The Miscarriage Dads Podcast
E21: The Hope and Heartbreak in Fertility Trials (ft. Tom Kreffer)
Welcome to episode 21!
In the labyrinth of infertility, you'll discover that life often reserves its most unexpected turns when the map seems most clear. Tom Kreffer continues to share his personal narrative of facing a natural pregnancy's delicate dance of hope and trepidation after IVF's trials. It's a tale that mirrors the lives of many listeners, revealing the joy and angst of expanding a family and the solace found when sharing these moments. Join us as we navigate this complex terrain, embracing each other's narratives as a source of strength and healing.
Thank you for tuning in to find solace, gain understanding, and embark on your healing journey with us!
Sincerely,
Kelly
Follow on IG @themiscarriagedad
Email themiscarriagedad@gmail.com
Make sure you subscribe!
Write us a review!
Welcome to episode 21!
In the labyrinth of infertility, you'll discover that life often reserves its most unexpected turns when the map seems most clear. Tom Kreffer continues to share his personal narrative of facing a natural pregnancy's delicate dance of hope and trepidation after IVF's trials. It's a tale that mirrors the lives of many listeners, revealing the joy and angst of expanding a family and the solace found when sharing these moments. Join us as we navigate this complex terrain, embracing each other's narratives as a source of strength and healing.
Thank you for tuning in to find solace, gain understanding, and embark on your healing journey with us!
Sincerely,
Kelly
Follow on IG @themiscarriagedad
Email themiscarriagedad@gmail.com
Make sure you subscribe!
Write us a review!
I've met people that have been at it for years and years and years and years put thousands of thousands, of thousands of pounds into the journey, into the pursuit of that goal, and I've met others that have just started and they're in a bad space as well, and you know what. But that's okay. That is okay for them to be at it. They have every right to feel the way they feel. As soon as we start getting into dialogue where, yeah, but you only had one miscarriage, I had 10. That is, we don't want to go there. We want to avoid that.
Speaker 2:This is the Miscarriage Dads podcast. This is the Miscarriage Dads podcast.
Speaker 1:A podcast humanizing the experience of miscarriage by normalizing dads openly talking about its impact on us as men and fathers. My own personal journey, um, was ivf I found. I tell you I want to talk about a quick ivf story. This just happened to me personally. So our first round of IVF, we eventually got to paying for IVF and we did the first round and on the day so it went well, we got um. It was, I mean, it's a tough gig IVF, really tough watching Charlene go for it, tougher for her for obvious reasons.
Speaker 1:But when we got to, because it's it's highs and lows, you start taking the injections. Okay, is it working? And then you're going for the scans, it's like, right, we can see the follicle growth, this is good, hopefully there'll be some eggs in there. When we retrieve the eggs and you're like, okay, so hold on to the next stage. And then you go in and they take the eggs and it's like, right, we've got this amount of eggs. And you're like, right, we've, we've got for another stage. Okay, what's the next barrier? Now? We need to fertilize those eggs and just see if, if we can get some embryos out of those. Okay, we've lost some of the eggs, but we've got three embryos brilliant. Okay, out of those embryos, how many have progressed to the next stage? So we went through all of that.
Speaker 1:So that is just. I mean, it's grueling, it's like a marathon, it's it's ivf. Is is a tough gig. So then we get to a point where we're going in for the transfer. I think it. No, the egg retrieval was on my birthday, but we go in the transfer and at this point we've had three and a half years of secondary infertility. It's been, you know, highs and lows. It's been a tough gig. But on the day of the embryo transfer, on our first round of IVF, we have this lovely, friendly nurse send me a video, a stop motion video of our embryo growing, which is unbelievable, like that. Yeah, I can actually see a video of the embryo they'll be inserting. And then on the day of the transfer, yeah, it's just incredible. You know, know what they can do now and then she comes over with a photo and she's like there you go, there's your embryo. Take that. And that is such a different experience than just having sex and hoping you've got pregnant because you can, you've got a, you can, you've got something you can see, you can visualize.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and and we, we fell so head over heels in love with that embryo, which is just a couple of, so we're talking a few cells here, but, like we just said that we're okay to do that. That is that that is my god-given right to fall in love with that embryo, regardless if it's at that stage, rather than okay, we're six months through to this journey. And then, because I was so head over heels with this embryo, I gave the embryo a name, which is such a rookie mistake, but I did it and I don't regret it. But we called the embryo Babadur and the transfer went in and it was.
