Inexplicably Missing

I've had a very looping thought headspace of late. And, probably no coincidence, I have had the desire to "bunker down". And I'm going to just look at those phrases for a sec.... Does the word "loopy" - as in "feeling a bit crazy"-  come from the experience of thoughts looping around? My thoughts are going round and round on repeat lately. And it's not a nice repeat. I've lost a lot of confidence in myself, and my inner critic is loud. Then there's the bunkering down phrase. I realised the other day that the term is actually hunkering down. Huh. I have always said bunkering. Maybe it's the influence of unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt?? (love that show). I think it's capturing something about the social isolation and cutting off the world effect of being in a bunker. Facco and I very much "bunker down" when we are trying out fertility stuff. So that's me at the moment - a loopy bunker-er.

I have been thinking about my mum a lot lately. This week will mark 4 years since she died. I can’t honestly say that my relationship with my mum was the most straightforward. There have been some very toxic times in my life that are due to our relationship, some of which I am not sure I have fully forgiven and forgotten.  But lately I have found myself leaving the difficult aspects of our relationship to the side, and yearning to talk with mum, to hear her thoughts. What has come to me lately are wonderful memories of how it felt as a child in our relationship. We were incredibly, intensely close. I used to come home from school and absolutely relish talking to her about my day, I swear each day I talked with mum for hours. I’d hang around in the kitchen while she cooked dinner, chatting away. After dinner we’d continue to chat. Together we’d dissect every little thing that was going on in my world. We’d interpret my friends’ behaviours and all the silly bitc...

The pregnancy blood test was negative. And so far... I'm oddly unaffected. Blunted perhaps. My dad said "if I were you I'd be out howling" (really dad? I don't think I've ever seen him cry. But it's sweet that he shows such empathy). My friends are concerned about how upset I must be. Maybe it will just hit me later... which is definitely a me kind of way to take bad news. Yes, maybe it will hit. But maybe it's just a long accumulation of pain that I've been living with for years and maybe that pain just hasn't really been made any bigger by another 'no'. The situation just is what it is. I'm thinking that possibly the way I'm feeling... a kind of numb acceptance... indicates that it's time to get off the dizzying IVF merry-go-round. I don't have enough hope in the process working for me to keep investing in it. It seems pointless for our situation. And expensive. And draining.  It feels like it has way more potential...

Okay so last night, trying to get that balance of Sunday evening --- relaxation for the end of weekend but accepting a week of work ahead... I decided to: 1) eat cheese. Not just any cheese. Ridiculously good cheese.... époisses ... made by monks in burgundy. It's funky and it's a SOFT centred cheese. 2) drink wine. Not much. Certainly not "getting drunk" or anything near it. Just a small glass... ok maybe 2 small glasses. Mind you it was a DAMN good pinot noir from Tasmania. And it was SO SO good with the cheese and bread. I feel like some people would not dare take the risk of those things, especially after how much effort and expense I've put in to all this getting pregnant process. But you know what, I'm ok with it. I think it is just my insistence on staying "normal" during this extremely weird process and avoiding "Guilting myself out" --- (which--- I am guilty of...) But then I'm also wondering, am I actually just being a re...

This old Australian ad for multigrain bread keeps coming to mind... a little kid is eating their multigrain bread and marvelling at how delicious it is... asking "how do they get the grainy bits so soft?" Frame is then cut to another cute child who says "They hit them with a hammer I expect" original child, unconvinced, says "Maybe an elephant sits on them?" The joke in my family was to be rude and say "MAYBE AN ELEPHANT * SHITS* ON THEM". Indeed, perhaps I have been proverbially shat upon... With genetics, with whatever it is that causes this fertility issue... The description coming from the words of my IVF scientists is that my eggs are "soft, and grainy" So there we have it. After my complicated regime of interesting drug cocktails, and a longer protocol aimed at pulling out the best quality eggs available... seems that... the egg quality didn't get far. We pulled out 10 eggs. 6 were mature. 2 fertilised. Day 5 ther...

