Comedienne Anne Kansiime has shared her traumatizing journey with infertility and why she was not able to give birth for a long time.
This year, the entertainer and her boyfriend, Skylanta, received their first baby – a boy, Selassie. The news excited Kansiime’s fans although many, who were unsuspecting, received it with surprise.
In her latest video posting on YouTube while responding to a couple of questions from the public, Kansiime revealed that for a long time, she has tried to have a baby but failed, because her fallopian tubes were blocked.
The process of fixing this problem was hallowing, she said.
“I was told my tubes were blocked and we started the process of unblocking them. It’s like how you get a straw and you have to pass some thick liquid through it using force. And they have to do it (unblocking one’s tubes) when you are awake. It’s so painful,” she said.
She says she had to undergo this procedure thrice and each single procedure took three days.
Although these procedures happened “a long time ago”, the pain that came with them continued to haunt her even later when she tried to have a baby with Skylanta.
The comedienne also opened up on how she tried In vitro fertilization (IVF) with no success.
IVF is a process of fertilization where an egg is combined with sperm in vitro. The process involves monitoring and stimulating a person’s ovulatory process, removing an ovum or ova from their ovaries and letting sperm fertilize them in a culture medium in a laboratory
“There are some tests you fail in life and you can’t convince yourself with any joke or motivational quote. You just feel like a failure,” Kansiime revealed.
She said: “I don’t know how to explain it to people for whom getting pregnant comes easier…., but when you are told you’re not pregnant when you wanted to be, or when you set out to be pregnant and your period comes, you feel like something is really wrong with you.”
Lat year, during the first lockdown, after failing IVF and losing hope, Kansiime left Kampala and relocated to Mbarara (Skylanta’s home) where she stayed seven weeks. All she wanted was “to chill”.
Her desperation was extreme, that not even spiritual motivation could console her. Despite a friend continuously telling her to trust God, she says this never made her feel any better.
She says she didn’t know she was pregnant until a colleague (her creative director) noticed her physical changes. There was an incident where she was wearing a very tight dress and her colleague kept telling her to tuck in her belly.
That same day, her creative director discreetly bought her pregnancy tests and told her to do a random test. Kansiime did not take the test until 4 days later as she had ruled out this possibility. When the first test came out positive, she did a second one just to be sure.
“I rushed to the hospital for a scan, just to be sure. My fear was, it could have been an ectopic pregnancy since my tubes had been blocked and I had failed IVF….. So, I can’t relay say when it is I got pregnant. During the time when I did bad manners with Skylanta (in Mbarara) and got pregnant, I had just given up.”
At 39 weeks, she gave birth through cesarean section (C-section), after the baby had failed to rotate.
It was Kansiime’s birthday and she was tired of waiting. She went for a checkup.
“He (baby) was no longer engaged. The head was below my chest and his bums were down. They (medics) told me that even if I was to wait 40, 41 weeks, he still wouldn’t turn. They said ‘If you want to give birth today, you can give birth today or a week later, but just know, he won’t engage for you to push him naturally’.”
The next morning, she gave birth to Selassie who is now 5 months.
She says the details are coming in her ‘Chronicles of Ubuntu’, a show she says will show viewers “inside our hearts”.
Kansiime says she is not doing anything to snap back (lose weight after conception).
“I’m breastfeeding, and I can say that’s the best snapback trick in the book. But I’m also enjoying it. I don’t really want to snap back. I want to be like this for a while. I feel good.”
