This happy lil’ vegemite is the air in my lungs…

Why not give it another shot…? At least that’s what I told myself this month even though I’m damn sure last year I swore off Chlomid (and drinking, and KFC for lunch…and buying jeans). Pretty certain we decided to stick to trying ourselves until the Big Day comes when we have our last actual true blue IVF cycle. But things change, like the seasons (as does my mind), so like a good girl, I took my four little white pills each morning, as well as my good friend prednisolone (steroid) who has turned out to be not such a good friend, actually and then we thought hey, why not go all crazy ass on this cycle and whip in a little trigger shot too…you know, just to spice things up a little.

The trigger shot is meant to help boost your chances of actually ovulating and because I have currently also sworn off those stupid ovulation test kits (I cannot for the life of me work that little doowacky thing with the mini microscope) Fertility Gods Be Willing, this might be a better option. On day twelve, I stop in at the clinic and my favourite nurse – a lovely Kiwi girl – tells me she’ll quickly give me a shot of pregnyl. ‘This one might hurt a bit,’ she says before stabbing into the (once firm) fold of my tummy what may or may not have been one of those flying daggers they use in the circus. I don’t know because I never watch when the needle goes in. Hurt? FM, yes it flipping hurt! Not only did it sting but as the liquid goes in to my body I begin to wonder if I might just faint. Tough it up, chick I say silently in my head, you’ve had your nether regions disected by the somewhat large head circumference of your son you can handle this shit for sure. I pull my top back down and climb off the injection chair. ‘All good’, I tell her through clenched teeth…who am I kidding? It bloody aches for five hours afterwards.

Now it’s just a waiting game…like every month you sit tight for twelve days and try not to go bat shit crazy while resisting the constant urge to search up every possible early pregnancy symptoms you can feast your demented eyeballs upon. Not that I feel sorry for myself, there are people so far worse off than me.

We’ve got the boy and we are lucky. When I look into my 11 y o’s eyes…like the bluest blue of the ocean on a clear day, I couldn’t bare to ever not see those twinkling peepers again. A piece of me. My most treasured gift. My heart tenses when I think of the inconceivable grief suffered by a relative last year. There was a horrific fire involving her and her young children. Two made it out. Her and her youngest son did not. As she crouched on her bathroom floor trying to douse the heat from her own and the skin of her beautiful little three-year-old boy, somewhere during that time due to smoke inhalation, she passed out. If it weren’t for a neighbour breaking in to get to her, she would never have made it. She was rushed to hospital and placed into a coma in the ICU. For three weeks she lay still in a hospital bed before the doctors thought it would be safe to bring her out. The words she heard when she was woken would, I’m quite sure, have made her not want to wake up. Ever. Her little boy, the youngest of four, did not make it. Her gorgeous little brown-eyed boy had been buried while she was helpless and bedridden. She never even got to say good bye. This is not my story to tell but there is nothing like watching from afar as someone goes through the greatest grief of their life to make you realise your own problems are actually jack shit.

There is nothing more certain that death and nothing more crippling than grief. I hold the 11 y o just that little bit tighter when I think about that poor girl and what she has gone through and more so, what she faces ahead as the months and years slowly edge by.

It’s times like these I realise my own pain is nothing but a tiny distant blip in the radar of life. I count my blessings. Love n hugs, Lady MamaG xox