Thalia's fertility journey

Holiday family entertainment

We've just returned from a Chanukah party day at my mother's house. It was good and bad. Good in that we got to see my brothers, one sister-in-law and my three nephews, and eat nice food and be together. Bad in that one brother went off into the deep end after a remark I made which pushed a button for him. It wasn't an offensive remark, and I immediately apologised, but he wasn't having any of it, and when I apologised again when he left, he had another go at me. It's left me incredibly tearful - weirdly so - and I'm trying to figure out why.

To understand this I have to give more family background than I have before. My family is not very Jewish for two reasons. The first is that my mother's mother's family came to England over 400 years ago, so they are very very anglicised and so my mother didn't grow up with many of the so-called traditions like many 'jewish' foods (actually often Ashkenazi foods) and didn't keep many cultural customs, although they did keep most of the religious ones like Friday nights, Synagogue, High Holy Days etc.

The second is that my father isn't Jewish, and given the drama my parents had when they wanted to get married, they gave up religion at that point - both of them - and brought us up to be nothing. When I was 7, though, I decided I was Jewish, and after that I would go to my grandmother's for each religious festival, did Jewish religious education at school, etc. So I'm the most practicing member of my family.

Previously my brothers haven't been interested in the Jewish side of our background, and neither of the mothers of my nephews have been Jewish, so it isn't a big part of their families. One brother has just started to get interested, so it was partly his encouragement that led us to have a Chanukah party while he was in London with his family this weekend.

The tension was that today is one of the most important football matches of the season for the team that my brothers, father, cousins etc all support. So the younger brother - who is single after a bad separation from my nephew's mother 2 years ago, and a bad break-up from the woman who looked like she was going to become our sister-in-law a few months ago - was very not thrilled at the idea of having a party today and hence missing the football match. He reached some kind of compromise with my mother that said he would go home to watch the game late in the afternoon, having recorded it so he didn't miss any.

Then at lunch today he started talking about leaving and taking the older brother and the two older nephews with him, at about 1530 - very early if we were going to get to the park, play dreidel, light the candles etc. They were discussing logistics and my sister-in-law and I raised eyebrows at each other and I said, lightheartedly - "Next year can we have a family get-together where there's no football or it can be recorded?" And as mentioned above, younger brother lost it, and had a little diatribe at me about how we could have showed up earlier since he'd been there 2 hours before us (we didn't know he'd got there so early, and were home cooking for the party and wrapping presents this morning, having also done so last night til gone midnight), how he is the only person who ever has to be flexible (also nonsense, he's decided he wants to go and spend Christmas Day and the few days afterwards with the older brother so we won't see him again til sometime in 2009, while we are left to spend Christmas Day with H's parents (without his brother and family as they are off to my other sister-in-laws' family) and Boxing Day with my mum and my mentally handicapped Aunt, which is fine, but much less fun than being with my brothers and their families), no one appreciates him etc.

It was all a bit unpleasant. I immdiately apologised and everyone glossed over it. Sometime during the afternoon the plan changed and older brother and family stayed to have tea, while younger brother went off alone, leaving his son to stay for tea - fine with nephew since he worships his older cousin. On his way out I caught younger brother to say goodbye as we won't see each other again, and I simply said I was sorry for having upset him, and I got another diatribe. This time I interrupted him and said I was just trying to apologise and I didn't want to row about it, just to say sorry, so he stopped, said sarcastically that everything was fine, and stalked off.

I am irrationally upset. Which is a combination of horrible tiredness from working like a dog since September without a break, having had several late nights this week due to combination of work and work socialising and cooking, and being up in the night due to Pob having yet another cold to go along with her constant cough. So tiredness is part of it. Sensitivity to general family tension is another part - I have always tried to be the family peace-maker and taken a lot of responsibility for that. Concern that my brother is clearly having a crappy time and is generally not happy is another. Concern that he's angry at me, which I always hate. And fury at the unfair judgement he's handing out. There are probably additional less savoury emotions underneath.

Anyway, in the grand scheme of holiday dramas it's not bad. But it upset me anyway.

Nuchal scan tomorrow. Think that had anything to do with it?

The boards! The boards!

I should have given up the boards long ago, when I first found blogworld. Those awful blinkies and the babydust and the incredible ignorance of most of the people there. But somehow, I got drawn back in. I can help, I thought, I have knowledge! But the board I post on apparently doesn't want that. Either people are posting things like:

No heartbeat, beta of 150 at 6 weeks, now I'm bleeding is there any hope

And people are saying "*hugs*" (only more annoyingly with little people that expand and contract), "hang in there, you never know, this other woman on here had no heartbeat and at 8 weeks they found out she had twins!!"

Or people post some factual enquiry, usually

when can I test?

and lots of people are telling them that it's 17 days post egg collection or 21 days past trigger, or whatever.

