baybeasts

Egg retrieval was at 0830 this morning, though we had to arrive at 0730 so I felt nervous good and proper for an hour. Same as last time, I started to feel a fair amount of pain in the last hour before pick-up which made me shit scared of early ovulation.

It went well though. One less egg than last time, and I suspect we’ll get about 6 or 7 to fertilise, and it would just be fabby if one sticks.
I decided to be brave and refuse the lovely fentanyl in recovery this time, and bugger it, I’ve been nauseous all afternoon anyway! Nevertheless, the pain has been minimal compared to the February pick-up, perhaps as today produced less ovarian bleeding and 11 punctures rather than 17.

S said there was some heavy-ish vaginal bleeding and I was wang-packed with gauze during my slumber. The recovery nurses must have sneakily pulled the gauze out again-there’s nothing there now.

I had my third wang cam scan this morning and I was hoping to have dozens of huge juicy follicles because the doses I’ve been on are higher than last time. Last time I started on 150iu of Gonal F and got up to 300. Thirteen days of stims.
This time I started on 225 and went to 300 after 5 days. It looks like I’ll have only 11 days of stims which is probably better for the eggs. I may not have as many eggs in the end, but that doesn’t matter if their quality is better, of course.

It’s hard to fart.
A bit like when you have your period and everything is so sore and swollen that even farting hurts.
I’ve had to break the no farting whilst eating dinner at the table rule.
I made the rule in the first place.
I’m not sure whether it’s making S cranky or amused.

I had a bit of a cry today after we found out our lovely Dr David is leaving the IVF company in a few weeks. He is trying to start his own small private IVF clinic, but nothing is certain.

Most of the other IVF doctors are shitheads. It’s a real bugger.

I’m having an issue with my hair. It looks a bit like this:

I’ve been growing it for over two years now. I’m not sure why, exactly. Bean has been too ( I think it is lovely – though she is lucky enough to be beautiful enough to carry off pretty much any hairstyle). This post is very much about me, not her (though I think she feels a bit the same about some of the issues I raise).

I am struggling to know how to frame this post. Sometimes the discomfort with my flowing locks seems to be purely in the realm of fashion crisis, shallow and irritating. It’s fluffy and it annoys me. At these times I think I should just get a different hair cut, maybe sleeker and less layered, or maybe I should learn how to use a hair dryer and the straightening tongs.

But I know that even if I did these things, it wouldn’t solve the sense of discontent I feel every time I look in the mirror. It feels like something much deeper – symbolic of a series of crises of gender and sexual identification, aging, work and my place in the world. And these are what I am struggling to articulate.

It is much harder to take these feelings seriously – sometimes when I flippantly say at work that I want to cut my hair off because I’m tired of not being recognised as a dyke my (uniformly straight) colleagues look at me strangely and say, ‘why does it matter?’ I can never seem to come up with a convincing twenty word answer. This post is my attempt to explain. It will possibly be the final thinking through that will send me to the hairdresser, cherishing the moment when I can say the words ‘cut it all off’. Or maybe by the time I work it all out I will be renewed in my commitment to keeping it long for just a little bit longer.

I had lovely long hair as a young adult – straight and shiny almost down to my waist. Cutting it off when I came out in my early twenties was a revelation. For the first time in my life I liked what I saw in the mirror – I felt like I belonged in my own skin. I felt sexy, spunky, even a bit cool and edgy. These are feelings that I never had as a teenager. I never quite understood how to be a girl – I didn’t know how to make boys (or anyone really) like me, I didn’t know what clothes to wear or how to put on makeup, I always felt awkward and like I was unsuccessfully faking the femininity required of girls in my country town. I never felt like a boy either though – I just felt uncomfortable trying to match up with the gender expectations that I thought were critical to finding love and connection with other people. Sure enough, I was unqualifiedly terrible at picking up! So when I came out as a lesbian I felt like – well, there’s no way to say it that isn’t a cliché – I felt like I’d found myself. I still often felt awkward in my skin and terrible at picking up, but it was much less severe and interspersed with times of feeling decidedly spunky and comfortable (and I did pick up much more successfully!).

