There’s always an unasked (or sometimes annoyingly asked) question that I know comes up for every women over the age of thirty.When are you going to have a baby?

For me, it was complicated, and I found the question excruciating.

When Harley and I had been ‘going out’ for a week or so, we went away to the Blue Mountains in New South Wales for a so-called ‘dirty weekend’. As we lay in bed that first night, full of love and gushy emotion, Harley told me solemnly that he’d had a vasectomy ten years before.

I still remember the moment. It was like hurting yourself in an accident – you don’t feel anything at the time but you know it’s going to sting eventually. My heart was hammering, my mouth went dry, and I stammered out: ‘That’s alright.’

But was it?

The Private Life of Amanda Keller. Post continues after podcast.

I’d never been particularly maternal, quite the opposite in fact. But when confronted with the prospect of being childless, suddenly I realised I’d always assumed motherhood would be part of my life. It seems so naive now to look back at it, but I thought that Harley’s vasectomy was no big deal, and somehow all would be well.

What mattered most to me was that Harley wanted to have a baby with me as much as I wanted to have a baby with him. So first step was a vasectomy reversal.

We made an appointment with Australia’s top vasectomy reversal man, a microsurgeon who’d become famous not long before for attaching a new forearm onto the stump of a man called Clint Hallam (who’d lost his hand in a circular saw accident). The pictures of the operation were gruesome, but Harley boasted that at least the doctor had worked on things to scale.

Our first meeting with him was what I’d call… unusual. When he discovered Harley and I had both worked onBeyond 2000he produced photos of a new chair he’d designed for the Sydney Opera House. We responded as enthusiastically as was humanly possible. Let’s face it, if you’re going to curry favour with anyone in the world, it’s going to be the man who’ll be swiping a scalpel around your husband’s nether regions.

And his love of technology didn’t end there. When Harley awoke from his procedure, resplendent in pyjamas still bearing the creases from the packet they came in, the doctor popped some state-of-the-art 3D glasses on us both, and we watched Harley’s operation in three glorious dimensions.

People are funny. Some poor bugger further up the corridor was woken from his anaesthetic by a clown! A gift from his wife.

So we were off. Next stop, baby.

Yeah right.

After Harley’s vasectomy reversal I think I ignored the fact that nothing was happening on the pregnancy front for some time. It’s what I do. If something’s hard to deal with, I ignore it.

I don’t recommend this as a tactic if you can help it.

A few years went by (I know, I know, don’t nag me… ) and time after time I endured eyebrow-raised queries regarding our childless state. Meanwhile, I visited a fertility naturopath and swallowed disgusting-tasting potions, had my hair analysed for lead, was asked if I sat too close to the computer screen, and was queried about whether I ate crushed glass for breakfast, etc. etc.

I rolled my eyes but persevered because this benign approach was so much less frightening than the alternative… medical intervention, which just felt too overwhelming to think about.

What happened next reminds me of when I decided to get my driver’s licence. I woke up one morning at the age of twenty-six thinkingtoday’s the day.I bought a car, had lessons and got my licence all in one week – ten years after everyone else in the universe had learnt to drive.

Once again I woke up one morning and thought,Today’s the day, and made an appointment at an IVF clinic. At the age of thirty-five, it was time to get this baby on the road.

Amanda and Harley in 2005. Image: Getty.

A week later Harley and I met with Dr Steigrad, the medical director at Sydney East Fertility (as it was then called). Dr Steigrad listened to our story and said that yes, we were candidates for IVF. I left his office feeling scared but elated. This could be fixed.

In those days, however, only one in four couples emerged from the gruelling IVF process with a baby. When you embarked on the ‘journey’ of course you imagined you’d be that one couple. Everyone knew someone who’d had a baby through IVF. The media was full of IVF success stories. It was easy to forget the three in four couples who came home empty-handed time and time again.

The fabulous Di Craven, one of the nursing coordinators at the fertility clinic, became our point of contact. Over the following years I came to love this woman but our first appointment was head-spinning. Di explained the chemical rationale behind the entire procedure, and the plethora of ways we had to administer the thousands of potions. For me it was like listening to my accountant, or a parachute instructor… I just heard dogs barking.

While Di was drawing something on the board I thought, in my light-headed state, she was drawing a bum. How funny. But you know what? Itwasa bum. And she was explaining in detail the precise point on my bum Harley would have to plunge the needle when he gave me my daily injection. I started seeing spots and my whole body flushed red hot. I thought I was going to faint.

Next Di produced a bloody long needle and an orange, and showed Harley how to insert the needle. Cripes. He had to draw the liquid up into the syringe, avoiding air bubbles (thank you), then manoeuvre a needle as long as a finger into my rump. There was something about making sure the needle hadn’t hit a major vein by sucking up a little blood into the syringe but by then I was having an out-of-body experience. In fact even my out-of-body self was putting her fingers in her ears saying, ‘Make it stop, Mummy.’

