Forty in Fiji.. and other F words

Well, I turned 40 on holiday in Fiji a couple of weeks ago.

It would have been a wonderful way to reach a new milestone....

... had my period not started the night before.



Fuck.

Birthday blasty on board..

Apologies for not updating sooner.. I wrote three quarters of a post a few days ago before Blogger had a conniption and I lost it all! Ugh.

Anyway, to cut to the chase - we have one Blastocyst on board! And nothing in the freezer.. as usual.

My belly is still bruised (the biggest one from acupuncture!), I'm still bloated, but mostly doing ok. I caught a head cold and then developed a tummy bug right before, during and after egg collection. Reeeeeeallllly not ideal timing! Of course I couldn't take anything apart from Paracetamol. The nurse in the day surgery asked if I was feeling well and I had to whisper to her about the upset stomach. She said it was probably fine. They only managed to retrieve two eggs.. which I guess I should be happy about seeing as it was one more than last time. I only had mild sedation (fentanyl) and a local anaesthetic. This time the sedation took effect straight away - this doctor didn't muck around! The room was spinning but at least it wasn't too painful. Hubby was allowed in with me but then I was wheeled back to my cubicle to recover and he was taken away for his TESA (testicular sperm aspiration) under a general anaesthetic (his choice LOL). They said it would take 20 mins or 40 mins depending on whether they had to try both sides. I had no watch or clock but I'm sure he was away for at least an hour! And nobody came to update me! Now hubby has a heart problem and they quizzed us repeatedly about his medication and whether he should have stopped taking it beforehand. Needless to say I was freaking out! In the end I buzzed a nurse. She went away for about 10 mins to find out and then wheeled me over to his cubicle where he was just waking up. Why they couldn't have just put him straight into my cubicle in the first place I don't know! They only ended up needing to work on one side so he would have been out of surgery for at least half an hour. So frustrating!

Anyway, lesson to self - if we have to go again, TAKE THE NEXT DAY OFF WORK! I was convinced I would be fine given my past procedures. However this time I had to start work at 3pm and felt like I'd been hit by a truck! The cold and diarrhea really didn't help either. So for the next three shifts I was allowed to start at 6pm and only do a 4.5hr shift. Thank god I quit my last job.. I NEVER would have had that flexibility!

So we had our transfer on Saturday (I had to go by myself as it was 7am in the city and our darling toddler usually sleeps in until 7.30am) and I had barely slept. We went out to dinner with friends the night before and they stayed til 11.30pm! We had our toddler babysat at home and I forgot to tell her he still wears a nappy to bed. So at 3am I was awoken by a sad little soul covered in pee. By the time I got back into bed my dodgy tummy was back I had trouble getting back to sleep. That 6am alarm was the worst sound I've ever heard! I just felt like everything was conspiring against me this cycle! But thankfully the scientist greeted me in the cubicle with the good news that we had one blastocyst. The other embryo was a bit slow so they were going to "keep an eye on it" and see if it developed further and caught up. They never do. I went straight to the acupuncturist after my transfer. She fitted me in despite it being her day off. She said it was the most important one so she would have made sure she could do it for me.

So now..... we wait. This time it's a bit different. We fly to Fiji on Saturday (I'll be 7dp5dt) for my 40th birthday and I'm still not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Yes it will take my mind off things.. but I won't be able to go crazy and enjoy some deadly cocktails. I'm kind of kicking myself now. I should have listened to hubby but my usual impatience won out. I don't really know when my period is due as the Lucrin mucked up my cycle.. but I have a terrible feeling it's bang on my birthday. I'm stocking my suitcase up with sanitary products just in case.. and a few HPT sticks (although the Ovidrel I've been using for luteal support probably means I won't get an accurate result until a bit further on).

God this could all go horribly pear-shaped. This birthday will definitely be memorable.. but hopefully not for all the wrong reasons.

Oodles of needles

Well, thank god I don't have a needle phobia! Three jabs a night?! I am officially a pin cushion.

On the left we have Lucrin which I've already been taking for over two weeks. On the right is good Ol' Gonal-f. And in the middle is the biggest pain in the butt - Luveris. You need to be a chemist to know what you're doing with this stuff! Fingers crossed it works its magic on my tired old follicles. This already feels like the longest cycle ever!!

Third opinions

Sorry for the delay folks..
I was a bit gutted that we didn't even make it to transfer last round.
That one lonely embryo was rubbish.

