David Guetta and Sia’s Titanium song got me through my fertility treatment | Dance music

AAt the end of 2011, the party season was in full swing but I was not enjoying the festivities. Two years into fertility treatment, my body was pumped full of synthetic hormones and I felt like a pin, while my head was filled with the fragile hope of having a baby, and the exhaustion of trying to fail.

I was in my 20s. I met my husband when I was 22; we got married when I was 25. “I want to have young children,” I told him. It was a feeling I had had since I was a teenager. But I kept worrying that it might not come easily to me. As it turned out, my intuition was right. As I neared 28, I was fixated on infertile entertainment.

I was recovering from my second miscarriage that year when I heard Sia’s sarcastic voice on the car radio belting out the catchy words to a dance number on the computer – she. David Guetta contract, Titanium.

It’s not a song I would rate or listen to again – I’m more into R&B and hip-hop 00s – but it came at a good time in my life. I was forgetting how I felt a few days before I was on birth control pills and how they administered them. I always mustered up the courage to go to the hospital before and after work, and my job was very difficult. It left me in a “crying in the bedroom” kind of pile. I needed something to pull hope into me.

I turned on the radio and listened to the words: “I can’t destroy the bullets, I can’t lose anything/ Fire will put out the fire.” It was like it was talking to me and about me, letting out words of hurt to all we had done to them. As Sia’s voice soared through the chorus and Guetta’s vocals – “Ricochet, take your aim” – I cried, but I felt myself gaining strength too. “You shoot me down, but I won’t fall / I’m titanium.” These were the words I needed to hear.

I felt like a stuffed doll. I showed it again and again in the days that followed. I might not be able to face a Christmas party but I can’t be weak in the bedroom either.

In the following months, I spent a lot of time in my car, going to work and going to get my blood tests, hormone tests or internal tests. Titanium listening became a habit. Each time, his video display had the same power and I could turn up the volume, roll down the windows and sing badly with my terrible voice to wash me away.

The following May, when my husband and I went to another hospital IVF embryo transfer, I let it encourage me; when we came back from the scanner to confirm that we were six weeks, so we are 12 weeks pregnant, I celebrated with them. When I was pregnant with fear, I turned to her when I needed encouragement.

In January 2013, our first son was born. Today, he is the eldest of three: his brother arrived after 15 months, through IVF also (the last of our mature eggs) and four years later, another brother, without fertility treatment. We consider ourselves incredibly fortunate; for many, the results are not the same.

In our family, everyone knows that Titanium is my war song. It’s the only big dance that involves marketing on my list, and a trophy for my achievements.

My kids call me every time it’s playing or playing on TV. When I made a playlist for my husband to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary, it was a song that represented our year 2011. And the other week, when he was out with friends, he sent me a voice from the bar: he recorded it and played it in the background.

There’s something very disturbing about fertility drugs: you see life through your own filter in order to conceive. If you’re lucky, the filter loads. It worked for me, but the war song remained. So, now, elsewhere in life, when I need a shot of energy and find myself in the car, roll down the window and drive on.