Lynne and Mark

I grew up with an incredibly painful period from when I was 16 or 17 years old. And back then the attitude was ‘just put up with it’.

I met my husband Mark at the age of 20 and we decided that we would try to have children.

We tried for around three and a half years with no success whatsoever.

Mark worked in the construction industry, and I worked in health.

To get an appointment with a gynaecologist back then was really difficult.

But because they didn’t diagnose me with dysmenorrhea or endometriosis, the attitude was ‘there’s nothing wrong, you’ll fall pregnant when it’s your time.’

Finally at the age of 25, I went to my GP and luckily for me his brother was a gynaecologist, so we made an appointment, and it cost me an arm and a leg because I wasn’t diagnosed with any particular issue, and it wasn’t covered under Medicare.

At this stage I was 26 or 27 years old, and he came back to me and said, ‘you’ve got a thing called endometriosis, and its really hard to fall pregnant with that’. He told us there’s a couple of options but there’s also a 90% chance that I will never have children.

By this time, I’d used up all my sick leave, there was no type of leave other than annual leave that I could take to go through any treatment, and it was so expensive.

We went to the only fertility clinic in Newcastle, and I used annual leave to attend appointments, and I didn’t tell my work because I had a male boss who was very religious and I don’t think he would’ve been supportive.

We tried artificial insemination for about three months and that was two days off work each time.

Then we discovered that Mark had a problem, he was diagnosed with low motility.

So that stopped artificial insemination.

Next we entered the difficult stage of IVF.

It was 1991 and I was working at the John Hunter. I was incredibly lucky that I now had a female boss who was going through the same thing that I was at the exact same clinic.

She was very good to me and kind to me and would say ‘if you need to go, just go’ and she would allow me to take a couple of hours off and go and get the hormone injections.

It was exhausting, it was time consuming, and it was depressing.

I remember the first time I had the egg collection done, Mark had to take time off work because his industry didn’t allow him to take any of that sort of leave. There was no support from his work. I was lucky that I had my boss but even that was only a couple of hours here and there. Otherwise, I had to take all my leave. They wouldn’t let me take leave at one point, so I had to get a doctor’s certificate which was embarrassing because of the stigma surrounding IVF back then.

We did that from 1989 to 1993, four years of it, and it didn’t work.

In the meantime, I was still dealing with terrible pains with my endometriosis, and they had to do laser treatments for that and then it got onto my bowel and they had to do a bowel resection, it was all very dramatic.

My doctor looked a bit like Woody Allen, and he had quite the sense of humour and he said to me “I’m going to be really honest with you, it looks a bit like a haunted house in there and I really don’t think that it is ever going to support life”. But he said there’s was this new treatment ICSI (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection) that we can try but because it was so new and so expensive to do, we could only do it for three months, or three treatments.

In 1993, we started ICSI. I had to take personal time off; I had no leave left. I was lucky to have Mum and Dad help pay our mortgage because Mark also had to have so much time off from his job too.

We had three goes at ICSI and of course that didn’t work either.

It took a real toll on my health and my relationship with Mark.

But the silver lining here is that in 1994 I adopted my daughter. So, I had the joys of being a mother, but I didn’t have the joys of carrying her and giving birth to her.

In 1995 I ended up having a full hysterectomy.

When I first started talking about the RHL campaign with the HSU I was like “if only”. If only I had that ability to use RHL to assist me in having a child. If only the science was so advanced back when I was going through it and I had that support from my employer.

It is great that we’re pushing for RHL for men too. It was a really stressful process for Mark. I would have to say to him ‘this is my appointment, and you need to be there’ and he’d be at work and he’d have to leave and the stress of making up an excuse to go because there was no leave that he could access. He had absolutely no support. There was little to no support for me, but there was absolutely zero support for him.

The RHL would’ve given him the ability to apply for that leave and take a few hours off for the treatments. It would be the norm as an Award entitlement and there would be no stigma around it.

Employers should get behind RHL because it is the morally the right thing to do. If I knew that my employer had a system where I could take that leave it would lift so much stress, increase my productivity and I would want to go back to that employer.

My female boss who supported me, we remain good friends to this day.