Where Do I Fit?

We've just come back from friends' wedding reception - a very relaxed do in their flat and its garden (the wedding was last weekend and we missed it, sadly). The party's going on all day and I think we arrived in a lull, so there were just our friends and two other couples. All three couples had kids under three. There was much talk of working part-time, nurseries, nappies etc, etc. Our friends were talking about how their day was likely to progress. It sounds like the evening will be full of the voluntary childless folk - out for a good time, bit of dancing, a small drink etc, etc.

As we left, I was painfully aware that we don't "fit". It was lovely to see my friends (and one half of one of the other couples, who is someone I like enormously and hadn't seen since she'd had her wee boy) and I care about them very much. I'm genuinely interested in how their life is going and what their wee one is up to. But, naturally, their life revolves around their child.

Then there's the evening crowd. That used to be me! I used to like a good party - meeting people, getting a bit merry, listening to some good music (not so big on the dancing), staying out late, chatting with friends. And, apart from work, that used to be my life. But now, I have to stay sober and I'm getting a little elderly for the late nights and the loud music - and I just don't want that life all the time anymore.

Now . . . I know where I want to fit, where I would fit, where I would be happy to fit. But the problem is, you need a passport to get there, and I don't have that small, pink, loud, lovely passport. It's not like applying for a job or passing an exam - it doesn't matter how much you want it and how hard you work for it. If fate has decided against you - you can't have it! You can go through all the treatments under the sun, eat brazil nuts till you puke, treat your body like a temple, hang upside down from the lightshade after inter.course (if you're still having any!), bankrupt yourself and lose all your friends due to your obsession . . . but you still won't necessarily get that baby. 

And please - "just adopt"? Anyone who thinks there are perfect little babies piled up somewhere waiting just to be handed out to the next deserving couple that comes along and asks politely shouldn't be reading a blog like this. The adoption process makes the IVF process, with all the hormones and needles up the hooha and the shocking success rates and vast amounts of money, look like a walk in the park. We consider adoption roughly once a week, but there's only so many times a couple can pull themselves together and be strong again before they have to consider the damage they're doing to themselves and those around them. But I feel that's another post.

The only place I feel I do fit is with other infertiles/miscarriers. The relief of spending some time with another person who is going through the same kind of stuff as me is enormous. I have laughed and cried with girls I wouldn't have known under other circumstances. But it's transient - so many of these people will have their babies - so many of them have and that is as it should be - and then . . . 

 . . . where do I fit?

A Bit of Teacher Blogging

The scene - In church for the school Easter service. Sitting with my class at the front of the church waiting for the service to begin.

Small Boy: Why is there a cross on the lightshade?

Me: Well, that's kind of why we're here today. Christians believe that Jesus died on the cross at Easter, so it's a special sign to remember Jesus.

SB: Why did Jesus die on the cross?

Me: [starting to wonder where this is going and whether my theology is up to it] The rulers of the land where Jesus lived were worried that he was getting more powerful than them and they were jealous, so they put him on the cross to die.

SB: [thoughtfully] Hmmm. I suppose they didn't know about the other Jesus then.

Me: [silence and frantic thought, followed by] Um . . . the other Jesus?

SB: [in slightly exasperated tones] Yes - you know! The baby Jesus that came at Christmas.

Think we need a timeline lesson. And I'm getting worried about the upcoming stuff on birth ceremonies - we'll maybe stick to the girls' naming ceremony for Judaism.

Oh - and a good one today - 

Another small boy: [on spotting me as he comes out of after-school art club] Hi Mrs S.

Me: Hi there. What are you doing in art club today?

ASB: Art.

I had to ask!

So - Bad luck Only Comes In Threes, Does It?

Our IUI cycle is progressing. 

Our luck during the cycle has been appalling - we've been stuck in several two hour + long traffic jams getting to and from the clinic, turning a journey that should take just under an hour into a three or four hour marathon (and that's without the appointment and the other end of the journey). 

I've had a horrible time at work - far, far too much of it and a child who has decided to choose now to spend half the morning screaming (every day!). 

I managed to break the saline ampule for my first HCG jab and ended up at the local hospital at half past midnight on a Sunday night to get more. 

I think my single enormous follicle decided to pop early so we had a mad rush to the clinic a day early just in case. 

And when we tried to get away for a nice weekend with relatives (and with the second lot of HCG on a cold block in my bag), we missed our flight because the airline we were meant to fly with won't give you the option of checking in online if you're carrying sharps but then they have no method for allowing folk on earlier flights priority over those on later ones if you have to check in at the airport and then the folk in front of us in security had decided to pack their bags full of liquids and not declare them (including a tin of SOUP - I ask you!). So we got our car back from the long-stay car park and drove there, praying that the drugs would last out (think they were OK). 

