Motherhood takes on many forms.
If you’re a mother, you’re pregnant or seeking to get pregnant, you know full well that welcoming a baby into the world is no easy process.
While there is certainly hope, tenderness, love and happiness, there is also fear, suffering, uncertainty and, in recent times, a new factor: COVID-19.
If managing assisted reproduction treatment, pregnancy and childbirth is hard work at the best of times, imagine what it’s like during a pandemic!
Mª Ángeles knows the feeling.
She decided to become a single mother and visited our clinic with the desire to start a family as soon as possible, in 2020. Her first attempt failed, but the second was going well until the pandemic, confinement and the closure of all non-essential services derailed things. Her transfer, already prepared, was cancelled overnight.
“I felt uneasy because I had no information, nobody knew anything, nor how long it was going to last, nor how it might affect us… After undergoing treatment for so many months and having everything ready, the dream of becoming a mother suddenly came to a grinding halt. I’d planned to become a mother that same year. I didn’t want to postpone things any longer. But my plans fell through and what’s more, I couldn’t find any answers.”
In seeking these answers, Mª Ángeles spoke to her Equipo Juana Crespo gynaecologist.
“My gynaecologist told me to try to live a normal life and be calm, that everything would pass, and not to focus on the treatment and everything I’d experienced before. So that’s what I did. I tried to continue being careful with my diet, staying calm and relaxed, and wait.”
Every month, Mª Ángeles reported when her period was due in the hope that the long-awaited transfer would arrive. On 25 May, when the pandemic allowed, the day arrived. After negotiating the PCR test in the morning, her embryo was transferred that afternoon.
Despite her joy, Mª Ángeles’ pregnancy was kept secret until she was four months pregnant.
“No one knew anything because of the risk my pregnancy posed given my age and due to COVID. I was obsessively careful about no one coming near me, about everything: where I went, who I spent time with, etc.”
Despite the pandemic, the pregnancy went well until delivery. Then things got extremely complicated.
“I was due to give birth in the middle of a major Covid wave, after Christmas. I had to have a caesarean section three weeks early due to some problems. To my surprise, the day after giving birth, the person who had accompanied me during the delivery tested positive, when the day before she had tested negative.
After coming into direct contact with a positive COVID case, I had to be isolated alone in the room, without seeing anyone, not even my daughter who was in the ICU. It was horrendous.
That was the worst thing about this whole motherhood process and the pandemic. Because I have the feeling, even three months later, that I did not experience my daughter’s birth as other mothers do. As it was a caesarean section, I saw her come out, with the mask, oxygen under the mask, anaesthetised without knowing anything, and I saw the baby in passing before she went to the ICU. I couldn’t touch her, no skin-to-skin contact, see her without the mask. I couldn’t even kiss her until 10 days after she was born, after completing quarantine!”
Fortunately for Mª Ángeles and her young daughter, things came to pass, and the pandemic ended up affording a benefit: lots of privacy.
“One thing has characterised my pregnancy and these first months of motherhood: a great deal of intimacy. That’s the only good thing the pandemic has given me. It’s been an extremely personal, intimate, and serene time with her. As things are going smoothly, I spend a lot of time with her every day. You get another view on motherhood.”
This Mother’s Day for Mª Ángeles is special. Last year was pure chaos with the frozen embryos. A year later, she is enjoying the best life has to offer, a beautiful daughter who arrived during the pandemic.
Life emerges from chaos
Like Mª Ángeles, many other patients felt lost in the face of so much uncertainty. Meanwhile, at Equipo Juana Crespo, specialists turned their attention to finding solutions.
For Dr Juana Crespo, with over 30 years dedicated to reproduction,
“there has never been a more difficult time in my professional and personal life. We’ve experienced lots of uncertain times, but nothing as difficult as COVID. There were so many doubts in every area: social, health, etc. We didn’t know if the coronavirus was going to affect oocytes, semen or cause embryonic malformations or complicated pregnancies. We didn’t know anything.
We could not guarantee that our patients were going to have a healthy child and we stopped everything. I learned a great deal. For a whole month, my life was focused on learning the behaviour of coronavirus in reproductive cells. Later I knew that I could be calm and give my patients peace of mind and security.
The road to motherhood is sometimes fraught with anguish, heartache, stress, and disappointment, but that’s life. If you’re able to change your attitude and be clear that being a mother is a priority, you’ll get there.
Fortunately, technology, science and experience have equipped me with many tools to help 40,000 patients celebrate Mother’s Day,” Dr Crespo explains.
Equipo Juana Crespo would like to wish a happy Mother’s Day and offer up lots of encouragement for you all in these moments of uncertainty, because we know that there’s always two sides to every motherhood story.
