Saturday, March 21, 2009

Hey Ho - it's IComLeavWe!

And I'm joining in for the first time. Wow. A whole new way to procrastinate for a week, fantastic!

Back story - I had a child when I was 30 with my (crazy) ex-husband = the Little Guy (also crazy but in a good way). We didn't try to have tLG, he was a miscalculation of cycle times. Married my current husband, the ever-loving and endlessly-patient Big Guy at the beginning of 2008 and we started TTC. He has two kids, I have one; we decided we'd like to produce some spawn together.

The Big Guy was very excited - he thought that this would mean a couple of wonderful months of constant s.e.x. and then a pregnancy. Alas, his dreams came only partially true. With OPKs in hand, we've done 13 months of perfectly timed mid-thirties s.e.x. to no avail (except, of course, for some most excellent bonding). Given our ages (I'm 37 in May and he's 39) we started testing toward the end of last year. I've had lots of blood drawn, a lap and dye with a scope and sample and the Big Guy has done 2 SAs.

Results - one low morph result for him, nothing abnormal for me.

The Lovely Dr L.'s Conclusion - Secondary infertililty ... we'll get pregnant one day. Eventually. Or we can do IVF.

And so we did. And here's the path we've trodden so far.

Feb 08 - June 09
TTC naturally - no luck
begin investigations in Sept 08

Jan 09
me - lap, bloods and hysteroscopy all clear, DOR
tBG - 92% abnormal morph, all else great


ICSI #1 June/July/Aug 09 long down-reg
BCP May-June
0.1ml Lucrin CD2-12
225iu Gonal-F (upped to 300iu on stim day 6) CD3-13
3 follicles, 2 eggs
2 embryos tx, 1 A-grade, 1 C-grade
1 chemical pregnancy

ICSI #2 Sept 09 flare
0.1ml Lucrin CD2-11
300iu Gonal-F CD3-12
4 follicles, 2 eggs
1 embryo arrested on day 2
nothing to transfer

ICSI #3 Nov 09
antagonist + 100mg clomid
Clomid CD2-6
450iu Gonal-F CD3-13
9th Nov scan - only 1 follicle supposedly
12th Nov - 2 follicles, 1 already erupted
cycle cancelled due to mismanagement.

ICSI #4 Nov/Dec 09 flare for free
0.1ml Lucrin CD2-11
450iu Gonal-F CD3-11
3 follies, 3 eggs, 2 embryos!!!
Twinkle and Blobby transferred
24th Dec - BFN (I was a Christmas drunk)

Jan-June 10 
finish Honours thesis by the end of March
start DHEA - 75mg per day  


CD3 Bad baseline results from Jan 23 pre-DHEA
FSH = 7.4
AMH = 2.8
inhibin-B = 23


CD3 Blood tests from April mid-DHEA
FSH = 14.3 (wtf?)
AMH = 1.9
inhibin-B = 10 (wtf?)


April 28 - reduce DHEA to 50mg per day to stop mid-cycle bleeding

June 10 flare
0.1ml Lucrin CD2-11
450iu Gonal-F CD3-11
2 follicles, 1 egg
1 embryo - abnormal fertilisation
nothing to transfer

End of the IVF road.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Excited about research

Strangely, I am. Which is truly a sign that I am living in Bizzaro Land. I attended a "Writing an Excellent Literature Review" seminar the other day and somehow, against all odds, the tutor got me all pumped for research. I'm not so keen on the writing.

Speaking of which, I have been studiously avoiding doing any writing at all by paying more attention to data extraction. I knew electroencephalograms were generally messy but I never realised how many mathematical transformations were needed to make a signal into numbers I can compare statistically. Thankfully I have a spiffy program to run all the algorithms and I have just had to learn a sequence of program instructions. Much easier and oh-so-pretty at the end.

Oh, not pregnant again. This month I am cross and cranky about it all. And I am thoroughly sick of people telling me "Relax and it will happen". Remarkably, this comment seems to come from women who needed assistance to have babies - yet somehow they think that I just need to relax.

Am Not Relaxed.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Show and Tell

Stirrup Queens and Sperm Jester Palaces have a Show and Tell going on. And because I loved show and tell as a child I'm going to join right in.

This was the Little Guy when he was born...

