Liz Ellis has opened up about her heartbreaking fertility struggle in the February issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Speaking from her farm in the Byron hinterland, the former Australian netball captain speaks candidly about the three miscarriages she and husband Matthew suffered trying to conceive their longed-for second child.
The first miscarriage, Liz recalls, didn’t upset them that much, but the second was a different story.
“For the first time, my age really hit home,” she tells The Weekly. “I was 40 at the time and, for the first time, I started to think maybe I’m not supposed to have another baby.”
Yet they decided to keep trying, this time turning to IVF. On their second cycle, Liz fell pregnant again, but it wasn’t meant to be.
“This miscarriage was the hardest one,” she says. “It was the beginning of last year. I was 42 years old. My body was a mess of hormones. I was distraught and I went into a depression.
“And because making a baby has started to consume your every waking thought, you start reflecting on how stupid and careless you’ve been. We’d been married 16 years. Why didn’t we freeze embryos? Why didn’t we get started earlier?”
After three more rounds of IVF, they had given up when Mother Nature dealt them an unexpected hand.
Read more about Liz’s miracle pregnancy in the February issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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