This is the hardest part

Earlier today, I said that the hardest part of this journey with trying to conceive is waiting, waiting each month to see if a miracle has happened and you are pregnant. You spend those two weeks trying not to get too hopeful, but nevertheless hope bubbles up – you allow yourself the luxury of  a few moments spent working out the due date and you picture yourself holding your longed for baby in 9 months time. You keep on hoping..right up until the moment your hope dies.

My hope died again this afternoon when the cramping and spotting turned into a full on bleed and I couldn’t pretend it was implantation symptoms anymore. My period has come and the IUI has failed. I want to crawl into a hole and never come out again.

I should be ready for this shouldn’t I? I shouldn’t be sitting here typing through my tears. I shouldn’t be feeling this aching emptiness again as another month of trying and failing to get pregnant comes and goes. Yet here I am doing just that.

I don’t know how it can be any other way. You invest so much of yourself mentally, emotionally (and yes financially) in each attempt at assisted conception. Not only did I have the IUI procedure, but I also had acupuncture to help with the implantation and went for a hypno-fertility session where I visualised implantation taking place and held onto that image right up until this afternoon.  You have to believe, you have to have hope, but when it doesn’t happen, it takes such a toll on you emotionally.

How do we keep going on this path? I am finding it really, really hard right now and you know what, this isn’t even the hardest part of it all. The hardest part is when your miracle happens and you conceive your baby only to lose him again.

The waiting is the hardest part

Just heard an old Tom Petty song on the radio, The Waiting and the words of the chorus have stuck in my mind

The waiting is the hardest part

Every day you see one more card

You take it on faith, you take it to heart

The waiting is the hardest part

Well I am not sure that it is the hardest part of this whole process, but it certainly isn’t easy. The closer I am getting to the end of the 2-week wait, the more anxious and nervous I get. It doesn’t matter how much I tell myself what will be will be, I still count down the days, one day hopeful and excited, the next stealing myself for disappointment, not to mention googling and imagining all the early signs of pregnancy I know off my heart at this stage.

I’ve been having dark spotting and cramping over the past few days, and although I read that only 4% of pregnancies experience this as implantation bleeding and pain, I am clinging onto it as a hopeful sign.

And now we wait…

Home from the clinic. Bit stressful – a few minor problems and at one point, I didn’t think the procedure was going to go ahead, but after a bit of delay, we had it done.

I’ve just been reading through what I wrote after my last experience with IUI and I am feeling very different this time. When I left the clinic this evening, I felt a huge weariness come over me. It was such an emotional time last year after the excitement of the successful IUI, the thrill of seeing our baby’s heartbeat, and then the devastation of miscarrying our little baby boy. I just feel a weariness at what is ahead. Either the IUI will result in a negative result in two weeks time, which will be a huge disappointment, or it will result in a pregnancy, which is of course what I want, but then I have to face the possibility of going through another miscarriage again.

I think it’s just hit me how really scared I am and how hard this fertility road is – it requires huge reserves of resilience, courage and emotional strength and just at the moment, I seem to be all out of that.

And it’s game on

Had the scan today. Butterflies started about an hour earlier and got increasingly more fluttery as we had to wait in the clinic for our appointment. I was trying to steal myself for doc saying that I didn’t have any nice juicy follicles but a nice big one emerged…only one, but he is happy to go with it.

So, it’s game on for next Tuesday afternoon!

On the road again…

What's Willie Nelson doing here?

What has Willie Nelson got to do with a fertility blog??

Well, all week I have had this line from a Willie Nelson song going round and round in my head

I’m on the road again

Yep, I’m back on the fertility road again. I have dusted myself off after last year’s heartbreak and all week I’ve been doing my Gonal F injections and sniffing my Suprecur nasal spray. Tomorrow I go for a scan at the fertility clinic to see if the injections have worked and if I can go ahead with an IUI.

I feel excited, I feel nervous, I feel hopeful, I feel anxious, I feel..lots of things..but one thing I know for sure…

I’m back on the road again.

New hope for women at risk of miscarriage

Great to read this latest piece of news in today’s Irish Times:

WOMEN AT risk of miscarriage are becoming pregnant following treatment with an inexpensive intravenous infusion, a major fertility conference in Dublin has heard.

A new study carried out by Care Fertility in the UK has shown that use of the special infusion resulted in 50 per cent positive pregnancy tests in a group of women with recurrent embryo implantation failure following IVF.