So, my Doc is delaying his foot surgery till next week. Since I had already done a week's worth of induced menopause injections with a new drug for this round called decapeptyl, I thought, ok, I'll stick it out. In hindsight the menopausal induction may have contributed to the huge frazzled feelings I mentioned at my last post! I felt bloody awful. Tomorrow I've got Egg pickup. It's been a weird cycle. This doc has us on a serious drug cocktail and a half. I've been taking human growth hormone and menopausal urine injections... My partner's been instructed to "put the balls on ice" for half an hour per day (kid you not) and eat goji berries and drink aloe vera juice. So it's feeling a bit zany. Throwing a lot at it.  I've been doing 4 injections a day of various weird things these last weeks. A colleague who has done some ivf with this doctor warned me "don't be too freaked out by the singing" at egg pickup. That sounds like a...

I called my IVF clinic today to let them know it's day 1 of my period. I've started this long-down reg protocol over the last week or so, taking some Decapeptyl injections and a cocktail of some other stuff. So I had to call up to arrange a day 6 scan.  Anyway, bit of context, on any Day 1 of my period I am typically a frazzled woman. In the last few days I cut a weekend holiday short because of realising I forgot to pay a tax bill and tax form that was due, came home early to organise the paperwork and then realised the paperwork was not actually due, I still had a few more days so didn't really have to cut the holiday short...  I also had been tasked with packing for the holiday and forgot to pack any teeshirts... and my partner's swimwear (for the beach). So my brain feels somewhat fried. Then the fried brain effect has just been upped a bit. Because when I called the clinic today, the nurse there let me know that my doctor (the guy we waited 9 months to get i...

Maybe it's because we're getting a new car soon, but I keep thinking of bumper stickers appropriate for people like me who are enjoying their struggle with infertility... 1) The bumper sticker answer to the pram parking situation... So whenever I am having a hard time trying to find a park at the shops, and there are vacant pram parks, I wish so much that I had a bumper sticker to say something along to the lines of: "After xxxx$$$ of failed IVF treatment I have earned my right to use pram parking" 2) My answer to the "My family" cute little stick figure stickers... Maybe they should have a new type of sticker that denotes the lab-cultured embryos... Although if I went this option, I think I would have a pretty full back window... with close to 70 embryos...  3) The "baby on board" sticker --- simple response... "No baby on board"  Well maybe not... but it's one possible route for being less invisible... 

I'm getting over it. We have recently had the results of our 7th IVF round... which are... negative. sigh. I'm not surprised of course. It's starting to feel a bit ridiculous. Plan is to meet with a third doctor, who we have been waiting to see for months, to see what light he would shed. The thing I'm frustrated about is that IVF... it's not treating the problem at all, as far as I can see. I'm not a doctor but it seems to me that there's something up with the fact that our embryos are not hardy. IVF is just trying to maximise numbers, not helping to fix whatever is causing the problem with the embryos. But the thing is that the medical professionals don't actually know what the problem is for us... so IVF is all they've got to offer. I'm feeling a bit silly to continue with it, because who knows how long it could go on for, and who knows if for us, with whatever our problem is, whether it even could work. Well a few questions for the new do...

Old mate fertility specialist likes to use technical language whenever possible. Hence he refers to my oocyte retrieval as "sucking your eggs".  He's all class. It really hasn't been a great round, and my heart is not really in it. While we retrieved 18 eggs and made 8 embryos, they all grew badly and were massively fragmented. Except for one, which was not so fragmented, but still not a blast at day 5. It is inside me now, along with the runner up. So we'll see how it goes though I'm not holding out much hope. I'm not sure if it's really more me, and getting too "serious" about all this.. but I have to say I'm tired of the attitude at my clinic. I don't think I will go back there. It's kind of like the Jetstar airline of fertility clinics, where the staff have a jovial "laid back" attitude to things like safety and professionalism. I would imagine that working in a fertility clinic you might naturally develop a ligh...

