Tomorrow morning, somewhere after 10, I’ll wake up in a hospital bed with an IV drip pumping some sort of pig fat-like substance (no not really but it looks weirdly similar to the shit in fast food thickshakes) into my wrist and a number written in biro on my left hand. The number will have been put their by Dr Babies to let me know how many little follies have managed to grow themselves into eggs before he’s carefully sucked them out and off to the lab to await their little friendies for a petrie dish hook-up.

I’ll want to look at that number but I’ll be scared as all shit. It could be okay, it could be zero…I’ve never actually had zero before so maybe they don’t even write it, they let you work it out for yourself. But if it is a number and is higher than the average two-year-old’s IQ, then we’re in business.

an essential tool for all serious Infertility Junkies

So much of our life will stop over the next two weeks and despite my vastly raging hormones I’m relatively – thanks to my new Dr Needle Lady – calm. Ish. Sort of relaxed. Maybe on the very lower spectrum of psycho. Oh let’s just settle in the middle and call it quietly neurotic.

I’m certain all the members of my household, including the blessed sweet dog who can’t even speak for himself, would have been ecstatic if I had taken myself and my 375mg of FSH on a ‘maniac break’ to the other side of the continent this past week just so they didn’t have to tread on eggshells around me…which by the way is very fucking loud and irritating and makes a big ass mess of the floor, so could you not even do that for shit’s sake? I may have threatened to leave the 12 y o on the side of the M1 (child services, I did not actually stop the car in the middle of the highway, I merely said I would) for reasons that are now unknown to us both but at the time would have been highly validated and completely rational. Did you get the hint, I am right, always.  And especially where copious amounts of hormones are involved.

If they thought I was batshit crazy this week, wait till my old foe Progesterone kicks in…it’s up there with Lyndsay Lohan after a three-day bender who’s been refused entry into a nightclub at 3am. And because of this factor, I hereby denounce all responsibility for anything that comes from my lips these next 16-odd days unless it’s to tell you how cute your fluffy new puppy is, or how much I like your lippie colour. Then, and only then is it safe to instigate a conversation…otherwise, keep walking people and look straight ahead.

If, and it is a big IF we get some decent eggs tomorrow and then IF we manage to fertilise at least one or two of them by Saturday and IF they then grow into fine little embies by Wednesday there’ll be something to celebrate. Oh no wait, we can’t celebrate because after that it’s another IF the embryo manages to stick in my slightly uninhabitable uterus (hence the need for an IV of intralipid and steroids for the next three months) and make itself all nice n’ cosy up in there. And we haven’t even got to the good bit. There’s one more IF it makes it to four weeks we can sigh a fucking massive relief…oops be careful, already counted those chickens and found plastic eggs. I might have to hold off ordering my favourite shade of Bugaboo because yet one more IF the embie sticks and actually works, it’s a heartbeat scan at 7wks and then weekly monitoring after that…waiting, hoping, scared shitless, paranoia.

Don’t count your eggs before they hatch…but another one just like this please…

I’m a great believer in good luck charms like the little carved wooden Chinese luck stone I keep in my bedside drawer (beats wearing lucky undies) and I’d like to think the tiny dolphin who popped up out of nowhere and jumped back down beside the 12 y o’s boat yesterday afternoon just in front of my pool – any closer and Flipper and I might have been swimming lengths together – was a sign of good luck that this last round is going to be our best one yet…the one that works. Either that or I was seriously daydream/hallucinating and am going to become impregnated with some sort of weird mermaid-child.

