Have a baby, by sex or science

..for anyone’s sake and I will not be dictated to about what I should and shouldn’t feel. I FEEL. I don’t give a shit if it’s stressful for other people when I’m upset at their baby’s birthday party. They should try walking a mile in my shoes before they suggest that I am making other people uncomfortable. I don’t give a flying FUCK. Having a nephew is not the same for me as having a family of my own, especially when faced with the very real possibility that this will never happen. I do not wind myself up – I cry when put into stressful, triggering situations, and I took myself outside to do it. What do you want me to do, swallow the pain, grin and bear it until it’s cancer, to save the feelings of others, when my own feelings are crushed month upon month and day upon day, and there are reminders of my loss on every street, in every supermarket trolley seat, in the belly of every other woman except my own? My feelings of pain at my infertility are as valid as a parent’s feelings of joy at being a parent and you don’t see them hiding those for the sake of other people, do you?

And so begins cycle 38, in fury at my ignorant, impossible family and floods of tears. Honestly, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

Thanks for that, you bitch. It’s just what I’ve always wanted.

::puts on present face::

At least I can drink my way through my birthday and Christmas now. And believe me I will.

And so begins cycle 36. FML.

Infertility can make me feel left out and freakish at any time of year, but when child-centred Christmas looms and my birthday approaches to take another year off what’s left of my fertility the feelings intensify and become almost unbearable.

It’s my nephew’s first Christmas and although I love him, I’m half-dreading it. The whole family is going to be obsessed with him all Christmas. People with kids are incapable of talking about anything else at the best of times, but Christmas is the worst. We haven’t had a child in the family at Christmas since my brother and I were little.

And I’m going to be 37 on Monday. Last birthday I cried on and off pretty much the whole day, especially since I had to be confronted with my SIL’s pregnant belly for the first time. Now one year on we are no further forward. In fact, with one failed IVF cycle behind us, we could even say we are further back.

Please don’t let us have to go through another year, and another Christmas, without a baby of our own.

At my six-monthly endocrinologist checkup last week, he took bloods – just routine to check my thyroid levels and so on. Yesterday I got a letter, copied in to my GP, saying that my bloods were fine, I’ve lost weight, everything’s good, blah blah, then casually instructing my doctor “Please immediately commence Dekristol 20000 IU weekly for severe vitamin D deficiency”. Holy what?! I have a vitamin deficiency?! I am flabbergasted. Is this new, or has no one picked it up before? My level is 14. Apparently anything below 25 is a deficiency, and anything below 50 is insufficient.

WHAT?! Am I going to get rickets?

A quick google – very quick, as I was on my way out – revealed a host of studies showing a link between infertility, anovulation, PCOS and vitamin D deficiency. If all this is fixable with a simple supplement, eating more egg yolks or a sunny holiday, I will be simultaneously overjoyed and annoyed – could have saved us three years of heartbreak.

Anyway, I am off out again now and I still haven’t had time to research it, so I’ll do some over the weekend when I get a chance.

Yesterday brought my monthly weigh-in at the fertility clinic. Last month I had gained a couple of pounds, and I really expected this weight gain to have continued. My body seems to be playing tricks on me at the moment – although most of the time I’m not all that hungry or interested in food and I’m doing a lot of exercise, so technically should be losing weight, I’ve felt a lot fatter lately. But this feeling hasn’t been consistent, nor has it been borne out by clothing fit – my jeans felt tight but a skirt I bought a couple of months ago was distinctly loose, and this inconsistency replicated itself across the whole of my wardrobe.

So it was with anxiety that I stepped on the scales yesterday, and with astonishment that I saw the number tot up to 2.3 kilos (5lbs and a smidgen) less than it was last month. My biggest monthly loss and my lowest weight yet.

This means that I only have to drop another 2 kilos or so before we can make a start on IVF two. If I can match this loss this month and maintain it over Christmas, we may be able to start early in the new year. Gosh!

Weirdly, I don’t feel as though I look that much different, although I’ve now dropped almost 9kg (20lbs) since last December. I can see the difference on the least expected parts of my body, such as my arms and the small of my back, but I haven’t lost much off my tummy (my bugbear). In fact sometimes it seems larger than ever. And none of my clothes are too big for me yet. I am certainly much fitter, stronger and toned though. Thank you Zumba, I love you.

