Thousand

Yo, peeps!

For some reason I occasionally get the urge to start a blog post with a cheery and utterly demographically and geographically incorrect ‘yo, peeps!’.

Today was clearly one of those days and, to my eternal cringing shame, I am not only probably entirely the wrong kind of race but I live in a nation where ‘hey mates!’, ‘hey youse all’ and the grammatically painful like would be more appropriate.

So, yo. Peeps. Wassup? What does ‘yo‘ mean, anyway?

Internet, I was planning on doing a super beautiful detailed post chock-full of finest real estate porn but then the dog ate my wifi connection and THEN I realised my computer sucks and then I came up with some other bulldust excuses but mainly I realised that my own candids snapped without the aid of a wide angle lens, special lighting and, most importantly, liberal abuse of Photoshop to make the walls look less bleeping meringue and the tiles all sparkly and free of hideously stained grout plus the even better omission of the real estate agent to photograph any room with the horrible prolapsed brown curtains and the completely absent back garden means that you all really wouldn’t get just how much sexier my house is now than it was a year ago and, ergo, I would feel like I have been spending my maternity leave painfully giving my grout a very effective nose-job and painting the thing a pleasing neutral coffee palette for nought.

Breathe in, breathe out and try not to run on so in the next sentence.

Also, I put in over sixty blasted trees in my garden to date with the aid of a post hole digger when I was on permanent night shift and sick as a dog in the first trimester of Bhaji gestation and I can’t even show you a bramble filled ‘before’ picture for contrast.

Poop.

Plus I keep improving further things at the kind of warp speed rate only a woman who is seriously avoiding studying for important upcoming exams can do and thus half of them would come with the ‘but I changed this bit’ proviso anyway.

Do you still want to see them all, or would you rather live with the Real Estate dream avec photoshop, posh furniture and careful omission of the bits that really sucked when I moved in?

Don’t all rush at once.

Anyway, I hope you all had a fabulous Chocolate Season, Saag and Naan personally went to one of those multiple birth group easter egg hunts where all of us had a positively jolly time trying to enforce a five egg per child limit on the identical twins and I found that even though I own a set of twins, I can’t stop staring slightly longer than is polite at a sodding field full of them in Hunt For Crap mode.

We backed this up with a lunch of the kind of epic proportions that removes the requirement for a dinner in the same day (thanks to kind friends) where happily enough Saag did not shit her pants under the onslaught, thanks be, although as I come to think of it, I don’t think she’s done the business in two full days now and THAT isn’t the best solution to the brown problem we’ve developed Chez MII, either.

Did I ever mention the Brown Problem, or do I need to backtrack to hosing off a dripping with sh!t Saag several times in the last week for goodness knows what regressing cause?

I also found out that aforementioned kind friends have been all a swivet about affording their next IVF because of the thousand dollars a month they are spending on Chinese herbs and, feck me, I know I was probably meant to be a little more politely biopsychosocial about the expensive abuse of the placebo effect less I antagonise all potential patients and be dubbed yet another pillar of the Evil Science Based Medical Conspiracy, but I wasn’t.

I mean, when your happy pills are making your wallet sad and they haven’t worked in five full years and you can’t do IVF due to the cost, it’s time to take stock.

Happy easter,

G

Place

Okay, so I’m rather late to the healing salon party and in a way I don’t think it matters.

Knowing me, I’m probably not writing about quite the right thing, anyway, because gad knows I’ve spent the better part of seven years blogging about the wrong thing in as much detail as humanly possible. Some of the things I’ve gone and written about speculums are dead dodgy, for a start, and there was this time I turned them into a personal art project with mixed results and so on. I’ll leave somebody else to pull my back archives for speculum art because unfortunately I never did create the tag ‘speculum rabbit’ to celebrate the occasion and to be brutally honest the sheer weight of crap I’ve written over the years makes finding the post in question a bit to terrifying at this time of night.

In other words, life has phases, even virtual ones, and for those of you who found my coffee-fuelled ramblings at the frazzled Mama stage, this is my story.

I am a real person.

For those of you who prefer it straight,  these are my kids and this is my life. I have public blogs for both and am happy to share. I try not to get comment linkback here for obvious fanny-related posts aplenty along the IVF brick road way, but a friend acquired here is a friend. Period.

So, once upon a time I wrote about infertility. About dead babies. About my period. About cycle after cycle. About IVF. About miscarriages. About loss.