The weekend was a change rather than a rest, and on the way back CM took a wrong turn and then, in trying to get back, we suddenly found the road ahead of us closed (with no warning at all ten miles back when we turned on to the road). I think we'll be staying off the roads for a bit - which is just as well, since there may soon be a petrol shortage here in Scotland.

SO I'm on to the second week of the 2ww - except, with the second HCG I think it might be closer to a 3ww. Must call clinic. Not feeling optimistic. Friends have said that I'm using up all my bad luck with the other stuff so that, come the decisive pee-stick, all the good luck will have been saved up for a BFP. 

Well, my IVF cycle (now almost 3 years ago) went similarly. I overstimulated and nearly got cancelled - got that happy news on the Friday just before my parents' 4oth wedding anniversary celebrations. Had to wait till the Monday to hear that we could go ahead. Then the family dog was knocked down on the day of egg collection (she survived, thank goodness). I was wheeled into the surgery fretting about the poor dog, oblivious to the fact that they were about to stick a huge needle up my hoo-ha! 

On the day of embryo transfer we discovered that CM had left the car in the wrong place and it had been towed and we had to run (ouch!) to my folks house to catch a lift to the hospital (nurses greeting us with enquiries after the health of the dog). We discovered that, despite having 13 embryos, on day 2 we only had one grade 2 (and it was a 2 cell) and one grade 3, 4 cell to transfer - and none to freeze. 

In my 2ww, I got caught outside all day in major heat without enough water and my car broke down at a friends flat and I had to climb the 5 flights of stairs 6 times between the car and the phone. Since this is an IF/miscarriage blog and not a TTC no 2 blog, you'll be able to work out how the IVF cycle ended. Since I've had 3 more miscarriages since then, am three years older and IUI only has a 10-15% chance at the best of times, I'm not holding my breath.

BUT - that's OK with me. I'd rather have this pessimism (realism?) than the optimism I had 3 years ago that led to real misery when there was no BFP at the end. Our hopes (such as they are) rest with donor eggs. 

On a final note: 3 comments on my last post - a record for me! That cheered me up no end :-). I've got myself onto the Stirrup Queens etc list and I'm going to get out there and read more blogs and make more comments. Thanks girls!

What Might Have Been

As part of some additional responsibilities I've acquired in my job this term, I went up to visit our school's nursery to talk about their pre-school year kids' transition to Primary 1 in August. What a mixture they are - some looking WAY too young to be coming to "big school" next year and some that would fit right in with my Primary 1 class already. When I arrived, they were having their story to settle them before home time. When it finished, the nursery nurse said "Shall we let the mummies in?" and the children started smiling and shouting "yes!". The mums came in and children rushed forward to greet them. The nursery teacher introduced a couple of them to me and they asked me some questions about how things would be for their wee ones when they start school. Once they were all gone, we had our meeting.

All the way through the meeting, and on the drive back to school, and now and again since then, I was fighting tears. Because, in the words of Jessica (who I blogged about before), "It should have been me, it should have been me". Five years ago we lost a baby who would have been starting school this year. It was the first of the 6 losses and the only one for which we had a due date - the 4th of December . That baby would be four and a half now and would be starting school in August. Instead of progressing my career and visiting nurseries to talk about other people's children, I would have been enrolling my own child at our local school - the same one I went to myself. I would have been looking at the children I teach in Primary 1 this year and wondering how my own baby would deal with "big school" - if I was working - if I wasn't on maternity leave or a career break with another baby - one of the five "what if's" that followed the first one. But instead, I'm doing an IUI, waiting for donor eggs and filling up my life with ambitions that aren't really me.

You see, I wasn't meant to be the career girl that I seem to be turning into. All I ever wanted was to be someone's mummy.

Back in the Saddle

Firstly, I was really sad to hear about Carrie's cycle. She and I have a lot in common on the IF/miscarriage front (among other things), and it would do my heart good to see success for her - for her sake, and to give me some hope it might work for me too.

We are unexpectedly back to treatment again. We were waiting for news on our donor cycle - we're near the top of the list but there's been a bit of a lull in donors/egg-sharers. So we decided to revert to the plan we had before we knew we were near the top of the DE list and go for an IUI cycle.