We started stand up paddle boarding this weekend. We just went out, bought some boards, and gave it a go. No lessons. Just got out there on the water. It was pretty great. The weather was just beautiful, and there were stingrays everywhere. (side note- Personally, I am quite scared of stingrays. I think they are stunning creatures, just so... other-wordly... that they freak me out a bit). The paddling was mindful.. a wonderful meditation to be out there on the water on such a beautiful day. Though I found myself at times rather frustrated with how little power I had, when I was trying to get somewhere. I shifted my weight, I tried engaging my core, I tried different strokes, I tried specific patterns of alternating from left to right. But I felt so underpowered. I decided to just trust. There was only a shore to get to. Even if I just drifted down with the wind, and had very little power, I would eventually reach land. But then yesterday, I was talking about the paddling to someon...

This Monday, I am in another state of disbelief... and in asking myself "how did I get here, how did this happen?" one plausible answer seems to be... I am cursed. Here is the run down of events... Looking back, I was in good spirits all week. It was my birthday a few days ago on on the Saturday- the 11th, and I decided to organise a few get togethers - a dinner Friday night with family, and a brunch on my birthday with close friends. And Sunday, I also had a baby shower with a very close old friend who was actually doing some rounds of IVF the same time as me. I felt good about attending this shower, with my recent news of pregnancy. So we were due to have our seven week scan on Wednesday. I was really cross because we had to reschedule it to Friday, the clinic had called to say they had overbooked this week. I was then in a bit of a flap complaining about my fertility doctor and trying to find a new doctor to deliver the baby. I wasn't having much luck there either...

I really can't. I *AM* actually pregnant. I did not believe I was pregnant when the nurse told me that the first test was positive. Nah. It is a low reading. If anything I was annoyed because I really wanted to stop taking all these medications I'm on. I also didn't believe it when the second blood test was positive either. The reading was still low, and I had to go back again for a third test. I only believed it when the doctor said the words to my face. My partner... he just cried. We were overwhelmed. We really believed that this was not possible. We were really expecting some kind of bad news. Of course, I still feel incredibly wary, and still rather in disbelief... but excited, amazed, joyful...

*Trigger warning - this post mentions positive pregnancy tests* I am seriously confused about my hope levels. They are as confusing as HCG levels. I don't know how hopeful to be. Maybe I can even be excited? This round of IVF has been different somehow. It is kind of sweet when friends tell you that they "have a good feeling this time". But it also sets you up for a bigger fall. Something about this round of IVF brought so many of these kind of comments which I hadn't had previously. The weirdest one was a receptionist from my work, who actually had no idea I was doing IVF, came and told me that she'd had 4 vivid and repetitive dreams about me being heavily pregnant. My partner, he turned 40 recently, and we had a big party a week ago. We were hoping with the current IVF cycle that we'd be able to freeze everything and so we could not be in IVF headspace for the party. But those plans went awry and I had to have a fresh embryo transfer a few days before...

I am not really an angry person but this week I've been raging a bit. After my first catheter experience I can say I was already a little on the unhappy side. Then I got the somewhat good news - that this time we had 12 fertilised embryos. But I would not hear until day 5, Monday, what the plans were for freezing. The cycle I did this time was supposed to be a "Freeze all" cycle. At the last minute I told the doctor I was a bit concerned to trust this since we have never had anything to freeze at all, so we changed the trigger injection to ovidrel incase we needed to do a fresh transfer. Since egg collection,  I've been injecting myself with this horrible medication called Clexane which leaves bruises everywhere. So we pencilled in a fresh transfer for Monday at 1:30pm, and I'm told "You will find out first thing Monday morning whether it's going ahead". First thing Monday morning, no news. I call the clinic. Sorry, no one can talk to you...

