all the adventures and memories he deserved. I recoiled at the thought that I could spend so much time and money creating a sibling, it might come at the cost of living a full life with the child I already had. 

As I made these deliberations, I hoped a different kind of fertility treatment would agree with my body’s imagined likes and dislikes. That same month, I was looking forward to the simplicity of an intrauterine insemination (IUI) procedure, where donor sperm is introduced directly into the uterus, and your body takes it from there. The only medication I’d take was a “trigger shot” of hCG hormone the night before, to make sure I ovulated at the optimal time. 

Overall, the process would also cost less than FET—or so I thought. In mid-April, a clinic nurse called me to London for a HyCoSy test. “What’s that?” I asked, surprised. “I’ve never had that before.”

She explained that they would push a liquid dye through my uterus and fallopian tubes, to check for blockages that might impede the journey of an egg to meet the sperm. Blockages can develop anytime, so even though IUI had worked perfectly four years previously when I got pregnant with SJ, it might not this time. This was explained with the heavy implication that my old clinic should have done a HyCoSy test before the IUI.

“How much does it cost?” I asked warily. 

“£450,” came the reply, a little over $600. 

I groaned internally. Just when I thought my wallet was only in for a slight beating this month –around £800 for IUI, versus the £1,600 of each FET– the bill was suddenly more than 50 percent heftier than expected. My instincts reared up again: With no scientific evidence, I felt like it was a waste of money. I felt like my tubes were clear, but what if I was wrong, and wasted the entire cost of an IUI? What if, like with most aspects of trying to conceive this time, things were more complicated than I had anticipated?

In mid-April, I had £450 worth of dye (a minute amount) flushed through my pristine tubes. The doctor actually said she’d never seen it flow so fast. To top it off, it’s the only fertility procedure I’ve ever had that caused intense pain, with a generous side helping of nausea and a headache after. At least I had peace of mind. After that, I waited for the start of my next cycle, which handily coincided with the start of the month. 

With it came the van. On Saturday, May 8, the tiny, yet, to my eyes, magnificent vehicle was delivered to our sleepy street by the friendly people who’d converted it from an eight-seater minivan to a four-seater micro camper van. On Sunday, May 9, I drove to London for the IUI that I hoped would result in my second child. 

When you reach the final stage of a fertility treatment cycle—the appointment that could create a pregnancy—it usually comes after weeks or months of preparation, even if it’s a first attempt. When one of these big, crescendoing, exclamation marks of an appointment happens, it’s hard not to have thoughts like, I wonder if this is the last time I walk through this door… I wonder if this is the last time I’ll see this nurse’s face… I wonder if this is the last time I drink water to the precise point of having a “comfortably full bladder”… (This is basically the slogan for FETs and IUIs.)

I still had these thoughts, despite trying not to. When it’s your third attempt, the I wonder if this is the last time… line of thinking can start to seem like self-inflicted mockery. Perhaps it was that mental tug-of-war that distracted me from actually drinking enough water. I was the last patient of the day on a Sunday, however, so when the nurse checked the fullness of my bladder, she must have thought, That’ll do. I’d quite like to get home.

When the doctor came in, donor sperm at the ready, the nurse had to apply extra heavy pressure to my abdomen to get a clear view on the ultrasound screen. It was in that state of intense discomfort that I realized what a full bladder is for. It gives the ultrasound wand something to push on and “look through.” Without it, she had to work a lot harder to give the doc the view he needed to accurately place the sperm.

I started to silently panic that the heavy pressure would stop the IUI working. Surely it would discourage the sperm from swimming up or the egg down? I didn’t begrudge the nurse (she was also humming dreamily, which I found very relaxing) but I did think to myself, Well, that’s fucked it.

And yet—perhaps for all the reasons I had intuited about what my body did and did not want, but likely for none of them at all—it worked. Like a redo of my first attempt at IUI, with this same donor leading to the birth of my first child, this time again, it worked first time. Almost exactly a month later, two weeks after a succession of positive pregnancy tests (no matter how many I did, I couldn’t quite believe it) I had an early scan back in London to confirm. 

Almost exactly four years earlier, I’d taken the pregnancy test that would lead to SJ’s birth. Back then, my initial emotional reaction was muted and could best be described as literal disbelief. No tears, no relief, just shock. True to personal form, the same thing happened this time, when I peed on the first stick and the many after. 

Maybe the objectively joyous, life-changing information bounced off some hard psychic armor I’d installed in anticipation of more bad news. Maybe the earlier experience of miscarriage added to my tendency toward wariness and habit of emotionally processing events long after they actually happen. 

One of the first thoughts that did manage to traverse my frazzled neural pathways was, I think I was a bit hasty buying a van with only enough sleep space for a family of two… 

Over a year after I first tried to get pregnant again, I was finally on my way. As I left the clinic after the early confirmation scan at six weeks of pregnancy, clutching a grainy ultrasound printout of virtually nothing, another thought suddenly slipped through: I wonder if this is the last time I’ll ever be here.

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