The need for answers

My husband is running a photography course this weekend and fortunately I am less tired so I am able to help out as I usually do. When I first found out about my conception he was very sympathetic but couldn’t quite understand why I wanted to pursue the matter and was afraid that it would cause me further stress. I lost my father when I was 17 in a road accident - yet another lorry - and I lost him again this year. Of course I still love him as the person who brought me up and cared for me just as I love his family and their kindness but now relationships have to be re-evaluated.

At first my son and daughter felt the same as my husband about my enquiries and a certain amount of curiosity too. However, their attitudes all changed when I got to the point in my blog when I told about my conception and I got an answer! Not an answer to my parentage but a link with other people like myself. I’d never knowingly met anyone conceived like me before in my life.

But I need to go back a little to explain why I started the blog. After news about my odd DNA and my conception I went through a period of grief about the past. I did all sorts of research on the internet about Reynold Boyd and the other fertility pioneers. I looked at the medical journals of the 1920s and 1930s which is where I realised how prominent the study of eugenics was in the discussions on fertility. However, I had to come to terms with the fact that probably no bone marrow donor would be found and I would die. Being musical I sorted out all the music for my funeral postponing the will until later!

Then I learned something amazing – a donor had been found in Germany. At last there was a possibility I could live, a lot of very difficult medical hurdles to surmount but if I could get through into remission I had a chance. At that point my oncologist found a new unlicensed drug to give me. From then on I made progress. I decided that the secrecy surrounding my origins was not my choice and I wanted to be open and honest, hence the blog. In doing so I started to learn, not just from the internet but from people just like me who had been living with this knowledge a lot longer than I had and who had banded together, given support to others and had tried to lift the veil of secrecy from this subject. As soon as my husband and children read some of their stories and opinions they realised why I had been right to go public and that this link was vital.