At the end of the day what I write about is my life so over the years what I write about has changed. My life has changed. I write about my ridiculously funny, wonderful, terrifying, rewarding, life-hogging job, my children, the family I finally have. I even write about my blasted home renovations or at least I plan to when I can get around it because goodness knows if I haven’t already bored the socks off of the last reader, then writing about paint colours should do the job for me.

I write about my life and that’s all I can do. I’m not good at other stuff. I like to write about my feelings, my day, the things I probably shouldn’t put on social media. I’ve done it for seven years and I guess this blog is seven years of me, in a slightly neurotic nutshell.

I don’t have the time I used to. I  adore working in obgyn, but it’s pretty much a lifestyle option. Accordingly, I have to pony up and pass some real ass big girly part doctor exams one of these days.  I also have three children.

Something has to give. I don’t write as often as the post come into my head. I simply can’t anymore.

But I write, anyway. Half the time i should really be doing something else, like folding the neverending pile of washing, but instead I write to you all.

Because I want to and it’s as simple as that.

I write about my infertility, about my losses, about my children, about my work and about ME. I can’t change it. I can’t sex it up any.  My place may not be squarely in the infertility blogosphere any more, but I am here nonetheless. I can’t say I fancy chasing fresh readers in Mamablogland because what I write isn’t conditional on how many people read. I just write. From both sides of the stirrups.

I plan to keep writing. I aim to be funny as piss if I can do so, because personally that’s about  the best coping strategy I have and goodness knows I’m going to be stressed enough over the next half a dozen years to need a little light relief. A vent. I don’t think there’ll be any new stuff about IVF. I could be wrong, but for so very many reasons I think that part of my life is done. But if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be on the other side of the stirrups, then I guess I’m your lass. The one with the bad reproductive past history.

I can’t control my audience, who and how many. It doesn’t matter.

I write because I want to do so and I thank you all, whatever brings you here and however many of you there may or may not be.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Bhaji is being a right bugger and has just escaped from her baby straightjacket for the third time in an hour and is duly flailing looking for the boobie. Yes, I am cussing myself for that particular sleep association right now.

g

Insurance.

Help!

Bhaji, after a run of what I like to call ‘bleeding civilised’ nights in that I got to stay in MY bed ALONE and Bhaji slept in HER bed and with only one four am hours of dark and ungodly wake up, decided last night was the night to mix things up a bit.

Internet, last night I was awake on the hour and for most of every hour starting from one forty five in the morning. There’s ungodly and there’s positively bloody heathen. Again I can only observe that it is hard to sleep when your arm is going numb and somebody is sucking on your chest at random intervals and that bit where Miss Nightshift startled me to full wakefulness at seven am by loudly shitting through her nappy, down both legs and up her back and ONTO MY SHEETS (again) was really just totally unnecessary Parent Torture Bonus Point scoring.

In other words, I am clutching my fourth coffee for the day, I am duly urinating like a big, black horsey, I have a mild tremor and I can’t really hold a train of thought for more than about half a sentence. What?

See.

So, unusually and on variation from form, I am going to ask YOU to tell ME about something political. Mostly because I think LS is being a hard arsed  raving nutter who should have a little more sympathy for people in the same reproductive boat as ourselves.

The tax man tells me that my medical expenses were twenty four thousand dollars in the Year Of Nightshift Conception. I expect the twins were little better three years back, ergo we, in a nation of snuggly ‘universal’ health coverage probably spent the best part of fifty kay generating three children.

I mean, seven kinds of holy crap, but ouch. Still, it could have been much more expensive if we’d lived elsewhere in the world. I’m factoring in six clomid cycles, three IVF stims and eight or nine or whatever it was embryo transfers, premature twins and a term singleton plus a reproductive partridge in a pear tree.

At over fifteen thousand dollars per child the little buggers really should be making my breakfast and ironing my work blouses because when you add THAT figure to my not inconsiderable study debts I am going to be able to retire comfortably some time in about the next century.

This is the post where I ask you if I’m mental or LS is, and yes, I am asking the Internet to award points on a political discussion.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

One of the things about living in the land of universal healthcare is that while we all justifiably enough bleat that it is big, unwieldy, inefficient and sloooooooow, at least there is some kind of IVF cover. Sure, the big clinics gouge a fairly healthy chunk more than the rebate paid and the rebate for reproductive things is capped lower than the rebate for new hips because babies are a lifestyle choice (insert your own opinion about this move here) after all, but at least there is coverage. A frozen transfer is about 1-2 k out of pocket, depending on your luck.

That’s not so bad.

