Thalia's fertility journey

14dp2dt: 383

383. We're doing ok. It should have been at least 128 yesterday, on its way to 256 tomorrow, so this is way more than doubling in 48 hours. I will have to wait til this evening to check on betabase, but even I can see it's good!

I have to confess that looking at last night's peestick again before I went to bed made me feel that today's answer was going to be ok - it was, by the time it had dried out a bit, considerably darker than Tuesday's.

I am very very relieved. Repeat on Monday. Let's hope this is not a repeat of pregnancy #1.

This post may appear three times as I tried to post from email twice earlier in the day. Apologies.

13dp2dt: Pregnant for now

Home again this evening just in time to put Pob to bed. She was pleased to see me, but not overly so, and completely refused to kiss me, which was a bit sad. Perhaps she's cross with me for going away. I hope tomorrow will be better. I'm having a Friday off work for the first time in a month, so am seizing the opportunity to get my hair done, take Pob to Gymboree and then to a friend's house for tea. Pob is going to be a pumpkin, as is one of her little boy friends, I must remember to take a camera.

I expect to get the blood test results sometime during Gymboree, not quite sure how I'll handle it. I am still pregnant according to my FRER this evening, and it looks at least a little bit darker than the one I did on Tuesday, so the fat lady isn't opening her mouth just yet. However, it needs to be 200 or so for me to be convinced this has a future. Let's hope, yes?

 

Not great, not over

Beta is 64 which is median for today - it certainly isn't twins or triplets! Dr Shoes is worried re bleeding and progesterone is 'only' 42 so wants me on IM progesterone til Friday, when I'll have a repeat beta.

I have to say I am not even a little optimistic at this point. I don't think Dr Shoes is either, although of course she didn't say that. We'll see what the rest of the week brings.

Oh joy.

11dp2dt: Hold your horses

Last night I peed on two more sticks, just to assuage the panic I'd been in all day that the fancy new sticks were prone to false positives. Both (two different brands) came up clearly positive, no need to squint. I went to bed feeling happy. You can tell something bad is coming, can't you?

This morning a real gush of dark red blood. Not a dribble, not a spot, but a gush. Post-gush there seems to be not much more, but it's there every time I wipe, a red smear.

We'll review.

- Pregnancy #1, ended in miscarriage at 8 w (although never got to a heartbeat), bleeding at this point, day 13. Less than this, but a reasonable amount. Then stopped until the miscarriage
- Pregnancy #2, Chemical, enough blood for a tampon around this point. Then no more bleeding until I stopped the progesterone
- Pregnancy #3, Pob. A spot at around 5 weeks - really a spot, a little beige smear, bleeding at 13 weeks briefly, less than this. Then nothing

Doesn't look that good does it?

We'll see what the beta says.

10p2dt: Apparently I don't know my body at all

The fancy Clearblue Easy Digital test I got in an online giveaway about six months ago came up "pregnant 1-2" this morning. Which in their confusing way of measuring things is 1-2 weeks since conception, which is about right given it will be 2 weeks on Wednesday. So, um, I appear to be pregnant. Mea culpa for the bitching and moaning.

Now if it says 1-2 weeks, I'm assuming that means hcg is less than 100, which means that it might not be a great beta tomorrow. Clearblue Easy's help line refuses to give any information about hcg levels, but they do say that the minimum sensitivity is 25mIU so at least the beta tomorrow should be more than that. I should hope so, if it was less than that I wouldn't be holding out much hope for this particular passenger.

I got given the test in a deal to get women to review them, only I've lost the link to the survey I'm supposed to fill in. I do think they are a brilliant marketing ploy, designed to drive people absolutely nuts, and ensure maximal sales for the product. They are very expensive, but the temptation once you've got 1 positive to go out and get the next and the next in order to see the numbers going up (they go to "pregnant 2-3" and "pregnant >3") must be immense. I will try to resist and just have my lovely expensive blood draws instead.

I'd almost forgotten the immense craziness of this time. Feeling sure there will be blood any second. Totally tense about the blood test tomorrow. And then the next blood test on Friday. And then the scan. And then the next scan. And then the nuchal and and and... of course the likelihood is we may never get that far. Wishing and hoping. Pretending I don't know the due date would be 8 July.

Pregnant. With no symptoms to speak of. Who would of thought it.

9dp2dt: Ignoring reality

Thanks for the comments on Friday's post. I started to write a post and ended up writing that paragraph, then realised I really couldn't go on. A paracetamol from a colleague helped (paracetamol is ok, right?). And now I've had two decent nights' sleep as H kindly took the night shift both Friday and Saturday nights. Friday she slept through but last night she was up from 2230-midnight or so, so I did well to avoid that.

