Skip to main content

no need to panic

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 analysis has shown slightly higher than normal rate of fragmentation. But I was never convinced that this was a big issue, because it was only ever so slightly out of the normal range. But in MY head, I thought, if we ended up having to go the donor route, it'd probably be with sperm. But at that last visit, he started speaking about donor eggs. I'm pretty sure I just stared at him blankly and remained full composure. I remember him saying - how do you feel about that? I just said, well... we're not ready for that now. That news took a while to kick in. I mulled away on it. And then it suddenly hit in the middle of a blood test. That this is really not good news.

Well... I'm happy to say, no panics today! I visited again for my first check up of my current IVF round. Had a blood test too, same nurse. No panic. I'm good to go. Since that dreaded blood test day, I've had a laparoscopy, dye studies, and D & C to check out whether I have endometriosis. I got the ALL clear. Everyone's talking about how people have increased fertility after this procedure, so I decided, I will take the opportunity of possibly enhanced fertility, and try again with my own eggs.

But this might be the last round I try using my own eggs... maybe, maybe not...  I'll see how I go.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the stories that are out there

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-...
17 comments
Read more

belonging or be longing somewhere

I heard a great radio segment the other day on the importance of belonging.  Belonging is a pretty core and pretty basic human need I would say, and we certainly don't feel great, in fact we probably do things like turn to drugs and alcohol or other addictions or avoidant behaviours, when we don't have a strong sense of belonging somewhere in the world. These notions of belonging got me thinking about the infertility/trying to conceive journey. I guess getting online and reading and writing a blog has been all about gaining a better sense of belonging in this process. But even in this lovely online world there is a sad kind of aspect to it that... some people move on to the world of having kids and it doesn't feel like I "Belong" with them in the same sense. Some move on to have no kids, but as I am still trying to have kids, in a sense, don't "belong" there either. I can perhaps feel that I belong wholeheartedly with other people in my position, bu...
13 comments
Read more

it's invisible

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.
7 comments
Read more