We have significantly more elective single embryo transfers (eSET) than multiple ones these days because IVF is  relatively affordable. eSET is the norm at many clinics. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but the flavour around the IF blogosphere suggests you US-ian types pay ungodly amounts of money and unsurprisingly tend towards transferring scary-mucho amounts of embryos and just sucking up the risk a bit.

Over time and anecdotally I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read of young women with a high risk of multiple pregnancy transferring three or above embryos. Two seems to be the absolute minimum.

Not to horrify, but even twin pregnancies have a not-so-comfortable rate of Bad Things. Triplets are much scarier.

Locally, because eSET is common, the twin pregnancy rate from ART is now much lower than in times past. This has had a knock-on effect of fewer costly NICU admissions for premature twins i.e. the policy of at least partially funding IVF ultimately SAVES money, due to the  reduction in NICU bed demand.

That’s actually been proven in real dollar terms.

LS thinks that the solution for the US problem of a very high multiple birth rate and prematurity cost related to expensive ART is to refuse insurance coverage for NICU admissions from deliberate multiple embryo transfers.

I guess it’s one strategy, but personally I don’t think it’s got legs.

It’s rather harsh. What one of us when desperate for success and financially pressured as most couples on the ART-merry-go-round are really wouldn’t ever  transfer multiple embryos even with such a policy? I’m betting those ending up with twins and above would then just hope like crazy their twins would be the thirty eight week take home type. After all, fifty percent of twins are born at term,  it’s a coinflip statistic.

The way I see things, all that this sort of policy would generate is that the ten percent of twins and more of higher order multiples who are severely preterm, plus a big chunk of the moderately preterm would still be in the NICU, anyway, and in about the same numbers as before.

 The only difference is the debt punishment  to the parents for their conception and birth just became unmanageably high.

So why exactly don’t insurance companies cover IVF more over your North American way? Evidence here shows that doing so with eSET would probably not only save money, but heartache and bad outcomes as well.

I think LS is wrong. Very wrong. I also think insurance in the US is a bit screwey. Thoughts?

G

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The Maths.

I did the maths.

Since the beginning of the PBWCLEW saga in 2007, I’ve now been officially pregnant for a total of eighty nine weeks. I have eighty nine weeks of various forms of gravidity and parity on my scorecard.

Eighty nine.

Sure, they’ve been varied, each fun and sometimes mildly entertaining in it’s own special way, for example the Viability Check goes something like this: 

…yes-but-no-if-you-are-being-picky-and-insisting-on-extratuerine-existance, doubly yes, no, no-you-fool, and possibly-nope-but-hey!-survey-says-yes ….

The Pregnany Experience list runs more like:

…..normal-boring-trainwreck, big-bigger-contractier-whinier-wraparoundcellulite-preeclampsia, Not This Time (At Work), REALLY Not This Time (At Work) With Added Limboland Waiting, and my current incarnation of vomit-vomitier-vomitest-whattoothenamel?….

Oh, and in an unfair twist of fate, I seem to be developing stretchmarks on previously un blemished skin between my trashed belly button (which is more of a belly whale these days) and my ribs. Goodness knows how I managed to carry twins till a fundal height of explode and a pesky singleton goes and trashes the only remaining good bit, but there you have it, folks. Babies are hazardous for your bikini plans.

I think I’m going to have enough skin left over for a burns convention at the rate I’m going.

But, regardless.

Eighty-nine official weeks of gestation. Sixish clomid cycles. Three stim cycles. Something like eight or nine transfers along the way. About a billion very personal scans. Nearly as many ovum. A buttload of embryos, which I ended up needing because I think I chewed through nearly twenty of the things achieving aforementioned abdomen-shredder pesky singleton.

More vomit than a booze cruise on steroids. Enough drugs to sink the Titanic. The pretzel-like ability to give myself butt-shots.

I don’t think the word ‘enjoyable’ has featured in any of my eighty nine weeks but despite this fact, getting and staying pregnant has been damn nearly a full time job for at least four years of my adult life.

I’m not really sure what comes next but the maths tells me that I don’t think I can do this again. I can’t face it. At the risk of being flippant, I don’t want triple digits on my weeks of gestation scorecard.

It’s a strange place to be.

I honestly have no idea where to put all the energy that has clearly been going into my sideline full time job of assisted conception junkie but I’ll have to do the maths on that one, too.

Right now, I’m having trouble getting my head around removing item ‘achieve pregnancy’ from my to-do list.

G

PS. The vomiting actually gets a lot easier with the advent of reflux because it’s already approximately half-way there.

