Richie Sadlier opens up about fertility battle ahead of the birth of his first child
Richie Sadlier and his wife announced their baby news in August. Picture: @richiesadlier via Instagram
Former football star Richie Sadlier is expecting his first child in the New Year after a long and difficult fertility battle. However, despite beating the odds, the RTÉ pundit admits he hasn’t been able to allow himself to get “too confident” yet.
He explains: “I think because of the road we've been on for the last number of years — it's been amazing to get to the point we’re at, but it's been a tricky road.”
In 2018, he and his wife Fiona were told that they would never conceive naturally and so, the pair began a lengthy fertility journey that would involve four rounds of IVF and plenty of tears before amazingly, Fiona fell pregnant naturally.
“We were kind of used to building our hopes up numerous times or being really positive that things would go well or just imagining things going well. We’re both really positive about all this and we have been throughout the whole thing. Up until now, we’ve always been wrong to have expectations that things will all work out and that we’d have a baby.
“I think [with] all that experience, there’s a nagging voice in the back of my head and I wish it would shut up and I wish it would go away but it’s still there. Just kind of saying, ‘until there’s a baby in your arms — don’t’. Anything could happen.
"Hopefully in a couple of months, there will be a baby for us to look after... and it will all be worth it."
Richie Sadlier has joined Thérapie Fertility to encourage the Irish public to consider their own fertility after new research showed that 83% of people believe that cost is the number-one factor prohibiting people from accessing fertility treatments in Ireland.
The research investigates the awareness among the Irish public when it comes to fertility issues and shows that nearly two-thirds don’t know that 20-25% of heterosexual couples struggle to conceive naturally.
Richie, a pundit and psychotherapist, says he really wanted parenthood to be a part of his future, but it was after completing routine fertility tests that he and his wife were told that they would need to start IVF within months if they wanted to have a child.
“That was a lot to take in initially because we hadn’t had any lengthy conversations, we didn’t have many years of trying where we wondered whether something was wrong, so this was really harsh news to hear. We sat on it for a while and within two or three months we were back in the office of the clinic saying: ‘yeah, listen let’s go for this’."
The pair did the first round of IVF in October 2018 and were “fully convinced” that it would work.
“We were really positive, we were full of optimism, we followed all of the advice we were given about diet or lifestyle — all that stuff and we just said, 'of course, this will work'.
“We planned how we would deliver the good news to parents, and we worked out when the due date would be and started discussing names — all that stuff that you do when you think you’re going to be a parent and then there’s this awful news that the first round didn’t work.”
They had another embryo to try from that initial round of IVF, which unfortunately also did not work, before completing a second round of IVF shortly before their wedding.
“I remember at the time thinking, ‘well this is definitely going to work.’ The law of averages — it’s going to work. Surely it will. I remember at the time I planned to work in the good news into my wedding speech… wouldn’t it be a lovely time to deliver the lovely news that we’re pregnant — and of course, that didn’t work either.”
Overall, they did four rounds of IVF and were about to give up and start looking at egg donor treatment when they found out Fiona was pregnant.
“We had that lovely experience that you see on TV where couples go into a scan and you hope that you see the first signs of what will become your little child but unfortunately when we got there, there was no heartbeat detected.”
They were told it was a pregnancy of “uncertain viability” and that they would have to do another scan a week later. If there had been progress, they could call it a viable pregnancy but if not, it would be a pregnancy loss.
“We had this awful scenario of having those seven days where we weren't sure whether we were meant to begin mourning it or accepting it, or whether we were to hang onto the hope that there might be some kind of miracle turnaround.
“I was due to go on the Champions League the night of that scan and I was in bits. I rang RTÉ and said 'sorry, there’s no way I can go on air tonight'.”
The result unfortunately was an early pregnancy loss and so the pair once again tried IVF with the last embryo from their fourth and final round before moving on to egg donor treatment.
“We were told IVF wasn’t going to work anymore and we were starting to discuss egg donor treatments and we were making plans to go to Spain for egg donor treatment and then the following month, we got the lovely but surprising and shocking news that we were pregnant.”
Fiona had amazingly conceived naturally and at 15 weeks, the moment finally came for the couple to share their good news with the world. However, Richie says he wants to let people know the journey they had been on in the hopes that it might spark a conversation on fertility.
“I deliberately mentioned the fact that we’ve been doing IVF and that we were told this wouldn’t happen for us because I knew that there would be a lot of couples out there who are in that boat.
“I think the more normal the conversations are, the quicker people are to talk about it and to get support of friends or to get the right information from people who can actually help, rather than just going through this alone, silent, keeping it private, keeping it hidden from your friends and having that weird mix of feelings of inadequacy or shame or discomfort or embarrassment.”
Now, the pair are looking forward to finally welcoming a baby into the world next year and as Richie says, they are exactly where they’ve always wanted to be.
“It’s lovely. This is exactly where we always wanted to be but probably were always unsure of whether we would actually get here so it's lovely to be where we are.
“But in saying that, I really hope there isn’t any new arrival in the next few weeks because I need to get the World Cup out of the way,” he laughs.
- For more information on Thérapie Fertility, see therapiefertility.com
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