baybeasts

My period decided not to wait for the blood test tomorrow.
I decided to rub it in by doing a home pregnancy test.
Just to be sure, to be sure…

yep.

-period pain
-blood
-negative home pregnancy test

but to satisfy our IVF company, I’ll have to have the bloody blood test tomorrow. S is beside herself. I’m numbish, but will (typically) have a delayed reaction.

P.S. Many bloggy thanks to those who comment now and then. It makes us feel all warm and squishy.

there is nothing that makes waiting easy. last night i said to bean, citing directly from my own experience,

“it’s like when you are a kid, and you know you are going to australia’s wonderland next weekend but you just can’t bear it that you have to wait between now and next saturday for the weekend to be here and you can just feel it like a big squirmy feeling in your chest and your stomach and it is unbearable.”

and she said,

“no it’s not, it’s like you might be going to australia’s wonderland next weekend but your parents haven’t said if you can go or not, and they won’t until the morning that you are supposed to be going.”

that’s exactly what it is like.

the advice that so many people give us - to forget about it, try and think about something else, keep busy etc - simply doesn’t work for us. by far the most satisfying activity in this particular wait has been - wait, this deserves a story.

bean told me this story when i asked her why she wanted to be a midwife (because she is so brilliant and beautiful that she really could have done anything she wanted). when she was a child, she loved visiting her aunt, who was a nurse. this aunt (perhaps because of fertility problems of her own) had an interest in all things reproductive, and had bought two gloriously gory textbooks, full of dry words and frightening pictures of women’s insides and all the things that can possibly go wrong as a zygote divides a gazillion times to make a baby. i can’t remember - perhaps the books were forbidden to bean? anyway, she would pore over these books for hours, and this is one of the places where her fascination with all things baby began.

i love this story - the image of a little bean so engrossed in these big, heavy textbooks with their knobbly bloody illustrations. and so when we went to brisbane and visited this aunt in her home, i asked for verification - is it true that bean loved your textbooks? and she not only verified, but disappeared upstairs and came back down carrying the very textbooks in question. they are indeed gloriously gory and almost quaint - the kind of textbooks that you see in op shops with their dull covers and grainy black and white photos and diagrams revealing the outdated, the mysterious and the freakish.

in this two week wait, bean and i have pulled out the one on embryology, and have been tracking the little four-celled pip’s hopeful progress from zygote to morula to blastocyst - it is now called something very long and complicated that i can’t remember, and if we are the lucky 30% it will have embedded itself deep into the endometrium and established primitive circulation. to follow up the bread and jam analogy, the pip has found its way through the jam and is sitting right up against the bread, and is just starting to send out little thread-like roots into the bread.

i don’t know why we hadn’t thought of doing this before. i think actually seeing the perfection of those four tiny cells on the screen before dr david gently squirted them inside bean has made it seem more real - we can easily imagine those four cells dividing and dividing again. before, we didn’t even know if the sperm and eggs were managing to meet at all.

and it helps. knowledge is power, in a situation where power is so far out of our reach.

You’re To Kill a Mockingbird!
by Harper Lee
Perceived as a revolutionary and groundbreaking person, you have
changed the minds of many people. While questioning the authority around you, you’ve
also taken a significant amount of flack. But you’ve had the admirable guts to
persevere. There’s a weird guy in the neighborhood using dubious means to protect you,
but you’re pretty sure it’s worth it in the end. In the end, it remains unclear to you
whether finches and mockingbirds get along in real life.

Take the Book Quiz

You’re Catch-22!
by Joseph Heller
Incredibly witty and funny, you have a taste for irony in all that you
see. It seems that life has put you in perpetually untenable situations, and your sense
of humor is all that gets you through them. These experiences have also made you an
ardent pacifist, though you present your message with tongue sewn into cheek. You
could coin a phrase that replaces the word "paradox" for millions of
people.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I’m not the only one who worries about pooing after a transfer!
From her very own…

Nurse CutiePie told me that as soon as we were done, I could get up and pee.  “It’ll be up there.  It’s not going to fall out or anything like that.”  I told her about reading an IVF bulletin board post about a woman who was afraid she’d pooped out the embryos by going to the bathroom immediately after transfer, and Nurse CutiePie said “Seriously?  Where did she think they’d put the embryos?  Maybe that’s why they needed to do IVF: They’d been doing it wrong.”

Before the transfer, I was worried about having to poo.
I was worried that the movement of bowel would create sympathetic movement in the uterus and usher out our little pip in an untimely fashion.
(you know, like when you have your period and get the runs?)
Anyway…I shouldn‘t have worried. Actually, I don’t give a shit.
For real, mate.
There has been very little bean poo.
For this I have to thank the progesterone goop that gets shot up the wanger every night. It’s drying out my nether regions to a chip. Everything is dry. Dry poo. Dry wanger.
Don’t care about the wanger. That’s not seeing any action for a spell.
But the poo.
Usually 3 prunes would do the trick. I ate half a packet, a gallon of water, some pear juice, a whole lettuce and some norma-fibe and still had a pretty unsatisfactory result.
I hope the stolen moisture is keeping the endometrium nice and juicy-that’s what it’s meant to be doing.