I am about to quit caffeine again, since I’ve readdicted myself again and it’s a poison, and on the offchance that I do get pregnant naturally…

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah… great joke there, Abs…

..I would sort of be poisoning my baby with it. Oh but I love coffee. LOVE. IT.

Suppose I’d better stop drinking again then. FFS. Perhaps after this weekend, when we are spending an evening with a notoriously hard-drinking couple who are being let off the childcare leash for the evening.

No further news in the baby department.

..but there’s nothing doing really. We had a follow-up appointment at the fertility clinic a couple of weeks ago, and a consultant told us that they really had no idea why our IVF failed. I responded well to the drugs, and they were chuffed with the quantity of our embryos – apparently it’s rare for all eggs to fertilise, but all eight of mine did – and less chuffed with the quality of our embies on day three, but although they weren’t great they weren’t crap enough to expect a failure.

Of course, most people’s first cycles fail anyway.

Unfortunately they did what so many doctors do and went for the IMHO “blame it on the weight” option. He said that although I responded well to the drugs, which was their initial worry given my weight, an interaction between my weight and the drugs may have been responsible for the embryos not sticking. To be honest I can’t really remember the details of it, and it didn’t seem to make much sense at the time either, and it really felt like they were grasping at straws, which annoyed me somewhat. I mind that it failed, but I don’t mind if there’s no reason for it to fail. I do mind when they try to make me feel like it’s my fault.

So the only thing they could suggest to do differently for cycle two was for me to go away and drop another couple of BMI points. They seem to think this is achievable in a couple of months giving us a start-date for cycle two of the beginning of December-ish, but given that it’s taken me nine months to lose three points without driving myself eating-disorder crazy, I think they’re over-ambitious.

_{And let’s not even raise the point that BMI is a load of bollocks and that I am fit, healthy, muscular, exercise like a mofo and have great big boobs and an unshrinkable bum upping my BMI points.}

So anyway, I haven’t really been working overly hard on dropping those BMI points. I mean, I’ve been doing a lot of Zumba, but gaining heavy muscle is just going to make things worse! And while I have been eating intuitively much of the time and aiming for low-GI most of the time (always adding protein etc), there has been a certain amount of comfort eating following the spectacular grieving of an IVF failure. So, for example, my former regular breakfasts of fruit, cottage cheese or eggs, yogurt and low-GI toast have gradually given way to foods that still follow the same principles but which are a bit more calorific – for example, the same toast but with a slice of cheese instead. Also, I have been drinking again. Not, like, drinking drinking, but before IVF one I was teetotal for a while, and at the moment I’m not, I’ve had at least one big sesh, and I’m sort of planning another later in the month.

I hate saying diet-like things but it’s time to get back on the wagon and gear up for IVF two. I’m resurrecting my abandoned one thing goal and I’m going to try to update with my progress even a little bit each night.

My fertility coach said “Pregnant by the end of the year” and barring a miracle that’s not going to happen now, but I want to give IVF two, which will probably be sometime in early 2012 the best possible chance.

I haven’t replied to any of them, for which I apologise – it just hurt too much to go over and over. But I really do appreciate it.

It’s now a whole cycle since the failed IVF (and no, the much-vaunted post-IVF fertility did not kick in and I have not got pregnant naturally, what do you want, a cake?). We are back at the clinic on Tuesday for a follow-up appointment. Hopefully they will be able to give us some information about why number one failed, and how we can do better on cycle two. I suspect it will be a case of trying to get better quality embryos. I’m not sure how you get better embryos. Or it may be that I need more progesterone support to keep the embies in there. They might send me away and tell me to lose more weight. Actually, I have no clue. As I stopped “feeling pregnant” on the day HA found out about his redundancy, I have a strong suspicion that there’s a mind-body connection thing going on – it’s entirely possible that my body decided that with no money coming in (although he has a fab new job now), it just wasn’t a good time to have a baby. Body-mind connection doesn’t discriminate between natural conception and IVF. I thinks it’s acting in your best interests and it just don’t give a fuck.