But it’s not just my battle. Before I’d became a badge-wearing member of the Infertility Junkie Brigade, admittedly, I didn’t know a whole lot about it, all the people involved, how much support you need and why the most essential part of this fucked-up ‘journey’ (what a wank of a word, there is absolutely nothing fun or enlightening about it) is to have the World’s Most Beautiful Loving and Considerate, Supportive and Generous partner in life before you get on this road because the jolts and sharp hairpins are more than I could take if I didn’t have Him and the 12 y o by my side as my trusty pit crew. Lov n’ hugs and baby dust, Lady MamaG xox

A little over twelve years ago, well that many plus a few hours or so, my life changed forever. It’s hard to ever imagine a time when you weren’t in it, my little nugget (I know you hate me calling you that but it’s better than the name ‘Peanut’ we called you when you were in my belly wouldn’t you say?). And that sound you hear is the sniffle of your mother not dealing with the fact her ‘Bubs’ (another name you’ve told me not to use and I promise I’ll stop, soon) is almost up to her shoulders and just a cat’s bum whisker away from being a teenager. Too soon. Way too soon. I need more time.

I swear you were only just starting out as a preppy, a big navy blue bag strapped to your back like a rocket launcher that probably weighed more than you did and a slight breeze would have swept you clean over, like yesterday…I can see your little blonde candy floss hair blowing in the wind the first time the training wheels came off and you were racing like hell to the end of the street, me chasing after you ready to catch the fall you never made…

When, with your proud beaming smile, you became the little man in my life to give me away and almost broke the sound barrier, skipping me that fast down the aisle I had to check my heels for smoke. You didn’t care that it meant you had to share your mum with someone else, you were more excited that we got to share you.

I know you’re like super dupa excited about growing up, reaching your goal height of 6ft 2, doing the things grown up boys do and all…but your mum over here? Well she ain’t quite so excited. Slow down, I want to yell. Stop growing. Stop getting big. Stop turning into a fine young lad before my eyes and my heart can’t take it.

I love that even though it’s not cool to hug your mum when we’re out, you still sneak your hand in mine and squeeze it tight. How you apologise about hurting my feelings because you don’t want your face to be painted for halloween. And I even love that when you got a detention at school for not wearing the right uniform (yes, I’ll let it go that it was for the third time) and told the head of the junior school you were worried about upsetting me because ‘my mum’s very hormonal right now’.

Unbreakable bond…

I love that you still kiss us goodnight and talk to your dog like he’s your best mate in the whole world.

I know you’re in a hurry to get big…it’s just that your mum isn’t.

Happy birthday to the greatest thing I ever did…Lov’n’ big ol’ hugs, your MamaG xxox

The cost of a small house on the outskirts of Bundaberg. Approximately nine general anesthetics. Thirteen kilograms. Severe hair loss. Tiny puncture wounds throughout my body. Two small incision scars. Track marks on my inner arms. Ovarian over-stimulation. Steroids. Litres of introlipid (fat) via IV. Inability to travel. Emotional destruction. Self doubt. Painful bloating. Jealousy.

The cost to one day hold our own little wriggler in our arms = priceless.

This is the real true shit they don’t tell you about infertility in the pretty pastel-coloured flyers they hand out at the doctor’s office.

They won’t tell you how much it’ll make you want to scream every time you read about yet another celebrity pregnancy (that will doubtless end in separation). How you will feel like an utter failure as a woman. That it will baffle you your body which once worked like clockwork has begun shutting up shop for stocktake without your wanting it to. You’ll cry more. At practically everything. Your hormones will rise and fall like Miley’s undies. Dart sharp pangs of jealousy will pierce your heart every time someone else gets up the knock. You will know every single month exactly where you are in your cycle and feel every single inner movement in your ovaries/uterus/gut/tits.

And I promise not to name it North, Rocket or Pear

You will become a hopeless wanting, desperate baby-crazy nutter who will try anything and everything from Chinese herbs to ‘fertility yoga’, scoffing pineapple by the kilo at ovulation and pulling naked headstands at will.

But let’s get one thing straight…no person would ever willingly expose themselves to IVF unless they had to. It isn’t a choice, it’s a compulsory action as a result of shit going on in your body that you have absolutely no mother-fucking-control over. And now, apparently the government is looking at cutting the safety net for infertile couples? Bloody great.

