Thalia's fertility journey

Fear factory

I'm scared. As always, I'm worrying about the myriad things that could go wrong from here.

1. I'm worried that I will have already ovulated before retrieval tomorrow
2. I'm worried all those follicles will be empty tomorrow for some other reason
3. I'm worried that they'll have eggs, but the eggs won't fertilise
4. I'm worried that the eggs will fertilise, but then conk out before transfer
5. I'm worried that we'll have embryos to put back at day 2, but that I won't get pregnant because day 2 is too early to tell if those are the right embryos
6. I'm worried that I'll get mildly pregnant, with an unhopeful beta, and then miscarry
7. I'm worried that I'll get pregnant, but that there will be nothing on the scan
8. I'm worried that I'll get pregnant, and we'll see something at the scan, but that I'll miscarry after that
9. After that, I'm just worried that something else awful will happen - horrible genetic problems, stillbirth, cot death
10. Cheery type, aren't I?

Actually, anything after #6 seems quite unreal to me. I've been alternating between imagining myself pregnant, with being terrified about being pregnant, and with being terrified at how I will cope if we don't get pregnant. If I start bleeding at 8dp3dt again - or 9dp2dt it will be this time - it will be a Friday, and I'm pretty booked up on that day. Last time I was able to cry off from work and do phone calls from home, it will be harder to do that this time. The beta will be on a Monday, if we get that far. I wonder if I can get them to do it on a Sunday, instead? They keep telling me they don't get blood results at the weekend, but that seems impossible. Perhaps they just don't get non-urgent stuff? I'll have to ask tomorrow.

I also have to ask tomorrow how to do the PIO injections. H is very nervous about doing them, but is prepared to suck it up if he has to, but he's going to need a nurse to hold his hand - metaphorically of course - for the first one.

I did do a Puregon injection yesterday morning. The doctor hadn't given me a clear downside reason, so I did 250 instead of 300, as a compromise. That nearly-finished 900mIU cartridge was just sitting there in the fridge, taunting me. Afterwards I freaked out and wished I hadn't done it, but it was all too late. Please, universe, let this not be my undoing. This is the direct cause of #1 above. It was so very hubristic of me, that I'm now waiting for my Nemesis to arrive. That's the way it always works, right? Only perhaps with all the hubris in the world, I could be let off the hook this time? Let's hope so.

I'll post the news from my blackberry tomorrow.

The final push

I'm feeling grumpy because I just got my upward feedback report from work, and it's only just above average for my peers. It's not bad, but I feel very frustrated. I've tried so hard in the last 6 months not to let any of what I'm going through affect people at work, after my feedback in the autumn showed that it was having an impact and people could tell my heart wasn't in my job. So although this one is better, it's depressing that it's still not great. Although I have figured out that this one includes the whole year, not just the last six months, so the last six months must have been considerably better to have lifted me back over the average. It has still made me cry. I just want there to be something in my life that I am indubitably great at, and I thought it was my mentoring of my staff, but apparently not. That's very disappointing.

Which is annoying because today brought good news again on the cycle. We have 13 follicles, people, count them, 13! Two are so small they won't do us any good, but still, to even be able to measure 13 is pretty miraculous to me.

• On the right, still over-achieving: 20, 18, 17, 16, 16, 15, 15, 13
• On the left, still sulking: 19, 16, 16, 12, 11
• E2: 4992 (1360 US)
• Lining: 11.6mm

It was a bizarre experience to lie there and see all those follicles in the right ovary. Each one overlapping with the other as she moved the wand around. I don't know how the ovaries of those of you who produce 27 follicles have room, this one looked pretty full up!

I got my prescription for enoxaparin, to be started the day after egg collection. H is going to the chemist's this afternoon to get some extra folic acid to take on top of my ironic prenatal. On the one hand on this cycle I have done much less to try and control how things turn out - no acupuncture, no wheat-free-ness, no fertility yoga; on the other hand we are doing much more medical intervention. Let's see if it makes any difference.

The instructions are to do the orgalutron injection tomorrow morning but no puregon, then do the ovitrelle injection at 10pm on Saturday night, collection on Monday. I am suspicious about the no puregon because I'm keen that those 15mm babies catch up. I discussed with Dr Gorgeous what the downside to taking it was, and she said they're concerned that my E2 will go too high, and that I'll be overstimulated. With this many follicles that seems unlikely, and I am tempted to go ahead and do a final puregon injection tomorrow. Sacrilege, I know, ignoring the doctor's instructions, but I think this is another incidence of them being over-cautious and the downside doesn't seem very bad to me. We'll see how I feel at 7am tomorrow. I'll keep you all in suspense til then.