Speaker 1:You know, it was. It was a good day, it was. We felt wonderful, we felt positive, we felt like it could work. And then they say this thing well, I think in infertility terms, they say you're pregnant until proven otherwise. And they say right, you've got a dreaded two week wait, which I'm sure you've had enough guests on and you may have had that conversation, but you've got a two week wait before you can do a pregnancy test.
Speaker 2:You're actually the first IVF guest that I've had on the podcast, so this is all new perspective and information for me and, I'm sure, for many people in our audience. So what you're saying is after the transfer, you just got to sit and wait for a period of two weeks to then go back and get either a positive confirmation or the most devastating news.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, let's stay on this for a bit, because this is important than if you've not had any other IVF guests on. Yeah, so yeah, skipping the science which I will butcher if I try and go for it accurately. This is this is important than if if you've not had any other ivf guests on. Yeah, so yeah, skipping the science which I will butcher if I try and um go for it accurately. Yeah, you get. If you're lucky, you get to a point where you've got a healthy embryo that they say is viable for pregnancy and they transfer that embryo, okay, and so you know you've got an embryo. You know it's been implanted and they are telling you, or infertility speakers, you're pregnant until proven otherwise.
Speaker 1:Of course, you need the body to accept that embryo. It needs to implant and attach itself onto the lining and begin the process of growing. And you don't know if the body's going to do that, and that's why you need to wait two weeks and after those two weeks the hormone levels in a female would have rebalanced enough to take an accurate pregnancy test. If you do it before, then you might get a positive pregnancy test when it's not positive, so you don't want to do it too early. That's this whole other thing. Should we actually wait for the full two weeks? And it's horrible 's? It's horrible, it's horrible, horrible waiting Cause you just you could have a baby or you might not.
Speaker 2:How long do those two weeks feel in real time?
Speaker 1:Oh, so the first day goes pretty quick because you feel good, and then then it's just, it's just agony. It really is painful every day and it's, it's the same thing. It's just, it's just agony. It really is painful every day with and and it's, it's the same thing. It's it's that, that isolation feeling, because Charlene would wake up and she might have a bit of a cramp or have some symptom, and you're like what does that mean? Is it good news? Is it bad news? I don't want to make a big deal out of this, so I'll just sit next to her and nod away. Okay, let's just keep monitoring it. But a million things are going through my head and I'm on the side checking google again. Don't do that, but I am to see the symptoms. Um, and it's, it's, it's, it's one of those, so it so.
Speaker 1:It's painfully slow, but at some point I think we were four or five days in when she started bleeding, and that in itself is not necessarily a cause for concern. Light spotting after implantation can happen. It can be quite normal. So I read this and, to be honest, I kind of got excited. I was like no, this is good news. This, this is good news. This is what we want. This is, but this is.
Speaker 1:A lot of people experience this and they get a pregnancy and that pregnancy goes on and at the end of it there's a healthy child, um, but then she started bleeding quite a bit. There's, there was a, there's a lot of blood, and then panic bells are um going off. So we called the clinic and we explained the situation and they said, okay, well, you know, you might, you might be fine, it's, it's probably okay. But then they said we do want you to do the pregnancy test early. Uh, by a couple of days, they said, even though we say two weeks, just just a day. I forget it was either day 13 or day 12. But they said you can do it a little bit early. So we've already got an excruciating two-week wait, made worse by some symptoms that are causing alarm bells, and then we're told to take a pregnancy test. That's been the hardest part of the entire journey because, like, there's this blood there's, there's, there's more blood than there needs to be.
Speaker 1:Shannon thinks she's coming on her period, even though she can't come on her period because she just can't because of the drug she's been taking. So it's something else. But we're like, well, it can't be the embryo, because an embryo is just a ball of a few cells. So there's that Weirdly, there's that going through your head, these question marks, this curiosity. Well, what's going on here? So then she takes the test and it's just hell, it's just awful, we're both in the bathroom. It's just hell, it's just, it's just awful, we're both in the bathroom. She's crying, she, she knows what the test results are going to say.