Offline

Do forgive me, I’ve kind of been offline.

I can’t say that I precisely recall at what point I ceased whining incessantly about howling misery, divided-in-two cramps, an unmistakable and rather painful everything-is-going-all-prolapse-y sensation of, well, one cervix becoming rather lax and products of conception UN-concepting in the usual messy fashion and the like EXCEPT that I may have not got to that point on accounts of I was busy moving house, home, losing my marbles in the process and, yes, working.

I still love a good case of run-on sentence abuse, even with near-terminal anaemia.

It’s not very nice at all to flush lumps of gore down the loo in the middle of a ten hour cover shift, but at the rate I keep losing pregnancies it’s either that or join the dole queue. I guess at least then I wouldn’t have to hear about perfectly well thirty five year old’s and their funny chest pains that COMPLETELY WENT AWAY WHEN THEY STOPPED LIFTING SOMETHING PREDICTABLY BLOODY HEAVY (but they came to emergency anyway) because, quite frankly, my sense of patience with some of my patients is getting rather short.

Also, who the fuck spends four hours in an emergency cubicle complaining of funny tingling in their hands they only notice when they’re sitting down and doing nothing else and then pipes in at the end when I’ve wasted about five hundred government dollars proving that there’s clearly nothing wrong with them (apart from the bit between the ears, that is) with a puzzled ‘So, doctor, I’ve been thinking it over while I’m not at home with my screaming three children and my mountain of debt and, you know what? I feel SO MUCH BETTER. I think it’s all the stress, isn’t it?’.

Yes, love, it is and trust me you don’t know anything about stress.

Anyway, to cut a long story of woe short, I think I’ve just about finished expelling pregnancy 4.0, I had yet another ‘we’ll get back to you tomorrow’ beta today and if it is less than two I may as well cycle again if I can lie convince my clinic nurses that I am only CD3. I am not in the bleeding mood to wait out a cycle purely on technicalities, pardon my pun, if only because the way LS and I are getting on, um, well actually I don’t really want to talk about that. If that’s okay with you.

Suffice it to say my father has ended up on antidepressants and is begging me in tears on a daily basis not to end up alone but when he’s not here LS is reminding me just how true it is that the best way to a man’s heart is with the contents of the steaknife drawer.

Somebody buy that man a clue.

G

PS. Did I ever tell you about the forty year old who ruptured her waters at 22 weeks, thought she was twenty SIX viable weeks, had her maths wrong, found out after she’d already committed to soldiering on with bedrest and then at 26 weeks for real dropped the baby in the toilet-water of the hospital room bog at 8pm one night?

He died.

I love obstetrics when I am not moonlighting as an angel of emergency department sympathy (hint 24 year old who is six weeks pregnant with first child: landing on one’s ass in the laundry isn’t going to hurt the baby but I will still be very nice about reassuring you with regards to same) but sometimes it really, really plain old sucks.

I need a lucky break here.

Seven

Apologies for the dull tone around the blog, it’s just that I’m on the pill and no matter what any clinic nurse will tell you about the why’s and wherefore’s of aforementioned little hormonal tablets, it’s pretty damn hard to get pregnant on the pill. Actually, since I haven’t been on it since 2004 it’s actually about as hard for me to get in the family way OFF the pill, but that’s a whole ‘nother seven IVF’s, six clomid cycles, lethal anomoly, miscarriage and a partridge in a pear tree.

Ergo, I am dull at the moment.

I am full of newfound sixties sexual freedom (ha!) but oh-so-reproductively dull.

On the plus side- at least I am the kind of dull that doesn’t have to whine on about my horrid hypoestrogenic brain splitting headaches because down regulation slaps my pituitary into submission for about half a year, because seriously, calling those headaches a minor side effect is omitting to mention how debilitating it is to feel constantly like your brain is melting out of your left eye socket and taking half your visual field with it in a series of flickering lights. On the minus side- not pregnant.

As I am, yet again, stuck in a fertility treatment hamster-wheel holding bay until I am given permission to indulge in some serious sanctioned abuse of subcutaneous drugs I really don’t have much to say.

Oh, perhaps other whan why the merry hell am I about to do my seventh bleeping IVF if I’m such a good prognosis patient?

I think my prognosis is excellent for the fortunes of my clinic, but since only two of about a billion embryos thus far have ever hung around (to be singing in their cots- at 9pm- RIGHT NOW-two entirely different nursery rhymes completely out of key with the result that it sounds like somebody is torturing a cat in there but I refuse to intervene on the basis that nobody sounds unhappy as such, just woefully out of key, tune, note and rhyme) I’m just a tiny bit over it.