Vindicated

And I quote:

Dear Thalia,

I just reviewed your results from TDL. You do not have the antiphospholipid syndrome which is good news. Your karyotype is also normal.

You are homozygous for the MTHFR C677T mutation and you are slightly deficient in protein S. This means you have a slightly increased predisposition to thorombosis (sic)(forming blood clots). The role of these factors in miscarriage is controversial, but the latest advice from the RMC centre at St Mary's is to consider heparin treatment. The role of MTHFR and heparin in infertility and implantation is even more controversial.

There is no evidence base to these sorts of treatment, so advice is somewhat empirical. On balance my advice would be to recommend heparin treatment after egg collection. Please contact Dr Casual in the IVF unit who will write you a script and the nurses will show you how to administer the treatment.

Lots of love, Dr Candour*

I'm glad I got the test done. It makes me think that everyone should get tested for these things before starting fertility treatment. I think that if I was in the US, he would also have prescribed me extra folic acid, is that right? In that case, I'm off tomorrow to buy a mega dose. Can anyone tell me how much extra they are taking? It can't do any harm.

It has dropped my intense love for Dr Candour down a notch. It's a bit of a throwaway, email, isn't it? (although he did write back 5 minutes later and tell me the exact dose to ask for). They are so bloody conservative at this clinic, it's not true. It makes me glad I am so proactive about my treatment, it makes me scared that this factor has long term health consequences that it will take me a lot more research to understand. And it is probably not the cause of our infertility. But at least it's one potential future, not yet occurred problem that I can knock on the head.

Oh boy.

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* Not really. But it would be nice if our REs were this relaxed, no?

Twitching

I have a sense, just a little teeny weeny one (as much as someone who has never seen the two pink lines except that one time when we didn't do an IUI when I peed on the stick after the hcg shot just to see what it would look like) of what it might be like to be pregnant and to be worried about symptoms coming and going. Over the last two or three days my ovaries have been getting increasingly uncomfortable. On Sunday at my parents-in-laws, I was getting these stabbing pains that caused me to wince, and everyone kept giving me these concerned, but slightly freaked-out looks, until my four-year-old nephew just looked straight at me, and announced: "Aunty Thalia's making funny faces Mummy!" That got everyone laughing which was probably a good thing.

Between my back pain and my ovary pain I'm quite the cripple. I have to bend over slightly when I walk and I can't walk very fast, which is completely unlike me as I am the woman who disappears in crowds by zipping through the gaps. In addition I'm now limping because my right calf muscle has seized up. I don't remember these kinds of stabbing pains in my ovaries last time, and I can't find any record of them in my posts, so I've been seeing them as a good thing. Although of course what it could be is lots of lovely endo growing on them in response to all that great oestrogen floating around. I can also feel my ovaries as hard, tender balls on either side of my abdomen. Good thing? Bad thing? It's a thing, anyway.

Yet today, the stabbing pains are not happening nearly so much. So I'm immediately freaking out, thinking maybe the follicles are shrinking as I type. Of course I do know that's nonsense, but it still is my little internal freak-out in that space where logic doesn't reach. I guess we will know more tomorrow.

Eleven

For the very first time, I went to a cycle scan on my own today. H was lying in bed groaning and clutching his stomach. He had a curry with a friend who is over from the US last night, and apparently it wasn't a good one. I felt slightly aggrieved for having to go to the scan on my own, but only slightly. He did look very sorry for himself.

I had Dr Gorgeous again this morning. I just walked into the clinic and she was standing by the sign-in sheet. I think she was supposed to take someone else, but she looked at me, said "Good morning, Thalia" and told me to come with her. That was a good thing, I like a bit of continuity in my cycles.

The problem with Dr Gorgeous is that she doesn't say anything while she's scanning. So she's sitting there click clicking away with the machine, and I'm thinking, well, all those clicks have got to be a good thing, but I don't know for sure, and H wasn't there to hold my hand, so I was getting rather tense. Then she had to remove the probe to pull the machine closer to her, and then reinsert the probe again. Two wandings in one morning, aren't I a lucky girl? She stayed silent all the way through until she removed the probe for the second time and told me I could get dressed. Finally, after getting dressed she showed me the numbers.

Eleven. I have eleven follicles on those darn ovaries. Way to go girls.