I really hate endings. Let me tell you how much I hate endings. I went into complete meltdown with the last episode of Melrose Place (the original ’90s version not that recent joke of a remake) that I almost required an intravenous of red bull just to get me through the day. You know that feeling when you’re really getting into an awesome book/movie/porno and it goes and ends on you. Ever feel like you just want to stalk the author weekly with your insightful, ’10 reasons why you should write a sequel’? Nope? Just me…okay but you get my drift.

Endings of anything are shitful (except maybe eyebrow threading, I stop taking in air until that shit is done yeeeeoooucch) which is why 2016, January to be precise, is a month that will either spell the end or the beginning…and I have no idea which one. It will be our very last round and by last I mean no-more-reunion-tours final finito finish. We’ll be trying a different protocol and to spare you the intimate details of which I’m usually more than happy to spill but for the sake of others involved who shall remain nameless, let’s just say the both of us will be feeling a bit sore after this one.

A couple of weeks ago we visited the wonderful and ever inventive pioneer of reproductive medicine who is Dr Babies and sitting in his office we finally came to the conclusion I probably didn’t want to hear. That despite the fact we could go on trying for ever and ever after that, eventually everything has to come to an end. The one Willy Wonka golden ticket was that my AMH levels have remained at 7.5, which is what they were three-and-a-half-years-ago. Someone hand me a fucking gold star, quick sticks! If you have no idea what these figures mean (I barely know myself) but it’s basically how many eggs you have left in the carton and let’s just say even though I am now entering my golden years in terms of fertility, all is not completely and utterly lost and shrivelled into tiny black currants.

And that’s where it ends. Or maybe begins. Only the Fertility Gods, or a bloody Leprechaun can make that decision. Three and a bit years, one little tiny embryo that almost made it, a whole lot of emotional, financial and physical suffering – all hinges on one last go. As it stands, in Australia, there is absolutely no government-funded support or counselling offered to couples going through IVF…yet one in six people in this great southern land of ours suffers from infertility? Go figure. Shit needs to change. And by change I don’t mean stripping couples of the chance to make their little baby dreams come true. Love n’hugs LadyMamaG xox

Drew Barrymore, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Milla Jovovich…and me. What do we have in common I hear you ask (other than our supermodel good looks and heaving swiss bank accounts of course) we all share the same birthday. Well not the actual day but we are all Year of the Rabbit which I’m pretty sure is why Ange and I get along so well or at least I imagine we would anyway.

Like my fellow bunnies, I’ve never been one to simply let a birthday pass quietly, which is why I have been celebrating the entire week…and will continue to do so well into next week (when my actual real bonafide day of birth falls…(the 10th for deliveries) and maybe even the one after that.

I love me a celebration which is why tonight instead of letting it slip on by into the universe like another Justin Beiber hit, I’m tackling the turn of my decade so hard it would make Ansastasia Steele blush.

Sure I’m not as fit as I once was the last time I turned over a new decade. Sure a weekly intake of KFC skin takes about ten times as long to work off  as it did then. Sure there might be a few more ‘life creases’ making their way across the corner of my eyes but battle scars they are. Each one has been a reminder of the decade that has been the most challenging of my bloody life.

my gorgeous lil love nugget

But by shit I’ve made it. I haven’t just slid in by the skin of my teeth I am galloping like Penzance towards the finish line of my former decade, taking a good swig of the Bolly on my way.

I’d like to say I care that my rig might not be as toned as it once was and maybe my hopes of a VS runway career have been hopelessly dashed but honestly…who gives a damn shit? Would they write on my headstone ‘Had great abs’…or ‘totally great thigh gap’. Nup. They’ll say ‘loved that shit’ and maybe ‘great fondness for KFC skin and chocolate’. These days my dreams are miles different from what they once were, in my old age I’ve discovered happiness is what feeds the soul and lucky for me I’ve got it stock-piled in fifty-gallon drums outside my garage.

