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Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mother and Me a podcast.
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Speaker 2: Mama Mayer acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. I actually feel like it's a blessing that I get to live through her, if that makes sense, because she is so beautiful and healthy and strong and very much like me in every kind of way. So having her is kind of like a privilege that I get to now experience childhood through her.
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Speaker 1: What childhood should be welcome to, Well, your body explained, I'm Grace Reuvey, and you just heard from Amy Morrisby. Every now and then you meet someone whose relationship with their body completely redefines what resilience looks like, and Amy is exactly that person. Born with a rare gastro intestinal disorder, Amy spent the first three years of her life in a hospital. Ward she underwent major surgeries that left her with only sixty centimeters of her small bow. Amy has gone on to a lot. She's gone through a grueling IVF journey, enduring tragic losses, but within this story is an extraordinary act of love when her own sister stepped in to carry her daughter. Now an author and a nutritionist, Amy joins me to discuss rewriting her narrative surviving an early menopause at thirty and how she finally learned to stop breathe and truly inhabit herself in her own skin. Amy, your story starts, well, you can't quite comment on it because you were a baby. What do you know about the very early days of your life?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, so born, beautifully healthy, little tiny baby. I was everything seemed to be going well. I was feeding well, and then around day three I just hadn't passed my maconium. Okay, and if anyone who's listening knows that have had children, that the maconium can either come out with the baby or not long after the birth. So we had gotten to three days old and still no maconium, but a very distended stomach.
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Speaker 1: And so what tests did they start ordering at that point?
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Speaker 2: Well, by day three I was showing signs of distress and my maconium instead of coming out the bottom, was coming out of my mouth. Obviously that's signs of blockage, and that was what they were treating me for, you know, blocked bow. I was having things like animals, flushes, all the things, and obviously still nothing. So by day four, I was in Brisbane. Also, it's nineteen ninety country town new Ward. There wasn't a lot nineteen year old mother, so the best thing to do was to take me to the closest, you know, established hospital, which was the Raw Children's Hospital. So in Brisbane and off I went. My mum had it cesarean as well, so my mum's recovering. So once we all arrived down in Brisbane, I obviously was seen quite quickly in the children's unit. There were adopted by the name of Fred Lditzki. Happened to be on shift, and you know, multiple tests, lots and lots of tests, and the diagnosis around twelve days old, when I had had a major surgery to investigate, was that I was missing the ganglion cells in all of my large intestine.
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Speaker 1: What does that mean?
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Speaker 2: When you eat food and it goes down into the stomach, down into the intestines, your cells move everything. They move food through, they digest, They helped things keep moving until it's exited the body. Those cells were there, but they were not viable. So they were playing around with crones because that's common. Hirshbrung's is not Hirshbrung's also really only has been found in boys. I was also the first female on their record or in an Australian record that could potentially have had Hirshbrung's disease, but crones made more sense to them at the time, so that surgery was quite significant. I'm going through the actual notes at the moment.
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Speaker 1: What have you learned about yourself through these?
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Speaker 2: A lot.
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Speaker 1: A lot things that your mom doesn't even know or didn't remember.
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Speaker 2: Things my mum forgot. I thought it would be traumatic, it's not. I think it's different to because I'm a mother now. I feel like seeing it now from my mother's point of view, is now what's happening. And when they went in and did that surgery at twelve days old, they found the cells weren't just missing from my large intestines. They were missing from majority of my small intestines and my colon. So I wasn't just affected in one part of my body. I was actually even the appendix.
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Speaker 1: So what does that mean on a day to day perspective? So as a baby, you know there's formula or there's breast milk, What did that mean for your calorie intake? How that affected you, and then as you can start to cognitively remember what your childhood is like, what happened.
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Speaker 2: So I was on TPN. I always knew that I had a central line at some point in my life.
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Speaker 1: Line.
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Speaker 2: Yes, So it is a line that delivers nutrients directly to the blood. It bypasses the gut, bypasses the stomach, and you will find that a lot of people who live with either digestive or gastro intestinal disorders actually will have a TPN full time because their gut does not absorb any nutrients and cannot then deliver to the rest of the body. And I do have scars where the central lines were. There was always cords and tubes and everything coming out.
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Speaker 1: And that's an outpatient thing. So when you were at home as a baby, you didn't have to be in hospital to receive that treatment.
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Speaker 2: Well, I never came home until I was three, and during that those three years, I had days where I'd be out. I just had to be very more. Mum had to be very careful because if I was around anyone who is unwell or carrying a bug or anything.
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Speaker 1: What does she tell you about those three years, what they were like for her?
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Speaker 2: When I was born and she was going through all of this, you know, she made a promise to herself that she would not leave my side, and she didn't. So it's even as an adult, I'm married with my own daughter. And isn't it funny that if I'm unwell, or if something doesn't feel right, or my eyes are sunken or I don't feel I wring my mum. So the cords did come home with me my mom. My mom became my nurse as well. And look in the midst of this, my mum had a second child, my sister, when I was three. My mom had to learn how to be my nurse. And there is flashbacks that I do have. It's usually there's this one flashback I have quite often, and I'm laying in the laund room on the floor, and I remember I had a I've got an iliostomy, which I've still got now it's permanent. But I also had a mucus fishler to the right.
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Speaker 1: Could you explain each of those things?
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Speaker 2: So in iliostomy is obviously part of the small intestine, it's permanent, it's there, it's what keeps me alive. And then the mucus fishler because I didn't have anywhere for the waist that the body collects. There's nowhere for it to go because I don't have well, I had a colon, but it was to make sense to the listener, it's sewn up, it does not work, nothing can come out. So the mucus fishil acts as another colostom or an iliostomy for output. And this all had to be kept sterile and clean and changed all the time. And I remember laying there and my mom would have to flush. My mom would have to put tubes down my stoma while I'm awake, and I remember that pain, but it had to be done. And I remember she would hang the fluid bags on the fan on coat hangers, and that was every day.
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Speaker 1: How does this change your childhood? Because you don't know any better, Like this is just part of your life. But what's fun to you? What are some of the games or the social times that you remember? And as you get older, you go, huh, my life was very different, Like what do you remember about the childhood naivity of that time?
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Speaker 2: So this is a confusing part even for me. Is I simply just don't know, And especially now that I'm educated, I don't know how I'm alive. I simply just it doesn't make sense to me because from the ribs down I have no organs. It just honestly does not make sense. But I was such a happy child, and I truly believe it's because my mum and dad were so young when they had me that they was still in a place in their life where things had to be fun, and it was really important for my mum to have a normal childhood. I still went to school, a normal school, but my mom came to school with me a lot, which I didn't like, but she was always there. Very competitive. I actually am very competitive. I loved sport, so I really did try and do as much as I could. And if I was ever told that I couldn't do something, well, no, I'm going to do it. Yeah, if I want to do it, I'll do it unless mum really said no. This mum really said no, like you literally, like if a ball hits you in the stomach, we can't, we can't have it.
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Speaker 1: So you said, from the ribs down you have no organs, Like we're jumping a little bit ahead in this.
00:10:19
Speaker 2: Story, and that's a lot.
00:10:21
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've also heard you say, oh yes, the organs I have left. So can you take me through medically what has been removed and when it had to be removed and what's left?
