Alex | ten year fertility journey, ectopic pregnancy, unexplained infertility, IVF, vaginal birth

“We were very, very keen to have kids. I felt very young and healthy and naively went off the pill and was expecting to get pregnant any day now. It took about a year for my period to come back, so it was a slow process and I started seeing naturopaths and acupuncturists, but I still trusted my body fully.

“A couple of years later we started seeing doctors and fertility specialists. We had unexplained infertility, there was nothing particular they could find in my body and nothing in David’s sperm that was going to be a problem that was solvable. I found that mentally really, really challenging. I didn’t recognise it at the time because it presented for me as anger and irritability. I remember feeling that I just wished something would happen to me, that something would fall out of the sky onto me so that I would be seen to be hurt. With fertility you don’t walk around with your arm in a sling, no one can see it.

“I was starting to throw plates, not recognising myself, so I saw a psychologist. Then David and I left our jobs in Melbourne and moved to Lord Howe Island, where I worked as a scuba dive guide and a yoga teacher. I think in the back of my mind I was like, this will be healthy, it will be natural, considering we’ve got unexplained infertility, we will probably get pregnant.

“We were on the island for a full year when we had a call with our specialist to come back and do IVF. The week we had that call, Covid hit Australia and everything went on hold. We ended up locked down on that tiny island for the best part of a year, painting decks and swapping food with the community.

“When the borders opened we flew back to Melbourne for our four week IVF cycle, except it turned into so much more than four weeks. During that time I fell pregnant naturally and I was so happy, I thought the island had done the trick. But at our eight week scan we were told it was an ectopic pregnancy and they couldn’t even find it. I was told it would feel like a heavy period, so I waited for that. Instead I ended up in Sunshine Hospital, passing out and vomiting, and they told me I had a ruptured fallopian tube and internal bleeding. Because of Covid restrictions David couldn’t even come in with me. I lost the pregnancy, my first ever pregnancy, and a fallopian tube. I felt so many steps backwards.

“I wanted to keep going straight away, so we started an ICSI IVF cycle. We put one embryo in fresh and it didn’t work, not even a blip on the radar. We did another egg collection, got some more embryos, and put one in fresh again, and again it didn’t work. By that point we’d lost our place on the island, so we moved home to Tasmania to be near our families. I pretty much crashed then, I was skinnier than I’d ever been, having nightmares, really depleted.

“Over the next couple of years we did frozen transfers that resulted in a couple of early miscarriages, including one that needed a D and C. I started applying a lot more self compassion to myself through those losses, breathing and moving my body rather than blaming it. That’s also when I really built my business, working with women through fertility struggles and birth trauma, using yoga and bodywork alongside nervous system regulation. I used to say that if I died tomorrow no one would care, and David would say, well I would care, but I meant no one needs me the way a child needs a mother. Building that business became a way of feeling like I was making a difference, whether or not I ever had a baby myself.

“By the end of 2025 I’d had investigative surgery which found stage two endometriosis, and another frozen transfer that also ended in miscarriage. I genuinely made peace with not having children. I started to really own that narrative, that I could still be a whole woman without a baby. David was ready to stop using our last embryos and medication, but I said I had one cycle of medication left in the cupboard, I’d used it before and knew how my body responded to it. I calendarised the whole cycle for David, so he knew which week I’d be feeling fragile and which week we’d find out. It meant neither of us was holding those four weeks in our heads the whole time.

“That cycle resulted in a natural conception. I was terrified because every previous positive test had ended in loss and surgery. We got a heartbeat, then another scan, then the twenty week morphology scan, and I cried with relief because I hadn’t quite let myself believe I would still be pregnant by then.

“I had a really healthy pregnancy and spent a lot of time preparing my body and mind for a vaginal birth, seeing an acupuncturist, having pregnancy massage, and doing neural emotional technique with a chiropractor to work through my fear around induction. My waters broke spontaneously at 38 weeks and I laboured at home for most of the first day. Once we got to hospital things slowed down, so I ended up having augmentation with the drip, which the doctors explained was just reminding my body of the contractions I’d already been having, rather than starting from nothing. That reframe really helped me mentally.

“I laboured for two days in total, working through it in the shower with gas, and by evening on the second day I was fully dilated. I got into the bath and pushed for about 45 minutes. I reached down and picked her up myself and held her on my chest, and it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I felt so powerful.

“Three weeks on, it isn’t all bliss. There’s so much love, but there’s also this real sense of having to rebuild my identity again. I never want to forget what I went through, and I never want to lose touch with the women I work with who are still trying.”

If you’d like to connect with Alex and find out more about her work in Hobart you can find out more at Sollus.