• On the left, the slacker ovary has: 12, 11, 11, 11
• On the right, the over-achiever has: 13, 12, 12, 12, 11, 10, 10

I couldn't be more relieved. The E2 won't mean anything anyway given I'm on the orgalutran, so there's nothing much to obsess about for the next 48 hours. I did get them to take my blood anyway, and, as I expected, the nurse didn't raise an eyebrow. Hah!

I'm so incredibly relieved. Please, please, please let this keep going in this way. Next appointment Thursday. Let's hope I can be as happy that day as I am now. Egg retrieval probably Monday at this rate, which is what I had assumed before we even started. I'm taking a leaf out of Millie's book, and I'm allowing myself to hope. Not too much, but just a little. Although of course getting good enbryos wasn't our problem last time. Well, I will still hope for now.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Hope, please go and give DD some love, she's just had her last IVF cycle end with a negative. I'm stuck for anything helpful to say. What do you say after you've said "I'm sorry" 57 million times. It seems crass, but it's the truth. I'm so sorry, DD.

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Updated to add, so that I have this in my records for next time, E2 is 1253 (341 American), LH 0.3, so all is fine. Next scan is Friday.

Magpies and ladders

IVF, or perhaps infertility in general, has made my vague whisper of a superstition gene turn into a raging harpy. On the last cycle I regularly saw a single magpie out of the window of one of my clients' offices. It freaked me out every time, and I'd desparately peer out of the window, searching for that elusive second bird. Earlier this week I saw a single one again and,for an instant, lost all hope that this cycle would work. I've mentioned before my inner voice of tension which tells me regularly that we're not meant to have biological children, that because H speaks Chinese we clearly are supposed to adopt from there. I've given up all caffeine this time, not even my regular morning green tea has survived. I've been worrying because I'm not doing accupuncture and hoping that that is not a horrible mistake. Any ladders or black cats in my path are going to leave me a gibbering wreck.

A week ago I decided that perhaps I was being punished for a particular dark secret of mine that I had never told H. Perhaps the fact that I was withholding this information from him meant that I wasn't a fit parent and so the universe was withholding my fertility. So I confessed. He took it very well (no, I'm not going to tell you what it is). He was a little shocked, but he dealt with it well. It was such a relief, and such a vindication, yet again, that I married a marvellous man. Unfortunately the telling of this secret didn't magically relieve my tension, I'm still looking out for those damn birds. But it was the right thing to do, nonetheless.

What with all this insane stuff going on in my head, turning up at the clinic this morning was a regular laugh-a-minute. Again, I was so nervous I was shaking. We left home in a hurry, tense because I couldn't find the scan sheet I was sure they'd sent me home with last time. And after doing my Puregon injection in a frenzy of tear, wipe, click, turn, stick, push, withdraw, press. I was done in under a minute. Not bad going and such a change from the first injection last year. Luckily the clinic didn't seem to be too busy this morning, so they weren't that upset that we were five minutes late.

We saw a lovely new wand monkey. Dr Gorgeous should probably be her title, she was about 27, great hair, all the accessories in place, and generally quite charming. She was a bit awkward with the wand - how do some people manage to do the scan and you don't wince once, while others just seem to naturally hit the wrong angle? - but overall a good experience. Three follicles on the left, six on the right, all at about 7-8mm. While this hardly qualifies me for IVF superstardom, it's not too awful for day 5. It's sadly about the same as we got last time at this point, and some of them just didn't develop**. Of course we had no idea if the ovaries would respond at all given the Zoladex treatment, so perhaps I should count my blessings. I guess if we get six again, that will be ok. I was hoping for more, but we know that hoping doesn't get you anywhere in this game...

Dr Gorgeous did say that it looked quiet enough that they would probably not want me to start the antagonist today. I've got it with me just in case, it might be my first chance to do an injection at work, and why miss that opportunity for stress and stories.

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* Updated with the news that my E2 is 253, which is about 68 US, LH is 0.3. The doctor said that they want E2 to be at 300 on day 5, and mine is only 15% off that, so they want to up the dose to 300mIU a day. Which is their maximum. This scares me. No where else to go after that dose. It also annoys me as I wanted to start on 300 and Dr Candour told me it was too high as that was their maximum dose and he didn't think I was ready for that. Oh well. They want me to start the orgalutran today so I've taken the first shot in the loo at work. Not my best effort, a big bubble of it came back out! I'm not too worried since I'll do another shot of it tomorrow morning.