_{As an aside, I’m running the risk here of touching on the infertile’s bugbear – people banging on about stress when actually it has little to do with conception and miscarriage. Never EVER say “relax and it’ll happen” or “stop trying and it will happen” to someone going through infertility unless you want to raise their hackles immediately. And also stay away from the topic of adoption unless they raise it themselves. For lots of people the drive to grow a baby inside them, and one that is half them, half their partner, is a large part of wanting to have kids and struggling with infertility. It is not just about raising a baby. And adoption is an incredibly difficult and stressful process which often fails – it is not baby shopping. There’s enough stressful stuff to think about when you’re going through infertility without adding the tangled web of adoption to the mix. And if fertiles think adoption is so great, why don’t they go and do it instead of popping out babies just cos they can? So please, take my advice and stay away from it. You have been warned. Rant over.}

To be honest, I don’t feel ready for cycle two. I was raring to go on cycle one, but now I know what it’s like (particularly the horrors of egg collection) I’m anxious. And I’m very aware that if this cycle fails, it will not only be extremely upsetting but it’ll be two thirds of our opportunities used up. If we hit cycle three we’ll truly be in the last-chance saloon. Yet I know that the longer we leave it the less likely we are to be successful, so we should get on with it. I have a lot of questions to ask the consultant on Tuesday.

I had a blood test yesterday morning at the hospital and they called to let us know at lunchtime. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, as I had started bleeding the day before, but expectation doesn’t cut through the pain one little bit. The last 48 hours have been some of the most distressing of my life, and today feels even worse. I think it’s sinking in that one of our three chances is gone, gone, gone.

I have cancelled appointments. My electrolysist has been through the same and understood completely, the lady at the bank was equally as kind – her best mate also had a failed cycle, plus I was crying, it would take a heart of stone to refuse a crying woman. Kindly friends are offering tea and solace but I don’t feel like I can see anyone, and certainly not those with babies. I can’t even bring myself to reply to texts and emails yet. I started crying in the supermarket last night when I saw a stack of application forms for Mum of the Year, and when I escaped to the car I was parked in front of a sign for parent and child parking. Everywhere I go the world is saturated with the glory of parenthood. So I just want to be at home, alone or with HA, where I can avoid reminders of what I’m missing.

The one nudge I can’t avoid is the occasional squeezing cramps of my pathetic bleeding uterus. I feel like it’s mocking me.

I hadn’t written much about the IVF, but so far it had been reasonably plain sailing. The hormones and injections that turn some women into banshees didn’t really bother me – it was exciting to be on our way, taking control – right up until the final shot which matured the ovarian follicles. The morning after that one, 24 hours before egg collection, I woke up feeling like I was carrying two massive tender tennis balls in my abdomen. When I drove over a speed bump in the road I felt them bounce up and down inside my body – ka-dunk – and I was terrified I’d rupture a follicle and lose a precious egg.

The egg collection was distressing and painful, and left me crying in agony and unable to move much for about a week. Not surprising really – they stuck needles through the top of my vagina and drained my superstimulated follicles. They retrieved eight eggs, and they all fertilised quite happily overnight, but sadly our embryos weren’t good quality. Only three were usable and none were good enough to freeze and use later – this cycle was to be a one-shot, one-transfer deal.

The embryo transfer two days later was one of the most emotional moments of my life. HA and I saw our two chosen embryos projected on a screen – they were dark blobs sitting side by side until the embryologist sharpened the camera’s image to show their Venn diagram structure. I loved them immediately. HA sat by my side, holding my hand, and saw them enter me on the ultrasound – two little specks whizzing up the tube through my cervix then dispersing like stardust into my uterus. Amazing. What a privilege to see your potential babies just two days after conception. I cried my eyes out.

The next ten days were nothing short of magical. I was more pregnant than I had ever knowingly been. I felt so positive, happy and upbeat. Within days my breasts swelled (yes, even more, I didn’t think it was possible) and became sorer than they’ve ever been before. I began having cramps – which I interpreted as implantation, plus probably some healing pains from the intrusive egg collection. I was 100% sure that I was pregnant with at least one baby, maybe two. I took it easy – no Zumba, no lifting. I talked and sang to my embryos, scoured ingredients lists for forbidden ingredients and stocked up on cocoa butter. I went off food almost entirely. HA sat with his hand on my belly and we talked nothing but babies. I felt pregnant and swollen, and I laughed and cried with relief and joy.