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Speaker 2: To my knowledge, when I was seven was the biggest surgery I've had, and that was when the hard decision was made between the surgical team and my parents that the iliostomy had to stay in order for me to live well. And however that future looked, we didn't know, No one knew. But all of my large intestines were removed and everything except sixty centimeters of alium small vow and then the appendix went with it. And then we're really flashing forward here, but it makes sense to add it in now. But when I turned thirty, I needed a hysterectomy where they took uterocervix, filopian tubes, ovaries.
00:11:16
Speaker 1: And that was because as a result of scar tissue on your organs. How did that happen? Is that through multiple surgeries or what's the flow and effect to it?
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Speaker 2: So throughout the rest of my life through teens, you know, I needed minor surgeries, lots of minor surgeries because I'd get unwell, I'd get infections, I get you name it, I had it. You know, I'd get blockages, twists, things would twist, you know, even still as an adult, sometimes I'll just end up with a twisted bowl because there's it's just wild what's going on in there. And I just I've lost count of scars. I've got scars that run from hip to hip. Now obviously I've got a hysterectomy scar as well, which runs hip to hip under it. There's a lot going on. And it wasn't actually until we started going through fertility treatment and had different kinds of surgery then that we discovered the scar tissue had in fact grown onto my reproductive organs. Scar tissue has no blood flow, So it's not just a matter of going in and we'll just oh, we'll remove that bit of scar. It doesn't work like that.
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Speaker 1: When you went on a fertility journey and decided that that's something that you wanted in your life, were you thinking that you were going to have struggles because of your diagnosis?
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Speaker 2: It was questions I asked throughout my life, because well, I'm a girl. Yeah, of course, you know when I dream of getting married and having babies and doing all the things. So I was prepared as a young girl I was prepared as a child. One thing I will say about my upbringing is no one ever spoke to me like I needed to protection. My medical team, my parents, everyone was always transparent with me. They never spoke to me. It was just black and white. And I had developed a vocabulary more, you know, by the time I was a teenager than what most adults would ever develop in their lifetime. And terminologies and just all of.
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Speaker 1: This crazy say good at pe and biology chemist, Like, if you've learned all these medical things that many people wouldn't are so lucky to not know in school?
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Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, I think what an honor to understand the body at a biological level. I think we should all know.
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Speaker 1: That's such a lovely way to look at it. Okay, So you always had been asking questions the whole time, So it gets to the point of going, okay, I might want a child. Are you exploring IVF at first or are you trying for a spontaneous pregnancy.
00:13:55
Speaker 2: I didn't know when, and I never put a timeline on it because I was so compromised my whole life. All I wanted to do was travel, and all I wanted to do was be a millionaire. I just wanted to make lots of money so I could retire my parents and make my siblings happy. That's all I wanted to do. And I love business naturally. Now, anything that challenges me I love. So Fortunately I met my husband when I was nineteen, which is, you know, terrific, given that it was also not on my radar. You know, I didn't dream of leaving school and meeting someone and starting a life straight away. I wanted to do all the other things. But I think I was around about twenty one twenty two, I was actually on the contraceptive pill and still was having irregular cycles, shocking side effects like I struggled with skin and weight fluctuation, which I really didn't need because I had enough on my plate. Yes, okay, so when I moved to a country town west of Brisbane, I started seeing a GP and just said, look, I'm on this pill. I don't think it's doing anything good for me. I'm in a relationship, and you know, I have been told that having a baby's probably going to be difficult. So look, I'm getting married next year and i'd like to explore what my body is like not being on the pill. And that's when it all started. I came off that pill and a lot was revealed to me, A lot now that I know, was things like and demetriosis, like things just started happening that I hadn't experienced before. And it was quite odd because my pain tolerance is very high, very very.
00:15:41
Speaker 1: High, I can imagine it would be, and.
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Speaker 2: The pains that I started experiencing were very odd, very strange. Lower back pain, just uncomfortable. I couldn't sit still, I couldn't think straight. And then there was an episode one night at two o'clock in the morning where I actually had a perforated fillopian tube, so the blood flow had been cut off to my ovary and you know, hours in emergency, and you know, this is putting all in a nutshell. But it turns out that when it was time for the body to do what the body was supposed to do, it just went no, not doing that, and that's where it all started. I was referred to a specialist. They started testing things like egg count, egg quality, what's my cervix, what's my urine wool like?
00:16:28
Speaker 1: And this is in your early twenties.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, this is in early twenty twenty. I think I was twenty two yeah, because I was getting married at the end of the year.
00:16:35
Speaker 1: Right, And so when you found all of this information, how did you feel about your timeline of wanting to have a child, because, as you said, it wasn't about having a child. Immediately was like, all right, well, I just want to see what my body does.
00:16:48
Speaker 2: When the specialist sat in front of me and told me that my reproductive system was reflecting someone in their forties in terms of my quality of eggs, amount of eggs, all of the all the tests, and that's what he was telling me. And he asked us a series of personal questions. You know, are you married, No, we're getting married. You have a house, yes, Do you have a career yes, you know. Have you traveled yes? Okay, great. I think you should think seriously about collecting some eggs and freezing or even starting the process now. He said, your body has been through a lot. Your reproductive system tells us that things are declining quickly. If you're going to have a baby, I suggest you do it now while you're actually young and fit and strong and healthy, because the way your body will cope with pregnancy now will be very, very different to how your body handles pregnancy in your thirties or your forties, and we just sat there, you know, about to get married twenty two years old. I had given my husband an alternatum a couple of years before, saying, look, this is this is my life. This is going to be our life. Never know what I'm going to be sick, We don't know if we're going to be be about to have children. Here is your chance to go on find someone else. All big out yea at nineteen imagine that. But like I said before, by the time I was a teenager, I was very grown up.
00:18:19
Speaker 1: Had to be. Were they encouraging spontaneous conception or saying let's start an IVF journey?
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Speaker 2: So we started IVF pretty well. As soon as we got married. The process started, which is quite in depth. Lots of hormones, and something had shifted up until we got married. We were to harvest the eggs, freeze them, save them for a later date, fertilize them, create embryos. But when it came time to start the process, I had read that there was an option to do a fresh transfer, meaning that instead of collecting the embryos and waiting for them to form, to be transferred into the freezer, you can actually transfer one directly back into the uterus. It's more favorable to wait till they've been frozen and the bodies recovered, and then you start again. And I think now that knowing myself and being young and eager and wanting things yesterday, I think that that would have played a big part. You know, we're married, now, we're in love, we're on the wedding high, and I think I just wanted to see. I wanted to test the waters and just see if it was going to I was. I didn't want to wait to see if.
00:19:36
Speaker 1: It was going to work. Yeah, you wanted to know.
00:19:38
Speaker 2: I wanted to know.
00:19:40
Speaker 1: So you did the fresh transfer? Yes, And how did it go? No?
00:19:44
Speaker 2: It was it wasn't, No, it didn't. Nothing stuck. Yeah, there was no pregnancy here. From there, it was just one to the next, one to the.
00:19:53
Speaker 1: Next, trying rounds. Yeah, how many rounds did you go through?