No more interventions til Tuesday morning. I wanted to go in sooner, but on Monday I need to get to one of those 8am meetings so actually it works better if I don't have a clinic appointment to deal with as well. I should take this as a sign. A good sign. Tell me to relax, someone, please, and I promise not to shoot you!

Sooner than you think

I had several reflective posts planned, one about superstition, one about luck, and one about sorrow, among others, but instead I am back in the immediacy of a cycle starting. This morning we rose early, despite the lovely luck of a bank holiday here in the UK, and headed off to the clinic. We were there for an hour, which is unusual for them, but at least part of it was our choice, and I'm glad we took the time. Dr Candour had sent me an email over the weekend, before he headed off on holiday (Again! What is it with this man? Why can't we all have the same holiday allowance, and the ability to take it, as our gynaecologists?), saying that I should try to see a particular doctor, and this doctor was hard to come by. At one point the doctor of choice called someone else, even though I'd already missed one slot with another doctor to wait for him. Although I went over to him and pointed out the mistake (I thought I might have to wait for ever), I decided to let the woman he'd already called go in front of me so as not to keep her waiting. I'm all for accumulating karma points if I can - heaven knows I need them - so I've been trying hard recently, offering my seat on the tube and all that good stuff. Do you think you get karma if you know you're trying to get it? Does it matter what the intent is if the outcome is good for the other person concerned?

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, having a scan with the lovely Dr NoName. I saw him on the last cycle but didn't see fit to name him. Now I'm struggling for the appropriate moniker. He's quite ok in person but has a crappy phone manner, doesn't like me asking questions on the phone but is happy to chat in person. He's Israeli/South African, and told me to call him by his first name. Dr Casual? That will have to do for now, I'm not feeling very inspired. He got brownie points for remembering us, which was impressive given we haven't seen him in 5 months, and he didn't have our file out.

The scan took a while, and I was so nervous I was shaking throughout. I was also bloody uncomfortable. They've got a new set-up on the chair and the knee-holders are very very far apart. I'm just not that stretchy, people. Dr Casual did his best to adjust them for me, but we had to give up and just go with it. Eventually Dr Casual was done with the wanding (how I haven't missed that experience) and showed us the answer. My lining is very very very thin, so I won't have a bleed, hooray, and both ovaries are quiet, with no cysts but a respectable set of what are probabley antral follicles (I counted at least 5-6 on each ovary). My clinic doesn't seem to care about these, he certainly didn't count them, so I decided that was one less thing to worry about.

I then had to repeat most of my history, since despite Dr Candour's promises, he clearly hadn't discussed my case with Dr Casual, and Dr Casual was understandably confused about what happened next, since they've never done this protocol on anyone before. I talked him through it, including answering his question about why I was on Zoladex in the first place, and reassuring him that I knew I had fibroids in the abdominal cavity. He promised to check with the consultant on duty, and get back to me later.

And he got back to me a couple of hours ago. E2 29, LH 4.something, FSH 2.7. I guess that Zoladex did its job well. Was it supposed to reduce the FSH too? All we know is, I'm definitely suppressed, and the endo doesn't seem to have made a reappearance, although there was evidence of a little scarring on one ovary. He wanted me to start the injections today. I had been planning to start tomorrow, but there you go. It's my own fault, they want me to come in for bloodwork and a scan on day 5, as I insisted, and it's easier for them to do that on a Friday rather than a Saturday, so just after lunch I injected 250mIU of Puregon with my new pen, disposing of the needle into my tres chic new sharps bin, which is sporting a very streamlined and curved sillhouette compared to the one from my last cycle. How these things move on.

So we've started. I can hardly believe it. I'm excited. Although I've been planning for the last few weeks how I will cope with the day when I find out I'm not pregnant, and hoping that it won't be because I start bleeding, I also have some hope that this might work and of course have already succumbed to some great fantasies about what that might look like. H has told me he's hoping for twins so we don't have to go through this again, although he's also worried that my  back won't be able to take it. Also, if it's twin boys..Hell, I can't keep writing stuff like this, it's too scary. For now, I just need to stay calm and get through the next two weeks. We're on our way.