Speaker 1:And remember, at this point, we've we've got a picture of our embryo on the wall, we've given it a name, we've got a video of this thing in our minds. This, this thing is we. We can conceptualize it, unlike anything else before. But it's still at the start of pregnancy. In fact it's before then, because we haven't even got to the end of that two weeks. So should we be feeling like this and you go through those things? Maybe not, we still.
Speaker 1:This is no different than all the other times that we've geared up to take a pregnancy test. Or she skipped periods and she's late and we've got excited and we've seen pregnancy symptoms, or we've thought we've seen pregnancy symptoms and then that's ended up not being the news we wanted. It's no different than that, but of course it is different because our emotional experience has attached itself to this picture and this video and this name that I've given the embryo. So it's completely different. And then you've just got the discomfort that Charlene's undergoing and gone through, which I have, like she's tried to explain it but I have no idea how awful that must have been for her. But it was awful enough, just me being on the sidelines just watching it and obviously going through my own thing, because I want another kid and I want to have another kid with her and I want to give Arla a brother or sister and I, you know, we're a happy family and we, that's, we want to build on that and just all these million of other cascading thoughts.
Speaker 1:And then the pregnancy test was not pregnant and for a brief period of time our world really did come crashing down. That that was the first time where we sort of allowed our lives to just fully open to the pain of this thing, rather than, okay, we've got Arlo, we've got to take him to this place on Friday and this place on Saturday, and we've got this thing. We sort of had no choice but to just take some time, to be like, okay, no, we, we are not enjoying this experience. This is hard and we're okay to feel pissed off and we're okay to be upset, and it doesn't matter that this is just the first round of IVF, it doesn't matter that this isn't our 10th round of IVF, it doesn't matter that we're not a hundred thousand pounds in debt, we're only 20,000 pounds in debt, all of those things.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it's surreal in one sense, because the only difference between all the other pregnancy tests and this one was the fact, as I said, that we, we put a name and a face to this thing effectively, even though it was just a picture of an embryo. Yeah, so that that's like it's. It's like trying to rationalize that and trying to make sense of that in your head is so different because you've got that sensory input, a photo, a name whatever you've. You've, as I, sensory input, a photo, a name, whatever you've. As I say, you've attached this thing and you've made it a thing, and so when that's ripped away from you in bloody fashion, it's just, I mean, it's painful, it is, it's not, it's not pleasant.
Speaker 1:And then, when we called the clinic, the vocabulary around what happened makes it even worse and they, they explain that it's basically a withdrawal bleed where the body says, you know what? No, embryo is defunct. And they said we won't know the reason why, but it's probably because there was a chromosome imbalance, so the body was doing its job. It's like, okay, well, no, this isn't. This isn't a healthy embryo that you thought it was, and that's a whole other thing. That's a whole other thing.
Speaker 1:You, you pay all this money. You, you go through all this treatment, the injections or charling, went through them, and then they're telling you our embryo is looking good embryos, look at, this is. In fact, when they graded our embryo I forget the grade scale, but they basically grade them good, good to really good or bad and ours was at the top end, according to our consultant. She was like this is this, is a star, this is this is a really good embryo. And that just added to the enthusiasm that we had that this was going to work. It just added to the that magical day of let's have this transfer and let's walk out the clinic really optimistic and smiley with our photos of our embryo.
Speaker 2:We just got elevated even higher and then, for that to not pan out, for them to say, yeah, no, probably chromosome imbalance, body did what it should do, uh, and just flushed it away that has to be one of the most emptying feelings in the world, when you've done everything that you're supposed to do and, like you said, you have the experts in this, basically holding your embryo as this model icon of what a healthy embryo should look like. And then all of these positive things, all of these positive things, and for that to end up in such a tragic, painful loss. That can't even be explained, and the way that it is explained adds even more to the sense of emptiness. Because it's not that, it's not that you guys took any wrong steps, it's not that. You know, I often think about this and I don't know how how was the word I'm trying to say here? I don't know how right this is to say you never want anything bad to happen in any way, shape or form, about anything regarding anything. Yet bad things happen, and I'm saying it like that to get to the point that I'm trying to get and not to minimize what it means that this happened to you and the things that happened to me I often think about when we get to the area, to the realm of reasons why did this thing happen?
