Inexplicably Missing

Monday this week was egg harvest time for me. They've pulled out 12 good ones, and I got the news today that they have created 8 little embryos. We will just have to see how these little embys grow now. While the numbers sound good so far, we are cautiously not getting too excited about it since last round we got 9 embryos at this same stage, but by day 5 there was only the one good one, and another one that was barely passable. Well, all we can do is hope! Do your best little guys! grow well!

I am up to my 5th time doing this IVF business... And yet, somehow, my head doesn't quite get used to the strange warping of time while I am in an IVF cycle.  I find that life gets divided into "before cycle", "in cycle", "after cycle"... Like the other day, I called up dad because I felt as though it had been SOOOOO long since I had spoken to him. Then I realised it was only about 2 weeks,.. less actually? I couldn't even work it out. I thought about all that had happened since then. Not much really. Just me going to work, and giving myself needles. I really didn't have anything newsworthy. So why did it seem like a lifetime ago?  ... Before cycle. A coping strategy for me is to try to stay somewhat straightforward about day-to-day life while on a cycle, to just go through the usual motions of life. I learned this after the rollercoaster of cycle 1 , that it might be better for me to remain in a state of emotional equanimity, just focus...

Day 11 today of my 5th round of IVF. It seems outrageous, since so much of my headspace is distracted by IVF musings of late, but I totally forgot to give myself the morning FSH injection yesterday. Ooops! mad dash home during my lunch hour, since I finished work quite late yesterday. On to the Orgalutran from last night too. I've always found that one a bit ouch. Has anyone else out there forgotten? I was so appreciative to see people's comments on my post about the stories that are out there . It was somehow comforting and uniting to know that there are so many people who have been and are right now are going down their own path with facing infertility.  I actually have plenty of friends who have had some infertility issues and needed some treatment to help... I was even going through IVF at the same time as one of my good friends. She's now pregnant and it feels as though we are veering down different forks in the road. She can look forward to her baby. I feel like ...

It seems to me that the happy-ending story that is so often "out there" about infertility is this: "Here is a couple who struggled and struggled to have kids, and then, finally, they had a baby. The end"... I think something about this story feels like a lack of honouring of the losses felt along the way for infertile couples. I know life goes on, and I know it does no one any good at all to get stuck in grief or pain. But surely there is some kind of transition for people to adjust from infertility to parenthood? Maybe there is a certain loss that is always felt? Transitioning to parenthood seems like it would be a hard process following infertility battles, and different somehow from a "normal fertility" transition to parenthood which I am sure would be hard enough (and I think is spoken about a lot). Something about the "...and then they had a baby" part of the story seems a bit dismissive about the infertility dramas, or gives a message of-...

Today I'm ok. My partner and I are in this together. I have friends who understand. I have opened up to the right people. I have a dog who looks at me with love. I have two cats that need a lot of time in laps. ...and yoga has always got my back.

(warning - some explicit language) Round 1 of IVF. It started in 2016. It went like this. I was excited! I was actually really excited. I love my fertility specialist! He is so lovely and caring and he listens! Each day I felt like I was injecting with intent. Injecting with a cause. My eggs were growing! I had 17 follicles, and they were looking good. Felt like a super star. I was getting almost manic. I had another friend who had just fallen pregnant using IVF. She fell pregnant round 1. I assumed it'd go the same way for me. I had more eggs than she had! YES. Winning. I have lower doses of the medicines and still more eggs. YES. Winning. I have nice sized follicles. YES, winning. Lalalala... Everything is all going so well! It's all going to be good! Surgery day to take the eggs out. Loved that sedation. BOOM. Lalalalala!!!Loved that pain relief. Yeeeeah. Even loved the stupid sandwiches in hospital, I was starving. (I still fucking love those sandwiches...

This is my favourite piece of unsolicited advice so far! I was in the midst of a two week wait one day a few months back, and well, I totally had my period. I had a very strong urge to rebel against my infertility. But then, I'm encouraged to persist, sticking those stupid pessaries up my endings until the official pregnancy test because ... you never know... I decided that, given the rebellious mood, I needed a couple of gin and tonics this particular evening, but then got an attack of the guilts. What if I actually AM pregnant? I probably shouldn't drink. I have spent all this money, gone to all this effort. How stupid would it be to have a couple of drinks? So here was my solution. I went down to the local shops and bought a pregnancy test. I'm pretty sure I was looking like hell, there were probably tears galore throughout that day, and I recall just wanting to get in and out of the shop unseen.  I had picked up a couple of groceries... including the pregnancy test...

The last time I visited my fertility clinic I panicked. I was just sitting there getting a blood test, I looked at the blood coming out of my arm, then I looked at the nurse, and then I said I felt faint, and BOOM... a kind of negative epiphany just hit me right there. That I'm overwhelmed. That I don't like what is happening. Until that point I was somehow doing ok with it. But the last visit to my specialist, just days before that blood test, was not particularly positive. He basically said that he doesn't really know what is going on. He says on the one hand, what's happening could just be random variability, and maybe we've just been unlucky. But in that visit, he seemed to think that something's up with my eggs, that they are a bit resistant to forming life, even though they score great on the AMH. Until that point I'd had in my head that there was something suboptimal about the sperm, again, they do great on the general tests but a more ingrained ana...

I met up with a group of friends on the weekend, an old group I haven’t seen for ages, who do not know about my fertility struggles. They’ve all reproduced, in fact, the air was thick with fecundity, and children were running about everywhere mostly at knee height.  It was a situation that made it obvious...  we’re missing something… fertility, a child. Someone, in a harmless enough way, said something about babies and sleep deprivation, then a throwaway remark to us “… and that’s why these guys don’t have kids”…   Oh y es, that's funny. True, sleeping is quite wonderful and yes we get plenty of it. I chose to smile and laugh. I didn’t show the grief, because the grief is invisible anyway... just like my child... and the grief may be unnecessary because I don’t even know if I am supposed to be grieving, because maybe our missing child will miraculously show up one day.

This isn't really the start. I'm not sure where the start point is. Maybe it was when we decided to stop using contraception and be "not trying, but not not trying". If so, that was around 8 years ago now. Maybe it was more like... when I visited a doctor about something unrelated and she said  "You've been trying to get pregnant a really long time, that must be getting really devastating"...  and I thought - no... it's not devastating... because... I'm not trying ... I just not not trying...  Maybe it was after that conversation, when I realised, yes, seriously, it had been a very long time. Maybe the start point was when I officially tried to get us timing sex. Whenever that was.  You might be able to gather I wasn't keeping track too well.  Maybe it was when I saw that all my friends were falling pregnant within a few months of stopping contraception, and it dawned on me that... oh... that's normal. What was happening for ...