Now in my early thirties, I am in a stable, beautiful relationship, and I have taken this opportunity to test a theory that I had – that feeling more comfortable in my skin and cutting my hair were correlated rather than causally related. The real underlying cause, goes my theory, is that I was older, more confident, and trying to pick girls rather than boys (much more within my comfort zone). So I am still older and more confident, and I have picked up my ideal woman so have no need to worry about that anymore – therefore I should be able to grow my hair back to its lovely shiny length and still feel good. And I should do this one last time before it all goes grey.

With the loving support of Bean I struggled through some very dark days of mid-length, uncontrollable hair, and I now have the shiny locks I wanted. I get a lot of praise for them, especially from family members who are thrilled to see me looking like a girl again. But every time I look in the mirror or at a photo it looks kind of wrong. I don’t feel pretty. I have never felt pretty – the best I have ever felt is spunky, and I definitely don’t feel spunky with long, fluffy hair, no matter how good the cut is.

Something I find strange, though, is how strongly it is about the hair, rather than clothes or even weight (though these things also impact on my confidence in presenting myself to the world). With short hair I was still happy to wear skirts, and I still am, though I always feel more comfortable in pants. And while being overweight upset me because it impacted on the clothes I could wear and feel good in, it wasn’t quite the same as the slightly dysphoric feeling I get when I have long hair.

I use the word dysphoric deliberately, because while I don’t feel transgendered in the sense of not wanting to be a woman, I do feel dislocated from the set of expectations and ideals that are generally attached to the concept of ‘woman’ by the first world consumer culture that I occupy. I also feel confused, because there is no clear gender ideal that I aspire to be – I feel a bit like I have to invent it for myself. Actually, thinking about it, I guess I do have an idea of my ideal gender – it is a variant of woman, one that veers towards the androgynous but likes to play with both femininity and masculinity, one that is strong and sexy and a bit spiky. It definitely doesn’t have long, fluffy hair.

Those are the internal reasons. There are external ones as well – a whole realm of desires and confusion about wanting to be recognised as something other than the nice, straight-looking long haired lady I present to the world at the moment. I want my sexuality and my dissatisfaction with the rules of the culture I occupy to be written across my appearance. I don’t feel comfortable in the straight, conservative world I live and work in, and I want it to show, partly out of a sense of defiance, and partly as a system of semaphore, flagging my queerness to those who can read the code, flaunting my difference to those who would otherwise think me one of them.

So why do I bother keeping it long, I hear you ask, dear reader. Well, it was bloody hard growing it out – two years of suffering through every day being a bad hair day. Also, I can see that the hair itself is kind of lovely in its own way, and I would feel sad to lose it even though I can only appreciate its beauty as something not quite attached to me. Once I cut it off I know I will never grow it ever again. And it is actually kind of easy to manage – no product, less frequent haircuts, less trying to come up with a new funky style every few months. I almost never wear it out (which kind of defeats the whole purpose of growing it long, I know), and it is pretty easy to just get up in the morning and tie it back, rather than fiddling with hair product until it is sitting just so.

So for the moment I will keep it, slight sense of hair dysphoria and all. I’ll try and get a sleeker, less fluffy haircut. And one day, one glorious day, I will cut it all off and feel like myself again.

My period is due any day now, and it is a good feeling to be calmly expecting it and not dreading it. It won’t be a real period anyway-just a few days of feeble bleeding and not much pain. I’m hoping that the anxiety will ease now that the pill has stopped. It’s been foul, really deeply awful.
Last night I lay in bed worrying that the bedroom windows were not properly locked. I forced myself to stay in bed, as it was way too cold to indulge irrational anxieties.
Sigh…

I am counting down the days until the end of this cycle. One month of drugs down, one more to go. I am alarmed because with the first IVF stim cycle I found the first month quite easy and the second month much harder…

I am nearly at the ‘Stimulation’ part of the cycle. The synarel (which looks like a little white bottle) runs concurrent with the injections (which look like a pen). There are only 8 pens in the picture, but last cycle I was injecting for 14 days.

And this was our fabby pumpkin crop! Sadly we have lost about half to mould as we didn’t store them properly. We will also try to get them planted earlier this year so they are not exposed to a winter frost before harvest. We have planted out some little knobbly type carrots which are doing well so far. I’m very excited about these carrots as I’ve found them so hard to grow in the past. Must thin onions soon.

