Tag: fertility

You just have shit luck…

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At least you have one. A throwaway comment but it sliced like a box cutter when someone said to it to me last week (after I’d already told them our last cycle had failed, but she’d seemingly forgotten). ‘At least you have a healthy boy, you should be happy with that.’

Shit, lucky you told me because had you not pointed out this fact to me I would have completely forgotten I gave birth to the world’s most perfect tiny human twelve years ago and who has been and always will be the absolute light of my life ever since. Just as well I have people like you to tell me the most blindingly obvious stupid fucking facts. Don’t you think I know this already???!!!

babyfeet

There are some things you just don’t say to a girl hiked up on fertility medication like a crack whore. And ‘at least you have a child’ is one of them. The other is ‘it’s so easy for me to get pregnant’. If you mention these lines to a woman coming down from a cycle you may want to wear protective eyewear…And possibly one of those Joan of Arc-style chainmail vests before doing so.

I was already feeling like a bucket of shit-stained undies at that moment in time and I felt like spitting staples at them. I didn’t say anything. Instead uttered under my breath the shitfulness of people’s ignorance.

What I wanted to say is, I’m quite sick of being Fertility’s bitch locked up in her dungeon of pain. I want out, I’m using my safe word, let me go. Let me goooooooooo. And I want all the people who think what they say is helping to shut the fuck up. It doesn’t help. There is nothing about ‘oh you have a child already’ that could possibly help someone who has been trying to make a small version of herself and her beautiful husband for the past four years and has been utterly consumed by it. Not ever. If there’s any kind of mind altering hypnosis/medication/therapy that can magically erase your ability to think about fertility, fertility and nothing but trying to get pregnant every waking day then I’ll take it. Shit I’ll even sign up for vintage-style electric shock treatment if you reckon it’ll make me forget about every single thing that isn’t working and blowing our dreams up like a hillbilly bonfire.

Last Monday it was time for my routine debrief with Dr Babies after our failed IVF I’m going to call the Worst Motherfucking Cycle Ever, I asked the question we all nervously mumble knowing full well we’ll never get a straight answer to. ‘Why didn’t it work…?’

It didn’t work because it wasn’t ‘our time’. It didn’t work because my eggs are shitfully old and shriveled into tiny caper berries. It didn’t work because The Vet is too stressed and exhausted. It didn’t work because I hadn’t detoxed for long enough. It didn’t work because I didn’t have acupuncture regularly for 18 months beforehand. It didn’t work because I waited too long between cycles. It didn’t work because I had six wines on Christmas day. It didn’t work because I didn’t drink the bin juice the naturopath prescribed me two times a day. It didn’t work because the protocol wasn’t right for us this time. It didn’t work because I rode my bike that one morning. It didn’t work because my body’s getting too old to reproduce. It didn’t work because I haven’t eaten enough leafy green vegetables. It didn’t work because my tongue is white and apparently that means your liver is fucked. It didn’t work because I waited too long. The biggest reason it didn’t work…ass-achingly shitfully bad luck. That is all. He didn’t have an answer because there really is no actual answer. It either works or it doesn’t. A fifty per cent gamble and our horse didn’t come in. It was a stupid fucking donkey.

The next words he asked have to be – apart from being told you are infertile – the single hardest words for a woman TTC to ever hear…’have you considered donor eggs?’ Bless him, it’s not Dr Babies fault, he’s clutching at whatever straw will help him make our dreams come true but I felt like tearing my eyeballs out of my head. ‘No, no, we won’t’ I answered a little too quickly. When you’ve brought a tiny piece of yourself and your partner into this world and you get to see little mannerisms, looks, features and personality that remind you a little bit of you or him, it’s a hard thing to get your head around. Don’t get me wrong, I really don’t love myself that much but once you have had your own biological child it’s kind of hard to have that right taken away from you.