Speaker 2:I get to the point of saying, even if I did get a because. That because would not justify it, would not justify that thing happening, that bad thing happening. Yeah, I see, yeah, I see, and. But I also get to places, tom, where it's like I, I wish the because gave me some sense of justification. You know, like why did this happen? Well, this happened because, and then you give me a string of reasons that I can then take those and be like you know what, for as painful as this is, for as much as this sucks and it hurts, it kind of makes sense, but that doesn't happen.
Speaker 2:And even when it does happen, it's not satisfactory, right, because the pain that I'm feeling in my heart right now heart right now, because of what you've just shared is that the because that you guys got just in and of itself seemed to just like cheapen the whole experience, because it was nothing that you guys did and it was nothing that was wrong initially, and it was nothing that was wrong initially and it was nothing that, like, everything was quote unquote perfect. So then, how could everything? It's almost like you are the exemplary student. You've never skipped a class, you've turned in your homework on time, you've passed every test, you've aced every quiz, you participate, participate in class activities you help tutor some of your other classmates to help bring their grades up. I mean, you are the model student and then when you get to your final year, you don't graduate, you can't graduate yeah, I mean, we're back, we're back in that room.
Speaker 1:We're back in that room, that room, we're back in that room with no doors, no light, and you're asking questions and you've got no answers and there's nothing you can do. I, I would. I know we're we're getting on a bit, but I do want to touch on another thing about my personal experiences. I I wasn't thinking about just my personal experience in all of this. I, and I still cannot do this. I couldn't, I cannot get it out of my head that so many people struggle with fertility, infertility, and one in four reasons cannot be explained. And again, I'm one of those, and at this point, this happened to me when I already have a son. So we might be back in that room. Yeah, so we might be back in that room yeah but how I got out that time was arlo.
Speaker 1:He came to the room, literally knocked down the wall and he said daddy, can we go and play? Yeah, yes, in that period he was my lighthouse. But then I'm like, well, he's four at the moment. One day he is going to grow up, he is going to meet someone and they are more than likely going to have the same or similar conversation that I had with his mother and think about starting a family. We now know through our own experience it will not be a given. That is very painful to consider.
Speaker 1:As a parent that was right in the middle of the room until a few moments ago, having just lost, having understood that the first round of IVF had failed, having understood that we've been through this for three and a half years, we've we have too much experience on secondary infertility issues and a little bit of primary infertility issues. And because of my public life with the books and I'd started writing about infertility nothing's public about that yet, but I'd started looking into it more and I'm looking into the stats that infertility is getting worse I've got that parental element eating away in the back of my mind. Yes, this experience is awful, but we still won the lottery with Arlo. I still held onto that. That. That was tough, that IVF round. But, as I said, arlo was the one who freed me from that room and I still held on to that. That that was. That was tough, that IVF round. But, as I said, arlo was the one who freed me from that room and I still held on to that. That notion that we were given more than we ever thought the universe would give us and that ultimately sort of brought us back from sort of that, those dark times. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Then I've got my yeah, and then I've got my parental hat on thinking, well, this and the research shows that this is a problem that is getting worse and worse. And this brings us full circle to the start of this conversation, when we talk about the need, why we have children in the first place, what are those biological driving factors that make us sit down with our spouse and say, hey, let's have a kid, even though we have no idea what parenting is all about. It seems like a good idea, we're happy, let's go wide in, but he's going to experience that and he might not be able to do that, what you know. And again I'm now feeling powerful, like what can I do? What can I do to try and ensure he doesn't? That doesn't happen? Yeah, and, and so that's been a big part of me processing what happened to me and how that could have a knock-on impact on him.
Speaker 1:And I'm not talking necessarily a something I've passed on biologically, although that has crossed my mind. I'm talking about the state of the world. I think infertility connects to a lot of other global problems at the moment, like lifestyle. Yeah, um, I don't know about the climate, but lifestyle for sure, like I, I just I'm convinced that that has a huge issue and I don't think it's massively split between the developed and the undeveloped world. I think I it's a global problem. It's a global problem that we're all experienced, whether that's the water we're drinking, the air we're breathing, who knows but this is a global problem. This is why I said this problem that we're not talking enough about or we're not asking the right questions.