On shaky legs we headed home, wondering what lay ahead.

'A few days later I got a call from the clinic. I'll never forget it.'

First came egg collection. To get eggs you were required to ‘superovulate’ – that’s what the daily injections were for, to produce a bumper crop for harvesting. They should have a category for this at the Easter Show.

Day after day Harley filled me full of chemicals, but not in a cocktail party fun sort of way. The needles he had to use were works of art – sharp and perfectly designed to slide easily into soft yielding flesh. Provided, that is, you didn’t mess with them. One awful day Harley didn’t notice he’d damaged the top of the needle, adding a tiny burr to the tip. It went in without fuss but on the return journey it felt like a fish hook was being ripped out of me. This was not without exquisite pain.

My chemical levels were constantly evaluated with blood tests, waiting for the time when I was ready to be given the big ‘trigger’ needle to set up the harvesting process. The timing of this needle was crucial and had to be given when my hormone levels dictated it – no matter how inconvenient. Middle of the night? Too bad. Middle of the busiest day ever at work? Too bad.

That’s what I found hardest about the entire process – not being in control of the timing. I’d head off for daily blood tests and clinic visits and sometimes spend an afternoon under general anaesthetic for egg collection. A couple of our close friends knew we were doing IVF, as did a few people at work. However, trying to keep it under wraps, as we were, was hugely stressful.

I was doing breakfast radio with Andrew [Denton] at the time, and any absence was a big deal. It was impossible to be away without explanation. So I would wave goodbye to unsuspecting colleagues after the show and spend the day at the hospital, then front up again for work the next morning.

Amanda with her Triple M breakfast show co-host Andrew Denton. Image: Getty.

On the upside, I actually think having to keep working throughout this experience saved me because it gave my day structure and purpose. No matter how I felt (sad, sore, hopeful or terribly disappointed) there were a few hours of the day when I couldn’t dwell on it.

I came out of the anaesthetic after our first egg collection with the number 23 written on tape on the back of my hand. Wowee, twenty-three eggs! That was huge! How could we not get pregnant first go? So exciting.

A few days later we got a call from the clinic. I’ll never forget it. None of the eggs had fertilised. Not one. The whole process had come to naught.

Harley and I were both devastated.

My husband is a man of few words, but on that sad day he made a lovely speech, saying, ‘As rotten as we feel today, our relationship remains… I want you more than I want a baby.’

I said the same, but over the coming months and years a gazillion emotions came into play. Logically, I could rationalise how I would feel if we didn’t have a baby, but emotions aren’t always rational. I knew if we were unsuccessful I would grieve the lack and the loss for a long time.

The next IVF cycle, and the next, and the next, the eggs fertilised. We had embryos. We had cells dividing in petri dishes. But each time the embryos were placed in my body, they didn’t survive. The two weeks between implanting the embryos and the blood test that would say I was pregnant or not were excruciating.

While I was carrying implanted embryos anything seemed possible – until we got the results. This suspended reality was a better state to be in than the awful disappointment of the phone call from the clinic. And we seemed to be getting nothing but bad news. It reminded me of Shrödinger’s cat, which is a scientific explanation of quantum theory (is that a dog barking?). The idea is that you stuff a cat into a box with a device that randomly may or may not kill it. Under the lid the cat could either be dead or it could be alive – so to the white-coated observer the cat exists in both states. Its fate is undecided until you open the box (or get that call from the clinic).

I’d turn up at the clinic month after month and feel like I was letting everyone down. I’d been set an assignment, and I kept failing.

One month a tweak in the regime caused me to be overstimulated. I produced too many eggs, which was dangerous and incredibly uncomfortable. This coincided with a photo shoot forPenthouse Magazine. Sounds racy, but it’s not what you think.

It may surprise some of you to know that there are words as well as pictures inPenthouse. I’d been approached to be featured in the ‘words’ part of the mag. It appealed to my sense of the absurd. I suggested I hold a stuffed beaver. That way I could say I’d had my very own ‘beaver shot’ inPenthouse.

On the day of the shoot, I could not have felt more dreadful. It was at my house and my stomach, chockers full of eggs (like after a gluttonous Easter), was pressing unflatteringly against my pants, and my shirt was straining at the seams. Not in a sexy bosomy way. In a fat gut way. While thePenthousepeople were setting up, I sat in the bathroom in agony, and as soon as the shoot was over I headed to the clinic. This would have to have been the least sexyPenthouseshoot in the history of the universe.

At one point during my IVF years I was given chemicals to trick my body into thinking I was pregnant, hoping this would make those pesky embryos stick. As a result there was no point in having a blood test two weeks later to check for pregnancy markers – they would be present whether I was up the duff or not. So we had to endure a six-week waiting period, when an ultrasound would give us the news.