00:19:57
Speaker 2: So with this collection, wind up with wind up with sixteen eggs, four embryos. Yep, So we tried that four times the second transfer. Though we feel pregnant. I I couldn't believe something actually worked. So, without sounding insensitive, there was one thing to celebrate the baby, but it was another thing to celebrate the fact that my body did something right.
00:20:24
Speaker 1: What is your relationship with your body at this point?
00:20:27
Speaker 2: At this point, I'm obsessed with it.
00:20:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're pregnant. What are the steps when you do find out you're pregnant when you have a very complex medical history. What happened next.
00:20:40
Speaker 2: When it came to the pregnancies. It's almost like I was treated just normal, like how everyone else would be treated, given the fact that I actually have just fallen pregnant via IVF, so it's already different, you know. Then you moved onto things like progesterone to try and hold the baby in there, to keep things thick, because the brain has not encouraged the body to fall pregnant. Science has, so you're still on all these medications. So it's it's still business as usual, you know, checking in with your doctor, making sure your progesterine levels and al was the baby still there is a heartbeat yet, So it was still very focused on just keeping the pregnancy there. I never got to a point where I could come off progesterone and let the body take over, because as soon as my body started to understand what was going on it was rejecting.
00:21:35
Speaker 1: What were your first signs that something was going wrong with the pregnancy?
00:21:39
Speaker 2: Do you know? I had the most horrific morning sickness. I would have it from the minute my eyes would open and then to the minute they closed, and like clockwork, the minute there was an implantation. I didn't even need a test. I was sick, plus all the hormones amplifying everything. I was sick straight away. And then I also knew when the baby had stopped growing because my sickness would stop. So it had ways of telling me before I even knew.
00:22:14
Speaker 1: How many weeks were you when you found out that pregnancy wasn't viable.
00:22:18
Speaker 2: So the first one, we were actually quite early, quite quite early. I think we were around six weeks, maybe five weeks. We went to it was our first scan. It was our first scan, and we were very excited and still couldn't believe it, and we were going to check. We're going to see I'd never seen a baby on a screen before, I'd never seen a heartbeat. Couldn't even tell you what it sounded like, so that's what we were going for, and there was no heartbeat. I'd had some spotting and had some bleeding, but in my case that's not unusual. So really I didn't tie it to potentially being a miscarriage. I just said, this is my body because this has been my life. Clinically speaking, I just I don't think I ever held space for myself to actually grieve of what just happened. It wasn't until much later down the line.
00:23:11
Speaker 1: Because you moved straight on too, trying again and going again. So when do you feel like that grief did hit you? And was there a catalyst that made it all compound or just the fact that you stopped.
00:23:23
Speaker 2: Once our daughter was here, we had to think do we do this again. That's when it actually started to hit me once she was already here, because we then had to make the decision. It was then finally a decision I had to make. It wasn't just let's go, let's go, let's go. I had to actually make the decision then of whether or not we would try and give her a sibling.
00:23:47
Speaker 1: I do want to go back to talk about how your daughter did come into the world. Yes, at what point do you reach out to your sister or does your sister reach out to you and go, hey, I can help.
00:23:59
Speaker 2: So there was one pregnancy that was the catalyst, and I had lost the baby and once again had to wait for everything to do what it needed to do. At one point, this is where it gets really sticky for me, because I had so many cycles and so many hormones and drugs and all the things that I start to get confused. But at one point, to help me pass one of the babies was I actually had to have meth and tracks eight because I had a miscarriage. Went to emergency a couple of weeks later with horrific pain, horrific and they said, look, we just need to test for pregnancy. And I said, no, I had a miscarriage two weeks go. I'm fine, it's just my body trying to get rid of it. And they came back in they said, Amy, you're pregnant. I said no, I'm not. I said I had had a miscarriage two weeks ago. Confirmed. I said, no, your levels are over ten thousand, you're pregnant. Okay. So we had a scan and I was pregnant and.
00:25:01
Speaker 1: It was ectopic, which is when it's in the chew the Filippian chuw, Yeah, scientifically, you were pregnan two weeks earlier and it was in your uterus, but then there was another one at the same time in your filopian tube.
00:25:18
Speaker 2: So I hadn't Potentially The only way it makes sense to me is I had probably just fallen pregnant and then gone and had a transfer. Even to this day, it still is just wild to me because with IVF they put the embryo into the uterus and it can't float anywhere. So anyway, I'm in a Catholic hospital where the only way to actually for me to save my own life is to abort the baby because it's in my tube.
00:25:55
Speaker 1: Well, it's not viable at this point. If it's in the tube, there's no wave of it getting to the uterus, and there's a risk of rupturing the pilian chap.
00:26:03
Speaker 2: There's a huge risk to the mother anyway. So I'm getting very sick, very very sick, and it's a Saturday and the bishop is not on, so they cannot do anything except admit me and monitor me and wait for Monday to get permission for me to abort the baby because I cannot carry on with the pregnancy. That really sent me. That was the first time that it really affected me mentally. I'd go on meth and directs eight to slowly remove the baby because I'm so scarred. They can't go in and do anything without.
00:26:43
Speaker 1: Real causing more damage to you.
00:26:44
Speaker 2: That's right. So after that we decided that's enough. My husband said to me, you're not doing this anymore. I would rather you than a baby. So at this point, we're still young. We sell what we have, we move, we go to the Gold Coast, we live our best lives and do whatever whatever it is you do at that age. And then my sister actually, who was very very close with very close, so that she's three years younger than me, and during all of this she's having children. She had a beautiful daughter and son, and by the time her second was around one, she had decided that she'd like to stay home with them and do some study and whatever. And she said, look, while I'm here, do you want to have a baby. The problem is is I'm in a state now where I had shut it off. I'd shut the door. At this point, we were on the Gold Coast and we started seeing a new specialist in Brisbane, and funnily enough, when I first met him, he said, how many sisters have you got? And I said, why he said, oh, you know, just in case. So it was all very connecting the dots. So Jake and I actually, instead of jumping going, oh my gosh, this is it, We're going to do this, we had to really really think about it.
00:28:17
Speaker 1: What did it take for you to say, yes, let's explore this.
00:28:20
Speaker 2: I think at the end of the day, I actually decided to leave it up to my husband because he was the one that had to watch me go through this. He was the one that almost lost me, especially with that last pregnancy, and we took a few days to talk about it, and he was really unsure, and I just said, look if I wonder how we would feel down the track, knowing that we had that offer there and we turned it down. Anyway, we said let's do it. So we had three embryos left because when we started seeing the new surgeon in Brisbane, I collected eggs just in case when it was time to start the process and we'll skip past all of the boring stuff with the legals and the counseling, just all the wild stuff that's involved with three and they actually all weren't that great quality. So we chose the best one, the best embryo, the best grade. They go in grades, and the pregnancy took and she felt pregnant, we felt pregnant, and then it would have been about four weeks. Five weeks into it, she rang me, and I'll never forget her trying to tell me that she'd lost our baby. Her voice. Out of everything that I ever think about in our fatility journey, it's that phone call. And I was not, for a second worried about the baby. And I hope she knows now. And even though I don't know if I've told her, but in that first pregnancy, losing the pregnancy didn't bother me. And it sounds very odd to say, but it didn't bother because my sister was going through a miscarriage. So she's my first priority. I can only imagine what it's like to tell a couple who have been grieving and battling that you just lost their baby. I can't imagine the weight.
