If you don’t have children, will you regret it after 10 years？
CCTV News (Reporter Zhu Chunyan, Zhang Li, Zhang Ke):Infertility does not make people despair, but only after the failure of assisted reproduction … …
"I don’t want to give birth."
After crying in the hospital, Li Jing made up his mind: "No more children, and two people can live a good life."
It was in 2012, the fifth year after marriage, and Li Jing received two assisted reproductive treatments, both of which failed. Li Jing recalled: "In the three months of assisting pregnancy, I took a lot of injections of hormones." This is a process close to hope, but she feels more and more painful every day. "The joints of the whole body are hurting, and the fingers are particularly painful." She thought she had rheumatism, and only after going to the hospital for examination did she know that "it is not rheumatism, but a side effect of hormones". The pain gradually disappeared after stopping the injection.① (There are remarks at the end of the article)
What really broke her down was that when she took eggs for the second time, she woke up early because of anesthesia intolerance, which affected the number of eggs taken. Although the doctor meant no harm, the sentence "How can you wake up? How can you be a test-tube baby like this? " She was very wronged, and all the depressed emotions broke out at that moment: why am I? Why should I bear all this?
She decided to give up, "as long as she can live well."
As the first batch of post-80s, Li Jing understood the "Dink" tide and saw the free life of Dink after the 1970s. She had no obsession with her children, and what she wanted more was a little happiness that she could grasp. After five years of marriage, she and her husband didn’t put having children on the agenda.
But my mother-in-law is anxious. The mother-in-law who is usually sensible has changed. In addition to chanting to have grandchildren, she began to complain that she would not have children.
Image source: vision china
Li Jing had to go to the hospital for a physical examination, and the results showed that everything was normal. In desperation, she advised her husband, "Why don’t you check it out?". Finally, I found out the problem — — The husband was born without a vas deferens.
Want to have children, only through IVF technology.
According to the husband’s situation, the reproductive doctor needs to take out the sperm and eggs of both men and women, cultivate embryos and implant them in the uterus. That is to say, although Li Jing and her husband can’t have children because they are infertile, in the process of assisted reproduction, the husband only needs to have a sperm examination and a sperm collection, while Li Jing needs to undergo preliminary examinations such as reproductive system and sex hormones; Ovulation-stimulating drugs and chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) promote follicular maturation, and the levels of follicles and sex hormones are detected. Accept embryo transfer and other stages, about three months.
This process bears not only physical pain, but also psychological pressure. "Physical and mental exhaustion" is almost every interviewee’s feeling when talking about that experience.
"A lot of things are your efforts, there will always be some gains. But IVF is different. If you work hard, there may not be results. "
Sun Aiping decided to give up the treatment of assisted reproduction. After the failure of the third assisted pregnancy, her sense of fatigue doubled. She felt that she had "underestimated the complexity" before.
From December 2015 to July 2017, Sun Aiping encountered more and more problems in constant failure. At first, she was assisted in reproduction because of her husband’s asthenospermia and deformity, and later she was found to have hypothyroidism. Despite a period of conditioning, the recovery rate of the thawed embryo is still not up to the normal level, and the transplanted embryo is still not implanted (that is, one end of the embryo is "settled" on the endometrium). After consultation with many doctors, they did not find out the root cause of repeated failures, and thought it might be because of age. She was 37 years old.
Sun Aiping got married in 2013, when she was 33 and her husband was 45. She always doesn’t care about her age, and the age difference with her lover is more like their romantic declaration of love, which is armor, but unexpectedly, when facing the problem of fertility, it becomes a weakness.
The popular science book on reproductive health published at the end of 2017, "Women’s Reproductive Things", said: Most ovarian reproductive function declines from the age of 35, obvious after the age of 38, and aggravated after the age of 42, which means the loss of female fertility in menopause. Therefore, it is generally recommended that women should be able to solve the fertility problem before the age of 35.
For families who get what they want, happiness is 100%, but for families who have no results, the struggle is endless. Sun Aiping told herself and her husband freely that a happy life can’t depend on children, but another voice kept asking: "After 10 years, after 20 years, I still have no children. What kind of regret will it be?"
"You can’t have children."
Li Jing persuaded her husband to live a two-person life for the rest of his life.
It’s still the same two-person world, but they seem to have been deprived of the right to be happy. In life, the topic of children has become a forbidden area, as if a nerve had been tightened.
As a middle school teacher’s husband, he will not easily arrange a trip in winter and summer vacations. He has arranged his time to the brim. Over the years, he finished his degree in Tsinghua University and then took a degree in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, using one certificate after another to make up for the lack in his heart. Go back to your hometown in the northeast for the rest of the holiday. Working in Beijing for many years, their circle of friends is all peers, and the holidays of peers are child-centered. They are outsiders.
My mother-in-law won’t give up, how can her blood be broken?
She wrote a letter to the president of a well-known assisted reproductive hospital in Beijing. Although the contents of the letter were not made public, her words were sincere and affectionate. After reading the letter, the secretary of the Dean called back Li Jing’s mother-in-law, and the Dean agreed to arrange time for her face-to-face consultation.
Image source: vision china
Although this opportunity was rare, Li Jing, who was exhausted physically and mentally, refused. "I don’t want to be born." She is afraid of the hospital bed, lying there, no one can guarantee success, but the pain is certain and she has to bear it herself.
Li Jing thought, maybe life without children is incomplete, then it is incomplete, and there is less worry about children.
But this completely angered her mother-in-law. Mother-in-law can’t understand her "self-pity": what pain can be more painful than not having children? Why can’t you try again? Occasionally, she attacked her coldly: "No children are because of you, and you can’t suffer."
