Photography by Clara Balzary
The world of advertising and music videos is not synonymous with wellbeing. It's full of stressful hours and crazy demands and Deliveroo. Hardly the foundations for successful IVF, which wants you to take things easy, take time off work to have your ovaries measured, blood tested daily for weeks. IVF wants you to inject yourself at very specific times — yes, even in the loo of The Ivy. It wants homemade chicken soup. But somehow Sorcha and Max managed to make it work, with their work. Third time lucky.
I knew we'd be friends when I first met Sorcha at a party. Together we spent our 20s pouring over fashion we couldn't afford, drinking wine with wanton abandon, fertility not even a fleck on our radar. Sorcha and Max were one of the first couples I knew to get married but they weren't in any hurry to start a family. Their careers — production, and a jewellery designer — were their focus. Sorcha had always imagined adopting rather having her own biological children, until she woke up one day, aged 29, and was like, "we need to make babies." Her main reason being that she just wanted mini Maxes in the world. "When I decide to do something, I become very procedural. I'd literally text Max 'come home, we need to have sex immediately' because I was checking my ovulation window and didn't want to miss it," Sorcha explains. But the months became a year and they still weren't pregnant, so they went to get checked out. It then took another year for the doctors to figure out what their fertility issues were. "It took us a while to get over that initial shock, but then we realised that we had so many options." Being open to various ways of making a family is what helped them mentally. It helped take the pressure off when they started their first round of IVF.
"Come home, we need to have sex immediately"
The timing wasn't great though. Sorcha had just started a new job she loved. Deferring the IVF wasn't recommended, they had a higher chance of success if they started promptly. But she also didn’t want her company to feel that her job wasn’t a priority. Faced with this dilemma, she chose to not tell them. Which meant all the clinic appointments, and blood tests were done in secret, while the work stress piled on. It's something I can completely relate to. Pretend dentist appointments, doctor appointments, a locksmith call-out — anything but an IVF appointment — became my ruse. I found myself slipping into empty meeting rooms to get bad news from embryologists moments before presenting work to a client on a few occasions. The worlds just don't mesh. They're not considerate of each other. Sorcha and I question why we couldn't tell our bosses, and it was definitely due to an element of fear. Fear that you're perceived as not giving your job your all. Like wanting a career AND starting a family devalues you as an employee — which is utterly ridiculous, of course. But some work environments breed that fear rather than support women going through IVF. It's something that needs to change. Obviously there's the tiny percentage of companies who recognise the time off that's needed for fertility treatment. A recruiter recently told me about a company that offers two weeks leave for IVF. But that's definitely an anomaly.
Sorcha and Max managed to do an embryo transfer on their first round, but she tells me, "I stupidly went back to work the next day, as I was nervous about taking more time off. A lot of the women I talked to at the hospital said to go about your life as usual. So I did." The views of what you should or shouldn't do are pretty polarising. But avoiding stress is something everyone agrees on. When they got a negative result after the two-week wait, they went out that night and got drunk. Because sometimes that's just what you've got to do. "We just assumed that as we were having treatment we'd get pregnant. We weren't prepared for it to not work."
“We weren't prepared for it to not work"
Living in Hammersmith meant they could only get funded for one round. "I love the NHS, but they can only help you so much," Sorcha says, "they had a bit of one-size fits all approach, and our particular issues were very specific." When people talk about it taking years to get pregnant, unless you've been there, you don't realise how drawn out the process is. How it takes time to go through treatment, take stock when it doesn't work, and decide what to do next. They gave up booze for six months: "I made the decision to be really strict about not drinking because I didn't want to blame myself, I wanted to be kind to myself, mentally and physically prepared." They then headed to ARGC, the London clinic with the highest success rate. It's got a reputation for offering treatment plans very specific to a patient's needs. As much as Sorcha wanted to do all the yoga and acupuncture in her quest to get pregnant, she also wanted Western medicine with results.
"I remember being in the waiting room on the first day, and just looking around and seeing all these people who had a shared ambition. It was overwhelming, and somehow quite uplifting being around people in the same boat. I felt like these people were my comrades," Sorcha says. But if you've ever spent any time in a fertility clinic waiting room you'll know that no one talks to each other. They flick through a knackered, two-year-old copy of Hello magazine or scroll on their phones. "I wish clinics would do group counselling sessions, because you feel very isolated doing IVF. You can talk to your friends as much as possible, but I think to be able to talk to a group of strangers who are going through a similar thing would be empowering," she adds.
