Eggs
As bean mentioned in the last post, pick-up went very well indeed. It was much less stressful for me, as we worded the anaesthetist up before-hand – bean doesn’t want to be awake during the procedure, please, so no wriggling please. The first drug they give her must be something really good – last time she was cracking jokes about how spunky I looked in my scrubs and funny blue showercap; this time she was demanding that somebody in the theatre tell her a dirty joke. The theatre staff are used to it, I guess, and always play along good-humouredly. The recovery nurses were not so lovely – after telling me that I couldn’t stay by bean’s side because they needed more room, they proceeded to use that room to discuss the merits of the new patient trolley she was on, using their feet to shift her sleeping body up and down as they raised and lowered the trolley.
Also unimpressive are the lectures we keep getting from the nurses and scientists when we ask for detailed information about our embryos. It’s like pulling hen’s teeth. They hate to give away anything, usually because ‘you shouldn’t get too invested in the cell numbers/number of embryos/whatever because things might change.’ Well, der! They keep talking to us as if we are completely uninformed about IVF, and the best solution to that is to keep us as uninformed as possible. In fact, we are very well informed, and like to know everything. After all, these are our embryos, this is bean’s body, and the outcome of all of this is the stuff of our life. Not to mention the obscene amount of money we are paying them. So we keep pushing, and luckily for us Dr David understands where we are coming from and supports us by pushing as well, so eventually we found out that we have seven four celled, grade 1 and 2 embryos (one of which is hopefully blissfully cosy inside bean right now), which means that we have six very good frozen embryos plus a couple of not so great ones. This takes a great deal of pressure off us, because if this one doesn’t work, we’ve still got another six good chances.
Daffodils
Last Friday was Daffodil Day. A mate of mine at work was keen to get involved, and so we plotted fundraising activities, primarily selling bunches of daffodils and cupcakes. As the Cancer Council had run out of pre-ordered daffodils, we managed to find a way to get into the wholesale markets (thanks Russell!) to buy them ourselves. It was magic. It was a rainy morning, still pitch dark when we arrived at 4.30am. The flowers were all in a huge shed that smelt of florists. There were masses of all kinds of flowers at ridiculous prices, and people wandering around in fluorescent vests piling huge bunches of them onto big trolleys. We bought 130 bunches of ten daffodils each, and I bought several bunches of poppies and tulips for home. That day, my lounge room was filled with daffodils. I will update this post with a photo soon.
Doctors
I think we mentioned that Dr David is leaving our IVF company to set up his own, smaller, friendlier clinic. We are terribly sad about this. This might sound a bit odd, but I keep having faint echoes of the kind of feeling you get when someone breaks up with you – a sort of sick, betrayed feeling mixed with hopeless affection. We will miss him a lot – the warm smile; the way he worked out really quickly that we were well informed and then adjusted his language accordingly; the way he listened to what we wanted and went along with it if he could; his badgering of the nurses and scientists to give us information; his unfailing politeness; and the way that, when we gave him home grown vegies, he would always manage to remember and report back every single meal that they were used in. We have an appointment with another doctor, should we need her; and if the worst happened and we needed to do another stim cycle we would consider going to his new clinic, but the chances are that we won’t see him again, for the wrong reasons (the right reason would have been because bean was pregnant). And I’m sad.
