FCFU

Yes siree.

I am indeed.

Goodbye assisted conception - you drained our savings for NOTHING.

When I did my 'current status' sidebar tally, I thought to myself "what the fuck were you thinking Pundy? You are a super-freak and a moron all at the same time." In all my time in the blogosphere and trawling through Dr Google I have never come across anyone as poor at egg-making yet try-try-trying as me. Super-dooper-freak.

So Sunday was pretty fucking awful as you can imagine. All that sunshine, lollipops, rainbows and blah blah blah turned dark in an instant. In the time it took to hear my phone ring once and see a number I didn't recognise which meant it was a doctor calling right before we were about to leave the house (literally right before) to tell us not to bother. Luckily I'd just taken two val.ium and a pana.diene forte (my back had seized, fibromyalgia sucks balls).

So I listened.

"Oh No."

"No, that's it's for us, I don't want to make another appointment, Dr McB told us not to bother this time anyway."

"No , I don't want an appointment with the counsellor."

"Thanks. Bye."

And I trotted back to bed, downcast and numbnumbnumb and lay in bed and sniffed my Special Blanket (yes I have a blankie, I don't care how lame that is, I had a pretty fucking traumatic childhood, adolescence and early twenties, the blankie helps me feel safe.  If you're lucky sometime I'll take a picture and show you the awesomeness of Special Blankie.)

The Big Guy, my darling, my sweet, my everlastingly wonderful and gorgeous husband, followed me back to bed, curled up behind me and stroked my back quietly 'til I fell back to sleep. Four hours later I woke up crying and then I went and collected my 7 year old son from his fuckwit of a father.


THINGS THAT DON'T SUCK

• The Little Guy. He rocks. I got to experience being pregnant and it was wonderful. I hope all of you out there that have never had this, do get it.  It's amazing to grow a person. If I didn't have him I would honestly be suicidal. All my life I was afraid of infertility and desperate to be pregnant. Thank God he happened.
• My husband - he is amazing. I really do not have the words to express his spectacular awesomeness. And if I had to choose between having a baby and having that man, I would choose him every time. Every single time. Even if I didn't have the Little Guy. He is my match, my yang, my fit, my best, my love. Without him, I would founder. And to endure 5 incredibly fucked up IVF cycles with him beside me has been astounding.  He has never let me down. Ever.
• On Monday, I found out that I now have a Bachelor of Behavioural Neuroscience with first-class Psychology Honours. I grieved for my beautiful Gramps and did IVF all through that fucking research project year and I still excelled. Yay me.
• Wine, Val.ium, Cod.eine and Fen.tanyl. And chocolate and Osso Bucco and Three Cheese Risotto.

THINGS THAT SUCK

• I did not get pregnant. No baby for me.
• We wasted a lot of money.
• I took a drug that made my already thin hair fall out in clumps and gave me neck-ne and back-ne, thanks for nothing DHEA.
• I proved my desperation to a heap of random medical professionals.
• I cried buckets and made my eyes sore and my eyelashes thin out.
• I'm still in faint-chance-limbo.  I still ovulate, tBG has sperm, until I stop having periods there will always be a tiny hope that we could achieve pregnancy. So I get to spend the rest of peri-menopause ever-so-slightly-stupidly-hopeful. That's surely a level of hell.
• I will never get to have a family that has a Mum and a Dad and a Child and they all stay together. I didn't have that as a child, my child does not have that and now, I will never ever have that. The Big Guy was my chance. I will be by his side as I die ('cause I better fucking die first, I couldn't bear it the other way round) and so if we had had a child together, a child of our own, I would have gotten to experience that togetherness, that FAMILY. And maybe healed some of my own screwed-up-child-self-who-lives-inside-and-cries-for-her-Daddy.
• I don't get to see what wonderful person tBG and I would have made. Where is that dark-haired, clever little baby?

* Editing to add (FCFU = First Class Fucked Up) and I don't usually swear quite so much.

no PUPO pour moi

18 June - one egg retrieved -sadness
19 June - one embryo created - hope
20 June - transfer cancelled, abnormal fertilisation - despair.

One

Egg retrieval a few hours ago.

Two follicles but Just One Egg.

Beside me as I sat waiting to get taken into theatre:

• Lady A, in for a pick-up with 20 follicles
• Lady B, in for a termination

Life isn't fair.