Speaker 1:It's one thing to say, ok, infertility is a problem. It's quite another to say no, infertility is a problem. Why is it a problem, why is it it happening and what are we going to do about it? And, of course, if you talk about environmental concerns, well, then you get a lot of people sort of shuffling their feet and turning away, because then you've got to look at societies and how how societies operate, and you see what I mean. Then you're going way off tangent and you're thinking hang on a minute, yeah, I'm just trying to make a baby. Why are we talking about our carbon footprint and our manufacturing capability? And then, who wants to have that conversation? Yeah, and even if you do want to have that conversation, how do you have it? And even if you figure that out, what do you do about it? Yeah, it seems insurmountable, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:yeah, and that that's. That's like my, that that sort of brings us to where I am. In that journey I've gone from some guy who just loved hanging out with his partner and going on holiday to thinking, yeah, let's make a baby, to then going through our primary infertility issues and then that sort of having going all up and then we get an Arlo, and then this having this amazing smitten family life that we wanted to build on an increase, and then going through secondary infertility. Um, I should I should say cards on the table. My, my story, at least as far as I'm concerned, does have a happy ending. Yeah, so I was gonna. I was gonna tee you up for that. I was gonna tee you up for. Yeah, so I was going to.
Speaker 2:I was going to tee you up for that.
Speaker 1:I was going to tee you up for that.
Speaker 2:So before, before we get to that point, uh, because I want to make sure that this gets out. Also, what is the difference between primary and secondary infertility?
Speaker 1:So in the UK, if you're trying to um, if you're failing I hate using that word, but if you can't make your first child after the first year it's your first round of this then they would say that's primary infertility. If you have a child and you're trying to go again and you can't, and that takes at least you know that ticks over a year, then that's secondary infertility, um, and that goes on and on, and on and on until you know, understood how many kids you, yeah, and so that's something that is that is something that is particular to the UK, or is that language that is used?
Speaker 2:If you've even looked into that and like, is that like standard language that is used?
Speaker 1:I believe so. Certainly in the UK, I believe it's standards. So, certainly in the uk, I believe it's standards. Uh, with that though I I I think I was three years in to our secondary infertility journey before I understood that secondary infertility is a term, and it was only because and we've spoken about this in this episode that there's a sense of guilt that I had to work through from wanting to have something more of what I thought I wouldn't already get. So eventually I did sort of venture on. I got in touch with an infertility charity and again, I sort of used my public life as a way in, and I was directed to some social media groups for people that experience in either primary or secondary infertility. So that's how I sort of got in to that space and learned some of the dialogue and the language and the vocabulary around that.
Speaker 2:So let's try to land the plane on a positive note. So before we even get into that, let me just convey how grateful and thankful I am that you have opened yourself and you have revealed these aspects of your story Because, like I said to you, I've had guests on the show before. This is obviously a show about miscarriages and focusing on loss through that prism, and fertility and infertility through that prism, and fertility and infertility obviously all of that like they're not necessarily separate from each other. It just looks different. But the way that you've laid out your story and aspects of your story has been educational to me and I have a handful of other friends who are going through similar struggles as you're going through right now. And when I tell you it is as a as a witness to their experience.
Speaker 2:It is so painful to watch them go through the challenges that they're going through, knowing that I can't do anything to help them, but give them an ear to listen to them, a shoulder to lean on, hold space for them to say whatever it is that they need to say. I can empathize with the struggle because it took my wife and I many tries to finally get to two children and although we experienced miscarriage and you know that has its own nuances to what you said earlier in our conversation. Pain is pain and we're all being driven by this internal drive that we have to want to become parents and to want to have children, for whatever our reasons are, and when we do not achieve that, there are all sorts of implications for that. So I just want to say thank you, my guy, for really opening up and sharing your story in the way that you did and taking me into these very difficult spaces that you found yourself in at various points of of your story.
Speaker 2:But, like you said, your story is not. There isn't a a final punctuation mark in in the story. It is very much so open-ended in the best possible way. So how, where are you? At what point are you and your story presently?
Speaker 1:Well, the first thing I want to say is thank you for your kind words, and I spoke to Charlene this morning and I want to tell listeners this. I explained I was coming on the show, We'd be talking about infertility Is there anything off the table? And she said no. She said let's use our experience to just try and help people, and this is a term I always say is let's just redistribute the pain and create some good out of it.