Then four days ago, the cramps disappeared and the breast pain lessened. At first I figured they must have settled in, but as test date approached and I felt no further rumblings down below, anxiety set in. Two days ago I was on the phone to my mum and I suddenly had a very bad feeling. When I went to check, I discovered with a wail of anguish that I had started bleeding. Old brownish blood, the type you get at the start of a period. I called the hospital, and they said it could be my period, or it could be caused by the hormones which I was still taking to support the pregnancy. Then again, so could the pregnancy symptoms. Either way, nothing could be done and I had to sit tight for the test the next day. So I did – I sat and waited and Googled and obsessed and Googled and obsessed. The blood flow speeded up and changed colour to red, then slowed to a standstill overnight, then started up again. I couldn’t tell what it meant. I went to Tesco and stood looking at the pregnancy tests, but the hormones in my bloodstream from the IVF meds would obfuscate the results anyway so trying one was pointless – there was nothing I could do but wait for the hammer to fall.

Time seems to stand still in moments like this. I thought this fortnight – what’s known as the two week wait – had been the longest of my life, but the day between starting to bleed and taking the test felt like a week in itself, and in the five hours between our 8am blood test and the 1pm phone call to let us know our negative result every second was like an hour. I sat right next to the phone the whole time, and when the sympathetic nurse rang with the forgone conclusion I buried myself in HA and cried and cried on him. Five minutes afterwards, my parents arrived and I cried and cried on my mum. An hour after we got the news, poor HA had to go to the second of the three job interviews he’s had this week – as if this all wasn’t stressful enough for him already, he’s been knee-deep in job hunting and networking. My dad drove him to his interview and I sat with my mum and tried to calm down. I showed her how to use Skype and willed her not to talk about my nephew. I was OK for the rest of the day – numb and exhausted but OK. HA came home an emotional skeleton – I have rarely seen him look so drained. For dinner I ate crackers with the soft, moulded and blue cheeses I’d been denying myself while I was what they call PUPO – pregnant until proven otherwise – and drank a glass of my favourite white wine. I didn’t actually want any of it but I had it anyway because I could, a fitting bookend on a shitty day.

I feel much worse today. I’m not sure why. Perhaps yesterday I was a little bit in shock even though I was expecting it. Today I feel fragile and brittle, numb and tearful. My parents came around to check on me this morning. My dad started trying to fix the Dyson – fixing stuff is how he shows love – and he had a bit of a go at me because the brushbar was all tangled, and I just broke down. Now I’m alone, and that’s the best way for me to be right now. HA is dealing with it by not thinking about it and interacting with people, and he’s seeing some friends tonight for pizza, but I just want to be on my own and choose whether I think about it or not. I don’t want to have to think about or talk about anything else if I don’t want to. I’m crushed and heartbroken, and angry with my body – my stupid, ugly, pointless body that won’t do the one thing it’s designed to do, not even when we take away the chance and slot science into its place, not even with seven weeks of injections and hormones and surgical procedures and hope and love and utmost, utmost care and patience. I want to punish it by neglect and though I’m not hungry I want to stuff it full. I hate my period pains – I can feel them right now, and every time I go to empty my Mooncup I think about my embryos and wonder if I’ve just flushed them away. I hate my body for not even having the grace to make embryos that are decent enough to freeze – this cycle, this one of our three cycles, is over, there are no more embryos to put back into my womb, and with it 33% of our chances are gone. I have to go through the whole thing again. I really really really didn’t want to have to. I don’t care about the shots and the hormones, I just never wanted to do another egg collection and I never wanted to feel this stressed ever again. Now we’re left with no choice.

I have to call the hospital and make an appointment for a follow-up meeting. I’m not sure, because grief obscured what the nurse said on the phone, but I think they look at what went wrong. I’m not ready to handle that yet, even if it means they can look for ways to do it differently next time. I’ll probably call them back next week. They’ll probably make us have a month or two off anyway before next cycle. Right now we both need some time to grieve, catch our breath, get at least one of us back in work and life back on an even keel.

Please be understanding if I don’t comment on anyone’s comments, for a while if at all. I don’t mean to be rude and I do appreciate anything anyone says, but I’m so up and down at the moment I don’t know if and when I’ll be up to it. I might just want to choose to think about other stuff, or I might want to talk about it endlessly, like I have here. I hope this makes sense. Bear with me.

