Call off the search and rescue people!
Remember me?
I am still here. Thank you for your cards and flowers.
The 3 percentile
Well it is now official our low low chances of IVF success are now so low they are almost non-existent.
Lifeslurper in pain
Sometimes it is really hard to not feel like a totally useless waste of space.
Old, fat, infertile, not working, and now hardly walking.
What I Know Then, If I Knew Now
We are on the eve of the twelve month anniversary of our first dealings with a fertility clinic.
Four failed IVF cycles are the most obvious souvenirs of almost one year of official up close involvement with ART. These occurred between January and August.
Are we wiser? Hopefully. Are we more informed about IVF? Partially. Are we poorer? Certainly. Are we any closer to becoming parents? Well, there is no real answer to that one.
Because I did not wait to have children
The other day the coordinator of my fertility clinic’s recruited donor egg program phoned me. This was a call intended to provide a quick answer to my earlier email regarding the importation of frozen eggs from the United States to Australia. I had only recently heard of a Queensland clinic’s relationship with an American donor oocyte ‘bank’ and wanted to know if my own clinic had similar arrangements. The response was a resounding “no”. The science experimental, results poor, conflicting with State legislation, transportation difficult and so on went the points against the idea of frozen egg importation. Somehow this spiel segueyed into a statement on why so few donor eggs are available in this country, and there it was for what seemed the kazillionth time since I was first introduced to ART: women are waiting later to have babies.
Can I state for the record now: Lifeslurper did not wait to have babies. It was not a conscious decision. At no time did I think “hmmmm….I will relax and have fun now….waiting until I am over forty, then I will think about babies.”
Rotten Eggs?
Being the farm bred gal I am, I know that chook eggs can be tested by simply being placed in a bowl of water. If they sit on the bottom they are fine. If they rise to the top they are no longer fresh. Why isn’t an equally uncomplicated test available for my own eggs?
Free range hens tend to lay their eggs in a multitude of hiding places around the farm yard. There is always a chance that these won’t be discovered until they are past their best. What is left of my eggs have largely remained hidden in my ovaries for 44 years. Very little is known about them, and no one seems to have a definitive view of the situation: fresh or not?
Questions over whether we will ultimately get to attempt pregnancy through the use of donor eggs adds a whole new dimension to this uncertain and never ending complex maze of confusion that is ART. The fact that simple information on the process of seeking and receiving donor eggs is hard to obtain only serves to ravel the issue even further.
Wobbling along nicely
Men are a strange lot.
The other night I sat with Wobbles as he read. I was writing down a few plans and started absent mindly scribbling on the inside of the cardboard of my empty anti-depressants packet. As a joke I presented him with my ink doodle that had taken minutes to create. He was instantly enchanted. He looked at it very closely and made some very complementary comments. So I took it back, signing and dating it as if it was some great work of art. Later as we got ready for bed, I noticed Wobbles carefully picking up my prescription box scribble and taking into his study. This man who never picks up after himself and wouldn’t notice three week old milk if it was left to fester on the kitchen table in the summer hear.
What was he doing with it I asked? Wobbles was a bit hesitant to tell me what he was up to. He planned to scan it so he could have a copy and archive the original so to preserve it forever. Such a simple gesture, made completely touching in its honesty.
Paying through the no$e for a baby
Somewhere back in our recent IVF past, I think it was after Cycle Two and before Cycle Three. Oh my, how these things become a blur when they begin to multiply! Anyway, we had been in the city for an appointment with our fertility specialist, and somehow it happened that the nurse could see us shortly after our appointment was over, so off we went across this large city hospital to where the action end of the clinic is located. Could we be so fortunate after making five or so of these 8 hour (round trip) travels to the clinic all in a short span of nine or ten days, get away with having to make yet another journey back for what they term the ‘nurse appointment’?
In the nurse’s office we were signing papers, how many embryos did we want transferred, 1 or 2 (the standard for our chain of clinics). As if I was thinking. Only days earlier we had made the long hike to the city, staying in a nearby motel the night before, we had travelled to the clinic’s private hospital that morning having made it with any of those pesky early morning calls to suggest that things had gone awry.
The new life starts here!
It’s that time of the year.
Being a glass half empty kind of a gal, I have to do my best to not view the year as being over by the time we pass June. It is a yearly ritual. Something I blame on too many years spent as a student*, viewing the world and indeed my life in terms of the calendar year. In the latter half of the year I tend to dismiss the months remain as the fag end of the calendar, making my own silent vows to make better use of my time in the New Year.
Since infertility and ART reared its ugly head in my life, I have become rather time obsessed. I am not suggesting that IVF has assisted me in making better use of my time. Sadly, the real result seems to be an acute obsession with passing time that seems to lead to even more time wasting than my old ways.
Too much to swallow?
This infertility malarkey requires us to take a number of rather wide leaps of faith. During an IVF cycle we might find ourselves willingly injecting ourselves with various synthetic hormones and other lovely scientific creations designed to stimulate our bodies into doing all manner of amazing things.
Of course, the honour of doing this only occurs after we have signed our lives away, by acknowledging that the clinic and doctors are not responsible for any future health issues that might be visited upon us or worse still, our future offspring and every generation thereafter, it would seem.
