Aiming for the IVF stars

Contrary to advice Teddy Lifeslurper kept all FSH in the one basket.

Sometimes the planets fail to line up in our favour.

Often life goes into a dark eclipse as the heavens throw us into chaos. While others enjoy light displays in the skies above us, the only clue of recent activity is the giant craters in my ovaries.  

Our fifth IVF cycle is over. It ended prematurely last week. There has been plenty of time to dwell on its failure since. The stars had fated this from the outset. The entire cycle seemed out of kilter, error upon mix up, topped with communication problems – it just never felt right.  

As I was being put ‘under’ Monday week ago, ahead of my egg pick up (EPU) I had a slight panic.   

The anaesthetist, who had seemed fine when I had met him a few minutes earlier, was doing things differently. Four previous IVF cycles, and one lap had taken away my fear of anaesthetics. I am not sure whether it was the violent reactions to earlier anaesthetics or the knowledge that my own father had died almost thirty years ago during surgery that had created this fear, but prior to IVF, I kept my morbid fear of anaesthetics as another of my deep dark secrets.

Ever since last year’s bout of whooping cough, I have been revisited by the asthmatic symptoms of my first 17 years. Even in my early years I could not cope with the sound of my own (or other’s) wheezing. Being conscious of my own breathing meant risking that very delicate balance I had achieved over my own shallow method of breathing. To this day, I cannot listen to The Eagles’ song One of These Nights for the ‘wheeze’ like affect at the start. Strong winds, and even hot or cool air fans can set off something in my brain causing me to fear wheezing. My childhood fear that any wheeze could represent my last breath had mostly evaporated after my last bout of lung problems well over a decade ago. Since last year’s illness, the breathing usually becomes laboured in the evening. Various sprays help ease this.

For my previous IVF procedures, there had been the gentle needle in the back of the hand, as theatre staff gently spoke to me, telling me I would start to feel sleepy very soon. This time I was not asleep yet, as the anaesthetist placed the mask over my face. The sound was disturbing my own breathing, which was already struggling under the anaesthetist’s instructions to “breathe deeply.” I was not going to sleep quickly. I felt my chest restrict. It felt like I was being put to death. I had a very quiet panic and thought how everything about this cycle felt so very wrong.

EPU was taking place at our forth out-post of the same clinic. This time we had travelled to follow our beloved fertility specialist, Dr Loverely, who had taken the clinic to a new location. Only this location is part of my own past, the site of my near decade long hell of city living. Industrial, crowded, ugly and unfriendly. For me it was a place of desolation and loneliness. During one of our first visits to this site, I asked Wobbles if he really wanted our baby to be created at such a location. “If our baby is made here, it will be the most special place in the entire world!” As usual, I liked his confidence.

Yet time and time again, as I negotiated the sizable potholes of the neighbouring paddock-turned-car park, which had obviously been an industrial site at some stage, I did not feel so confident. The clinic was not the one-stop-shop we had recently grown accustomed to. Along one side of a busy road lay a day hospital, next door the fertility clinic’s room nestled into one corner of a shared occupancy, with the pathology situated in the opposite corner. In the middle of this was a receptionist who worked for neither the clinic or the pathology group, where she faced a large and open waiting area.

A couple of buildings up was the radiology place where the ultrasounds would take place. In the end, despite the presence of Dr Loverley, it all seemed a little too makeshift and way to exposed to a non-ART world.

On the day I rocked up for my pre-EPU blood test and ultrasound, they were conveniently timed almost two hours apart. The aforementioned receptionist was growing cranky at having to give thirty fertility clinic patients the same blurb; no, she did not work for our fertility clinic, could we just take a number and wait our turn?

The young woman from the pathology company was frantic. No, she did not know thirty women were going to converge on her a 10-minute intervals. No, she did not take appointments, and appointment times should not have been given out by the clinic nurse. She said it over and over with a growing sense of urgency. Only a few of the dozens of waiting people seemed outwardly impatient. Most faced it with good humour, we swapped notes on how long each had been waiting, and how soon was it before out ultrasound appointment time.

Realising a long wait lay ahead, I went over to the radiology place to check I was actually on the list. My paranoia over added mix-ups was growing. At reception I heard a member of staff exasperated response to another client’s complaint over time delays; “we are expecting thirty women in from the Fertility Clinic this morning!” Yay! Infertile for all the world to know!

My ill-ease over the sausage factory method of squeezing us through was reaching new levels. We’d not been in a ‘timed’ cycle situation since our first doomed cycle, whereby all patients are co-ordinated whereby their EPUs and ETs can fall into the same few days of theatre time. With this latest clinic there was the option of being moved to an inner-city location should my body not conform to theatre dates. With that first clinic, well we are still not sure if there were any fall back plans in place. My sense of irony was growing; our first mishandled cycle, and the cycle that Dr Loverley asked us to agree to be our last were starting to look mighty similar. I am all for paradoxes, so my stubborn stupid hope remained that this cycle would undo all that was wrong about every bit of IVF endured beforehand.