Speaker 2:So, that's.
Speaker 1:That's why I've been more than happy to share my story, and I definitely speak for Charlene when I say she's happy for this to be made public, so she can take some of the thanks as well. So to your question then. So we were, I mean we were at a bit of a juncture. The IVF failed in, I think, at the start of November last year, so we were deciding what to do. We had one more embryo in the freezer, so we did have the possibility of of going again, which would technically be still classed our first round of ivf, because you, if you, if you get after the end of the process, if you get seven embryos, then you get seven attempts at transfers before that concludes your first session of ivf and then you have to start all over again with okay. So we still had one of those. So we were debating whether, okay, do we, do we go ahead with the transfer, do we spend more money on a second round of ivf or do we call it a day, because we knew that if it were to. I mean, the age difference is getting bigger and bigger. Arlo is four now, he will be five in November and we hadn't answered that question. And the clinic. The IVF clinic told us look, go away, go think about it. Um, the embryo will be here for you next year. We're closing down shop. We're going to enjoy christmas with our families. We recommend you do the same. And we said okay. So we put the christmas tree up and we took arlo out and we started doing all these lovely christmas things and we started to forget about our infertility hurdles and that felt good because we just come off the back of the failed ivf and Babadur and all of that. So we're having a lovely time.
Speaker 1:And then, two days before Christmas, charlene came downstairs one morning and she said do you want an early Christmas present? And she shoved a positive pregnancy test in my face and I have never experienced shock like it. More than the first time around I found out it's going to be a dad, and more than anything else in my life. That was in december and now we're in the end of april. She is over halfway through the pregnancy and we are due end of august.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we are. Imagine the space we're in at the moment. Yeah, we are Again. The space I'm in right now, even though all my friends of two parents are telling me we're in for hell feels very similar to what they were telling us when we were waiting for Arlo to show up. Yeah, ignorance is bliss. We don't know what we're in for. Even though we know what it's like to raise a child, we don't know what it's like to raise two children. We don't know what this new child is going to be like. All we've got is our prior experience of Ale, which, up until this point, has been phenomenal. So I'm enjoying this period. Yes, I'm nervous. Yes, sometimes I have those days where I'm like holy shit, how are we going to cope with this? But for the most part, I'm in a wonderful place.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great. It is great Whether I'll be here this time next year, we'll, I guess we'll find out. But no, you know what I I? I appreciate you saying that because I was recently having this conversation with someone and either I was having the conversation or I was listening to the conversation had on another podcast that I was listening to. It's called the Still Parents Podcast. Again, every time I get a chance to mention the name of that podcast, I do because it's been so inspirational to my own podcast.
Speaker 2:But there's a sense of, once you've experienced the things that you've experienced the things that I've certainly experienced a next pregnancy, after a loss or after being told that you can't well, maybe that's a little bit different, but definitely after a loss, there is some part of you that wants to be excited. And then there's another part of you that's like I can't get excited in the same way. And you know, you talked about, you talked about putting a name to, to your embryo, and as you were talking, you were basically telling my story because my little Nemo, I put a name to a blob with a heartbeat, and it was a 30-something second clip that my wife sent me with this little fish like blob with a heartbeat that led me to make that rookie mistake and give it a name, just to find out a week or two later that there was no more. No more heartbeat. So every pregnancy after the first time that my wife told me she was pregnant was different, and the more pregnancies we had, the less enjoyable they became for me. The harder it became for me to be excited, the harder it was for me to not be anxious and antsy as we're waiting through the gestational period.
Speaker 2:When Juki was born my firstborn it was 2020, may of 2020. So he's about to be four years old and it was incredible to see him and to hold him. And then we went on to have another two or three losses after Juki. Excuse me To have another two or three losses after Juki. So by the time we got to Eden, who's my youngest son, when he was when, when my wife told me that she was pregnant, there was no excitement. Tom, I was not excited at all. She was not excited at all.