So, here we are.
About to start yet ANOTHER cycle at yet ANOTHER clinic.

As I'm screaming (literally) towards 40 (which was my original self-imposed cut-off), I decided to pull out the big guns. Let's not waste anymore time or money. It's time to try Genea. Apparently they have the highest success rates & Dr Mark Bowman is well-regarded for his second (or third in our case) opinions.

After what felt like a relatively rushed but thorough consultation, I signed my life away & signed us up for another shot at hope. Dr Bowman is trying something different, & that's all that I ask. He said if it's going to happen (& he made no promises) then it will happen within the first couple of rounds.

I feel stupid for staying at IVFA for so long doing the same protocol over & over! I should have demanded a reevaluation or moved on after 3 cycles. And then Bump just copied the same protocol. I don't blame Bump. I think they're fine for a couple of tries, especially as they're so affordable, but that comes at a cost - they don't monitor you as much which means there's an element of guesswork involved with timings. It's educated guesswork, but after so many unsuccessful attempts, I needed more. And you have to pay for that.

So after going on Lucrin injections on day 20 of my cycle (CD20) to flatten out my hormone levels, I just had to wait for my period to start before adding Gonal-f and Luveris injections (for follicle growth). I originally asked the nurses how late my period could be on Lucrin as we have a holiday booked (for my 40th) at the end of September.. they said only about 4 days at the most. That would be perfect. At least we'd know about a week out from the trip whether I can drink or not and I'd have a bit of time to regather. So we waited. And waited. And waited.

I woke up today (CD34) with no sign whatsoever of AF. I usually have a 26 day cycle & it's like clockwork. The nurses insisted I come in this morning to test my Progesterone levels. I had an early shift & finished at 9.15am, then had an accupuncture appointment near home at 10.30am. I had to race from work to the train station, catch a train to the City, walk to the clinic, have the test, walk back to the train station, catch the train, and drive to the accupuncture clinic by 10.30.

I was late.

And AF arrived one hour later :-/

So I will add the other drugs into the mix on Monday.. ahhh 3 injections a night. Can't wait.

One is the loneliest number.

Hello strangers :)

Sorry for the lack of updates since my last cycle.. it just gets exhausting sharing bad news over and over. I try as much as possible to move on with my regular life after a round of IVF.. so please forgive me if I go MIA for a while. I promise I'll update you at some point.

So. Here's where we're at:

1dpEC

Yes, I'm a glutton for punishment. I've jumped back on that crazy arse roller coaster.
We went back to Bump for another try & I had my egg collection / retrieval / pick-up yesterday. And the result?

ONE.

Yep, ONE lonely egg.

I seriously can't believe that I endured all those injections, blood test, vaginal scan, bloating, crazy hormones, expense.. & just ended up with one egg. That's what you get in a natural cycle for F's sake!!

So, they defrosted a whole straw of DH's frozen sperm for ONE good wriggler to inject my ONE and only egg. They've booked me in for my transfer on Monday but I can't bring myself to write it on my calendar. I'm also meant to be working but I'm not going to mention it to my work yet (I'm casual). We won't get another update until just beforehand (hopefully the day before but not sure if they do that on the weekend) so I could tell them I'm unable to do my shift but end up not having the transfer anyway. IF it happens, I'll ring up sick.

DH gave me the whole "be positive" pep talk again but I just can't do it. I told him I'm sick of trying to think positively & then being crushed when the inevitable happens. It makes no difference. I know, I'm a hypocrite. I am the same person who wrote a post about positive affirmations a few years back. I re-read them tonight just for shits n giggles by the way. But I don't truly believe that my mindset is solely responsible for the outcome of a cycle. If it's going to work, it will. I've also come to the conclusion that certain foods or potions aren't going to influence things either. Not to the point that the result hangs on whether I ate pineapple before transfer or took CoQ10 before retrieval or had acupuncture throughout the cycle. But I'll admit I still do some of those things out of habit.

So to summarise, you NEVER learn how to cope with IVF the longer you do it.

Quite the opposite. Yep, I'm a basket case. Who's with me?
x

Transfer Update

Sorry for the late update.. been trying to get "out of my head" a bit & think about other things.. Ha!