Having looked at the IUI thread on my favourite IF message board, I feel like this may be insanity. Those girls are mostly just starting out on their IF journey and I couldn't see a miscarriage listed in their sigs at all. It makes sense for them because IUI is what you do when you're in the early stages. But for someone with five years of trying, six months of Clomid, a failed IVF, endless IF/miscarriage testing and 6 early losses behind them . . .

However, we've established (due to the 6 pregnancies, no matter how short they were) that we can conceive without IVF. My AMH levels (hormone that indicates ovarian reserve) suggests that there's still some eggs in there. CM has some sperm issues, so the wash and scrub-up they'll get before their journey might do some good. Plus, the lovely clinic will let me have clexane with the IUI cycle to take account of my clotting issues and will also give me an HCG booster a week after insemination, which MIGHT help. Given my HCG levels have been abysmally low on the 3 pregnancies for which I had a blood test, it's possible that I have corpus luteum problems. Maybe, might, possibly - you can tell I'm not letting myself get too hopeful. 

That, and my hypochondriac nature is giving me panic attacks that the baseline scan (my first proper one in more than a year - apart from a quickie for the AMH level when they couldn't find my left ovary!!!) will show something nasty in there like endometrial or ovarian cancer. Oh, and the consultant I spoke to on the phone wondered who had told us to do a donor egg cycle as my losses were unlikely to be genetic and more likely to be "me". Yikes! Once I was able to talk again, I pointed out I was doing the DE cycle at HIS clinic and that all the losses were around 6 weeks AND I'd had every conventional miscarriage test and then some and, apart from some controversial immune issues that they wouldn't treat anyway, there's nothing amiss that some aspirin and clexane shouldn't fix. He then said that such early losses were pretty much a mystery to the medics and that just about anything I did from hereon in should be considered "suck it and see" thing. I felt miserable after this, but actually - he's right! I knew all this already - it's just hard to hear it from someone else. 

But, if anyone out there is reading this and knows anything at all about early pregnancy loss and donor eggs - is he right on that? Because 3 other IF/miscarriage folk have told me it was "the next thing to try" and everything I've read about very early losses suggests that genetic issues are the main cause. Hmmm!

Five by Five

Oh dear goodness - it's been 2 months since my last post. To be honest, when I started this blog, all baby-matters were on hold because of other health issues and so it felt a bit odd to have a blog about our attempts to become parents when there was no "attempting" going on, so I've felt a bit of a fraud. However, things have taken a significant turn in the last few weeks. The tummy consultant gave me the go-ahead to start fertility treatment again and, in the same week, just as we were wondering whether to try a round of IUI while deciding what to do next, our clinic called to say we were nearly at the top of the donor egg list and could we come in for an "implications" counselling session and to sign consents. Apparently, we could be matched and in a DE cycle within 2-3 months! Eek! And more of that to come in another post, I imagine.

This post, though, is inspired by the wonderful Carrie, over on Precious Little, who has tagged me and given me a big dig in the ribs to get on and post something . . . anything! Apparently, I need to come up with a list of hot men - what a trial ;-). There doesn't seem to be a limit on numbers, but five seemed a sensible number  - couldn't possibly put in fewer and if I went on longer I might not stop! So, in no particular order, I give you:

George Clooney

I know that finding George Clooney attractive is a terrible cliche but, in my defence, it took me a while to see the hotness. I was more into Anthony Edwards in the early ER days, and it was only once I'd seen a couple of interviews with George that I started to get it. He is witty, self-depracating and seems to have genuine principles. So I love him for his mind - honest.

Steve McQueen

I know I said "in no particular order", but I reckon that if I had to put them in order, Steve would come first. Mostly because he was the first famous person I really fancied (apart from a couple of seriously dodgy crushes on 80s pop stars - I'm not even going to tell you - far too embarrassing). In my mid to late teens I used to babysit for a couple who liked staying out really late and so I ended up watching odd things on telly in the early hours (this was the 80s remember - Channel 4 was brand new and cable was something they had in America). One of the first things Steve McQueen starred in was a TV western called Wanted: Dead or Alive, which was shown at about 1am on a Friday or Saturday night on ITV (I think). Now, I generally avoid Westerns like the plague, but with Steve in it I found that one unmissable. A troubled character in real life, a bad boy in many ways, and not at all the kind of guy I would go for in real life, but I still adore him. I have a bit of a thing for Daniel Craig simply because he reminds me of Steve.

Joe Duttine

I have no idea what I first saw this guy in - it may have been a fairly mediocre comedy called Holding the Baby - and I couldn't really tell you what it is I find hot about him. He has a northern accent, which I rather like, and he has brown eyes - I'm a sucker for brown eyes. I don't know - it's a mystery! Also, I feel I really need to include a Brit, since all the others are from the US.