I had never considered it before. Ever. Yet we’d talked about adoption – of which our chances are zero to zilch. Donor eggs were not on my agenda but all of a sudden they might have to be. If it means the difference between actually having a child that is at least half ours, and not ever realising this dream…well I’d be a dumbass idiot to not at least try it. And while it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to get my head around I’m slowly beginning to realise it might be our only option left.

For now we’re trying one last little glimmer of hope called Ovulation Induction – which at least involves no general anaesthetic, limited drug injecting and a bit of good old-fashioned rooting. Our chances are as slim as Kendal Jenner’s waist, I know but we have to try our luck.

The Hurt…

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better luck next time...

better luck next time, kids…

I had already started picking out the cot – an antique cane one for a little girl, a modern beech style for a boy. We’d picked out some names we liked and even joked about who our baby might look like. Hopes and Dreams. But then in the middle of the night, just as fast as those Hopes and Dreams had been built up, they came crashing down when at 3am, I felt bleeding. This story isn’t all that different from a lot of couples. We have wanted this baby oh-so-much and when you’re putting all your hopes into something, you can’t help but be nothing short of devastated. I’m used to hurt, pain even but I really wasn’t expecting it this time. I thought it would ‘take’, I really did.

Feeling like I’d been dragged through hell backwards, I decided to go for a walk by the beach this morning and get some fresh sea air into my lungs, help push out all the hurt. As if flaunting it in my face, I passed by not one but two pregnant women – at different stages of my walk. On my way back to the car, one of the pregnant women had stopped to talk to another woman who was walking her dog. ‘Oh I thought it was bad enough losing one at 12 weeks,’ she said rubbing her rounded belly. ‘We actually had him,’ the other woman said. ‘He was alive and we lost him’. I think those women were there to remind me not just that I’m not alone but to toughen the hell up and remember that however shitful I am feeling right now there are people who are going through much more hell than I am. People who’ve lost their babies, not just a failed IVF attempt.

Now, we have to start all over again. I’m not sure when that will be, we’ve got back up embryos in the freezer but there is a little piece of me that says ‘what if?’. What if I can never have another baby? Positivity is indeed the strongest sense of power but it’s hard to be all sweetness and light when your heart is breaking. Well, not just mine but for my beautiful husband as well, who wanted this little peanut just as much as me and who is just as powerless as me to control the outcome.

Then there’s the heartache of the boy. When I told my 9 y o this morning that, sadly, the baby hadn’t taken, my heart ripped in two as I watched tears stream down his little cheeks for the baby brother or sister he thought was growing inside his mummy’s belly. It’s okay, I reassured him. We can try again. ‘But what if it doesn’t take that time or the next time too…?’ he whispered between breaths of tears. Well all we can do is hope and pray that it works next time. We just have to be super good, I told him as I watched his broken little face put his school hat on and get out of the car.

What if I didn’t lift my 35-kg dog into the back of the car because he refuses to jump? What if I didn’t move some furniture around because I was having a ‘redesign moment’. What if, what if, what if. But there are no reasons it just isn’t. I’m just not. Like so many try and condescendingly tell you ‘it just wasn’t my time’. All we can do now is stay positive and hope that the next time it is ‘our time’ that we do have a healthy growing little bundle of loveliness that decides to enlighten our world even more…and we all three can’t wait to meet the little cherub whenever it is the little he or she does come into our lives.

As always, Lov n hugs, Lady MamaG xox

Ghost babies, standing on your head and spring cleaning your plumbing…

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Yesterday morning, the 8 y o appeared in our room at the sparrows fart looking rather pleased with himself indeed. He had carefully carried up the stairs some breakfast in bed for us. Though it might have resembled more of a milkshake in a bowl than actual cereal, it was totally fabulicious. And he was happier with himself than when Justin Beiber got his own jet. Totally the best treat ever. Completely reinforcing the positives of having children.