Last night we had people over for dinner for the first time in simply ages. I think it was me that first vetoed dinner parties, because I always did the cooking and started to feel very stressed about trying to produce great meals in our tiny crowded kitchen. But as the IVF effect has set in, neither of us has felt very sociable, so even though we still seem to have our fair share of going out, it hasn’t included dinner parties at our house. I am hoping that summer will bring good news and with it a desire to share food and our garden more generously with our friends. I’m dreaming of long summer evenings on the deck with cool drinks and the bbq smoking away and conversation roaming widely…

Last night we eased into it, by making it a dinner and TV night (David Attenborough’s Planet Earth – magnificent), and by only inviting two people (a couple). I think we were both really nervous about it, not helped by me somehow managing to sprain my ankle at lunch time, which led to storms of tears and panic about a messy house. But as I’m sure C and M can testify to, we pulled it together – the house looked beautiful and the food was divine. We had Saag Paneer, Dal Fry and Raita with cinnamon rice, all from the World Food Café cookbook. I think that all vegetarians need to own a copy – every single recipe that we have ever made out of it is a winner. Not only was it delicious, it was a great combination of flavours and textures, and we all ate way too much.

For dessert I made Jean’s Prune and Pumpkin Cake, which sounds kind of gross but turned out to be wonderful – light and moist and not too sweet. Jean is Bean’s grandmother, and last year, for a combined birthday present, she gave us a green ring-binder folder full of recipes that she has collected over the years, all lovingly typed out on her computer, slipped into plastic sleeves, and organised by category with matching pictures cut from magazines pasted onto each dividing sheet. It is precious. My favourite recipe so far has been Vegetarian Scones, which despite their wonderful name are simply savoury scones – quick to make and very impressive – but I think this cake is my new favourite.

Jean’s Prune and Pumpkin Cake

250g butter
1 cup castor sugar
1 tsp grated orange rind
3 eggs
1⁄4 cup orange juice
3⁄4 cup cold mashed pumpkin
1⁄2 cup finely chopped prunes
2 cups self raising flour
1⁄4 cup milk or thereabouts

Cream butter, sugar and orange rind. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Stir in the orange juice, prunes and pumpkin, then add the flour alternately with the milk until you get a fairly soft cake batter. Pour into a 20cm round tin lined with baking paper and bake in a moderate oven for 1 – 1 1⁄4 hrs (I thought that seemed really long, but trust me, it’s about right). Rest for five minutes and then turn out onto a rack.

(Well, we should have known that daily posting was setting the bar too high. But at least we are posting again at all!)

I have been feeling wierdly anxious. I hope it is just the pill. My ivf counsellor thinks it is the hormones and suggests listening to music, walking and cooking good food. Such solid sensible advice.

The synarel (nasal spray) is making me headachy and light headed. I don’t think it is causing the anxiety. S thinks everything is harder this time because the stakes are so much higher.

At least the weather is getting warmer…

The daily posting continues!

Today I present a portrait of Bean, drawn by the son of some very good friends of ours, in the innovative medium of magna-doodle.

Isn’t she cute? Isn’t he talented? Aren’t I lucky?

I’ve had a great run this year. A sore throat six months ago and a touch of hayfever and that’s been all. I’ve been on the pill for nearly three weeks and had nausea and a wee bit of thrush (nothing some icy cold plain yoghurt couldn’t fix) but nothing else. No sore or full breasts. Much wellness and calm.

Out of the blue today, I threw up! (i blame the Rev milk at work which is really water from the dishwasher mixed with skim milk powder…)
I had horrible stomach pains for an hour after brekky and then had to go chuck. I’m not a chucker. Last time I threw up was about three years ago after an unfortunate amount of vodka. I only throw up every three years or so and usually it’s alcohol. Wierd. Stuff came out the other end too, so I’ve decided it’s mild gastro. Sadly, it’s not pregnancy as I’m well into being down-regulated.

Synarel twice daily snorting starts tomorrow and continues for one month (until egg retrieval). Stim injections start on the 15th August.

I am very grateful for the chance to hatch a new dozen and of course terrified that it won’t work this time either.