Emanuelle (Manny) Plourde and Brett Lawson got married in June 2009 and hoped to start a family right away. After a year of trying to get pregnant with no success, they decided to consult a fertility specialist. The next five years were a blur of appointments, tests, injections, and procedures.The couple lived an hour away from the fertility clinic so making frequent trips to the clinic for cycle monitoring (on days 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 of Manny’s cycle) was challenging – especially given her job as a flight attendant. “It was brutal as I have to bid for my schedule every month and I had to sort of guess when I was going to get my period.”
Manny got pregnant in the first few months of cycle monitoring, but lost the baby at 11 weeks – an experience she describes as horrible and unbelievably painful. After two more rounds of cycle monitoring, the couple was growing impatient, so they tried intra-uterine insemination (IUI) - a fertility treatment where sperm are placed directly into a woman's uterus.
“I was creating eggs very easily but wasn’t having any luck getting pregnant. Having to bring the medication with me onboard the aircraft and injecting myself at 35 000 feet was tricky to say the least. I once had to ask a fellow flight attendant to come into my hotel room to give me an injection in my glutes as it had to be taken at a very specific time prior to an IUI.”
IUI was unsuccessful, so the couple tried in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the fall of 2011. IVF involves ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval from a woman’s ovaries, fertilization in a special laboratory, and subsequent embryo transfers.
For 2 weeks after the embryo transfer, Manny needed nightly progesterone injections in the upper buttocks to support implantation of the embryos. These injections caused extensive swelling and bruising.
“Brett had to inject me in the upper glutes every night for 2 weeks post procedure and he didn’t know where to stab me anymore as the entire area was just purple from bruising."
In Manny’s case 12 eggs were retrieved. “The egg removal was quite painful and only three embryos survived out of twelve”. Two of the surviving embryos were transferred several days after the egg retrieval (fresh embryo transfer) and one was frozen and transferred a few months later. None of the transfers resulted in pregnancy.
The intense psychological and physiological stress coupled with repeated disappointments left Manny’s emotions raw. “My brother called me on the same day I received my first IVF negative result to tell me they were 5 weeks pregnant. Their pregnancy was really difficult to swallow…”
An acupuncturist treating Manny recommended another fertility specialist, so the couple changed clinics and tried IVF again. But once again it failed.
In July 2013, Manny had laparoscopic surgery for endometriosis. She was never offered the option of the laparoscopy - it was her own prompting that led to the surgery. She says: "If I hadn’t asked for it, I never would have gotten it".
The fertility specialist recommended another round of IVF, but Brett and Manny were weighed down with the financial strain of treatment – they’d already spend over $50,000 on fertility treatments – and opted for the less expensive IUI instead.
After so many disappointments, the couple was overjoyed when IUI worked. Manny was pregnant – and elated! On the morning of her 6-week appointment, however, she awoke to severe cramping and thought she lost the baby. The pain was actually from a blood clot in her uterus. She was confined to bed rest for a week and recovered well. After this initial scare, the rest of her pregnancy went smoothly and on May 2, 2014 Manny gave birth to a healthy baby boy – Lucas.
Today, Manny is beyond grateful for her ‘beautiful boy’; she and Brett and Lucas are a tight-knit family that enjoy many outdoor adventures together.
For Manny the painful experiences she had are still a part of her: “Even now, at the age of 47, part of my heart sinks when I get my period every month. I no longer want to get pregnant because of my age and look forward to being menopaused, just so that part of my brain can finally rest.”
