When I tell people a rabbit got me pregnant, I don’t mean the fluffy kind.
It was eight years ago. Dean and I had been together for nearly 10 years and had decided that we wanted to have children. We’d always used condoms for contraception, so it was basically a case of stop using them and start having unprotected sex.
We’d both been into the party lifestyle for years and were bored with it. I was in my late thirties and had always assumed I’d have children someday, but although I wanted a child, I’d never felt that the time was right or that my life was together enough to bring a child into it. Dean had always said he didn’t want children, but he had begun to feel differently with age.
It suddenly seemed like it was now or never, and that I don’t want to miss my last chance to be pregnant and invest myself fully in the future of any child that came along. My child.
I cut down my drinking, stopped smoking, and began to focus on a more healthy lifestyle, including taking folic acid. Then, we started to try to conceive.
However, after a few months of unprotected sex, nothing had happened. It started to dawn on me that we had waited too long.
I thought it might be because of my crusty late 30s insides, or because we were both ex-smokers. We’d smoked a fair bit of pot over the years — Dean more heavily than me — and I’d read studies that say cannabis use is linked to male infertility.
Almost a year passed with no sign of pregnancy, and we began to think that maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. We considered visiting a doctor and getting checked out. Then I discovered that, in the UK, couples need try to conceive a child for two years before they become eligible for fertility treatment on the national health service.
***
One weekend, we were eating in the city center and happened to be near a shop that sold sex toys. I didn’t know it then, but what happened next was about to change my life.
I’d never owned a vibrator before; it just hadn’t been something that I’d felt enough curiosity about to bother doing. But that day, we bought one. It was more Dean’s idea — it wasn’t with the idea of conceiving in mind — and I just thought, well, why not?
I felt a little embarrassed about going into the shop to buy one myself, so I left it to him. He chose a rabbit type vibrator, and after a trip to the cinema, we went home and gave it a try out.
Similar to this Bombex Thrusting Rabbit Vibrator.
I hadn’t realized it would have so many different settings! It didn’t just buzz — it twirled, thrust, and wiggled in various different ways. I experimented with every option, curious to see what they felt like. The rotating element was the weirdest feeling, and I was certainly stimulated in ways I’d never experienced before.
The next time we had sex I conceived my daughter.
I am convinced that my insides had somehow been given a workout — an internal massage of some kind that made it more likely that I would become pregnant. I realize there’s no medical evidence for this, but mine isn’t the only anecdote I’ve heard that seems to support this notion.
A close friend who was lined up for fertility treatment had become pregnant not long before me. She’d had a fertility test known as a HSG, (hysterosalpingogram), in which a dye is put into the womb to check for blockages in the uterus and Fallopian tubes. A nurse at the hospital told her that it wasn’t unusual for women to become pregnant after HSG, even though it was only meant as a precursor to treatment, to find out whether there were any blockages. She said they thought it might have the effect of clearing out minor blockages or debris in the womb. “It gets rid of the gunk,” as my friend put it.
I wondered if that’s what happened to me too, when I used the rotating rabbit vibrator.
Of course, it could be a complete coincidence, but I know from figuring out the dates on the calendar that I conceived the first time I had sex after using this vibrator, and my gut tells me that these two things are connected.
Am I crazy?
