baybeasts

We have just come back from a whirlwind trip to Brisbane for a funeral (my grandfather) and an engagement party (my cousin). Here’s a picture of Stan and his family. He was my Mum’s Dad. I had to give part of the eulogy with 5 minutes to prepare and two toddlers calling out to me across the chapel. “Where’s dead Stan?”

As I had no father or siblings, Stan was the most important man in my life as I grew up. He taught me to ride a bike and catch a ball. He tickled me too hard and too long when I was little. He showed me I could drive down super steep hills and around big scary roundabouts. We fought constantly and as a teenager I often avoided his company. But when I cut off my hair in my early twenties and started bringing home women, he never treated me any differently. One of the last big conversations I heard him have (and these were quite rare), was with S about 6 years ago. She talked with him about the war and about his career in the public service. He deliberately retired early at a time when jobs were few and younger folk were in danger of being retrenched. He tickled too hard. But he always meant well.

And so. S had a chemical pregnancy, poor bugger. It’s a bloody awful feeling. That brings our combined total to 10 failed IVF cycles this year, including a cancelled cycle, a miscarriage/D&C and 3 chemical pregnancies. I just heard that our IVF company will let us know tomorrow if they have enough xmas staff to allow S to cycle over Dec/Jan. I will be so glad when we never have to deal with them ever again.

2009

bean jan - fet - bfn
bean mar - fet - bfn
bean apr - fet - bfn (early chemical?)
bean jun - fet - cycle cancelled - multinucleated embryo
bean july - stim flare, blast transfer - bfn
sorenson july - fet - 8 week miscarriage, d&c
bean sept - fet blast - bfn (chemical)
sorenson oct - fet - bfn
bean oct - stim antagonist 2 blasts transferred - bfn (chemical) nothing to freeze
sorenson nov - fet - ?
bean dec - ?
sorenson dec - ?

We’ll try for one more year

Juliette Lewis is hot. I’ve been panting after Queen Latifah for years, but she’s in third place now. S, of course, is number one.

In more bloggy news, I seem to be a wee bit pregnant.
4 weeks and 6 days pregnant. If this 1.5 mm embryo manages to hang in there, it will be due late July. We are ecstatic and terrified, but at least the odds are on our side now.
I first felt something different from about day 9 post ovulation(dpo) when I felt a few low achy feelings a bit like constipation (or, a lot like the ache I had once with haemorrhoids, or sometimes get with sexual arousal). I reckon it’s from blood congestion. The ache is still there, and much stronger. Sometimes I sit on a pillow.

HCG on 14 dpo was 155 and 17dpo it was 758 which is a doubling time of about 31 hours. Which is good. Scan is in a week and a half from now and we are hoping madly to see a heartbeat.

This is a cool web site-I am up to Carnegie Stage 9. (19-21 days post ovulation)

Our delightful IVF company like us to pay our monthly bill before we have treatment.

They recently sent us our next bill. Their euphemism is ‘pre-treatment quote’ but there is a big stamp at the bottom of the letter which says:

THIS ACCOUNT IS PAYABLE IMMEDIATELY.
PLEASE SEND YOUR REMITTANCE WITHIN 7 DAYS

We are used to their bold demands. What freaked us out this month was that they increased their fee for frozen transfers by nearly 60%, completely without notice.

Well FRAK ME.

Apparently they employed some snazzy new business manager who did a ‘time and motion’ study which came up with the brilliant conclusion that they could charge A WHOLE LOT FUCKING MORE.

It’s lucky I get paid reasonably well for squeezing milk out of breasts as we’re now facing nearly a grand every 3-4 weeks.

We have achieved a lot in the garden over the last two years. (The after shot is a bit like ‘Where’s Wally?’, hey.)
S is usually hiding in the vege patch. Sometimes I can’t see her from the back door, for the longest time.
And then she stands up.

We have a Japanese guest staying here for one week.
We were trying to explain to her why some people eat Vegemite. I was trying to think of a link to miso, to help explain the culinary context.
Yeast! It has yeast in it like miso, and that’s why it tastes um, yeasty, I helpfully explained…

We have met our new IVF doctor. We now have doctor kate. She has ordered a barrage of blood tests including a chromosome analysis of me and our donor.
I’ll also need (another) hysteroscopy some time soon.
I can say with certainty that taking a break from trying is not emotionally helpful. If anything, it is becoming more excruciating seeing the proliferation of pregnant bellies and small children everywhere I go.

Last week was Sorenson’s (second) try. We are back to the jar and syringe method of attempted conception.
We are not feeling terribly excited or hopeful, but fingers are crossed.

It seems I bring my reproductive incompetence to a variety of situations. We picked up the jar of semen (thanks R!) and drove to our friend’s house (thanks T!).
I did then put the syringe into S and I did squeeze in the semen. And it did come straight back out again.
Honestly, for pete’s sake…

thank god for battlestar galactica

Bean says she doesn’t want to write on the blog anymore. I think it has been infected with the taint of failure. The same thing happens with anything that is associated with infertility for us. When we first started trying, we decided that we would do something nice each month to try and make up for the disappointment of a failed cycle, and being us, that something nice involved dinners out at lovely restaurants. After a few months though, the glorious flavours of fine dining turned to ashes in our mouths, as eating out became associated with the dry, grey taste of disappointment. We stopped marking the arrival of bean’s period with anything other than hot water bottles and a visit to the DVD shop.

Now the blog has become a litany of failed attempts and sadness, so that is boring to write and probably even more boring to read. We don’t have the biting wit of Akeeyu or Julie, or the warmth of a Tertia or a Julia, and we can’t think of anything interesting to say about the world like Az or Ange or Nix can, because our world has become so small. So the easiest thing to do seems to be to just give it up.

But somehow, I expect that I will still post every now and then, even if bean doesn’t. Sometimes I like to have a semi-public place to ramble, even if I don’t have much to say.

The guard is changing in another way too. We have decided that, given my age and our frustration with not having managed to produce a baby yet, that I will start trying now too. I’ll start the old-fashioned lesbian way, with furtive exchanges of jars of sperm (thanks R!). Hopefully my ‘legendary’ fertility will step up to the plate and a syringe and a prayer will be enough to get me pregnant. Wish me luck – I certainly need it. A good dose of hope (a scarce commodity when infertility is around) wouldn’t go astray either.

no luck
very sad and tired
am going off the air
thanks for your attention

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.

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.