Back at pathology, my number finally got called. Nope, my paperwork was not amongst those faxed over earlier. I was given a number to call. Outside I stood in the brisk winds and managed to get a signal. My nurse would fax the blood requests over. No, I did not have the courage to ask why she wasn’t here in person to conduct the morning’s circus activities.

After the tests were over I had resolved to make use of being in the city. I would make some of this travel work for me and return to do more research at an archival repository I spent the afternoon at two days earlier. For on Wednesday I had managed to sneak in that ‘extra’ ultrasound and blood test.

As previously outlined, the timings were all wrong. The nurse had dismissed my concerns. Once I began the FSH I had started to bleed and had five whole days of a heavy menstruation, and I was still smarting from the temporary reappearance from an earlier nurse who had forgotten to pass on the message for me to cease taking the pill back in March. I tried my best to overlook fears that more nurse incompetence was looming so I again tried to contact her. Her phone message said she would be out of the office until Friday, the day of my ‘official’ tests. I decided to pull a ‘fast one’. I went back to the switchboard and asked to speak to a nurse, any nurse. This time I got an uber efficient nurse, who on looking at my past cycle results thought I should come in for testing first thing the next day.

So it was early Wednesday the radiographer was happy to tell me the results, that there was just a pitiful three follicles in there; at 17, 10 and 6 mm. This was confirmed later that day in a mobile phone call to me at the archives by Nurse Uber Efficient. Best case scenario: EPU Monday with one real contender follicle. My E2 was a mere 487. Crestfallen, I reminded myself I had previously gotten to embryo transfer on worse results.

After a long Friday of post-testing research at the archives, as the time neared 5pm, I grew concerned that there had been no word. I would need to know when to take the trigger injection and when to expect EPU before the clinics closed for the day. Information would be near impossible to track down over the weekend. I was about to pull over to call in when the call came. It was the kind of phone call I had never received before; an enthusiastic conversation with a fertility clinic nurse.

“Lifeslurper! We are very happy with your results! You have TWO follicles!” I would be going to EPU Monday. The follicles where now 23 and 15 mm and were followed behind by one of just 5 mm. Saying that as they were growing almost 3 mm a day, there was a chance the third might by a contender for pick up as well. My E2 had increased to 946. This, she said, was consistent with having two mature follicles.

So Wobbles and I spent the weekend feeling mostly upbeat. Sure there was the usual anxiety about all the things that can and do usually go wrong with our IVF, but going on our past record we hoped that as long as one egg fertilized we would get to transfer and be in with a chance.

On waking after EPU my first thought was that I had survived my little panic earlier. I had survived that. I could survive anything IVF dished up for me. My mind turned to results, a kindly recovery nurse said she did not know my results. Then the clinic nurse came in and said the same. Instantly that horrible sense of foreboding returned. There had never previously been such a problem receiving EPU results. Somewhere in the back of my mind I hoped there had just been a breakdown in sausage factory communications. Sadly this was not to be the case.

Dr Loverley appeared, and pulled the curtain closed behind him, before taking my hand in both of his and saying; “Lifeslurper, there where three follicles, but I couldn’t find eggs in any of them.” He went on to describe the lengths he had gone to ‘flush’ the follicles out in the search for eggs.

I asked if Wobbles knew. We had been separated early, when on reporting at reception of the day hospital a staff member shouted out from behind her desk; “has your husband seen to matters next door at the Fertility Clinic?” in a very feeble attempt to disguise the news from non-ART client others in the waiting area that Wobbles needed to go to the next building and make a spermicidal donation. I would hear this request, in various eloquent forms being shouted out to the male partner of each successive arrival. Wobbles and I did not know we would not meet up again until it was all over, and so did not have our customary hug and kiss.

When I saw him again, it was really all over.

Dr Loverley promised to have Wobbles sent in. Once he had closed the curtain behind him. I put my head back and did something I have never done in a fertility clinic before: cried.

Moments later Dr Loverley stuck his back through the curtain and told me that Wobbles had gone across the road for a coffee. I could hear Dr Loverley tell someone I was distressed, and sometime later the clinic nurse stepped in and stroked my hair and said a number of: “ooohhhh….poor thing….awwwwws” and so on. I understand it was well meant.

The recovery area being small, the next bed was soon occupied by the next ‘sausage’ who earlier as we huddled close by in our paper gowns before EPU she told me she had at least 11 follicles and was certain of going to blasty while I in return remained suitably vague about my own expectations. Soon I would be up and dressed and asked to move into the seated area, where an unprecedented number of males also recovered. In this tiny area were three other couples and me and my red face and blood shot eyes. Clearly they did not have space for a Crying Room.

Wobbles entered the door opposite me and looked worried. “Has anyone spoken to you?” I whispered before telling him of this latest development. Unfailingly his first concern was for me. We were only then moved away to a private area, where Dr Loverely came back to speak to us both between procedures. He insisted we come back two days later to see him again at this outer industrial site of a clinic. He even made the appointment for us.

I felt weak and chilled as we walked back to the paddock car park. It was just before midday. Our EPU had been booked for 11. In the space of less than an hour it was over.

One week and two days later much has happened, but very little has changed. My sense that IVF and me were a bad combination from the start seems to have been played out fully.

Perhaps I should have wished on some more falling stars?