00:30:29
Speaker 1: Does she have the same trait of you, of like, let me at it, I want to go again? Was she the one who led trying again?
00:30:38
Speaker 2: It's just by this point in my life, I'm very good with dealing with bad news, and I just wanted to make sure that she was okay. We didn't imply anything, just like we didn't ask her to carry in the first place. We let her take the lead, and when her body went through what it needed to go through, she was ready to start again. She said, well, we've got two left, and we did. We had two left, and Jake and I prayed for twins.
00:31:08
Speaker 1: She did not.
00:31:10
Speaker 2: We favored twins because we thought, well, this is this is probably going to be our only chance. If we get two birds one stone, well fantastic, So we did. We went again four weeks.
00:31:19
Speaker 1: Later and that was successful.
00:31:22
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, And we are serial testers, so my sister and I were testing multiple times a day from pretty much day three after transfer. And I remember my husband saying, don't test early. And I remember coming out of chemist's warehouse with a bag like this. So I spent a lot of time at her house. That is the worst two week wait anyone has to go through. It's the worst.
00:31:46
Speaker 1: What day did it start to show?
00:31:48
Speaker 2: The day six?
00:31:50
Speaker 1: Right?
00:31:50
Speaker 2: Oh, she's stuck, she's stuck.
00:31:53
Speaker 1: Can you take me to the day that your daughter came into the world.
00:31:56
Speaker 2: Yes, it was four o'clock in the morning and my phone was vibrating and it's the phone, she said, you ready to have a baby, My sisters, the best mother you will ever come across in your life. And I just knew had total faith in her. I was just she's in the lead, she's in control, and she's done this twice before and the best thing we could have done was let her do it the way she wants to do it. We made sure we had a beautiful room with a pool, and yeah, we had. It was gorgeous. We had dim lights and salt lamps and her music, and we had a private midwife who was with us the entire process too, so that we weren't just getting who was ever on shift on the day and had to learn about why is there are all these people in the room, and because we had a photographer as well.
00:32:51
Speaker 1: Beautiful. Yeah, had you planned the moment that she arrived and who would do skin to skin first? Because I know that's something like in the moment, there's a lot happening. Had you sort of created a plan as to how it would it would go?
00:33:07
Speaker 2: Yes? So the first thing on the plan was the pool. So it was really important that Shana had somewhere to be in water. So we made sure that that happened no matter what, and she said during the one of the appointments of our midwife, she said, how do you feel about when the baby is born. I passed the baby to Jake, my husband, who's very quiet, but just like my sister's husband, Aaron, they're just the most easy going guys and they don't have a lot to say and they're just there for the ride. So we thought that was a great idea. And you know he's Jake also very squaremish and said, how would you feel cutting the cord? And Jake said, okay. So we made sure that that happened as well. But I wanted to make sure that my focus was my sister because if anything was going to go wrong, I wanted to be there for her because I know that the baby is safe. The baby's always safe. It's the mother that was my priority because someone is literally going through Helen back to have my child. So I was with my sister the entire labor. We spent two or three hours in the shower together, just water on the back, tipped over a ball. Not a single pain relief.
00:34:33
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:34:35
Speaker 2: And she was born at five point fifteen in the afternoon, when Francesca came out. Francisca is my daughter's name. When she came out, my sister was over the bath, over the side of the bath, holding onto her husband, and my midwife said, come here, and I came around the back and she put a mirror under my sister, and when my daughter came out, she came out with her eyes open, which my midwife had never seen, and her eyes reflected off to the mirror straight into me, and I literally made eye contact with my daughter when she wasn't even out of the womb. And that's the part that sticks in my mind the most.
00:35:21
Speaker 1: At what point do you feel like you've become a mother? Is it that moment? Is it finding out? Is it making it at the twelve week stage? Is it a skin to skin like where do you feel like, Ah, that's the moment.
00:35:35
Speaker 2: Well, because of my disease, the scariest thing for me was passing my disease onto her. When we found out that she was a girl, there was a little tiny bit of relief because my disease has only really been documented to affect males, so there was that. But when she went straight to Jake and we've got photos as well, she was passed Shana passed her up and I should obviously I should say too. It was really important that skinned skin was with Shana, so we did. We did skin to skin with Shanea and delayed the cord so Shana had a moment in the pulled her out and had a moment with her and they talked to each other and it was really beautiful. And my sister said, I'm your auntie, and it was really really nice. And pass to Jake. Jake had his had his skin to skin moment, and then this is on camera too. As he passed her to me, I put my hand under her bottom, and you know how you hold a baby, and she poot in my hand. It's perfect in my in my hand, and that that was the moment that I realized, She's okay, she's fine.
00:36:55
Speaker 1: Her bowls work.
00:36:57
Speaker 2: She doesn't have what I have. It is done, it is finished, So I'm okay. There is a time that sticks with me. She was about six months old and she was in the bath and she actually giggled for the first time, like giggled. I actually heard her voice and I remember screaming, Jake, quick, come here, and he come running in and I made her laugh again. And Jake and I stood there crying because we'd heard her voice for the first time, and that was actually the moment that I realized I was her mum. I had to work hard to not have that connection, but to have that realization that she's actually not going anywhere, because you're in a constant state of things being taken away from you.
00:37:48
Speaker 1: So you just wait, and what do you feel Your relationship now with your body is.
00:37:55
Speaker 2: Well, like I said before, I'm pretty obsessed with that. I'm pretty proud of it and really really just in awe of what it has been through. And it wasn't until then I went through a really traumatic time when I turned thirty that here was another blow, but it just I got through it again. And it sounds really bizarre because you don't know what the future holds. But I kind of.
00:38:25
Speaker 1: Feel like I'm done, You're done worrying about it? Yes, because what else?
00:38:31
Speaker 2: Yeah? Because like now it's a matter of well, I've only got the major ones left, so they're all major.
00:38:39
Speaker 1: But now you know, there's such a beautiful story in connection with your mum, your sister, your daughter. There's a very you know, for a bit of woo woo, a lot of beautiful, feminine energy within your story. How connected do you feel to your daughter through all of this.
00:38:58
Speaker 2: I actually feel like it's a blessing that I get to live through her, if that makes sense, because she is so beautiful and healthy, strong, and very much like me in every kind of way. So having her is kind of like a privilege that I get to now experience childhood through her, what childhood should be through her. So my connection to her is that it's more of the privilege that I get to experience life with her, and that everything that I had been through was for her, was so that she could be here and show me what childhood should look like what I didn't get to get.
00:39:50
Speaker 1: I think that's the perfect place to end it. Amy, thank you so much for sharing your story today. It's Yeah, it's been so lovely to listen to. Yeah, And I'm so glad you have a beautiful daughter, and you have your health and your body and the relationship with your mum and your sister's well.
00:40:07
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mother and Me a podcast.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Mama Mayer acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. I actually feel like it's a blessing that I get to live through her, if that makes sense, because she is so beautiful and healthy and strong and very much like me in every kind of way. So having her is kind of like a privilege that I get to now experience childhood through her.