So we went and met up with a new fertility doctor yesterday. It was illuminating. and *Very* different from what I've been doing. The doctor was an interesting guy with some new ideas about what we can do with our cycles... interpersonally, he's rather different from my last doctor who was all sweet and caring... this guy was warm too, but had quite some brashness, used some rather un-technical language like "vag" and "shagging"... and he also has a tic which made the experience a bit more colourful (he hums little tunes all the time). I don't know, I think this field of medicine might attract some interesting characters.  Anyway, I guess the important thing is that he seems an honest and up front kind of guy who will tell it like it is... I think I will like him... it's just a bit of an adjustment. Plus it doesn't matter so much if I like him or not, just whether he can get the job done! He has definitely given us some new treatment options ...

I was recently talking to a friend of mine who has a "no kidding" life after painful infertility experiences involving many miscarriages. So the conversation started out with us chatting idly about a gym I had recommended to her and she was super excited about it. I had gone to this gym myself but pulled out of my membership because it turned out most of the classes were heated and those that weren't were hard-core cardio. I just knew that it was not going to be consistent with trying to conceive. I know that this is a very "first world" problem of me to have, but I had a bit of a whinge about how it sucks that lots of decisions you make just have to be put on hold while you're trying to conceive. The reason I recall this otherwise pretty trivial conversation was her response... she said to me...  if you could figure that out, how to "not be on hold" then you've just about solved the suffering of infertility.   Her argument was based on her ex...

We have just had a little break away from our usual life... (back into it this Monday, eek! ) This last week we gave ourselves permission to just enjoy our break, and decided not to think or talk too much about fertility struggles. I think we did well. We stayed by the beach and were able to watch whales every day just splashing about out there. One day we saw about 40 dolphins, surfing in waves and jumping out of them, just for pure fun. We ate amazingly good seafood, had gelati, and the odd afternoon beer or wine. We tried out surfing, and we didn't do too badly. We went bike riding around the bush near the beach and on the beach too, which was so much fun, and our dog came along with us for the ride, he absolutely loved it. Our little cat finally got out of hospital, and he came with us for the holiday. So in all we had our dog and two cats with us on the break, which did kind of feel like our own little family. For me, there is nothing like being with nature to reconnect to a b...

I woke up on Friday to unseasonal rain heavily falling, and an ominous feeling.  My 10 year old cat, who to put it simply is our little animal soulmate, had a massive turn in his health the day before. We had taken him to the vet and he was in over night. It was quite a mystery issue. He was on a drip and they thought perhaps he'd be better after 24 hours, and so we were hoping that he would come home today. Our plans were to head off on Saturday for a surfing holiday. While not ideal, we figured we could bring our cats with us on the holiday so we could keep an eye on the sick one. Instead, we discovered later that day that he'd gotten worse. He had to go in to a specialist vet to have more investigations. Then I was aware that I was getting cramps... suspicious period-like cramps. Checking in the bathroom... yes, blood was flowing. This was getting beyond what could pass as "spotting". So I was thinking... Ah #$@#%!  It's looking a lot like this round of IVF...

Well it was transfer day on Saturday! The news we had beforehand was: 12 eggs, 11 for ICSI, 8 embryos formed, and at day 3, my doctor thought that 3 of the embryos were looking good. This time we didn't use the embryoscope, so there were fewer observations being made. We didn't get a report at day 4, so we just waited till the transfer day, (day 5) to hear news of the final score.... I was feeling pretty good prior, as those numbers are pretty good for us based on previous rounds. On transfer day, I remembered that in previous rounds I do not leave the transfer procedure feeling too positive. Reflecting to myself why that is, I think that... it's the news I get from the scientists. They tend to explain all the events they have seen and they talk about how the quality of the embryos is poor and how unfortunately there won't be anything to freeze. Maybe it's not fair to blame them, it's the results that I don't like. But sometimes, you just want less infor...