So I'm doing ok, and we've had two reasonably relaxing weekend days. Yesterday we wandered nearish to our house and Pob had a lovely time in the playground, trying desparately to go head first down the slide, although we stopped her every time. She is a climbing demon and always tries to go UP the slide, and no matter how hard it is, she keeps on persevering. Today we went down to Borough Market, one of London's foodie destinations, to try and take part in the Apple Day festivities. I am well known for being an apple addict. Sadly the crowds and the rain made this no fun for babies, and not much fun for grown-ups, so we had a nice lunch instead, then Pob slept while we wanted round the Rothko at Tate Modern. When she woke we took her to investigate the massive 2058 sculpture installation which she loved.

So it's been a good weekend. Tonight I have to work, and I leave on Tuesday for a business trip which means I won't see her from then until Friday morning. That feels like a very long time. It also means I will miss my blood test, which is oficially Weds morning. What I'll do is sneak in on Tuesday and they'll complain and do it anyway. I might as well get it over with, even though I'm feeling pretty negative right now (haha funny). I am not convinced it hasn't worked, but fairly sure. I haven't peed on a stick yet because I can't see the point, really. I've had none of the stretching and cramps of my previous three pregnancies, and although I sort of think that the full-term pregnancy with Pob might have disrupted that previously dead-on signal of pregnancy, I also have never had a pregnancy without that early symptom, hence my general negativity.  We'll see. Only two sleeps until I find out. It'll be hard not to be able to hug Pob that night to make me feel better, but no doubt I'll survive, I always do. We always do.

±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±

Otherwise: My husband is unemployed. He has been for the last nine months. He is making less-than-half-assed attempts to get a job, and of course things are just getting harder. It has been driving me crazy for at least the last three months given he isn't doing childcare either. There you go, I've typed it. I've been avoiding it because I've been in denial for most of this period, scared of what I'll feel when I open it up. This I hope will mean I will finally write the post that I need to to get some of the frustration out of my system. But not now. Now it's time to go and give Pob her bottle.

7dp2dt

Not feeling so hopeful about the cycle, and feeling utterly ill. It's lack of sleep I think, have been working til midnight most nights this week and Pob is not sleeping, so I am exhausted. I'm at the stage where all I want to do is go to bed and sleep but I'm working and not doing a good job because I've got a horrible headache and feeling a bit sick. I haven't seen Pob since yesterday morning which feels ridiculous since I am actually in London, just not making it home in the evenings and had to leave very early this morning.

Hmm, am clearly in the mood to moan. You'd better go visit someone more interesting instead.

4dp2dt: Other people's losses

Still feeling optimistic about this cycle. Let's see how long that lasts.

A friend of mine at work had a miscarriage yesterday at just past 13 weeks. She had been very cautious and told no one til after the 12 week scan. I spotted her at about 10 weeks and offered her a thought on clothes to wear to keep the pregnancy hidden longer since she was clearly nervous about people knowing. We had a good chat and I was delighted when she wrote to me 10 days ago to tell me about the good scan, about how excited she was and about her due date of 26 April.

Today I heard from another colleague that my friend had lost the baby. The day immediately greyed around me. I have no idea why this loss has affected me so but I've been on the verge of tears all day. I just wrote to my colleague to let her know I was thinking of her, and characteristically she wrote straight back to say thank you. Because it was past 12 weeks she went through a sort of labour and got to see her tiny, perfectly formed baby. She is cocooning with her husband right now. I don't know her very well (and remember, we are English) so I don't think there is anything else she would welcome from me right now but maybe I will send chocolate or something in a few days.

I want to do more, though, but I suspect that is  more about my needs than hers. I think part of my distress is the shock. She is young, they conceived first time, the 12 week scan showed everything was perfect. I just assumed all would be well for her. Miscarriages aren't that common, right? But they are, even for the supposedly fertile friends we struggle with. And perhaps every time we grieve for someone else, we feel our own losses again. My losses are minor compared to many of my friends' in this community, but perhaps we feel all those losses, just a little bit.

I'm so sorry, friend. I wish it hadn't happened. I hope it never happens again.

Feed

Thanks for the comments about my feed. It turns out the problem was the post with the funky characters in the heading, it messed up a lot of feed aggregators. Who knew? Turns out swearing straight is better for your feeds than covering it up with symbols. I'll be more straightforward in future.

We've been here before...