I’ve learnt these past 10 years how life can change in the blink of an eye and no money or material things can bring back a lifetime of love and happiness. I’ve learnt how I need to take care of myself, how to be a fighter. How to come back stronger than ever. How to keep on top even though the tide keeps dragging you under again and again. I’ve learnt that the greatest thing I could ever hope for, could ever hope of achieving is the tiny miracle I gave birth to a decade-and-a-bit-ago. I’ve learnt how a heart can break like shattered glass, how your feet can be kicked out from under you. How your body can work perfectly fine to create another life in one decade then continually let you down the next. How to ignore my own fears, grief and pain to get the one thing that matters the most in this world…family.

I’ve learnt it’s possible to open your heart and learn to love again too. I’ve learnt the love of someone so incredible your face hurts is all you need to get through today and tomorrow. I’ve learnt there are actual true and real saints in this world. And I’m lucky enough to share my life with one. He’s helped me heal and be a much better me. He never winces at the memories of a past life so often constant but yet so integral to us. With a heart so big, so open and so generous that it heals not just ours but other folks’ lives too, constantly giving and helping and caring. Who makes you so proud you want to high-five and side ankle-kick all at the same time.

Always by my side…

It’s love, friendship and sometimes just an ear of the friends who have been there an entire lifetime who make your heart full.

I’m lucky even though don’t share Ange’s portfolio of chateaus in the South of France or Drew’s ET memorabilia to have the world’s best friends and family who are all sharing in the turn of my decade tonight. People who’ve left their families, work commitments and homes and travelled across Tasman seas, across states and across bridges to help me celebrate a decade that I’ve fought harder than Mike Tyson to make it through. I love you all more than words. More than KFC skin even.

This is Forty Shades of Me…and I’m proud as shit….love n’hugs Lady MamaGxox

This weekend thousands upon thousands of people made their yearly pilgrimage to a mountain held in such high regards it might as well be heaven. To get close to their gods, worshippers flock like seagulls on an oily chip wrapper.

I’ve been there myself quite a few times. The 11 y o has even been before too but he wouldn’t have known it if I hadn’t told him. He was six-months in utero at the time…and I seem to remember some pretty serious wriggling going on inside my belly every time I got close to the pit garage.

It is the holy-shitting-grail of Aussie motorsport. The temple of high-octane fumes, high decibel engines and fierce competition. For those who love racing, this weekend is the grand final AND the world cup all rolled into one.

But for others, Bathurst, Mt Panorama, The Mighty Mountain is a haunting reminder of a weekend where lives where literally shattered into oblivion. I’ve thought about going back one day, of touching the gravel in the spot where under the blink of an eye, a split second, everything went black but I’m far too chicken shit. You wouldn’t even be able to get me out of the car. I’ve seen it. I know the spot so well it’s etched into my brain but being there…on the stretch of racetrack that I’ve watched over and over inside my head…actually standing in the place that was once his heaven too, and now holds his spirit hovering high above…? Just too much.

I will leave my demons behind me.

Next year it’s going to be an entire decade since our happy milkybar blonde two-and-half-year-old was sleeping peacefully as the terror unfolded around him. By the time he’d woken up a couple of hours later, I was ten-thousand feet up in the air on my way the RPA hospital in Sydney to sit vigil beside his dad.

Sometimes he asks me what happened. When he was very little he wanted to know why his daddy was never coming back and a tiny mind will only go as far as yesterday or maybe last week…it can’t make it to a whole lifetime without one of the people who put you in this world in the first place and as he gets older, he’s going to need more answers. The same pinching why’s and what-if’s that have plagued my sodden terror-ridden consciousness for almost a decade now, will soon begin haunting his young adult mind too.

soar high above the heavens…

There will never again be the hardest moment in my life as when I had to tell him the news that his daddy was never coming back from his racing. That he had gone to his heaven above the mountain. Maybe one day he will go searching for his own answers, maybe the mountain will give him the closure I could never have the courage to seek. Hold your peeps a little closer tonight…Love n’ hugs, Lady MamaGxox

     
  Four little words. That’s all it took. What happened next inside a primary school playground, would start one of the most important relationships in my life. 