Gary Dourdan

This man is just beautiful! Those eyes - [sigh]. CSI is one of my favourite shows - the original being the best. I like CSI: NY too - see the next hottie - but I cannot watch CSI: Miami because David Caruso makes me want to shout at the telly. He took Jimmy Smits' (another gorgeous man!) place in NYPD Blue and I can't forgive him for it. And as for all the dramatic poses, his mannered handling of his sunglasses and oddly phrased speech - SO irritating. But back to Gary - yum!

Gary Sinise

Another Gary, another CSI guy. I liked him long before CSI though. I think it may have been in Apollo 13 that I first saw him. Again, a bit like Joe Duttine, I'm not sure what it is I go for in him. He's a musician as well as an actor and strikes me as a decent bloke in real life. I was really happy when he was announced as the lead in the new CSI franchise and he's doing a great job of it.

Do you know, I'm rather enjoying looking for nice-looking guys on the web. I'm beginning to regret restricting myself to five. But I'll stick to my word. Being new to this blog thing and not knowing any other bloggers well enough to tag (or hardly at all, actually), I'll open this one up to anyone who wants to spend a happy hour or so trawling Google images for pics of men they fancy - it beats reading up on infertility as a pick-me-up!!

Birds of a Feather

My sister and my best friend both had miscarriages before me. It's kind of a "third time unlucky" situation for me. My sister also had two years of infertility before her miscarriage. Since both of them now have two children each (a boy followed by a girl in both cases), I did try to draw some hope from this. But as I went past 2 years of trying and 2 losses, I felt less and less reassured by their successes. That said, I am so very pleased that it did work out for them, as it means I have my wonderful niece and nephew and my godson and his sister. I love all four of them, and if I never manage to have kids of my own then I can at least be the best indulgent aunty/godmother I can be!

My sister (I'll call her B - not her initial, but it means something to me) is three years younger than me. It was a bit of a shock to me when she came along, but I blamed my parents more than her - which, with hindsight, was very perceptive of my three-year-old self. We are close and have many opinions in common, but we are also very different - to her advantage, I suspect. I was reasonably academic growing up, always had a few friends, started dating in my early teens and generally life was relatively easy for me (tho' it never felt like it as a hormonal teen, of course). She was much less academic, stuck to a couple of friends and was a late starter on the dating front. But boy has she made up for it since! She is the most determined person I know and puts everything into getting things done. As a result, she has overtaken me on every count. She got married, had kids, a proper house and a proper job before I managed to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I'd love to tell our primary school teachers that although I managed not too badly in tertiary education, it's my wee sister who is currently studying for her PhD while simultaneously holding down a job, raising two kids and renovating a decrepit house. Yeah, yeah, yeah - I'm jealous at times (would I be human if I wasn't?) - but mainly I'm incredibly proud of her and wish I had the tenacity and will-power she has.

I'm ashamed to say that when she had her miscarriage, I only found out after the long-drawn-out event and didn't have a clue what to say to her. I occasionally remind myself of this when someone avoids me, or says something stupid after one of my losses. Once upon a time, I was them. She and her husband had been trying for two years, had a go at clomid, got pregnant straight away and then found out at the 7 week scan that all was not well. Not wanting to believe the worst, she and her husband decided not to opt for a D&C but waited a further few weeks before finally accepting defeat. I wish I had known all this at the time and I wish that, if I had, I could have found a way to say the right things. Happily, she got pregnant again on the very next cycle and, although she had some very worrying early bleeding, this pregnancy resulted in my nephew (now a very spirited seven-year-old). My niece came along without the same drama two years later. Needless to say, all this means that she has a pretty good idea of how tough things are for CM and me.

I met my best friend at university. I had arrived a couple of days early at the halls of residence and had spent my evenings in the company of the Chr*st*an Un*on. They were a lovely bunch of people, and I continued to be friends with them for the rest of my time in halls. I have dabbled with religion in my time - I'm fairly sure there's something bigger than me out there - but I have an unruly side and when I imagined my time at uni I imagined more beer than prayer. So I was quite pleased to bump into KS - I'll call her this, because we quickly recognised and acknowledged that we were kindred spirits. KS lived in the room above mine and when we wanted to chat, she would bang her hairbrush on the floor or I'd bang mine on the ceiling.In Freshers' Week, we both dumped our boyfriends from home (not proud of that one - but mine really did deserve it) and took up with two guys who also became and remain best friends with each other. The romances with the blokes only lasted into our 2nd year, but the friendships are still in tact and all four of us will gather this year to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our meeting. Not bad, I reckon!