SIx still growing, four at four cells, one three-celled, one two-celled but all rated 'good'. Dr Shoes cheerfully transferred the three best four celled-embryos, after we'd had the requisite "triplets are very very bad and you and they are very likely to die" conversation with an embryologist, and signed a form acknowledging we've had that conversation.

Now I know I sound flippant, and I don't really mean to. I think the US practice of regularly transferring two or even three embryos even in young women, particularly those with previous successful pregnancies, is mad. I do understand why it happens given the cost of cycles and the clinics' need to keep their stats up, but it does lead to a higher proportion of bad things than is necessary or ever desirable. So I support the HFEA's push to get clinics to consider single embryo transfer, bearing in mind that success rates for single embryo transfers combined with a subsequent FET are the same as those for double embryo transfers, but with a lower incidence of twins and triplets. But people, I am 41, I have got pregnant twice from IVF/FET and both times miscarried early with a singleton. I'm vanishingly unlikely to get pregnant with twins, let alone with triplets. And my chances of getting pregnant with a singleton is pretty damn low. So let's not panic just yet.

You can bring this conversation up to torment me with if anything untoward on the conception front does happen, ok?

I feel about as optimistic as I can be given how good these embryos look compared to the last cycle, but then what a 2-day embryo looks like isn't a great indicator of whether or not you'll have a successful pregnancy, hence the guardedness of my optimism. But still, not bad for an old lady.

Well well well

Six out of seven fertilised normally. There's a surprise. Let's see what they look like tomorrow.

Onwards and upwards.

Plus ca change

Dr Shoes did her usual thoroughly good job and managed to find seven eggs from eight follicles, although two of them were from pretty small follicles so they are unlikely to fertilise. So we have the five decent looking ones we saw on Monday. Let's hope they all fertilise and give us something decent to transfer on Friday.

One signal that I'm not taking this as seriously, or that I'm more relaxed, or that I have less faith in it working, is that I asked Dr Candour to prescribe me the progesterone suppositories instead of IM progesterone this time. And yes, they are suppositories, and not pessaries. My clinic recommends using them in the 'back passage' not in the vagina, although they say you can do either. We've used IM progesterone on each cycle since my first one ended in lots of blood at 8dp3dt. And I've come to understand that the research, as well as my personal experience, says that both IM and internal progesterone help support a pregnancy, but the IM progesterone will keep away a period even if you aren't pregnant, while the internal progesterone won't. So it may be more depressing, but it isn't any less good in terms of pregnancy support.

So I've made an intelligent decision, informed by science, to do something which is much less painful and intrusive, and traumatic, and do the easy version instead. Some part of me feels that I'm wrong, that I should have stuck to the IM progesterone - after all, I was on that the time I did get pregnant from IVF. And part of me knows that's nonsense. Which wasn't helped necessarily that all the nurses today had me down as doing IM progesterone. Ironic, since every other time when I have been on IM progesterone, they've assumed I'm on the suppositories and have had to be persuaded of the converse. I felt I had to keep explaining my decision to revert to the easy version of progesterone support. Which is silly and I'm sure they didn't care, but you know what it's like on retrieval day when you're feeling fragile and hungry and everyone keeps asking you your name and date of birth, and you realise just how bloody old you are compared to all these teenage nurses, not to mention the couple in the next bed who looked about 15 and turned out to have had 8 miscarriages.

Umm. Run on sentence. Sorry. Off to catch up on the work I didn't get to do today. Onwards and upwards.

Faster follicles, kill, kill!

Well you could have knocked me over with a feather yesterday when I got dressed after the scan and the sonographer told me I would have egg collection on Wednesday. That would be day 11 of stimms, the fastest ever (I have a spreadsheet with it all mapped out. Fastest previously was day 15). I'm not sure whether this is a good thing, a bad thing or a neutral thing, but it's a thing. I injected the Ovitrelle at 2330 and we have to show up in the clinic at 930am tomorrow.

The non-neutral to bad thing is that there are only 5 follicles with a chance - 21, 19, 15 on the left, 20, 18, 11 on the right, with both ovaries having lots of small ones with no chance of catching up. I think what's happened on previous cycles is that I've gone so slowly that the small ones have caught up, but not this time. Well, it is what it is and we'll just see whether it makes a difference.

As a consequence of this speedy performance, I have an unopened vial of 900mIU of Puregon, going free to a good home. I'll throw in a syringe of Orgalutran too if that's any good to you. Obviously easier if you live in the UK, or better still in London so we can transfer it more easily.

Onwards and upwards.