00:00:46
Speaker 1: What childhood should be welcome to, Well, your body explained, I'm Grace Reuvey, and you just heard from Amy Morrisby. Every now and then you meet someone whose relationship with their body completely redefines what resilience looks like, and Amy is exactly that person. Born with a rare gastro intestinal disorder, Amy spent the first three years of her life in a hospital. Ward she underwent major surgeries that left her with only sixty centimeters of her small bow. Amy has gone on to a lot. She's gone through a grueling IVF journey, enduring tragic losses, but within this story is an extraordinary act of love when her own sister stepped in to carry her daughter. Now an author and a nutritionist, Amy joins me to discuss rewriting her narrative surviving an early menopause at thirty and how she finally learned to stop breathe and truly inhabit herself in her own skin. Amy, your story starts, well, you can't quite comment on it because you were a baby. What do you know about the very early days of your life?
00:01:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, so born, beautifully healthy, little tiny baby. I was everything seemed to be going well. I was feeding well, and then around day three I just hadn't passed my maconium. Okay, and if anyone who's listening knows that have had children, that the maconium can either come out with the baby or not long after the birth. So we had gotten to three days old and still no maconium, but a very distended stomach.
00:02:30
Speaker 1: And so what tests did they start ordering at that point?
00:02:34
Speaker 2: Well, by day three I was showing signs of distress and my maconium instead of coming out the bottom, was coming out of my mouth. Obviously that's signs of blockage, and that was what they were treating me for, you know, blocked bow. I was having things like animals, flushes, all the things, and obviously still nothing. So by day four, I was in Brisbane. Also, it's nineteen ninety country town new Ward. There wasn't a lot nineteen year old mother, so the best thing to do was to take me to the closest, you know, established hospital, which was the Raw Children's Hospital. So in Brisbane and off I went. My mum had it cesarean as well, so my mum's recovering. So once we all arrived down in Brisbane, I obviously was seen quite quickly in the children's unit. There were adopted by the name of Fred Lditzki. Happened to be on shift, and you know, multiple tests, lots and lots of tests, and the diagnosis around twelve days old, when I had had a major surgery to investigate, was that I was missing the ganglion cells in all of my large intestine.
00:03:49
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
00:03:50
Speaker 2: When you eat food and it goes down into the stomach, down into the intestines, your cells move everything. They move food through, they digest, They helped things keep moving until it's exited the body. Those cells were there, but they were not viable. So they were playing around with crones because that's common. Hirshbrung's is not Hirshbrung's also really only has been found in boys. I was also the first female on their record or in an Australian record that could potentially have had Hirshbrung's disease, but crones made more sense to them at the time, so that surgery was quite significant. I'm going through the actual notes at the moment.
00:04:40
Speaker 1: What have you learned about yourself through these?
00:04:43
Speaker 2: A lot.
00:04:45
Speaker 1: A lot things that your mom doesn't even know or didn't remember.
00:04:48
Speaker 2: Things my mum forgot. I thought it would be traumatic, it's not. I think it's different to because I'm a mother now. I feel like seeing it now from my mother's point of view, is now what's happening. And when they went in and did that surgery at twelve days old, they found the cells weren't just missing from my large intestines. They were missing from majority of my small intestines and my colon. So I wasn't just affected in one part of my body. I was actually even the appendix.
00:05:30
Speaker 1: So what does that mean on a day to day perspective? So as a baby, you know there's formula or there's breast milk, What did that mean for your calorie intake? How that affected you, and then as you can start to cognitively remember what your childhood is like, what happened.
00:05:48
Speaker 2: So I was on TPN. I always knew that I had a central line at some point in my life.
00:05:56
Speaker 1: Line.
00:05:56
Speaker 2: Yes, So it is a line that delivers nutrients directly to the blood. It bypasses the gut, bypasses the stomach, and you will find that a lot of people who live with either digestive or gastro intestinal disorders actually will have a TPN full time because their gut does not absorb any nutrients and cannot then deliver to the rest of the body. And I do have scars where the central lines were. There was always cords and tubes and everything coming out.
00:06:29
Speaker 1: And that's an outpatient thing. So when you were at home as a baby, you didn't have to be in hospital to receive that treatment.
00:06:35
Speaker 2: Well, I never came home until I was three, and during that those three years, I had days where I'd be out. I just had to be very more. Mum had to be very careful because if I was around anyone who is unwell or carrying a bug or anything.
00:06:52
Speaker 1: What does she tell you about those three years, what they were like for her?
00:06:57
Speaker 2: When I was born and she was going through all of this, you know, she made a promise to herself that she would not leave my side, and she didn't. So it's even as an adult, I'm married with my own daughter. And isn't it funny that if I'm unwell, or if something doesn't feel right, or my eyes are sunken or I don't feel I wring my mum. So the cords did come home with me my mom. My mom became my nurse as well. And look in the midst of this, my mum had a second child, my sister, when I was three. My mom had to learn how to be my nurse. And there is flashbacks that I do have. It's usually there's this one flashback I have quite often, and I'm laying in the laund room on the floor, and I remember I had a I've got an iliostomy, which I've still got now it's permanent. But I also had a mucus fishler to the right.
00:07:49
Speaker 1: Could you explain each of those things?
00:07:51
Speaker 2: So in iliostomy is obviously part of the small intestine, it's permanent, it's there, it's what keeps me alive. And then the mucus fishler because I didn't have anywhere for the waist that the body collects. There's nowhere for it to go because I don't have well, I had a colon, but it was to make sense to the listener, it's sewn up, it does not work, nothing can come out. So the mucus fishil acts as another colostom or an iliostomy for output. And this all had to be kept sterile and clean and changed all the time. And I remember laying there and my mom would have to flush. My mom would have to put tubes down my stoma while I'm awake, and I remember that pain, but it had to be done. And I remember she would hang the fluid bags on the fan on coat hangers, and that was every day.
00:08:48
Speaker 1: How does this change your childhood? Because you don't know any better, Like this is just part of your life. But what's fun to you? What are some of the games or the social times that you remember? And as you get older, you go, huh, my life was very different, Like what do you remember about the childhood naivity of that time?
00:09:06
Speaker 2: So this is a confusing part even for me. Is I simply just don't know, And especially now that I'm educated, I don't know how I'm alive. I simply just it doesn't make sense to me because from the ribs down I have no organs. It just honestly does not make sense. But I was such a happy child, and I truly believe it's because my mum and dad were so young when they had me that they was still in a place in their life where things had to be fun, and it was really important for my mum to have a normal childhood. I still went to school, a normal school, but my mom came to school with me a lot, which I didn't like, but she was always there. Very competitive. I actually am very competitive. I loved sport, so I really did try and do as much as I could. And if I was ever told that I couldn't do something, well, no, I'm going to do it. Yeah, if I want to do it, I'll do it unless mum really said no. This mum really said no, like you literally, like if a ball hits you in the stomach, we can't, we can't have it.
00:10:15
Speaker 1: So you said, from the ribs down you have no organs, Like we're jumping a little bit ahead in this.
00:10:19
Speaker 2: Story, and that's a lot.
