Newscaster Glenda Chong is pregnant at 51 after her 10th IVF try

Armed with a packet of tissue paper, I stepped into the home of veteran newscaster Glenda Chong.
The beautiful black-and-white bungalow she rents with her husband Justin Chan is nestled in a quiet, leafy neighbourhood in northeastern Singapore where most residents, the couple included, rear chickens and the occasional turkey.
Though we work in the same large office, this was our first conversation that took place late last month.
Glenda was extremely hospitable and had an easy breezy way of chatting with strangers, no doubt aided by her professional training.
Even as we engaged in light-hearted banter about the “wilderness” where she lives and about her two exuberant dogs, I steeled myself for an emotional morning. 
While it should be a happy meeting given that my 51-year-old colleague was sitting down for an interview with me to talk about being four months pregnant with her first child, I know that her in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) journey over the last 10 years could not have been an easy one.
My editor, knowing that this was a process I am all too familiar with, even gave me an option of handing the interview over to someone else for fear it might be triggering for me. 
Although my last IVF treatment was three years ago, the emotional turmoil that I went through over the six years it lasted still gets me choked up when talking to friends. I expected Glenda to be no different.
After all, we have both been through multiple hellish cycles of hope and crushing disappointment, after injecting ourselves full of drugs to achieve a marginally higher chance of conceiving a child.
When I asked her if she and her lawyer husband have always wanted children, she was seated on a white rattan settee that her late parents received as a wedding gift.
Dressed in a white cardigan and a flowy orange dress that makes it difficult to spot her small baby bump, Glenda replied that they have yearned for a family since they were married in 2014.
Their “incredible childhoods” made them both want to share their life with “mini Justins and Glendas”. 
“The minute we got married was when we started trying,” she said, adding that they knew they were “late to the game” since she was 41 and he was 38 then.  
So she did what she could to give herself the best possible chance of conceiving — first cutting out alcohol and caffeine, and then exercising to stay fit.
She added that there was also the whole “rigmarole” of checking her temperature monthly to find out when she was ovulating, going to a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner for medicine and acupuncture, and checking a mobile application designed to understand her cycle and fertility.
“It was sex-on-demand,” she said with a laugh. To this, Mr Chan, who was sitting beside his wife during the interview, quipped: “Not so great for romance … and the whole house smelled like a medicinal hall.”
After two unsuccessful years, the couple turned to IVF, which involves stimulating a woman’s body to produce more eggs than usual, extracting those eggs and then exposing them to sperm in a petri dish before transferring a healthy fertilised embryo into the patient. 
The science behind this may sound infallible, but the success rate for a woman over 40 years old hovers around 20 per cent. It gets slimmer every year, sinking close to zero at the age of 45.In the last decade, Glenda said, they have knocked on almost every door and have seen six doctors, including two who were overseas. 
They changed doctors “like changing socks”, heading to a new one every time they heard about a new procedure or technology being used. 
“To give you some context, in the time that we’ve been trying, one of our gynaecologists retired,” Glenda said, adding that they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and have taken numerous tests for everything under the sun. 
Mr Chan jumped in to explain: “We wanted to give it the best chance possible. Because, you know, regret is permanent.”
When I asked how many IVF procedures she has done, she was a bit hazy on the details, but eventually settled on seven fresh cycles and three frozen as her answer.
A fresh cycle is when eggs are extracted and used for a procedure, while a frozen cycle involves thawing previously fertilised embryos for the transfer.
I’m not at all surprised with her inability to recall.
Years of IVF procedures mean a blur of doctors’ appointments, blood tests, pinching your belly fat (this gets easier with time because the medication sometimes causes weight gain) and icing the fat before injecting yourself at specific times every day with various medications measured out of vials.
This is apart from the probing and prodding by doctors. So unless all this results in a healthy newborn, they are details you’d rather forget. 
Recognising that they were “not getting any younger”, Glenda said that their IVF treatment in June was to be their last, whatever the outcome.
It seemed a fitting time to stop — it was their 10th year of marriage and their 10th try. 
“I remember telling (Justin) … truly, this is the last time for me … if it doesn’t work, then we stop and we start looking at retirement plans, what are we going to do and stuff like that,” she said.
The decision to make this her final round gave her some inner peace and she recalled being very relaxed going into the procedure.
“We had no expectations, just like, yeah, if it works, it works. Great, you know. If it doesn’t work, so be it,” she recalled. 
Much to their delight, it worked this one last time. Yet, there were no joyous phone calls made immediately to friends or even to her only sibling, a brother.