I wish I was a magical thinker because by g-d I really am at my limit.

Seven IVF’s is enough to have my name, speculum preference and degree of uterine anteversion engraved on a stirrup in the transfer room.

Surely this time?

Sigh.

G

Still negative.

Officially calling it and weirdly for an eternal pessimist this is the first time I find myself unexpectedly hurt by another early morning face-slapping negative.

I have no earthly idea why I expected this cycle to work when so many others haven’t, perhaps it was the magical thinking of returning to old protocol plus some even more magical thinking around it being my third transfer for this pregnancy attempt (and Saag and Naan were my third transfer, too) but I am stung.

Sails deflated.

I really REALLY did not want to be in this place I find myself, failing three fresh transfers (allegedly my best odds) along with the frozen ones.

I really REALLY can’t explain how much it kicks me in the gut to have to suck it up and go have dinner with a bunch of friendly pregnant women tonight who are all going to ask how the IVF is going. Sure, they’ll mean well enough and probably sympathetically tut platitudes while they rub their bellies but they’ll also go home and tell their spouses how glad they are not to be ME.

I just don’t want to think about yet another cycle next year but I seem to be fresh out of other options.

Sigh.

G

Negative.

Lily-white pregnancy test, 1. Geohde, 0. Also sore boobs, 0, and late OHSS distinctly absent.

I could really stop there, but then I would be missing the chance to bruise my virtual fists thumping a virtual wall because this shite just isn’t funny any more.

I’ve always been told that fresh odds are best and in not one of my three fresh transfers have I managed to have a shred of hCG in my system. I’m two for three on frozens, though, if you count chemical gestations.

I think I need to count the misery of snot and blood simply to keep my increasingly woeful stats up.

Seriously, if it wasn’t for Saag and Naan (and even with them, bless their supermarket ‘YOU’VE GOT A SORE BUM!’ shouting at utter strangers), my batting average would get me kicked right off the team for poor performance. Clearly I am batting at considerably less than the 30% normal expected embryos for my age-ish and it plain old sucks.

Doesn’t help any that in the last few days some pointless fucker decided to open both of their car doors bang into the side of my car, leave their distinctive red paint all over my car in two door shaped divits and now (after first agreeing that yes, it was clearly their fault since the side of my car is undeniably now the same cherry red as most of their blasted heap) is trying to weasel out of it with an ‘I shouldn’t have agreed to pay, it wasn’t me, I went home and told my wife the cost and she was so angry and so I thought about it and it now isn’t me that parks next to you every day- badly- and opens doors- carelessly- and furthermore I am going to imply that you are forcing me to pay up because you are a Doctor and I am about to have surgery and you could do something BAD to me on the table and I Am Scared Of You’.

Little arsehole.

I don’t know what pisses me off more, having a damaged car or having some shit imply I would commit medical malpractise over it. In the middle of a ward. Having my sixth IVF go tits up is just the icing on the cake, really.

He’s seriously tempting me. Also, he better pay.

An incredibly not-pregnant Geohde.

Barfly.

I guess that those of you who know me on other online pastures are already aware that because I work in healthcare and nobody wants a fresh serving of gastroenteritis with their hospital admission, I have to be well, chipper, and not in any way exploding from either end before I can return to work.

In other words, I have been paid to take two days off this week, two days in which I feel completely well although I am now a weight I haven’t been since I was about fourteen years old.

Gastroenteritis is an astonishingly fast, albeit brutal, weight loss technique but I really don’t recommend you try it at home. Funny how a few tiny not-strictly alive in themselves particles can bring one to one’s knees,  repeatedly, except really there wasn’t anything funny about it.

I swear these things get harder as you age.

I’ve been enjoying my unexpected time off getting all sorts of shit done that has needed doing for some time, to whit, oiling the deck, yelling at the kids when they tip their weeties all over the carpet, painting walls and generally not feeling it in the pregnancy department. No late onset OHSS for me. I feel fine.

In case you wondered.

I’m really quite glum about this last part since thus far out of about thirty six embryos generated only two have ever taken up my offer of uterine short-to-medium-term lease. I guess I do still have fourteen in the can but I am not going to let that get in the way of a little navel gazing. The last time I got greedy and defrosted my stash and tried to go to day five nearly all of them died.

I am just so very ready to be done with this.