The Little Guy was overcooked, he ended up being taken out through the sunroof after he got stuck and then he had awful Apgars, low oxygenation and proceeded to have seizures for the 4 days after his birth. This resulted in a stay in NICU, countless blood tests, IV antibiotics and antivirals, a cat scan, a lumbar puncture and a EEG. A whole lot of investigations that showed nothing. Apparently the Little Guy had seizures because he was traumatised by his birth. Astoundingly I didn't have seizures even though the birth was equally traumatic for me.

Anyhoo, way back then when I was so incredibly worried about him, worried that he was brain-damaged, worried he would die, I never imagined that he would grow into the person he is.

He is a lot of things, but he has been consistently obsessed with costumes and dress-ups from the moment he could don a funny wig and pretend to be a clown. His current obsession is with Darth Maul and being Darth Maul exactly. And I mean exactly. He has a complete melt-down if his costumes do not match his imagination. When he wanted to be Caratacus Potts in this number we had to make a straw hat exactly like Dick's. When he wanted to be Bruce from the Hooley Dooleys we had source a red top hat (unsatisfactorily) and then eventually make one.

Now his tastes have matured and his requests have become more difficult to manage. We looked at buying a Darth Maul mask but the ones he was happy with cost a zillion dollars so I bought some masks and permanent textas from the craft store, printed out a picture and left him to make his own. He was terribly unhappy with his efforts and so I reached deep into my creative heart (it's a shrivelled up stone of a heart) and made a mask for him myself.


So here's the Little Guy today. The mask is exactly what he wanted, he thinks I am the bomb and I am inclined to agree.



What a short time it seems between that small baby hooked up to all the monitors and this big boy.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

No way, no thanks, no how.

So we're not going to do IVF. We talked about it for a while and though I'm not really sure what the Big Guy thinks I think we ought to leave it. I think he'll do whatever I want, I mean obviously we're not doing it but if I wanted to then I think we would be because he'd be doing what I wanted. I wish I had more of a sense of what he truly wants for himself but I'm not really getting that at the moment.

Anyhoo, we shall keep on doing the deed and praying for a baby to come our way. I really want to have life inside me, someone else's life and am feeling more pangs and heartache now than last year. Naturally I s'pose. It's been 14 cycles and I've not seen so much as an evaporation line on any of the tests I've done. And yes I have been testing nearly every month. Maybe I'll stop doing that now (but I always say that at this point - I'm 4DPO and the urge to "just see" hasn't hit me yet).

As for the rest of life, my grandfather is still hanging on to it. His life I mean. And what an awful end this is for him. For a couple of years now he's been talking about dying (before he was diagnosed with a terminal disease) and he iterated that he never thought he'd be an invalid. Well now he is bedridden, doped to the eyeballs, wearing a nappy and being fed what meals he's awake for. He stopped eating and drinking last week for a day and a half and the family and docs thought it was the end. I dashed up to Brisbane to see him and by the time I'd arrived he'd regained consciousness and eaten dinner. Subsequently he's eaten and drunk every day.

While his cancer is painful and untreatable, it's not actively life-threatening (as in, not causing organ failure) and thus he lies waiting for the tender mercy of death. His heart, which has worried us all for that past 20 years, is ticking over as though there was nothing wrong with him so barring heart attack or dehydration nothing will kill him swiftly.

I sound so callous about this, at least I think I do. But I feel awful wanting his life to be done. Truly I do. It's just that I want his life to have quality and it doesn't. In January just before he was admitted to palliative care he threatened to jump over the balcony of the apartment if they dared to admit him. Two nights later he was delirious and unmanageable and was taken off by ambulance. This life is not the life he wanted. This end is not the end he wished for.

So I am wishing for an end for him. It's too much already. And at the same time I wish I had my Grampies back. I wish I was on Nellie sailing on the Pittwater and watching out for sandbars. I wish I was surfing in the big waves beside him and looking to see his strong body near mine. I wish I was being pushed on the swing and begging him to thrill me and push me higher. I wish I was listening to him tell me to accelerate into the corners while I drove us into his surgery for a day's work. I wish I was holding his hand and walking down the hot road to the shops. I wish I was escaping out of Mass with him and going to get a lemonade together. I wish I was listening to him sing Pavarotti in the kitchen as he makes spaghetti. I wish I was watching him lying on the beanbag with a book over his face having a nap. I wish I was listening to him tell me how proud he is of me and of how much I've managed.

I wish for anything with him but this.