I woke up from the anaesthetic, looked at the circled 1 written on my hand and burst into tears. Then I cried for the next hour and a half. The nurses were very kind and let the Big Guy, my rock, come in after a while when it was obvious that I wasn't going to stop crying any time soon.

Someone will call me tomorrow between 1-3pm to let me know whether we're going for a transfer on Sunday. I hope, with all my sad little heart, that they say we have an embryo to transfer and then that I don't get a call on Sunday morning cancelling it.

Low expectations = no tears

I went with a churning gut and sat for far too long waiting for the scan. It's a public holiday here and they had a problem with the doctors so I waited for over an hour - which did great things for my controlled-anxiety!

Mad Hatter's Energy Man told her to be in the present so I have been doing my best to be here too. My head provided me with the perfect (repeating) soundtrack, so for the past few days I've been listening to this



and this



My freefall scan resulted in two follicles - both on the left. (Nighty-nighty little righty. I think it's gone to sleep for good now.) I am the proud owner of a 15mm and a 12mm and have been asked to return on Wednesday to check on their progress, with a view to triggering on Wednesday for a Friday pickup. And no tears leaving this scan which is a pleasant eventuality!

Please, Universe, let one of these eggs be the magic egg.

Cupcakes and scan

Oh cupcakes how I love thee. And so does modernhaus who recently thrilled me with a link to Ming's delicious cupcakes and cookies.  Get a load of that foodporn gals. If that doesn't get your salivary glands going then pshaw, what on earth would?

Soooo...guess what I've been doing lately (besides shooting up loads of expensive and unfun drugs)?? Yup - baking cupcakes, though not Ming's 'cause I only saw hers today. 

I baked these Blueberry and Lemon Coconut cupcakes ...

and then I iced them with lemon icing ...

... and soon I'm going to have a cup of decaffeinated tea and eat some!

Blueberry and Lemon Coconut cupcakes (for substitutions and americano understandingses go search at OChef)

• 125g butter, soft
• 3/4 cup caster sugar
• 2 tsp finel grated lemon rind
• 2 extra large eggses
• 1 cup self-raising flour, sifted
• 1/2 desiccated coconut
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• a couple of handfuls of frozen or fresh blueberries

1. Preheat oven to 180C (350F) or a bit lower if fan-forced.
2. Beat butter and sugar 'til light and fluffy.
3. Beat in lemon rind and eggs, one at a time, beating between additions.
4. Fold in flour and coconut alternately with the sour cream.
5. Spoon mix into paper-lined 12 cup regular muffin tray.
6. Poke about 4 blueberries into each cupcake. (You can put half the mix in, then poke a couple of berries in, then put the other half of the mix over the top and poke more berries in if you feel like it.)
7. Bake for 20 mins, then remove to a rack and cool.

Ice with Lemon Icing - which has to be the easiest icing ever.

Sift a cup of icing sugar into a bowl and drizzle enough lemon juice over to make a sticky icing, not too stiff and not too runny. Then spread it over the cooled cupcakes. Drool.

Thank you back of the frozen blueberry packet, I thought that recipe looked delicious and I was right!

Tomorrow is CD8 and I go for a scan in the morning to see if my ovaries have woken up after 5 days of stimming. I'd like a couple of good follicles and a couple of good eggs (followed by good embryo/s, a healthy pregnancy and a live lovely birth) please Universe.

Four important walls

This post is inspired by, and dedicated to Eden and her Gimme Shelter post and linky-business. Go head over there and join the sharing circle.

I was born in Sydney and after my Mum and Dad split up when I was 1.5 my grandparents used to take me for weekends at a time so Mum could study. So every weekend of my young childhood and then every school holidays after that until I was 17 was spent at this house in W.hale B.each.

I loved this place, every nook and cranny of it.  I loved the smell of the walls and the feel of the sandstone pillars. I loved the sound of the surf down the road, the salty tang to the air and the magnificent gardens my grandfather built so lovingly.

I walked up and down those stairs for years. Finding eggs the Bunny had left for me. Playing with my Little People and my new red patent leather shoes with the little bow on the front. Skipping up with a towel over my shoulder ready to trek down the street to the beach. Imagining I was a princess in my secret garden, waiting for the prince to find me. Being chased by monsters all over and around.