Li Jing doesn’t care about her mother-in-law. What she knows better is that if it is really because of her, she is infertile, then their marriage will be lost.
As for whether Li Jing ever thought about giving up this marriage, her answer was very calm: no. Now that we know his situation, how can we bear to give up? She understands her husband, and he will face no less pressure. She just often misses that in the five years after marriage, her husband often said: If there are no children at home, you are a big child.
Children are the crystallization of family and the baton. Li Jing remembers that when she quarreled with her mother and didn’t understand each other, her mother said that you would understand when you became a mother.
Facing his own situation, Li Jing doesn’t know if there is any chance to understand.
The number of people in a similar situation to Li Jing has been rising. According to media reports, according to the statistics of the World Health Organization (WHO), the percentage of normal sperm in men has shown an obvious downward trend in the past 30 years. In addition to age, the decrease of sperm count and low sperm density are related to many factors, and bad lifestyle often affects human reproductive function unconsciously.
"Can give birth, you can give birth"
This is a huge group, but each of them feels lonely.
"No matter where you go, you see pregnant women." Looking back on last year, He Yue, who thought that she would never have children in her life, felt that she was out of place with the world around her and envied pregnant women. Seeing relatives and friends celebrating the birth of a newborn will also make them cry, which seems to be a happy moment that they will never touch.
He Yue had a physical examination before marriage, and everything was normal. After two years of marriage, I began to prepare for pregnancy, but I have been unsuccessful. I went to check again and got the result of premature ovarian failure. This is a bolt from the blue for the 29-year-old He Yue, as if the "prime year" had passed quietly in two years.
She wants to seize the time, receive assisted reproductive therapy as soon as possible and get pregnant as soon as possible. In 2017, He Yue went to Japan to do two cycles of IVF, all of which failed. It costs more than 400,000 RMB. Contrary to expectations, two treatments made He Yue think that he could not have children, and he was under greater psychological pressure.
Before learning about reproductive disorders, they all lived a normal life, at least not the same as after the failure of assisted reproduction. They tried and fell.
Over the years, Li Jing’s mother-in-law saw that it was not easy for her, and she calmed down a lot, and seemed to accept the reality that there could be no next generation.
The twist is that in an accidental chat, Li Jing’s mother-in-law learned about a family with a similar situation but a test-tube baby, hoping to ignite it again. She went home to discuss with Li Jing: Try it again?
Li Jing agreed. Li Jing, 38, became a mother in one year after examination, egg retrieval, fertilized egg implantation and successful pregnancy.
Now, looking at her 50-day-old son, Li Jing even feels incredible. After a busy day, lying beside the sleeping child, she will ask herself, is this a dream?
Twelve years, too long, twelve years, passed quickly.
When I was nearly 40 years old, I found the child who was playing hide-and-seek, and I found a treasure. Li Jing’s husband, who had been nervous for many years, dared not easily reveal the joy of his dream coming true from the moment he learned that he was pregnant to the birth of his child. Until now, his mother moved in together to take care of his grandson, and he is still trying to adapt to the life of four people.
The obvious difference is that he has become more moderate. Last weekend, my mother took care of the children. He took Li Jing out to eat jiaozi. "You see, the children actually didn’t affect our lives. We still have two people now."
Li Jing knew that waiting for each other through the rising and setting of the sun, the joys and sorrows are constantly intertwined, and this "unchanging" in her husband’s mouth is actually the best change.
"We still have two pairs of embryos in the Union Medical College Hospital. If we want a second child, we can regenerate one." Li Jing felt that years of ideological bondage had been untied, and there were more choices in life.
Sun Aiping and He Yue also succeeded in IVF respectively. Sun Aiping’s child was born at the beginning of this year and is now seven months old. He Yue was pregnant for 5 months, which was both pleasant and unexpected.
Although they have experienced despair, they are still lucky.
He Fangfang, founder of the Reproductive Center of Union Medical College Hospital, said that after 40 years of development, assisted reproductive technology has made continuous progress, from in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer technology, which can only solve the problem of female infertility at first, to intracytoplasmic sperm microinjection technology, which can solve the problem of male infertility, to genetic diagnosis before embryo implantation, also known as the first, second and third generation IVF technology.
"Nowadays, the therapeutic drugs selected by assisted reproductive doctors for patients can make the treatment plan more personalized and increase the possibility of successful treatment." He Fangfang said.
However, assisted reproductive technology is not omnipotent, and there are always unsatisfactory times. Han Hongjing, chief physician of the Reproductive Center of Peking University People’s Hospital, told CCTV reporters that while the application of this technology has brought happiness to many families, there are still some unsolved problems: such as patients with repeated implantation failures, patients with severe intrauterine adhesions and thin endometrium for various reasons, such as patients with premature ovarian failure, and various problems brought by advanced age … …
In addition to genetic factors, male sperm quantity and quality problems, female tubal nowhere, ovulation disorder, endometriosis and other factors, there are still some blind spots, resulting in unexplained infertility.
Infertility or infertility, though not contagious, is far from fatal. But for thousands of families eager for children, it is a hidden pain that is hard to say after all.
In the assisted reproductive hospital, familiar patients meet and say hello, "Are you here to get sperm today?" But out of the hospital gate, they will quickly put on masks and flee.
In order to protect the privacy of interviewees, Li Jing, Sun Aiping and He Yue are all pseudonyms.
① According to the introduction of the reproductive doctor, it usually takes 9-14 days for IVF to promote ovulation. Using hypodermic or intramuscular drugs to promote ovulation, instead of hormones in the ordinary sense, may cause mild abdominal pain or waist discomfort caused by ovarian enlargement after medication, which will not affect daily life.