21ST CENTURY BOY

I was glad to be present at his birth as I wasn’t there for his conception.

To explain this statement I need to take you back over 5 years to the time my wife and I decided to go on the journey that resulted in the birth of our beautiful son Jon.

Now before you click away from this I promise this is not going to be all about how wonderful our child is and how he’s doing things quicker than others his age (which he isn’t) it’s more about what it means to me to be a father again 20 years after the birth of my last child and my worries and concerns about becoming a “new” Dad in my mid fifties.

My wife and I had been married for over 7 years and she was in her late thirties and I had just passed the big five ohhh. I already had two children from a previous marriage and thought my days of dirty nappies and school runs were in the past, but my wife really wanted to have a child and we tried….and tried….and tried again but nothing happened. It turned out, after a visit to a specialist, that one of my wife’s ovaries was blocked and the other wasn’t performing that well either and even though I thought I must be okay as I have two children already, it seemed that I wasn’t firing on all cylinders either, its an age thing apparently.

So we discussed our options and decided to go down the IVF route, a journey that was full of pain,discomfort and some strange situations but was ultimately worth it.

I’ll be honest, I was apprehensive about the possibility of becoming a father again, I thought its possible that I may be 70ish by the time the kid is a teenager or worse still will I still be around to see him/her grow up, would that be fair or was I just being selfish?

We first went to see if the IVF treatment may be available on the NHS, to cut a short story even shorter, it wasn’t in our area, even though government had just said it should be made available to women up to age of 40. So we looked at the cost and after I regained consciousness I agreed we could try once.

Then something happened that put everything on hold (and this is hopefully the only serious moment in the blog) in a split second both my wife and I had a life changing event which unfortunately resulted in the death of a young mother and physical and emotional injuries and scars to both of us that will remain for the rest of our lives. That’s all I will say on that but it meant our plans had to wait until we were both well enough to continue but on the plus side we were due some compensation that would more than help pay for the IVF treatment, but that would be a few years before we saw any of that.

Now I haven’t mentioned that my beautiful wife is Turkish and from Istanbul and it turned out that one of the most successful IVF clinics in Europe is in that beautiful city and, more importantly to my credit cards, the treatment costs were 50% less than in the UK, even taking into account flights etc.,

So in July 2013 the journey, in more ways than one, had begun and we both flew out to Istanbul to meet the doctor and discuss the chances of success.

I will continue with this in my next blog as I am fully aware that anything with more than 600 words is too much for people of my age to concentrate on and even less without pictures…..so here’s a photo of a parrot smoking a cigarette to keep you amused. Oh and before anyone complains, no children (IVF or other), animals or parrots, whether ex or not, were hurt in the taking of this image. It was taken before the smoking ban, before digital and before I could afford colour film.