 ‘Wanna be my friend?’ I asked. She was the new kid who had just moved to our school from Darwin. We were only eight and still listening to Michael Jackson and watching Family Ties on a Friday night. I rode a wonky green Raleigh twenty bike to school that had a piss stupid squeaky seat and embarrassed the shit out if me. She said things like dinky and doona, had a sprint on her that could rival a greyhound and could flick flack and backward walkover like a Russian gymnast. I had found my new best friend. 

We grew up on the same street – our houses only about 200m apart and from that day on spent every afternoon, every weekend and almost every single holiday together. 

I made her come to youth group with me on Friday nights, mostly because I had a crush on a guy who went there. She reluctantly tagged along, not because she wanted to learn about ‘all that stupid God shit’ but because she was my best friend. She probably hated every bloody minute of it, protesting that she’d never set foot inside a church before then. 

  
We became blood sisters and I christened her in my back garden under the apple tree with the middle name she never had but always wanted. We never once had a single blue. Not ever. She had my back and just because she was tiny didn’t mean she couldn’t sink a decent left hook. 

That little girl and me, we who went through everything together, from our first love to the birth of our babies, to saving me from the brink of destruction after grief, and she’s entire worlds more than just a friend. 

In all our thirty-two years she’s been my one true constant always mending my heart or laughing in unison at life’s trivial shit. Never once letting me down, she’s my family made from love, instead of blood. God mummy to my son, twice my maid of honour and bearer of all my innermost secrets. 

These days we don’t live on the same street or even in the same country but we talk every other day as if we still did. 

Life has punched us both in the guts with some pretty horrific tragedy over the years but her love and compassion and loyalty and strength has got me over mountains. I could never ever have made it this far without her. 

This week I flew back home to see the little version of Mini Driver who I asked to be my best friend a gazillion years ago. She turned forty and I was damned if I was gonna miss it. It’s been forever since I last saw her and we laughed about the shit we used to get up to when we were a coupl’a kids sun baking at the local community pool. So long in fact that three years has passed since I’ve been home. Thanks IVF and your wonderfully debilitating powers, you really know how to interfere with a girl’s life. 

I’d been sneaky and found out she’d be having lunch at her local food court. When I sidled up beside her and wrapped my arm round her shoulders I think her brain didn’t register if it was real. Soon enough, her smile, covered with tears from the both of us was enough. 

It had been the best 48-hour trip eeeever. 

Thank you for being the jam in my doughnut…the best bestie a girl could ever have…lov n hugs Lady MamaG xox

There are two things people really don’t like to talk about. One is chlamydia. The other is death. While the latter isn’t contagious (unless you’re living in a leper colony) no one likes to talk about for fear if they do, it might happen to them. Fact is, it will. One day. We are all mortal.

Nobody likes to talk about someone who’s dead. And they certainly don’t like to talk about death. They’re scared they won’t say the right thing. And equally as petrified of saying the wrong thing. It’s unimaginable to think it could happen to you. That someone you know and love could just be gone…disappear off the face of the earth forever in the time it takes you to swipe the screen on your phone.

Mortality – even though it’s a part of every single one of our lives just as much as eating eggs for breakfast – it seems is much better not to be spoken of. Ick. Too creepy. Don’t go there. As for chlamydia…? Well not really dinner party conversation material – unless of course you want your guests to suddenly develop ‘a headache’ and clear out faster than a bunch of disgruntled rose-less Bachelorettes fleeing the mansion.