Side effects and silver linings

Along with the powerful, brain-constricting headaches, often accompanied by nausea, Zoladex seems to be doing me a favour. It's drying out my hair somewhat. I usually have to wash my hair every other day to keep it looking half-way decent, but for the last week or so I've got up to wash my hair on the second morning, and found that it still looks fine. The last time I had such an encouraging side effect was when I was 29 and I took Accutane to finally clear up my skin. I had all the side effects expected - horribly dry lips and nose, etc. - but I also woke up one morning to discover that my hair was going curly. It got really curly, to the extent that people who'd known me for a while thought I must have had it permed. I realised that the curliness was linked with dryness- I could get away without washing it for days and days and so long as I didn't brush it it stayed looking good. It stayed curly and dry long after I stopped taking the Accutane, but gradually wore off about 3 years later, leaving my hair in an annoying in-between state where it's got just enough random curl that it looks like shit if I leave it to dry on its own without a blow-dry. Let's see how long the Zoladex dryness lasts for - and it's not making my hair curly again, in case you were wondering. Which is a bit of a shame, but given that Accutane is a teratogen, I'd be a bit worried if the Zoladex side effects were exactly the same...

In the meantime, it's nice to get that extra 15 minuntes to go back to bed. Although this morning that resulted in me dreaming that I'd quit my job, even though I didn't really want to, and was working for a small company round the corner from my current office, who couldn't afford to give me a decent desk chair so my back was getting worse, and then it turned out that Melvyn Bragg worked there so he and I had a good chat. About what I don't remember.

Work is really insane, and it's making me tense, so the dream wasn't hard to interpret. In particular what's making me tense is that one of my clients is expecting me to show up at a series of meetings in the week commencing 24 April, all at about 8am. These meetings are about an hour and 15 mins drive from my clinic - in good traffic. My clinic opens at 7am. Do you see the problem? I'm not sure what to do. Of course if I get called in for a scan I will go, that's more important, but these meetings are with the big boss, and it's not ok to just walk in 30 minutes late - he's already very tense about the situation he's in. One option is to substitute for me, so I don't go at all. One of my colleagues would be happy to step in, but the client really wants me to be there as they think I know more about this area - which is mostly true. Well, I guess they will just have to deal with what they are given. But it makes me tense. At the best of times my job is so busy that I feel I am never able to be all the places I should be in one day. During a cycle, and a time when I'm very busy with work, this is exacerbated beyond my tolerance level - or at least beyond the tolerance level of my subconscious, which just wants me to quit. At least it has its priorities straight.

Falling is like this

Dr Candour did get back to me, and confirmed what Millie and others told us in the comments on my last post: In an Antagon cycle, you are messing directly with the level of oestrodiol, so there is little point in measuring E2 levels. He did say that they would want to know if there was an LH surge, so I wrote back to ask how they were going to know that if they didn't take any blood, but he hasn't responded yet. As I said in the last post, I know that if I just show up and put a tick in the 'blood' column, they'll take blood so I'm not that worried. And again, what I find frustrating is that it takes so little effort to give me the rationale behind their decisions, yet it is only Dr Candour who ever bothers to explain it - everyone else just fobs me off. Am I so wierd, wanting to understand what is  happening to me?

Don't answer that one, please.

I'm alternating between terrified of what happens if this doesn't work, excited at DOING something, and bored with waiting to get started. Not to mention consumed with anger and jealousy at those who are pregnant. I've made it to one day of our corporate boondoggle this week, and of course loads of the women are pregnant, and those who aren't are busy talking about their children. And there's no reason why they shouldn't, but it makes me want to slit my wrists. And then I feel guilty for being a horrible cow.

I'm also very, pathetically, fragile. While I am always someone who cries at the proverbial Kodak commercial, it's worse than usual. We had a presentation today from someone who works for a not-for-profit that aims to improve the lot of pre-school children across the globe. The short video they showed of the work they were doing in countries as diverse as South Africa, Northern Ireland, Bangladesh, Israel, Palestine, the US, and the Netherlands, reduced me to tears. In a crowd of 600 of my most senior colleagues. Not of course that anyone noticed, but I did feel like a basket case. Just to be clear, it's wasn't - at least consciously - a feeling of "there goes what I will never have" but instead just a signal of the emotional knife-edge on which I continually teeter. It's like it takes all my energy just to stay on that edge, so the slightest knock puts me right over the edge. And it's hard work crawling back up.

It's been a long time coming, this cycle. Four of us had transfers within a day of each other back in November. Lindy and Caroline are now 24 weeks pregnant. 24 weeks!! That's more than half way through and close to viability. S and I are still waiting to even cycle again. There's something wrong in that equation. Not wrong for Lindy and Caroline but oh how hard it is for me to read their blogs. I want to be happy for them, for all those women around me who are getting pregnant, but it's hard to stay focused on other people's happiness when I am so obsessed with what we don't have. And I don't know how we will ever get it.