00:10:21
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've also heard you say, oh yes, the organs I have left. So can you take me through medically what has been removed and when it had to be removed and what's left?
00:10:31
Speaker 2: To my knowledge, when I was seven was the biggest surgery I've had, and that was when the hard decision was made between the surgical team and my parents that the iliostomy had to stay in order for me to live well. And however that future looked, we didn't know, No one knew. But all of my large intestines were removed and everything except sixty centimeters of alium small vow and then the appendix went with it. And then we're really flashing forward here, but it makes sense to add it in now. But when I turned thirty, I needed a hysterectomy where they took uterocervix, filopian tubes, ovaries.
00:11:16
Speaker 1: And that was because as a result of scar tissue on your organs. How did that happen? Is that through multiple surgeries or what's the flow and effect to it?
00:11:26
Speaker 2: So throughout the rest of my life through teens, you know, I needed minor surgeries, lots of minor surgeries because I'd get unwell, I'd get infections, I get you name it, I had it. You know, I'd get blockages, twists, things would twist, you know, even still as an adult, sometimes I'll just end up with a twisted bowl because there's it's just wild what's going on in there. And I just I've lost count of scars. I've got scars that run from hip to hip. Now obviously I've got a hysterectomy scar as well, which runs hip to hip under it. There's a lot going on. And it wasn't actually until we started going through fertility treatment and had different kinds of surgery then that we discovered the scar tissue had in fact grown onto my reproductive organs. Scar tissue has no blood flow, So it's not just a matter of going in and we'll just oh, we'll remove that bit of scar. It doesn't work like that.
00:12:26
Speaker 1: When you went on a fertility journey and decided that that's something that you wanted in your life, were you thinking that you were going to have struggles because of your diagnosis?
00:12:35
Speaker 2: It was questions I asked throughout my life, because well, I'm a girl. Yeah, of course, you know when I dream of getting married and having babies and doing all the things. So I was prepared as a young girl I was prepared as a child. One thing I will say about my upbringing is no one ever spoke to me like I needed to protection. My medical team, my parents, everyone was always transparent with me. They never spoke to me. It was just black and white. And I had developed a vocabulary more, you know, by the time I was a teenager than what most adults would ever develop in their lifetime. And terminologies and just all of.
00:13:17
Speaker 1: This crazy say good at pe and biology chemist, Like, if you've learned all these medical things that many people wouldn't are so lucky to not know in school?
00:13:27
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, I think what an honor to understand the body at a biological level. I think we should all know.
00:13:35
Speaker 1: That's such a lovely way to look at it. Okay, So you always had been asking questions the whole time, So it gets to the point of going, okay, I might want a child. Are you exploring IVF at first or are you trying for a spontaneous pregnancy.
00:13:55
Speaker 2: I didn't know when, and I never put a timeline on it because I was so compromised my whole life. All I wanted to do was travel, and all I wanted to do was be a millionaire. I just wanted to make lots of money so I could retire my parents and make my siblings happy. That's all I wanted to do. And I love business naturally. Now, anything that challenges me I love. So Fortunately I met my husband when I was nineteen, which is, you know, terrific, given that it was also not on my radar. You know, I didn't dream of leaving school and meeting someone and starting a life straight away. I wanted to do all the other things. But I think I was around about twenty one twenty two, I was actually on the contraceptive pill and still was having irregular cycles, shocking side effects like I struggled with skin and weight fluctuation, which I really didn't need because I had enough on my plate. Yes, okay, so when I moved to a country town west of Brisbane, I started seeing a GP and just said, look, I'm on this pill. I don't think it's doing anything good for me. I'm in a relationship, and you know, I have been told that having a baby's probably going to be difficult. So look, I'm getting married next year and i'd like to explore what my body is like not being on the pill. And that's when it all started. I came off that pill and a lot was revealed to me, A lot now that I know, was things like and demetriosis, like things just started happening that I hadn't experienced before. And it was quite odd because my pain tolerance is very high, very very.
00:15:41
Speaker 1: High, I can imagine it would be, and.
00:15:44
Speaker 2: The pains that I started experiencing were very odd, very strange. Lower back pain, just uncomfortable. I couldn't sit still, I couldn't think straight. And then there was an episode one night at two o'clock in the morning where I actually had a perforated fillopian tube, so the blood flow had been cut off to my ovary and you know, hours in emergency, and you know, this is putting all in a nutshell. But it turns out that when it was time for the body to do what the body was supposed to do, it just went no, not doing that, and that's where it all started. I was referred to a specialist. They started testing things like egg count, egg quality, what's my cervix, what's my urine wool like?
00:16:28
Speaker 1: And this is in your early twenties.
00:16:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is in early twenty twenty. I think I was twenty two yeah, because I was getting married at the end of the year.
00:16:35
Speaker 1: Right, And so when you found all of this information, how did you feel about your timeline of wanting to have a child, because, as you said, it wasn't about having a child. Immediately was like, all right, well, I just want to see what my body does.
00:16:48
Speaker 2: When the specialist sat in front of me and told me that my reproductive system was reflecting someone in their forties in terms of my quality of eggs, amount of eggs, all of the all the tests, and that's what he was telling me. And he asked us a series of personal questions. You know, are you married, No, we're getting married. You have a house, yes, Do you have a career yes, you know. Have you traveled yes? Okay, great. I think you should think seriously about collecting some eggs and freezing or even starting the process now. He said, your body has been through a lot. Your reproductive system tells us that things are declining quickly. If you're going to have a baby, I suggest you do it now while you're actually young and fit and strong and healthy, because the way your body will cope with pregnancy now will be very, very different to how your body handles pregnancy in your thirties or your forties, and we just sat there, you know, about to get married twenty two years old. I had given my husband an alternatum a couple of years before, saying, look, this is this is my life. This is going to be our life. Never know what I'm going to be sick, We don't know if we're going to be be about to have children. Here is your chance to go on find someone else. All big out yea at nineteen imagine that. But like I said before, by the time I was a teenager, I was very grown up.
00:18:19
Speaker 1: Had to be. Were they encouraging spontaneous conception or saying let's start an IVF journey?
00:18:26
Speaker 2: So we started IVF pretty well. As soon as we got married. The process started, which is quite in depth. Lots of hormones, and something had shifted up until we got married. We were to harvest the eggs, freeze them, save them for a later date, fertilize them, create embryos. But when it came time to start the process, I had read that there was an option to do a fresh transfer, meaning that instead of collecting the embryos and waiting for them to form, to be transferred into the freezer, you can actually transfer one directly back into the uterus. It's more favorable to wait till they've been frozen and the bodies recovered, and then you start again. And I think now that knowing myself and being young and eager and wanting things yesterday, I think that that would have played a big part. You know, we're married, now, we're in love, we're on the wedding high, and I think I just wanted to see. I wanted to test the waters and just see if it was going to I was. I didn't want to wait to see if.
00:19:36
Speaker 1: It was going to work. Yeah, you wanted to know.
00:19:38
Speaker 2: I wanted to know.
00:19:40
Speaker 1: So you did the fresh transfer? Yes, And how did it go? No?
00:19:44
Speaker 2: It was it wasn't, No, it didn't. Nothing stuck. Yeah, there was no pregnancy here. From there, it was just one to the next, one to the.