Since we left uni, we have almost always lived at opposite ends of the UK, but our lives have mapped each other ever since then. We have changed jobs, flats and boyfriends within months of each other for most of our twenties, met our husbands in the same month and she married hers five months after I married mine. So it wasn't a big surprise that we both had a bad time starting our families. She "anticipated" her wedding, as a polite relative once described getting pregnant before married, by a few months and was actually pregnant and going through her first miscarriage as she performed her bridesmaid duties for me. I didn't know it till I got back from honeymoon - she hadn't wanted to spoil the wedding, bless her. She had another loss but then, about a year after I got married and six months after my first loss, she conceived my godson. Like my sister, she had some bleeding in the early stages and had been told not to be too optimistic. She told me pretty quickly - I think shortly after she told her husband - and I felt such a mixture of happiness and jealousy. In between her 2nd loss and the successful pregnancy, I had had my first loss and I imagine she had similar feelings when I told her about that pregnancy.

Obviously, our lives have taken different forks now - she is working part-time, living in a little house in a little village as a mum of two. I am still full-time, city flat-dwelling and childless. This started to form a small wedge in the closeness of our friendship - I couldn't empathise with the new motherhood experience in the way she empathised with my losses. She was careful not to overdo the "nappy-head" mother talk, and particularly careful not to complain about the downsides of motherhood. On the one hand, I was extremely grateful but on the other I was aware that I was not hearing some important stuff!

It kind of reached a climax when I did my IVF cycle and she was pregnant for the second time. She was so sure that the cycle would work that she held off telling me, imagining the joyous moment when I told her I was pregnant and she would say "me too!" and we'd share our pregnancies in the way we'd shared so many other bits of our lives. When the cycle was a bust, I think she just couldn't bring herself to give me her news. Time passed, and it was only when I asked her if she'd thought any more about baby number two that she told me she was more than 16 weeks pregnant. It was such a contrast with the previous pregnancy - this time I was the last to know. I was very hurt at the time and I'm embarrassed to say that I started crying as we spoke on the phone. Again, she had had some bleeding with this pregnancy and had been in and out of the early pregnancy unit having checks. She had been in touch 2-3 times a week throughout my cycle and had been so supportive, but had mentioned none of this. I was as much upset that I hadn't been there for her as I was because I felt shut out. Really, I was the one that was responsible for the wedge in our friendship - her reticence was an attempt to protect me, not to shut me out. I had not long discovered blogs at this point and that night, in some intervention by the universe (or whatever thing that is bigger than me that is out there - see above re religion) in catching up with archived posts on a blog I had just discovered, I found some words which possibly saved our friendship.

I had followed a link to a blog called "Cancer, Baby" written by an incredible woman who had been experiencing infertility and then discovered that she had ovarian cancer. Her blog has gone now, and so has she - I have never cried so much over the death of someone I didn't know, but then, by the time she died I - and all the others who followed her blog - felt like I did know her. Although I contacted her husband after her death to express my condolences and my admiration for her, as an inveterate lurker (this will have to change now!) I only left one comment while she was still blogging - to let her know how much that one particular post had helped me. She replied with a lovely email, thanking me and saying how much it meant to her to help others - like I said, an incredible woman. The post was called "The Girlfriend's Unguide to Cancer and Infertility". It followed one on how, when meeting a friend with new baby, she felt huge joy for her, but found the phrase "it should have been me, it should have been me" running through her head. The "Girlfriend's Unguide" post was on how help is given to us and how we receive it - how we have to meet our friends part-way in our attempts to have them understand and help us. These two posts rang so true for me and helped me to sort through my feelings and find a way to put them into words. I then emailed my thoughts to my friend (including a link to Cancer Baby's post). KS mailed back and quickly our friendship was as good as, if not better than, before.

B and KS have been through some of what I have and have been unbelievably supportive to me - without them to talk to, I seriously doubt I'd have remained sane through all this. The fact that even they have said things that have hurt me, when I know they would never in a million years say anything they knew would cause me pain, demonstrates how miscarriage and infertility can affect the perceptions of those of us who've been chipped away at by disappointment. When Jessica, the author of "Cancer, Baby" died, her husband and parents allowed her readers to print one copy of her archives before her blog was taken down and I treasure mine. Her writing was wonderful - witty, clever, compassionate and honest - and she helped a lot of people through her blog. 

***edited to say: I had included a quote from Jessica's post here, but today I read an old post from another blog that said that her folks weren't keen on cross-posting, so I've taken it down.***