Dr George Ndukwe, medical director of Care Fertility, told the Fertility 2011 conference in Dublin that 20-25 per cent of women trying to have a baby could have faulty immune systems.

“Every day in my clinic, I see women who have endured numerous IVF cycles, all with the same negative outcome,” said Dr Ndukwe. “I also regularly see couples who have suffered the misery of repeated miscarriage.

“We are devoting our attention to finding answers when nature goes wrong. This infusion is inexpensive, well tolerated and easy to administer.”

The average age of the 50 women in the study was 37 and the mean number of failed cycles was six. A matched cohort of 46 women who had no therapy had a clinical pregnancy rate of just 8.7 per cent compared with 50 per cent.

“Previous studies had treated the condition with Humira, a drug used in the management of rheumatoid arthritis. Humira is expensive [a prescription costs up to £2,000], it has risks and is unsuccessful in about 20 per cent of patients, ” Dr Ndukwe said.

He found that intravenous Intralipid was more effective, and cheaper at £200. Intralipid is a fat emulsion containing egg extract and soya oil, used for patients requiring intravenous feeding

Fertility method raises pregnancy rates

From today’s Irish Times comes a report about a new assisted reproductive technique which analyses embryonic chromosomes is significantly increasing pregnancy rates in couples struggling with infertility, particularly older mothers.

The Fish technique, developed at the Institut Marquès in Barcelona, is now being applied to Preimplantational Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) to analyse all embryo chromosomes in a single cell and to identify which embryos derived from invitro fertilisation are healthy enough for transfer to the uterus of the woman.

Click to read more

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2010. That’s about 31 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 48 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 124 posts. There were 14 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was August 14th with 136 views. The most popular post that day was Home again.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were beyondbreastcancer.wordpress.com, womb4improvement.blogspot.com, stumbleupon.com, en.wordpress.com, and twitter.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for saint anne, wurn technique, up movie, st anne, and st. anne.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Home again August 2010
20 comments

2

St Anne, patroness of childless couples July 2009
1 comment

3

What is the Wurn Technique? June 2009
3 comments

4

The cartoon that made me cry October 2009
5 comments

5

The 2 week wait August 2009
2 comments

I said I wouldn’t complain but…

My period is a week late and I had convinced myself that I was experiencing some classic pregnancy symptoms for the past week – headache, low back ache, overwhelming tiredness, queasiness…I told myself not to get my hopes up and that after last Christmas Eve’s events, to stop believing in Christmas miracles. And yet, we do, don’t we? Continue to believe..particularly when the snow outside my window lends an air of magic to everything.

I duly purchased the pregnancy test and promised myself I wouldn’t test too early, but now a week has passed and still no sign of my period. I decided to test this morning..but all I got was that sad lonely old empty window telling me that this year there won’t be a Christmas miracle.

I promised myself I wouldn’t complain, but sometimes you just need to let the sadness out, before you paint on your happy Christmas face.

Ouch! It hurts!

As part of the thorough investigations ongoing at the Beacon Clinic, I had a laporoscopy and hysteroscopy yesterday and ouch! I am in such pain after it. I thought it was minor surgery and I suppose it is in many ways, but I didn’t expect it to hurt so much.

For those who are non-squeemish and may be interested, laparoscopy is an operation performed in the abdomen through small incisions with the aid of a camera.  It involves two to four incisions: one through the navel, where the scope is inserted, and one to three on the lower abdomen near the pubic hairline, to insert the tools used to manipulate your organs. It can either be used to inspect and diagnose a condition or to perform surgery. In my case the doctor was investigating a possible case of endometriosis as well as having a good old look at my reproductive organs.

And I had a side order of hysteroscopy with this procedure. The doctor wanted to take a look at the lining of my uterus, which is quite thick and to see if a problem in my uterus may be preventing me from becoming pregnant.

So now I feel as if I’ve been in a car crash – my tummy is aching – it hurts to sneeze or cough – I would say to laugh, but I ain’t laughing! My shoulders also ache from the carbon dioxide that was used to fill the abdominal cavity. And my tummy is distended and bloated too as a result. I can’t straighten up to walk right  – I’m like an old crone bent over shuffling along. Remind me to be grateful when I’m no longer in pain, as we forget too easily how great it is to be able to do all the things we take for granted normally.