00:19:53
Speaker 1: Next, trying rounds. Yeah, how many rounds did you go through?
00:19:57
Speaker 2: So with this collection, wind up with wind up with sixteen eggs, four embryos. Yep, So we tried that four times the second transfer. Though we feel pregnant. I I couldn't believe something actually worked. So, without sounding insensitive, there was one thing to celebrate the baby, but it was another thing to celebrate the fact that my body did something right.
00:20:24
Speaker 1: What is your relationship with your body at this point?
00:20:27
Speaker 2: At this point, I'm obsessed with it.
00:20:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're pregnant. What are the steps when you do find out you're pregnant when you have a very complex medical history. What happened next.
00:20:40
Speaker 2: When it came to the pregnancies. It's almost like I was treated just normal, like how everyone else would be treated, given the fact that I actually have just fallen pregnant via IVF, so it's already different, you know. Then you moved onto things like progesterone to try and hold the baby in there, to keep things thick, because the brain has not encouraged the body to fall pregnant. Science has, so you're still on all these medications. So it's it's still business as usual, you know, checking in with your doctor, making sure your progesterine levels and al was the baby still there is a heartbeat yet, So it was still very focused on just keeping the pregnancy there. I never got to a point where I could come off progesterone and let the body take over, because as soon as my body started to understand what was going on it was rejecting.
00:21:35
Speaker 1: What were your first signs that something was going wrong with the pregnancy?
00:21:39
Speaker 2: Do you know? I had the most horrific morning sickness. I would have it from the minute my eyes would open and then to the minute they closed, and like clockwork, the minute there was an implantation. I didn't even need a test. I was sick, plus all the hormones amplifying everything. I was sick straight away. And then I also knew when the baby had stopped growing because my sickness would stop. So it had ways of telling me before I even knew.
00:22:14
Speaker 1: How many weeks were you when you found out that pregnancy wasn't viable.
00:22:18
Speaker 2: So the first one, we were actually quite early, quite quite early. I think we were around six weeks, maybe five weeks. We went to it was our first scan. It was our first scan, and we were very excited and still couldn't believe it, and we were going to check. We're going to see I'd never seen a baby on a screen before, I'd never seen a heartbeat. Couldn't even tell you what it sounded like, so that's what we were going for, and there was no heartbeat. I'd had some spotting and had some bleeding, but in my case that's not unusual. So really I didn't tie it to potentially being a miscarriage. I just said, this is my body because this has been my life. Clinically speaking, I just I don't think I ever held space for myself to actually grieve of what just happened. It wasn't until much later down the line.
00:23:11
Speaker 1: Because you moved straight on too, trying again and going again. So when do you feel like that grief did hit you? And was there a catalyst that made it all compound or just the fact that you stopped.
00:23:23
Speaker 2: Once our daughter was here, we had to think do we do this again. That's when it actually started to hit me once she was already here, because we then had to make the decision. It was then finally a decision I had to make. It wasn't just let's go, let's go, let's go. I had to actually make the decision then of whether or not we would try and give her a sibling.
00:23:47
Speaker 1: I do want to go back to talk about how your daughter did come into the world. Yes, at what point do you reach out to your sister or does your sister reach out to you and go, hey, I can help.
00:23:59
Speaker 2: So there was one pregnancy that was the catalyst, and I had lost the baby and once again had to wait for everything to do what it needed to do. At one point, this is where it gets really sticky for me, because I had so many cycles and so many hormones and drugs and all the things that I start to get confused. But at one point, to help me pass one of the babies was I actually had to have meth and tracks eight because I had a miscarriage. Went to emergency a couple of weeks later with horrific pain, horrific and they said, look, we just need to test for pregnancy. And I said, no, I had a miscarriage two weeks go. I'm fine, it's just my body trying to get rid of it. And they came back in they said, Amy, you're pregnant. I said no, I'm not. I said I had had a miscarriage two weeks ago. Confirmed. I said, no, your levels are over ten thousand, you're pregnant. Okay. So we had a scan and I was pregnant and.
00:25:01
Speaker 1: It was ectopic, which is when it's in the chew the Filippian chuw, Yeah, scientifically, you were pregnan two weeks earlier and it was in your uterus, but then there was another one at the same time in your filopian tube.
00:25:18
Speaker 2: So I hadn't Potentially The only way it makes sense to me is I had probably just fallen pregnant and then gone and had a transfer. Even to this day, it still is just wild to me because with IVF they put the embryo into the uterus and it can't float anywhere. So anyway, I'm in a Catholic hospital where the only way to actually for me to save my own life is to abort the baby because it's in my tube.
00:25:55
Speaker 1: Well, it's not viable at this point. If it's in the tube, there's no wave of it getting to the uterus, and there's a risk of rupturing the pilian chap.
00:26:03
Speaker 2: There's a huge risk to the mother anyway. So I'm getting very sick, very very sick, and it's a Saturday and the bishop is not on, so they cannot do anything except admit me and monitor me and wait for Monday to get permission for me to abort the baby because I cannot carry on with the pregnancy. That really sent me. That was the first time that it really affected me mentally. I'd go on meth and directs eight to slowly remove the baby because I'm so scarred. They can't go in and do anything without.
00:26:43
Speaker 1: Real causing more damage to you.
00:26:44
Speaker 2: That's right. So after that we decided that's enough. My husband said to me, you're not doing this anymore. I would rather you than a baby. So at this point, we're still young. We sell what we have, we move, we go to the Gold Coast, we live our best lives and do whatever whatever it is you do at that age. And then my sister actually, who was very very close with very close, so that she's three years younger than me, and during all of this she's having children. She had a beautiful daughter and son, and by the time her second was around one, she had decided that she'd like to stay home with them and do some study and whatever. And she said, look, while I'm here, do you want to have a baby. The problem is is I'm in a state now where I had shut it off. I'd shut the door. At this point, we were on the Gold Coast and we started seeing a new specialist in Brisbane, and funnily enough, when I first met him, he said, how many sisters have you got? And I said, why he said, oh, you know, just in case. So it was all very connecting the dots. So Jake and I actually, instead of jumping going, oh my gosh, this is it, We're going to do this, we had to really really think about it.
00:28:17
Speaker 1: What did it take for you to say, yes, let's explore this.
00:28:20
Speaker 2: I think at the end of the day, I actually decided to leave it up to my husband because he was the one that had to watch me go through this. He was the one that almost lost me, especially with that last pregnancy, and we took a few days to talk about it, and he was really unsure, and I just said, look if I wonder how we would feel down the track, knowing that we had that offer there and we turned it down. Anyway, we said let's do it. So we had three embryos left because when we started seeing the new surgeon in Brisbane, I collected eggs just in case when it was time to start the process and we'll skip past all of the boring stuff with the legals and the counseling, just all the wild stuff that's involved with three and they actually all weren't that great quality. So we chose the best one, the best embryo, the best grade. They go in grades, and the pregnancy took and she felt pregnant, we felt pregnant, and then it would have been about four weeks. Five weeks into it, she rang me, and I'll never forget her trying to tell me that she'd lost our baby. Her voice. Out of everything that I ever think about in our fatility journey, it's that phone call. And I was not, for a second worried about the baby. And I hope she knows now. And even though I don't know if I've told her, but in that first pregnancy, losing the pregnancy didn't bother me. And it sounds very odd to say, but it didn't bother because my sister was going through a miscarriage. So she's my first priority. I can only imagine what it's like to tell a couple who have been grieving and battling that you just lost their baby. I can't imagine the weight.