Blood? I'll give you blood

A week has passed since my last post, and much has happened. But I've been too exhausted to blog - work has been tense and busy. I've discovered that dehydration is not the cause of my migraines - or rather, it's not dehydration alone. Last weekend in Istanbul (yes, it was Istanbul, congratulations to the one person who spotted it) I didn't drink much water at all on Saturday, and felt fine. All week at work I've been chugging water, but on Friday afternoon I got so ill I had to return home at about 1430 and go to sleep for an hour before I could continue with calls - I had a headache that felt as if a metal band was being tightened around my head, and horrible nausea. So I reckon the real cause is lack of sleep, since I was working til 11pm several nights last week.

My challenge for this week is how to keep that under control, since in the end my productivity is lower if I have to conk out early one day due to a migraine after a few days of working late, than if I just don't do the late nights and get home each night in time for dinner. I've already decided to drop out of our company's management boondoggle this week - or most of it - so that I can help control the situation at my client. The one part of the boondoggle I will turn up for is the part where what I've been doing is on show - apropos the political stuff last week, I decided I would be well advised to ensure I was seen to be clearly in the lead there.

I had an interesting discussion with my new mentor early in the week about the political shenanigans. He and I have been allocated to each other in a scheme that aims to improve women's position in business in the UK. He told me that he thinks that nice guys in business do finish first - that sharp elbows and people who mess around behind the scenes do get their dues. It's what I want to believe, so I'm going to keep believing it. Instead of getting too worked up about what is going on, I just made sure that I was incredibly well prepared for the meeting with the big guns on Thursday, and demonstrated with no shadow of a doubt that I was in the lead. I also had a conversation with the head honcho to tell him what I thought should happen and he mostly agreed with my take on things. I think it went pretty well. I know this is probably overly cryptic for anyone else to understand, but it helps me work through this if I write about it, although I don't want to be too explicit. So that's all you're getting.

In other news, this week we had our consultation for the IVF cycle. I can now go ahead and order my meds. Including the dreaded PIO. The nurse who did it was a real flake - I much prefer Nurse Earnest, who we got last time, and who was the nurse who answered the phone to me the morning I started bleeding after the IVF. She is a sweetie. Nurse Flakey forgot to show us how to do IM injections, so I'll have to get someone else to demonstrate. She also told us that with an antagonist protocol, they don't do blood draws. She announced it as if we should be delighted:

"No poking, won't that be nice," she exclaimed. I heroically refrained from pointing out that plenty of other kinds of poking are involved, but instead tried to understand why they, seemingly alone in all other infertility clinics that I've ever heard about, decide they can live without blood work during IVF. She, of course, didn't really answer me.

"Well, we got this protocol from another clinic about 8 months ago," she told us, in a tone of voice that indicated that she thought she'd answered my question.

"Don't you need the information on E2 levels to decide when to trigger?" I asked, getting increasingly desperate.

"No, we just go on the scan information." she assured me. After two and a half rounds of this I decided to give up. H and I hightailed it out of there, pausing briefly to hand over £2,400, and I immediately wrote to Dr Candour to understand what the hell his clinic is playing at. I know that on the last cycle my low E2 on day 5 led to an increase in my Puregon dose, so what would have happened if they hadn't done that test? Dr Candour is on holiday til Monday (he seems to take a lot of holidays, no?) so I'll wait to see what he says. He's already told them that I can be scanned as often as I like (ha! take that you scan-rationers) - Nurse Flakey wrote it on my scan sheet while I was looking - so I hope that he might force them to draw my blood too. It may make no difference to what they decide to do with me during the cycle, but I'm a qualified infertile with a degree from Dr Google University, for goodness sake, you can't deny me my E2 numbers and massive obsession during stimms, can you?

Speaking of forcing people to draw my blood, I went yesterday to get the whole miscarriage panel done. Dr Candour sighed as he wrote out the prescription last time we saw him, but he knows enough to humour me now. It's taken me til now to organise going to get the blood drawn. It took 8 vials of blood - he's karyotyping me too - so we'll see if anything happens. I'm not thinking that there is anything wrong, it's just that I don't want to have to miscarry before they figure out that there's a problem. £540 well spent, if you ask me.

Finally, I found this a few days ago. Very cool. It would be even cooler if it was based on a real analysis of in what way writers are similar. Instead it goes on what people read, but it still whiles away an enjoyable 5 minutes or so. Have fun.