Speaker 1:That is your version of the two week wait that you have after an embryo transfer and IVF, but just a lot longer than the two week wait, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's that, but bigger. Yeah, oh, I can only imagine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, like sounds unpleasant there was, there was, no, it was very matter of fact, and Michelle would agree to this. We were, in our own ways, both waiting for the other shoe to drop when is this going to turn South? Just like the other ones before, with the exception of Juki, and so it was this constant air of anxiety and just waiting for, almost anticipating not necessarily desiring, because I wouldn't go that far, but it's almost like had it happened, I don't think we would have been surprised and and and in a way you know what I mean it would have. We wouldn't have just been like, oh well, there it is. It would have hurt, we would have definitely been impacted and we would have grieved the whole nine, but I think, intuitively, subconsciously, at some point after we've gone through the process, I think we would have both came to a place of saying yeah, but were we would have both came to a place of saying yeah, but were we actually surprised, though? Because that's what our other experiences had teed us up for?
Speaker 2:So when Eden was born this is something I say all the time when Eden was born and we saw him, tom, when the doctors picked him up out of my wife's womb he was born via C-section. The doctor was like I call him Sonny, that's one of the nicknames that I give him because he was facing up. So the doctor was like, when she opened my wife up, like he was looking up at her. So she said, you know, he was born Sonny side up, so call him sunny. So when she grabbed sunny out of there and we saw him, we both started to weep, my guy, because he was finally real. It wasn't the movements, it wasn't the kicks, it wasn't the ultrasounds.
Speaker 2:And we had so many more ultrasounds with him than we did with Juki because of our experiences. And my wife's OB was exceptional because she understood the assignment, she related she. She saw my wife's level of anxiety. She definitely made me realize how anxious I anxious I was also. So we had way more. So we had more reasons to not be in terms of all of the medical stuff leading up to his arrival. We had more reasons to not be anxious because we had ultrasounds every two weeks. At one point we had them every week and then he went to every two weeks. You know what I mean. So there were, so there were reasons for us to finally just be like everything's going to be fine. We were holding our breath the entire time and when my son was in my arms, when I was finally able to pick him up and carry him, as they were sewing my wife back up, tom for the hour and change that it took for them to sew her back up I was weeping, brother. I was weeping.
Speaker 2:I could not stop from strolling down my cheeks, bro, because he was real, you know and that's when I finally realized oh my God, I never thought that I would get to this point with this pregnancy. So to hear that you are in a good space and that you are enjoying welcoming your baby at the end of August, like that is amazing. I just want to give voice to the people who are having difficulty being in that space, and again, not saying that one is better than the other or anything like that. It's just wherever you are, that's where you are, and embrace where you are. However, you're able to.
Speaker 1:The uh, it might be true that the higher you are, the harder you fall. It might be true that the higher you are, the harder you fall, but that also works in reverse the lower you are, the higher you rise. So, yeah, that's a beautiful story. That is a beautiful story and, yeah, I guess we're full steam ahead to my version of that for me, with our experience, and we're excited, but there is questions need answering. We have a global problem, so I think we're getting we're ending on a really happy note, which I'm really pleased where we're at, but we, there is there is work to do. Yeah, people are people are suffering out there and we need to find out why and we need to do something about it man.
Speaker 2:Again, thank you so much for this incredible conversation is always good catching up with you. Uh, all the best to you and charlene and and arlo. How does he feel about being a big brother? He loves it. We didn't think he'd care.
Speaker 1:We thought he thought he'd just shrug his shoulders. No, it's great. We have mornings are great. In the bed, like the bumps showing now, I felt the first kicks. So we mess around, we have fun as a family. Just now we're three and a half, almost four instead of three. Yeah, we're all. It's great, it's lovely. We're very content.
Speaker 2:Life's good. That's incredible. That's incredible, man. Listen all the best to you from here on out, moving forward. Thank you for the work that you are doing in your book. So can you inform the audience how they can find your work, so that another female can shove your book into her male partner's face?
Speaker 1:so my, my books are available worldwide on all formats hardback, paperback, digital audiobook, ebook. Just search my name tom creffer, k-r-e-f-f-e-r. I've got a pretty unique surname, so horrible to say in spell, but once you find me, my work is, is readily accessible and you can have a great laugh at my expense as you see what parenthood was like for me and is like for me. Yeah, check them out. They do, they do very well. They make you laugh, they make you cry. You should have a good time, my brother.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you so much, man, and thank you again for spending some of your time with me today in conversation.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. Thanks for having me on, kel Been great. Thank you you.