00:30:29
Speaker 1: Does she have the same trait of you, of like, let me at it, I want to go again? Was she the one who led trying again?
00:30:38
Speaker 2: It's just by this point in my life, I'm very good with dealing with bad news, and I just wanted to make sure that she was okay. We didn't imply anything, just like we didn't ask her to carry in the first place. We let her take the lead, and when her body went through what it needed to go through, she was ready to start again. She said, well, we've got two left, and we did. We had two left, and Jake and I prayed for twins.
00:31:08
Speaker 1: She did not.
00:31:10
Speaker 2: We favored twins because we thought, well, this is this is probably going to be our only chance. If we get two birds one stone, well fantastic, So we did. We went again four weeks.
00:31:19
Speaker 1: Later and that was successful.
00:31:22
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, And we are serial testers, so my sister and I were testing multiple times a day from pretty much day three after transfer. And I remember my husband saying, don't test early. And I remember coming out of chemist's warehouse with a bag like this. So I spent a lot of time at her house. That is the worst two week wait anyone has to go through. It's the worst.
00:31:46
Speaker 1: What day did it start to show?
00:31:48
Speaker 2: The day six?
00:31:50
Speaker 1: Right?
00:31:50
Speaker 2: Oh, she's stuck, she's stuck.
00:31:53
Speaker 1: Can you take me to the day that your daughter came into the world.
00:31:56
Speaker 2: Yes, it was four o'clock in the morning and my phone was vibrating and it's the phone, she said, you ready to have a baby, My sisters, the best mother you will ever come across in your life. And I just knew had total faith in her. I was just she's in the lead, she's in control, and she's done this twice before and the best thing we could have done was let her do it the way she wants to do it. We made sure we had a beautiful room with a pool, and yeah, we had. It was gorgeous. We had dim lights and salt lamps and her music, and we had a private midwife who was with us the entire process too, so that we weren't just getting who was ever on shift on the day and had to learn about why is there are all these people in the room, and because we had a photographer as well.
00:32:51
Speaker 1: Beautiful. Yeah, had you planned the moment that she arrived and who would do skin to skin first? Because I know that's something like in the moment, there's a lot happening. Had you sort of created a plan as to how it would it would go?
00:33:07
Speaker 2: Yes? So the first thing on the plan was the pool. So it was really important that Shana had somewhere to be in water. So we made sure that that happened no matter what, and she said during the one of the appointments of our midwife, she said, how do you feel about when the baby is born. I passed the baby to Jake, my husband, who's very quiet, but just like my sister's husband, Aaron, they're just the most easy going guys and they don't have a lot to say and they're just there for the ride. So we thought that was a great idea. And you know he's Jake also very squaremish and said, how would you feel cutting the cord? And Jake said, okay. So we made sure that that happened as well. But I wanted to make sure that my focus was my sister because if anything was going to go wrong, I wanted to be there for her because I know that the baby is safe. The baby's always safe. It's the mother that was my priority because someone is literally going through Helen back to have my child. So I was with my sister the entire labor. We spent two or three hours in the shower together, just water on the back, tipped over a ball. Not a single pain relief.
00:34:33
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:34:35
Speaker 2: And she was born at five point fifteen in the afternoon, when Francesca came out. Francisca is my daughter's name. When she came out, my sister was over the bath, over the side of the bath, holding onto her husband, and my midwife said, come here, and I came around the back and she put a mirror under my sister, and when my daughter came out, she came out with her eyes open, which my midwife had never seen, and her eyes reflected off to the mirror straight into me, and I literally made eye contact with my daughter when she wasn't even out of the womb. And that's the part that sticks in my mind the most.
00:35:21
Speaker 1: At what point do you feel like you've become a mother? Is it that moment? Is it finding out? Is it making it at the twelve week stage? Is it a skin to skin like where do you feel like, Ah, that's the moment.
00:35:35
Speaker 2: Well, because of my disease, the scariest thing for me was passing my disease onto her. When we found out that she was a girl, there was a little tiny bit of relief because my disease has only really been documented to affect males, so there was that. But when she went straight to Jake and we've got photos as well, she was passed Shana passed her up and I should obviously I should say too. It was really important that skinned skin was with Shana, so we did. We did skin to skin with Shanea and delayed the cord so Shana had a moment in the pulled her out and had a moment with her and they talked to each other and it was really beautiful. And my sister said, I'm your auntie, and it was really really nice. And pass to Jake. Jake had his had his skin to skin moment, and then this is on camera too. As he passed her to me, I put my hand under her bottom, and you know how you hold a baby, and she poot in my hand. It's perfect in my in my hand, and that that was the moment that I realized, She's okay, she's fine.
00:36:55
Speaker 1: Her bowls work.
00:36:57
Speaker 2: She doesn't have what I have. It is done, it is finished, So I'm okay. There is a time that sticks with me. She was about six months old and she was in the bath and she actually giggled for the first time, like giggled. I actually heard her voice and I remember screaming, Jake, quick, come here, and he come running in and I made her laugh again. And Jake and I stood there crying because we'd heard her voice for the first time, and that was actually the moment that I realized I was her mum. I had to work hard to not have that connection, but to have that realization that she's actually not going anywhere, because you're in a constant state of things being taken away from you.
00:37:48
Speaker 1: So you just wait, and what do you feel Your relationship now with your body is.
00:37:55
Speaker 2: Well, like I said before, I'm pretty obsessed with that. I'm pretty proud of it and really really just in awe of what it has been through. And it wasn't until then I went through a really traumatic time when I turned thirty that here was another blow, but it just I got through it again. And it sounds really bizarre because you don't know what the future holds. But I kind of.
00:38:25
Speaker 1: Feel like I'm done, You're done worrying about it? Yes, because what else?
00:38:31
Speaker 2: Yeah? Because like now it's a matter of well, I've only got the major ones left, so they're all major.
00:38:39
Speaker 1: But now you know, there's such a beautiful story in connection with your mum, your sister, your daughter. There's a very you know, for a bit of woo woo, a lot of beautiful, feminine energy within your story. How connected do you feel to your daughter through all of this.
00:38:58
Speaker 2: I actually feel like it's a blessing that I get to live through her, if that makes sense, because she is so beautiful and healthy, strong, and very much like me in every kind of way. So having her is kind of like a privilege that I get to now experience childhood through her, what childhood should be through her. So my connection to her is that it's more of the privilege that I get to experience life with her, and that everything that I had been through was for her, was so that she could be here and show me what childhood should look like what I didn't get to get.
00:39:50
Speaker 1: I think that's the perfect place to end it. Amy, thank you so much for sharing your story today. It's Yeah, it's been so lovely to listen to. Yeah, And I'm so glad you have a beautiful daughter, and you have your health and your body and the relationship with your mum and your sister's well.
00:40:07
Speaker 2: Thank you.