They remained tentative about sharing the news until recently, for fear that they would “jinx” the outcome given that pregnancies at a later age are sometimes fraught with issues such as chromosomal deficiencies in the baby. 
All except four of her colleagues will learn about her pregnancy only after reading this article. 
Despite getting the all-clear after a battery of tests recently, the couple are clearly keeping their joy at bay. 
Glenda said that their home, which they moved into in 2019 to give their dogs more space, will remain largely the same for now.
She does not intend to buy any baby items or create a nursery until closer to the baby’s arrival.
And she has yet to decide how much she will share about her pregnancy with her 35,000 Instagram followers.
We got to the part of the interview where I expected the tears to flow on both sides and there would be use for the pack of tissue paper in my bag.
I asked her if she ever wanted to give up and if there were people who told her to do that. 
She recalled a time when she had three failed cycles in a row and received unsolicited advice from a nurse who told her that sometimes, “it just doesn’t happen”. 
“I didn’t know how to feel. On one hand, no one gives you a right to tell me that. But on the other hand, she’s probably seen hundreds and thousands of women, and she knows … and thinks it’s good advice,” she said.
Naysayers aside, her own resolve started to falter when she saw the number of eggs that the doctors could retrieve falling significantly.
From a high of around 20 eggs, her body could muster only one egg on occasions as time went by.
“So no matter how much I tried … that’s when it really took a toll on me, and I realised that time is not on my side … your hopes start to really, really diminish,” she said, adding that she was a complete mess emotionally at some point in the process.
“It’s not a feeling anymore and empirically, you see what’s happening and you know that there’s nothing you can do to boost the numbers.”
Did any of these procedures result in a non-viable pregnancy or a miscarriage?
Glenda replied that there was one miscarriage and it was very early on after conception so she “didn’t feel it”. 
She spoke matter-of-factly about how it was better for it to have failed early on than to have a poor quality embryo grow.  
The struggle to conceive can also make or break couples and I asked her if it took a toll on their marriage. 
Most of their disagreements were about whether to give up, she said, with Mr Chan feeling like he did not want her to go through any more disappointment — picking up on her emotions despite her ability to put up a strong front. 
Working in the news business, she said, has trained her to control her emotions and how she portrays herself.
She even considers herself to be “ruthless” over her own feelings, not allowing herself to cry or wallow. 
“Do something to make yourself feel better. Don’t wallow, because you chose this path, so you do it. I would just steel myself this way,” she said. She turned to hiking with friends and travelling to take her mind off it all and just continued the charge like a homing missile, a description coined by her husband.  
Her own way of describing herself was this: “I’m like a bulldog. You know, when I put my mind to it, I will bite and I will not leave any stone unturned.”
Glenda describes her pregnancy as being smooth so far; she has not experienced morning sickness but goes through what she calls “night malaise” where she feels extremely uncomfortable.
Again, nothing gets in her way and this discomfort sets in only when she is done with her news show for the night and heads home.
While she has managed to keep up with the rigour of work for now, she will eventually cut down her hours on air and take a more desk-bound role closer to her due date, which will be quite a change for the award-winning presenter who is used to being on her feet and in the thick of the action.
Glenda, who has been in the media industry since 1997, was named best news anchor at the Asian Television Awards in 2001 and was CNA’s China correspondent based in Shanghai from 2008 to 2011. 
She also does not crave anything but does have aversions to vegetables that look white, steak and strangely enough, her husband. 
“There was this one week when I just didn’t want him around. ‘Your presence is just disagreeable. Your smell annoys me, your look annoys me … Just leave me alone’,” she said with a laugh.
Shaking his head, Mr Chan said that it was the “strangest thing” and that he had to sleep in the study for a week as a result.
Given her age, her pregnancy is considered high-risk and she has to see her doctor, Dr Suresh Nair, the medical director at Seed of Life clinic weekly or fortnightly to check that both she and the baby are doing well.
Dr Suresh, who has been seeing Glenda since 2017, said in an email interview that he felt “positive” about Glenda conceiving because she had frozen eggs from when she was younger and was a “very fit and healthy individual”. 
He has, however, given her strict orders not to travel beyond a five-hour radius of Singapore and to book a place with a hospital in the vicinity if she does travel, just to be safe.
We ended the hour-long interview after speaking about their holiday plans and looking through some of the baby scans they’ve taken over the last four months, including one with her baby looking like it was showing a thumbs-up.
I left her home feeling more light-hearted than I could have imagined.
The journey to conceiving a child through IVF is less about how much your body can take and more about what your heart can. And Glenda’s heart of steel is one to be admired. I’m contemplating another shot at conceiving through IVF and I hope to take a leaf out of her book, by keeping those tissue papers away.