There was a time, approximately three-thousand-two-hundred-and-eighty-five days ago to be exact, when I didn’t like talking about it all that much either. Before death, grief, loss and mortality became a second nature I’d prefer not to know quite so intimately. Before I was the one people were avoiding in the supermarket because they didn’t know what to say to me, frightened to be around me in case my grief somehow got passed on to them. Before I didn’t have to be the one making decisions that would change my life, my son’s life and the lives of countless others.

Before Mark’s accident, we’d lost a very dear friend suddenly. It had woken us with a jolt to the harsh reality that it could happen to us. The loss of our friend prompted two things – one for my husband to take out a life insurance policy and two for us to talk about organ donation. A simple chat. Probably less than two minutes. And quite likely over a Hawaiian pizza. I couldn’t even tell you exactly where we were it seemed that insignificant but it would prove to be one of the most important things we ever said to each other.

Four, maybe five years later…those few words would turn out to save the lives of five people.

An immortal hero in our eyes…

He was so quiet when he asked the words, as if saying them out loud made them real. ‘Would you consider…let me ask you…had you and Mark ever talked about organ donation…do you know what his wishes were?’ The softly spoken neurosurgeon of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney had put God his very self into my hands that dark October day in 2006. He was asking me to make a decision that would ultimately mean the end of my husband’s life as he lay still on the hospital bed, machines taking over the normal functioning of his organs. My decision would also mean a future of others. ‘I’ll leave it with you to think about for a little while…’ he said and left the hospital waiting room.

There were so many times over those seventy-two hours, nine years ago, where I wished I wasn’t me, I wasn’t the one making decisions to end or continue people’s lives. I would like to have pretended I didn’t have ears. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, what he was asking of me. Shit if the ground could have opened up and swallowed me right then I would have jumped in head first with my eyes closed.

I didn’t need half an hour. I didn’t even need 10 minutes. ‘It’s okay,’ I tell him. ‘We spoke about it, it was what he wanted to do…what we both wanted to do…’ He looked relieved. But the relief was all his. I was the one choosing to turn off the machines, and despite the fact I knew all hope was lost, there was nothing else they could do… it still hurt like shit. It isn’t like asking someone if they want a side salad with their meal or even what school you want to send your kids to. It is the hardest words your brain will ever have to process.

Ten days after that conversation with the RPA neurosurgeon, a package arrived in the mail. It was from the Red Cross. Inside was a tiny gold rose pin and a letter. The pin, it said was a symbol of his generosity. A reflection of how much he cared. In the letter, the lady from the Red Cross who I met at the hospital during that weekend spoke of the five people whose lives would change forever because of my, our decision. It doesn’t say their names or even if they were male or female. I won’t ever know the people whose lives Mark helped save. But I know their stories. They tell of a life-saving heart transplant, a liver and a double lung transplant. It speaks of his kidneys, his pancreas that saved more lives and of his spleen that would be used for medical research and ultimately help thousands of people in the future.

I didn’t need a letter or a gold pin to remind me, I already knew inside my heart that one decision, that one talk made him a Hero. An immortal Hero in the eyes of all of us left behind to live and breathe without him, who loved and cherished him.

This month is Organ Donation Awareness. It isn’t enough to simply put it on your licence. You need to have that talk with your partner, tell them what you want, tell your parents, your children, the neighbour…anyone. Whoever it is who could one day be given the task of the Hardest Decision They’ll Ever Make.

Go on, do your part, go to the Australian Organ Donation Register it’s the most selfless thing you could ever do. What if it was someone you loved who needed a life-saving donation…whose life was hanging in the balance? No one wants to play God. None of us ever want to make a decision that switches off machines, that then stops lungs artificially inflating, hearts artificially pumping blood through veins and feeding tubes delivering a thick substance into someone you love’s empty body. But…if it was you on the other side of the medical curtains holding the arm of someone you love hoping and praying someone would come along who might be able to save them…wouldn’t you want to have that chance?

Lov n’hugs, LadyMamaG xox