On the first set, I have occasionally posted a very carefully worded note to say that things don't look good. A couple of times people have got in touch to say thanks, they appreciated the straight talk, but mostly I get shouted down by a bunch of women who think I am destroying their "PMA" and I should shut up.

On the second set, I sometimes post the facts. Implantation happens between days 6 and 10 in a pregnancy with a good chance of success, so if you are not getting a positive peestick (having tested more than one brand) at 14dpo then the fat lady hasn't sung, exactly, but she's certainly on her warm up. Then I don't just get shouted down, but told that every clinic is different, that there are different ways to calculate the age of a pregnancy, yadda yadda yadda.

In particular, one of the experts on this board seems to find me each time I post advice, and contradict me. She knows a lot, mostly from her own long and painful history, and is tremendously invested in the board, she posts there on almost every thread, but she is just wrong on a couple of topics. The problem I have with her is not that we disagree, neither of us is posting as a doctor after all, but that almost every time I post something she takes issue with it. It's quite irritating to type out a long post, with the sole aim of helping someone at an earlier stage in the journey, and then get attacked, or my advice contradicted, seemingly just for the sake of it. I think the attack is because she enjoys being the most knowledgeable person there, and I clearly know quite a bit, but it still hurts.

I know the answer is to give up the board. I don't have a community there, anyone I care about knows I'm here instead and checks in. I do like to look in on the board for my clinic to see how things are going, but they wouldn't miss me as I don't really post, I just check in. My advice could probably be duplicated by the expert above on most topics, and by others when she has a blind spot. My 'let me tell it like it might be' posts I'm sure everyone could live without. So why am I finding it so hard to just give up?

I guess I like being able to help, I like knowing stuff. That's why I came back to this blog, I wanted to continue to share the benefits of what I know, what I had to struggle to learn, with others. That board community is full of people who know very little, but I think some of them prefer it that way, it's more for support than for knowledge. I'm better off in blogworld where we fib to each other a bit less. Heaven knows I would not miss the blinkies.

Tell me to go cold turkey please.

One-sided views of infertility from the media. Again.

I don't usually read the Sunday Times. I don't really need to justify this, it's a matter of taste but what the hell. I don't read it because: (i) it's big and unwieldy and I don't know what to do with all the pieces, (ii) the political commentary is somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun (although from the owner of Fox News, not sure what else you'd expect), and (iii) it annoys the hell out of me. But this morning it was the paper delivered to the lovely hotel room in Paris where we were spending our anniversay weekend, and I do love to read the paper with my Sunday breakfast, and so I succumbed. And of course, it did annoy me. Specifically, this article, which contained the immortal quote:

Female fertility declines with age, so that women who have postponed childbearing discover they are unable to conceive when they want to do so. However, this is not the whole story: men are not only reluctant nowadays to commit themselves to women and children, but their own fertility is declining. More than half the patients at American fertility clinics are men.

Let's just consider that final sentence for a second, shall we? More than half? How many more than half? Because given that most patients at American Fertility clinics (and why the emphasis on American? Does he not have the figures for UK or European clinics?) are couples, surely approximately half will be men. So the sentence really doesn't mean anything helpful as it stands. Presumably the sentence should have read something like this:

Of the couples attending American fertility clinics, more than half find the cause of their infertility lies with the man.

However, this doesn't fit with the known stats. NIH says, for example, that approximately 30-40% of couples with infertility are dealing with 'male factor', while female factor accounts for 40-50%, and the rest is either combination or undiagnosed.

So what precisely was Mr Dalrymple trying to say? Perhaps it's just lazy journalism, he's copied it from the original book without thinking what it means. Or perhaps he is the victim of a poor copy editor. Either way, it's a very silly sentence.

And sadly the rest of the article is no better. Just a reiteration of stuff that's in the book he's reviewing, revealing a very slanted perspective on the topic. It's really barely a book review at all. Which is a shame as it doesn't help me decide if the book is worth a read or not, which is surely the point of a book review. Certainly if you read this article with an unjaundiced eye, you'd think the book is poor, but to be honest the reviewer seems to be so caught up in his own prejudices, and certainly hasn't invested any time in understanding the issues, so I've got no reason to believe he's pitched the review right.

There you go. Reason number 847 why I should never read the Sunday Times.

Typepad ate a post about our lovely weekend, I may or may not drum up the will to write it again. If not, lovely food, lovely husband, rubbish weather, baby kicking away, I'm a lucky woman.

Vignettes

Work is kicking my butt this week, so this will be just a brief snippet of a few things I don't have time to blog about properly.

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I saw the lovely Kath on Sunday. How jealous are all of you? She is just as lovely as you might expect, although, Kath, I have to confess that I wasn't expecting you to be so tall and gorgeous and glamorous. Not sure why, but I just wasn't. She also, dear readers, looks as if she's about 25, damn her. We had a lovely afternoon, wandering around central London, sitting in the park on deckchairs, visiting an art exhibition, and having a proper English tea. The conversation varied from our spouses, to linguistics, to how our hair was behaving in the weather (not), and, of course, to reproductive issues, and then on to parents and siblings and stroppy journalists. It was lovely to meet a new friend in person. Thank you, Kath, for making that long train trip.