So on Friday morning, (the day our transfer was scheduled for, four days past egg collection) as predicted, I received a call from the Bump lab. Out of just two eggs which fertilised properly, one had already arrested at about 6 cells and the other had only just made it to 9 cells. The scientist gave me the option of transferring the second embryo with low hopes of success or cancelling the transfer altogether. I've just realised now that I wasn't given the option of waiting to see if that embryo went on to develop further & doing a later transfer.. but then again they only do procedures on Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays so that could be why?! But he also kind of insinuated that they weren't expecting the embryo to develop to blastocyst stage anyway. It would have been classed as a good one if we were talking about Day 3.. there was little fragmentation & the cells looked good. But there was no compaction and there should have been about 12-16 cells by that stage.

I was only given about 15 minutes to call DH and make a decision. Obviously going ahead with the transfer would have some cons - the cost, both financial and emotional. Not going ahead with it would be frustrating and we may always wonder what if? We ended up deciding that my uterus was the best and most natural place for it to be & that we may as well give it a shot, even if it's an extremely long shot.

So fast forward to the following Thursday (6dp4dt) and I am trying not to get my hopes up. But Google is not my friend. On the one hand I read all these forums where women give other women like me something to cling onto. They give their own anecdotes of how they had a "slow developing embryo" and it turned out to be their baby.. or they know someone who knows someone who had an embryo that was a day behind in the lab but they got a BFP in the end. On the other hand, however, I've also come across a few pages where doctors don't mince their words & say there's very little chance that these embryos will develop further, "catch up" and attach. Or worse, some people who say they had a miscarriage or unhealthy child as a result of slow embryo.

I try to take all of these accounts with a grain of salt. But it's hard. How do you find that right balance between not losing hope so you don't get depressed, and not hoping too much so you don't end up devastated when it turns to shit? I'm already blubbering at the slightest thing thanks to the Crinone progesterone so that's' not helping my state of mind!

I've tried to carry on with life as before.. as much as one can. I've still had a wine or two (I've NEVER done this during the 2ww before I knew the result). I'm going interstate for work tomorrow night & coming back Saturday. Of course my period is due this weekend. I'm going to stock my case with a pile of tampons & not expect anything else.

Or I might pee on a stick tomorrow...

Hope is hard (1dpEPU)

Yesterday I was on such a high..

I had my EPU and, despite a little cramping, was feeling pretty good afterwards. I was buoyed by the fact that we had 9 eggs collected this round! This was awesome news and more than we'd had collected the last few rounds. The scientist called me that afternoon to say, of the 9 eggs, 7 were mature enough to inject.

Then today happened.

DH & I had a rare day off together with our toddler and it was a beautifully sunny, albeit crisp day. We decided to use some vouchers we had to go the Powerhouse Museum and let DS check out the Wiggles exhibition. He's had a lingering cold which seemed to flare up a bit today but he still enjoyed it. He ran around looking at all the old steam trains and old planes on display and absolute loved those. We had just headed back into the Wiggles section for a last look when I had a call from the Bump lab. I had to move outside as the music was too loud to hear.

The scientist said he was going to upload the information about our embryos on the portal (online webpage) shortly, but wanted to chat to me briefly about it first. It was ominous. He didn't sound positive. I always try to get a feel for the sound of the scientists' voices straight away when they call me with updates... and I could tell this wasn't one of those "good news" days.

He went through the fact that we had 9 collected, and that 7 were subsequently injected. He went over the fact that they had a bit of trouble finding suitable sperm during DH's testicular extraction, but eventually did find some that were "twitching". Apparently the fact that the quality of the sperm wasn't great, and some of my eggs were abnormal or also just not great quality, only 2 fertilised.

Two. On day one.

He could tell I was disappointed (duh) so started babbling on about how they don't check on them for a while now and that I'm booked in for my transfer on Friday afternoon and to get there about 15 mins earlier than my allocated time blah blah blah.... unless they need to contact me before then.

Yep. There's a very real chance we won't have anything to transfer. This has never happened in 12 cycles. How did things get so crap so fast? And how did DH's & my "gametes" age so bloody quickly???!!! It's only been 3.5 years since we conceived DS. Was he really our last chance? Will I never feel those amazing cartwheels in my belly again? Will I never get the chance to use the knowledge I gained during those long and delirious nights with DS and do a better job? I thought I'd just be so grateful to have him (which I am) and be ok with only having one. But I'm not. Not yet.

This "hope" thing is hard.