To the asshole in possession of my shopping

Dear Asshole,

I'm impressed. It took you a maximum of 15 minutes after I left the crowded coffee shop to steal the large Hobbs bag sitting behind the leather armchair, pressed against the glass. I know it wasn't more than that because when I called and finally got through to the incredibly unhelpful coffee shop manager, she swore blind it wasn't there, and that was no more than 20 minutes since I'd left the shop, struggling through the crowds with my whiny baby, the changing bag, and my other shopping bag - luckily the one that contained the two essentials of the day, formula and tampons. It's even possible you managed to swipe the bag before I left since I can't remember seeing it when we packed up to leave the shop.

Since the shop manager was so extraordinarily unhelpful I also managed to get a friend's husband to pop down there just in case, and indeed it was gone. I couldn't go back myself, given as how I was halfway home by then, with a whiny, hungry baby, and sadly no husband at home to dispatch myself as he is off having a manly weekend in the wind and rain somewhere.

I'm not quite sure what you're going to do with the stuff. It represents my entire winter working wardrobe and cost rather a lot of money. My credit card company says it can't repay me since stealing doesn't fall under their protection plan. This seems a bit unfair, but I know better than to argue with people who don't care in a call centre- that way madness lies. I've done my best to get some recompense, and have left a fairly vitriolic message for the unhelpful lady's managing director, but that's apparently it. No new work clothes for me. Good luck with the houndstooth suit, grey trousers, silk shirt and cream cardigan. I'm fairly sure you're not going to wear them and I'm very sure you're not going to get back what I paid for them. So I guess you had a good day. And I, along with the whiny baby with a runny nose, did not.

Yours

Truly pissed off Thalia

%$£@$%£

Well, I was going to write a post about economic melt-down and goodness me how the US senate needs to pass a that bailout bill, or I was going to write a thoughtful post about secondary infertility, but then I got my period this afternoon, so now I'm just going to write a pissed-off sad post about how much I fucking hate doing this trying to get pregnant thing again. Consider yourselves forewarned.

We've had seven tries at getting pregnant since I started ovulating again, including the IVF cycle. None of them have worked. And not surprising. I'm 41 and 3/4. I obviously wasn't Mrs Fertile to begin with. The endometriosis seems to be under control or gone but who knows if that's really true. It's not surprising. And it hurts a lot lot less than it did when we didn't have Pob. But it still hurts. Mostly it hurts on the day I get my period and the few days after, and the days when I have to make excuses with work. It hurts because somehow conceiving Pob made me feel invincible, that I had paid my dues and life would just go on from here, infertility remembered but not recurring.

But the dues are back and need to be paid again. I'm not one of those women whose infertility is cured by getting pregnant. I'm not an old lady miracle of fertility. I'm just a woman of a certain age whose fertility is crashing and whose chances of conception are vanishingly small each month.

That doesn't stop me hoping. I have a calendar written out at the back of my work notebook and every so often during the day I peruse it. I know the pattern of my period days. I know what 40 weeks from the start of each period would have been. I know my ovuation days and when it would be reasonable to pee on a home pregnancy test. I never get there because my period arrives beautifully, regularly, reliably and depressingly at 12 dpo pretty much without fail.

The hope is silly because every time I have been pregnant, I've known by about 8dpo. So if I don't have any signs by then, it's not our cycle. But each time I wake up on 12dpo and there's no blood, I hope. I look at my little black book and remind myself when 40 weeks would be. I day dream in the off moments during the day. And then sometime around tea time, I go to the loo. I wipe, and there is a pink smear. And I know its all over again.

Today hurt worse than the other recent periods. Because it's cumulative. Each month it feels less and less likely that we will get lucky again. Every month it hurts that bit more. And in this month, it brings us to the start of our fifth IVF cycle. I really don't want to do IVF again, but I really do want Pob to have a sibling. At the same time as I also struggle with the fact that I'm not spending as much time with her as I'd like, and having another baby wouldn't help that. But her having a sibling is what I think is right for her in the long run. I might have to revise that opinion in the end, but for now I'm sticking to it.

Sticking to it means injections again, injections and frustrating phone calls with the clinic, and scans and hopefully retrievals and embryos, and another week of sitting there, looking at my little black book, feeling worried that the potential baby would have a crap birthday (end of July, who's ever going to remember?), at the same time as knowing it won't work, and we'll be into 2009 and I'll be 42 and honestly why on earth are we still hoping. We got so lucky once. Others get lucky more than once, but increasingly I think once was all our luck in one go. It was wonderful wonderful luck and every day it gets better, but it made me greedy for more. I thought we'd get lucky again. Increasingly it looks like I was just that bit too optimistc.