Hearing Sorcha talk about the whole injection side of IVF says a lot about her style. The sight of needles used to make her pass out, literally, she had a terrible needle phobia. It was the main reason she didn't initially want to do IVF. But she knew that if she wanted a biological child, she'd have to get over her fear. So she just got on with it. The first time she injected herself she had a huge sense of relief that it didn't really hurt, the needles were actually quite tiny. Sorcha dealt with her fear of needles by getting, in her words, 'weirdly obsessed' with the routine. "I had this really pretty little box, and I thought, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to have my needles in here, and my different drugs here. I was like an upscale druggie." During the stimulation phase, Sorcha would get her bloods done at ARGC in the morning, then they'd call later that day to tell her what time to inject the hormones, so she had to be open to doing the injections wherever she was. "I injected myself in pretty much every restaurant in Soho," she laughs. "I remember a few incidents where I thought 'this is hilarious,' like being at a wrap party for a commercial and having to go to the loo at The Ivy to do an injection. And another time, Max and I were at a friend's 40th and had to go to the loo together so he could do the trigger shot in my bum — it looked pretty dodgy. But it's good to be able to look at those ridiculous scenarios we found ourselves in."
"I injected myself in pretty much every restaurant in Soho"
Their first IVF cycle at ARGC was cancelled half way through, as Sorcha wasn't responding to the medication. Something she puts down to the stress of keeping IVF a secret. An unnecessary one, she now regards. "I realise now that my fears of being transparent about the treatment came from my own paranoia." As on their second round, Sorcha was straight-up with her bosses, who were all completely supportive. She was able to take time off to allow her body to relax and react to the drugs. “In hindsight I can’t believe I didn’t speak to them sooner, they all have families themselves who they adore, and it seems crazy that in this day-and-age we have to hide something that is so important," Sorcha says. Now feeling that if her work hadn't responded in a positive way, then they wouldn’t have been the right company for her.
It was this second round of IVF that worked for Sorcha and Max, but she was seriously ill after the egg collection. "We got home and I started slurring my words, I sounded drunk. I felt drunk. But we put it down to the general anaesthetic. Then the pressure of going for a pee made me feel like I was having a heart attack, and I knew that I had to scream for an ambulance before I passed out," Sorcha remembers. She was rushed to hospital, put on Morphine, and monitored. It transpired that during the egg retrieval, the small puncture holes into her ovaries hadn't closed, so she bled internally. Something that's incredibly rare, happening to one in every 2000-3000 people. It was just serious bad luck.
There was some good news though, ARGC called to say they had five embryos. But Sorcha was done; she felt too ill to do the transfer. Their consultant was supportive but also determined to get Sorcha pregnant, and suggested she spend the next few days recovering while the embryos went to blastocycst. In the end they decided to go ahead with the transfer with a what-have-we-got-to-lose attitude. She'd already scheduled the time off work and would literally be lying in bed recovering. There was no harm in seeing if an embryo or two wanted to stick around. They decided to implant two. And whether it was the bed rest, the golden embryos, Sorcha's mum's chicken soup, or a winning combination of all three, but it worked, Sorcha and Max were pregnant with twin boys.
When you've been through the wringer to get pregnant, you expect an overwhelming sense of love when you give birth. Sorcha and Max are quite upfront about the absence of this when Sterling and Inigo were born. Something they think is important to normalise: "Your body's gone through a crazy experience, you're in shock, and as a couple we were just so exhausted. For the first three weeks we were like, 'we'll protect these babies and we'll always look after them, but why don't we have the love-at-first-sight feeling everyone talks about?'" Obviously their boys are their world now, but she wishes more people were more honest, the rush of emotion isn't necessarily automatic — especially with a caesarean delivery.
"why don't we have the love-at-first-sight feeling everyone talks about?"
People with twins say that you just accept that life's going to be mental for the first two years. It's all about survival. And they made it. There was never a point where Sorcha and Max stopped loving each other, but there were times when they might have stopped liking each other — which, let's be honest, is completely normal for any relationship. With the boys now four, they've all found their feet. Sorcha thinks that had they only transferred one embryo, they would have said, "we've got one, we're done." But luckily they opted for two, and they've got two very different boys: Sterling who is just like Max in every way, and Inigo who's Sorcha's spitting image — although recently his personality is becoming more like Max's. It took them five years from trying naturally to having the boys, so even though it's been a long and exhausting ride, Sorcha got her mini Maxes in the end.
The clinic that boasts results: www.argc.co.uk
Chicken soup for the two-week wait: www.hemsleyandhemsley.com/recipe/chicken-tinola/
Music videos to watch: www.caviar.tv/work
Jewellery to drool over: www.guyandmax.com