To my surprise, despite my still being four or five pounds away from the weight they wanted me at, the consultant gave us the go-ahead to start the IVF process at our appointment a week last Friday. So as of one week ago, I have been taking a nasal spray called Synarel twice a day, which is going to switch off my hormones and put me into a fake menopause, hot flushes, mood swings and all. I’ve never suffered PMT so I don’t really know what it’s like to have hormonal angers, but my friend R tells me that she had to take this drug for her endometriosis and almost walked out on her then-fiance in a rage which was induced by him using the wrong implement to mash potatoes. So I’m looking forward to those, as is HA. I’ve already had a couple of dizzy, woozy warm spells that could have been hot flushes, but it has been unseasonably hot here and I’ve also been on antihistamines for the appalling bites I’ve suffered at the teeth of an unidentified insect, so it could have been any of those.

At the appointment I had an ultrasound which identified that only one of my ovaries is showing signs of being polycystic, which is great news. I’m not sure if it’s new news, as the endo didn’t give me enough information to ascertain if this has always been the case, or if one of my ovaries has become more healthy lately, possibly due to my weight loss.

The other excellent news is that my right ovary had one great big lovely 19mm follicle on it, ripe with an ovum and ready to pop any day, ready to get fertilised. Seeing this on the screen left me excited, proud, and absolutely dumbfounded – look! A potential baby! I felt immediately incredibly fond of my beautiful, beautiful follicle, but it also threw us into a quandary – with such an obvious sign of potential fertility right there in front of us, should we postpone the treatment a month and try naturally one last time? It seemed a waste to ignore that sign and start on the drugs, especially since beginning treatment would mean going back to using contraception (I know, counterintuitive, right). But I could have been producing follicles like that every other month for all we know, and I’m still not pregnant after all this time, so the chances of it working out this month were slim to none. Despite it feeling like a betrayal of my body, we handed it over to science.

I am very aware that quite a few people are very interested in our story and are keen to hear the next chapter. But now that we are at this stage, it suddenly feels very personal, and not something I necessarily want to put on show even though I know that everyone who reads my stuff does so with tenderness rather than as entertainment. I’m in a quandary, because I know I will want people’s support, but at the same time I don’t particularly want to feel pressured (mainly by myself) to share much more of this tale than I feel comfortable with. We are entering a time which may be even more peppered with pain and heartbreak than the past two and a half years have been, as we enter the final countdown of whether we get to have children or not. Although IVF will give us a much better chance than nature has so far, there may still be trouble ahead – failed cycles and worse. On top of everything else, it’s not just my treatment, and I have to bear in mind the feelings and privacy of my partner too, particularly as he is also on 43T (albeit no longer active) and not anonymous.

So I hope people will understand if I’m not always forthcoming, and I selfishly hope that people will still offer their support if I do come on here and rant, rave, cry, moan and scream, even if I’m not holding up my side of the bargain by telling everyone the dates and details of what stage we’re at and how it’s all going. Please stand by me.

I have a fertility coach (she’s developing a programme and I’m road-testing it for her), and she is a big believer in the law of attraction. She believes that any doubt in my mind will sabotage my treatment, and has instructed me to act from now on as if I am already pregnant. I’m not convinced by the LoA, but I’m under coach’s orders, so from now on I am assuming that our child or children are already on their way to us very soon indeed, and I am delighted about that. This afternoon I walked slowly down the baby goods aisle at Sainsbury’s – yeah, it made me tense, but I’ve been avoiding it for over a year now since it makes me tear up – and actually looked at the products. And then I bought and ate gherkins, since that’s what pregnant ladies do ;-)

So concludes the entry I’ve been writing for a week.

Everyone, please, cover me – I’m going in.

We may get our schedule for IVF, though I don’t think I’m yet at the weight at which we can go ahead.

I think today I get trained in injecting myself. Gulp.

I heard some very sad news this morning which has made me reconsider the whole dual-embryo transfer thing. A woman I know a little bit had a baby boy this week – ten weeks early, he weighed just 3lbs 13oz. He was too poorly and died the day after he was born. It’s so heartbreaking I can barely even think about it.