I am feeling physically much better. Two of my friends are feeling terrible. The (quite a bit) older friend was left last week by her girlfriend of eleven years, necessitating immediate sale of their large property(mortgaged), and busy B&B business. She was left for someone her partner had been having an affair with for some time. The property was going to be their ’superannuation’.

My other friend gave birth to her baby at 38 weeks, but he died 22 hours later from complications relating to a diaphragmatic hernia.

It’s left me feeling sick and shocked and lost for words.

last night bean read the book that the ivf company gave us with different eyes. this time she saw the terrible statistics (30% chance of a positive pregnancy test, but only a 21% change of a fetal heartbeat at 7 weeks); the endless encouragement to put in two embryos instead of one; the hopelessness of it all.

i am tempted to write down all the hard things from this week (there a lot), but that will just turn this into another angsty sorenson post (what, you mean it is already? darn). just let it be known that i can’t wait for this week and the next to be over. and i can’t stop thinking about that little pip lodged in bean’s belly. no matter how hard i try to be all stoic, i can’t help feeling somehow desperately hopeful and yet helplessly resigned all at the same time.

I’ve had constant pain since egg pick-up. Anything abdominal that could hurt, has. Finally some relief this morning - I was able to roll over in bed without wanting to moan. It’s been freaky and exhausting. The 7 weeks of wacky hormone drugs was much more fun.

Details…

17 ovarian follicles (about 2 cms each) out of which we got
12 eggs of which
8 fertilised of which
6 divided normally
so,

we put one back in, and chucked the other 5 in the deep freeze when we got home (um…just kidding). The other five fertilised eggs are in liquid nitrogen at about minus 200 deg Celcius. They won’t all survive thaw, but we should get another few attempts if this one doesn’t stick.

If the little pip is still ‘alive’, it is an early blastocyst. It’s not very pretty. I’m looking forward to the weeks when it has a tail. So cool.

yesterday we presented ourselves at the RWH at 7am as instructed, but it was all dark, because we got there before any of the staff. the receptionist, when she finally arrived, was rude and we felt a bit despondent - after sitting in the dark for ten minutes it would have been nice to be greeted with a smile. luckily all the other staff more than made up for her crankiness. the admitting nurse was warm and chatty, bean knew the anaesthetist and was relieved that he was one of the nice ones, the theatre nurses were unobtrusive and the recovery nurse was a fellow dyke who we had met before and who treated us with extra special care. and you all already know how we love Dr David. did we say that on the first scan we took him some garden produce (potatoes, onions, basil, tomatoes)? ever since he has been telling us the meals he made out of it!

the procedure was over very very fast. bean was desperate to stay awake, but we didn’t realise until the very last minute that this was unlikely to happen. when they say ‘light sedation’, we think they mean ‘woozy happy good feelings’, but what they really mean is ‘fast asleep’. ‘woozy happy feelings’ did get a look in for about two minutes. bean said “i feel drunk” and then got very chatty, telling me i looked spunky with my blue theatre hat on and cracking jokes with the anaesthetist and nurses.

then suddenly she was asleep, and it all got a bit scary. Dr David was lovely, talking me through the procedure. it was fascinating and kind of full on to watch on the ultrasound screen as the big dark follicles bent with the pressure of the needle, popped back as the needle penetrated, and then slowly collapsed as the fluid was drawn out. small test tubes of pink fluid were passed from between bean’s legs over to the scientist, who was searching through it for eggs in the next room. there was a palpable sense of relief when she called out ‘first egg’. i was transfixed by bean and the screen, but at one point one of the nurses tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a video screen above my head, which was showing a big lump of mucousy looking stuff - an egg.

because bean had said she wanted to be awake to see what was happening, about a minute into the procedure the anaesthatist let her come out of sleep a tiny bit. it was horrible. she started moaning and writhing, trying to twist her body away from the needle as it probed her ovaries. he immediately gave her more drugs, and soon she was fast asleep and breathing heavily (not quite snoring - just deeply asleep as if she was at home in bed). i still feel freaked out when i think of it - it is so hard to see someone you love have pain inflicted on them. in fact, watching them do all sorts of stuff to her was really weird - moving her body around, poking and prodding, controlling her mental state…luckily, she doesn’t remember a thing. and i am still glad i was there, to hold her hand and witness the eggs - to be part of this strange way of making a baby.

the whole thing was over very fast - it only took maybe 15 minutes. recovery on the other hand took about two hours, and bean is still very sore and swollen. transfer is tomorrow - a much less invasive and scary procedure.

and we are pleased with our results. we got a good number of eggs, and more than half fertilized, so we have just the right amount of embryos - enough so we feel we have a good chance of getting pregnant, but not so many that we will have heaps left over. another hurdle down…

I have been phoned. Trigger injection is tonight at 7pm. Tomorrow is a drug-free day. Thursday we present at R.W.H. at 7am for 8am egg pick-up.

Wesley and Giles are, of course, Buffy’s Watchers.

Two balls of wall. The one I rolled on the left, and Sorenson’s on the right. I choose to take it as a sign that she’ll have an easier time getting pregnant (because she can do so many things I can’t).