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Did anyone see that press conference last week with Mr Bush and all those babies? It was one of the most yet another cynical piece of political positioning. It made me almost apoplectic with rage. Yes, those babies are all very adorable, and I for one don't want to deny them their current existence on the planet. But GW's statement that "how could we have thrown away these children in the name of research?" made me want to scream. How many people are living with Parkinson's because stem cell therapy isn't available to them? How many researchers are trying to understand the causes of cancer and struggling because they can't do the experiments they think are necessary because the materials they need aren't available to them? How many children are dying from childhood genetic disorders that we don't yet understand, whose treatment could be advanced by investigations with donated embryos? It was one of the most breathtaking examples of only presenting one side of a problem that I have EVER SEEN. Phew.

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The nurse from the IVF clinic called me yesterday - this is our new form of IVF orientation appointment now we are old hands. Her first question was: "Is Dr Candour ok with you starting so soon after, umm, what happened in June?" I heroically refrained from saying, "No, I held a gun to his head as he filled out the form and now I come to think of it you'd better head over to his office to make sure he's managed to untie himself." "Yes," I said, instead, "he's given me the zoladex injection so we are already underway." Wasn't that nice of me? I'll get my reward in heaven, I know.

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I know there was something else I wanted to blog about, but it's gone now, so that will have to do.

Despair, redux

Check back to my entry for about 26/27 days ago (sorry I haven't figured out how to link back yet). The one where H and I had failed yet again to have sex because he had performance anxiety. The big row, the stress, him going out for a drive. Then think to today, the one day we can try this month before it's too late. That shouldn't cause any performance anxiety, right? Yeah, you got it. We spent 2 hours earlier failing to have sex. I stopped when it got too stressful, which luckily coincided with when the baked potatoes I'd put in the oven for supper started burning.

We had yet another talk over supper, he took yet another walk. He's gone to bed and I'm not sure how to help him any more. We keep talking stuff through, but the following month it happens again. How can we get to a point where we talk it through and it keeps working?

Tonight is the last point it's worth trying this month as I know my temp will be up tomorrow. We can keep having sex which may be a good thing - lots of practice to get his confidence back (that's if it works). But what I want right now is a baby. If there's no hope of that, I'm not so excited about the sex. I know I should be, but I'm not.

I promise to start writing happy posts again at some point.

Unintentional poking

I had one of those experiences today. I've read about them on other blogs, but this was the sharpest one I've had. There are not that many women in my company at my level, so we take the opportunity to spend time together as a group at these conferences. Today there were 3 pregnant women and one baby present. When we were introducing ourselves to each other, one of the pregnant women said cheerily, "yes I was married in May, expecting in June - isn't that great!!"

We were married in May.

Slings and arrows

So the week of shit ended well. The big fuck-off meeting was a success. And I got told personally what a good job I and the team had done, which did make me feel a bit better. Of course the team wasn't there in person given the trans-atlantic nature of the meeting.

Towards the end of the meeting I got an email from the leader of my team telling me how crappy they were feeling, how they couldn't go on like this, and it took a lot of the pleasure away. The email made me feel as if it's all my problem to fix, not a joint issue that we need to solve together. I know this is my neurosis (partially) - I always feel responsible for everything. As it happens, I did have a discussion with the client that means we can probably rescope the project and make everyone's life much better, so things are hopefully looking up. But I wish they'd let me have one day of feeling a bit better about my professional life without needing to remind me that life has been difficult recently.

So I'm on my way home tonight for a weekend of nookie. I think we may have missed ovulation. Since I thought we wouldn't be trying this month I haven't been religiously peeing on OPKs and taking temperatures and the signs point to either an ovulation that's a long way off (bad because I'll be gone for 4 days from Monday), or already happened (bad because it would mean my cycles are buggered, and because we'll have missed this month completely due to utter lack of nookie for the last 10 days). In the meantime I have to hang around because one of the fuckwits changed the ending time of the meeting to 2 hours earlier than planned and didn't tell me, and by the time I found out all the planes home were booked up.

Today is not a bad day, I think I'm just being very glass-half-empty. I'll buy myself some peanut butter MnMs at the airport and that will make me feel better. Won't it?

Stress

So do you guys (the none of you who are reading this except Sandy, but it makes me feel better to believe you are out there) believe that stress affects fertility? Because if it does, I haven't got a hope. I am working with a bunch of fuckwits at the moment, and I seem to be unable to improve things. I've tried all different ways to get them to listen to me that we are running this project all wrong, but all I get back is "yes thalia, we know you feel that way, now get on with it." The annoying thing is that I didn't really want to do this project in the first place, but now I've signed up I can't really sign off.

My fertility doc thinks stress is a problem for me. Any help on how to handle this?