I sat out on that balcony more times than I can remember. Eating prawns and chips with salty, lemony fingers and listening to my Gramps tell me how delicious the heads were (yuk!). Late at night watching the lightning roll in across the sea, flashing pink and white through the big dark sky. Dandling my various cousins on my knee playing This Little Piggie on countless little toes. Posing for smiling happy family photos in groups and pairs and just by myself.

This beach is as much a part of that house as the gardens and the balcony. I learnt to jump over waves and read the surf. My Gramps tossed me over waves I couldn't jump while my mother and aunts and Granny sunbathed on the sand. He taught me to watch for rips and smell the rain coming on that beach and  I left my footprints there forever. Forever doesn't last long on a beach. I wish, so bad, that I could go back and visit those days. Stay in that house again with my extended family, eat Gramps' spaghetti and play bridge and listen to the grown-ups talking politics and religion and gossip.

Ahimè!

Ma no, io non sono una leggenda metropolitana! 

Addio sette mila, quattrocento, ottantacinque dollari ... numero IVF cinque, qui veniamo!


  
Help

CD27 and other news

This month I have felt lots of cramping down low in my sweet chariot. And so naturally I've wondered whether I could be so lucky as to be magically, wonderfully, urban-legend-ly knocked up in this cycle before the final IVF. Who knows, I gave up on my PingOAS obsession months ago when I finally realised that it was doing me no good to see the screamingly white space where my lines SHOULD have been every month. So no pee-sticks for me. I'm due by Sunday, in which case I'll be starting the last round of jabs on Monday-ish.

OhMyGod!!! I'll be injecting again within days. I'm battling hopelessness at present. I have to keep reminding myself that it is possible, I haven't stopped ovulating yet. However, if my odds were those of a horse in a race, there's no way I'd back it unless it was running in the Melbourne Cup. And then I'd cheer a lot and yell encouraging words at the horse while I watched it race on TV at the pub. 'Cause that's what you do on Melbourne Cup Day if you're not at Flemington.

I'm liking the metaphor here...let's see if there's more metaphorical fuel* to be drawn from this

It is a race built on dreams, on hard luck and triumph. It is a race which is also survived by tragedy.

That's the race I'm in. Mine's a race against time and I really want to be a winner.


In other news, I've never really given two hoots about Schapelle Corby or her punishment for what I consider to be an incredibly stupid crime. She was convicted of smuggling 4.2kg of dope into, INTO, Bali in 2004. Again, I say ... INTO Bali! She maintained she was innocent, and there are multiple explanations that were raised regarding crooked baggage handlers and drug-smuggling syndicates. Suffice it to say, I haven't cared too much about it. As far as I was concerned, she got the same sort of trial as she would have had here and she'd have been convicted here too. But for less time, because in Indonesia she got a 20 year sentence. Locked up at 26, she'll be released somewhere round 47. The other day I was in the supermarket and I saw this headline

And while I stood in line I read the article, which is of course complete fluff and elaboration. But it hit me then. Not only is Schapelle denied her liberty for 20 years, she's denied her fertility too. Her chance to have babies and thus to have grandchildren.

I don't think that's fair. That 20 year sentence is a substantially different punishment for man than for a woman. Now, years after her incarceration began, I feel terribly, terribly sorry for Schapelle and, for that matter, any woman who is incarcerated for a long prison term. A man at 47 can go on to have a family, a woman generally can't. Isn't it bad enough to be locked up, isn't that punitive enough? And why isn't this an issue? I know that here in Australia, you have to do something fairly heinous (homicide, sexual assault, injurious acts) to get put away from such a long time - all your fertile years. Poor woman - I'd be fighting that sentence too. And I'd get knocked up in prison if it were possible. Which it apparently is, according to the stories about Hotel K as the jail is known.

And then there's this - Bolivia woman 'sold new-born baby for $140'. I'm torn over this one. I know the moral ground ... no baby-selling, it leads to bad bad things. But in this case? She couldn't afford to keep the baby and had sold it to an infertile lady. God knows what will happen to that little one, I actually hope that the lady who bought the baby gets to keep it. There's gotta be some breaks for infertiles, surely.


*Can you even have metaphorical fuel?