He is almost as desperate for a brother as we are to give him one. Always telling me he is like, the oooonly kid in his class who doesn’t have a brother and no amount of me telling him he isn’t will persuade him otherwise. He is in for a rude shock when a) if we do have one and it isn’t a baby brother and b) that it takes nine whole months for the baby to grow. Yes, this fact of life was one he was unamused with.

‘But I don’t want to wait that long for a baby brother!’ he protests. No love, neither do we, but patience is a virtue to all those born outside the month of November, son, I say and ask that perhaps he could pray to God and ask him if he might be able to send us a little baby brother.

I’ve done everything from downward dog to standing on my head and still, I wait. Mr Fertility God, if you are going to punish me like this, how about you do something constructive like give me nine months of morning sickness. Stop teasing me with all these pretend pregnancies before you send me utterly and completely bonkers.

I have vowed and declared to stave off any drinking in the preparedness of my womb (for a week or two at least). I will limit the amount of times I run 15kms (okay, slight fib). I will not jump out of any aeroplanes (lucky for me, scared of heights). I will stop eating (quite) so much chocolate and promise to do Pilates at least once a week. There you go little baby floating around in the atmosphere up there, you hear that? Your mama is getting all nice and ready for you…now just come and find me! I did say please…don’t make me say it AGAIN in my outside voice!

I may have promised in earlier posts I wouldn’t take any more pregnancy tests but I’m a control freak which also gives me the power to change my mind at will. Yet again it promises 99% accuracy. So accurate in fact, that it tells me in big fat words ‘You. Are. Not. Pregnant.’ Loser. Take that, like a slap in the face with a cold barramundi. Bastard test.

I google pregnancy test addiction support groups but the search doesn’t come up with much… just a few IVF clinics and something that looks suspiciously like a black market for surrogates or Russian prostitutes, not entirely sure which.

And just to be certain I’m not going stark raving mad (er) I book in to see a new doctor for what she calls some ‘pre-pregnancy screening tests’. When I take my seat in the good doctor’s chair (I’ve asked for a female seeing as she’s going to be looking over my lady bits, there’s only one bloke I’m happy to get that familiar with just yet and he’s my husband. Oh yes, you’d better believe I’m well aware there’s no such thing whatsoever as dignity once the little person makes their way out your love tunnel, but until which time, let’s just make acquainting myself in that area with as few males as possible.

‘Everything looks fine in here,’ she says as she puts down her speculum, pinging off her white rubber gloves and tossing them in the bin beside her. ‘You can get off the bed and get changed.’ Hmm so she obviously can’t see the ghost baby inhabiting my uterus like a little alien, either.

‘So how long have you been trying?’ the doctor asks.

‘Well so far it’s been… about uhhhhm…eight weeks I think.’ I attempt to cough out the words in the hope she accidentally mishears me and mistakes it for eight years.

The doctor looks over her little specs at me. ‘So you’ve only had one or two cycles so far…?’

Well that would be a yes, but the last time round it happened so quickly, before you could even say which colour booties should I buy, I was up the duff. ‘Yes, just one,’ I reply feeling like I’m back in school again.

‘Right, well I think you better just relax and keep trying. A fertility doctor won’t see you until you’ve been trying for at least six months, without any luck,’ she says abruptly and, I suspect, thinking to herself she has an absolute twat of a woman sitting before her.

Yes, but…I want to yell at her, it was so easy the first time, why isn’t it now? I don’t want to see an IVF quack just yet, I just want some you know, testy type things done on my pipes…check they’re still working and all that. Plumbing hasn’t been used in a while and could need a little spring clean or something.

‘Right, okay, thanks for that,’ I tell the doctor as I pick up my bag and dart out the door, tail between my legs and my ghost baby possibly falling out of my uterus as I gallop out of the clinic.

Looks like this pregnancy gig is not quite as easy as I thought it was going to be.

Back to more waiting…such fun.

Hugs, Lady Mama Gx