I can’t really explain the feeling well, but the let down that began with the news that my best and brightest day fives were a bit dinged up has gone from childish introspective sulking that I guess I won’t be getting twins again (and being DONE with all of this shite for good, albeit with a likely rocky pregnancy to really remind me why I don’t plan to do THAT again either) to a more serious worry that I may very well not get any child at all.

Saag and Naan are just so sweet together when they’re not slapping each other silly or pulling out fistfuls of hair, and watching that bond just makes me so aware of how different it is to be a singleton, especially a third wheel one plonked in a twin family.

Is it better to be a third wheel or never to exist? I’m not sure.

I don’t think I plan to do another stim cycle if nothing from this makes it. Apart from anything else, I’ll by them have acquired the label of a recurrent implantation failure and since we’re talking multiple stims here it isn’t exactly like changing that up with add much. I’m not sure how fair it is on my family to keep taking resources away from other things we need to spend it on IVF and I sure as hell can’t really keep taking the time off of work.

That’s the other thing.

These to days at home remind me of exactly what I don’t have, time. And balance. Because I don’t have either of those, not in the slightest. I don’t get to spend days with my children. I don’t have time to buy furniture or redecorate my house. I don’t get time to see my friends.

I don’t foresee any change in that situation for a very long time and I don’t know if that is the best thing for my family, or for me.

I am tired, I am snappy. LS and I fight far more than we should. I don’t think we will last much longer as a couple. Too many bad words have scorched the air. We can’t unsay them. My father is suddenly morphing into an old man before my eyes and I find myself burdened with the inevitable age-old old age task of the eldest daughter.

It is odd to find somebody you have always looked to to fix things beginning to as YOU for help. I’m finding it hard to adjust. This is the man that moved countries as a single parent without a single friend, place to live, or asset to our names, and yet he managed.

Now he can’t.

It’s a good thing that Saag has taken to calling the metal butterfly in the garden her Barfly because I need that laugh that having a two year old who is best mates with her Barfly brings.

Back to work tomorrow,

G

$#!@&!!!

I do sincerely apologise for the radio silence around these parts, you know, given that I am actually doing the most relevent thing that the writer of an actual infertility related blog can do, to whit undergo my seven billionth IVF cycle.

It’s just that I’ve only had one day off to myself this entire month thus far and I get one more in a week or so. For the entirety of October and no, I am not making that up.

I am too tired to bother exagerrating and I have run out of clean knickers, again. Times are hard.

Also, my ‘day off’ was technically spent in a delightful turn of phrase known as ‘on call’, meaning that not only could I not do anything remotely useful just in case the outbreak of rampant dysentery on my ward had spread further afield than hospital-standard hand-hygiene policy would suggest, but I couldn’t even have the luxury of getting drunk. In case I had to work.

Updating my blog has had to rank behind getting four hours sleep a night because I am but human. Yes, and very whiny.

I am so very sorry about that, ladies and gentleeerrrRR, okay, ladies of the Internet.

It’s just that old people keep on aspirating half of their peg feeds and SLOWLY dying on me with unnerving accuracy right on shift change and thus to add insult to injury I am never getting home on time either, mostly on accounts of it is very hard to tell an-about-to-be-grieving family that one is due to sod off and they can ask the next doctor all of their burning questions about how dying while drowning in half a litre of brown feed from the inside goes.

Don’t worry, I am liberal with the drugs.

On topic, I have been rather notably less liberal with expensive recombinant FSH preparations as per my notoriously conservative RE and THAT is how I came THIS close to blurting out ‘…aaaaaaand SCORE! ONE EGG. I f@cking well told you so!’ when my bazillionth up the jacksie exposure of my infertile life confirmed the predictable outcome.

We’ve upped the dose to a dizzying 125 IU and, please hold me while I laugh/cry hysterically, started the antagonist and I have another scan tomorrow.

Can’t say I’m feeling particularly hopeful.

G

Timing.

I think that, after having just opened letter from my clinic hoping perhaps to have real word of cycle protocol (or failing that a bleeping prescription for the DRUGS since I am a confirmed fertility junkie these days) only to discover instead an ‘oops we forgot to bill you six months ago for those frozen embryos of yours, so’s how abouts you pay us NOW, xoxo hugs and kisses Financial Henchmen’ I can safely observe that timing is critical in these sort of delicate matters.

That is if the sender doesn’t actually want aforementioned letter rolled up tight, set alight and shoved firmly up their rectum.

Personally, having just had five embryos die in vitro and the last remaining hope die in vivo rather messily, I think I plan to tell Clinic Unmentioned that I highly disapprove of their style.

Also, where the feck is my puregon?

G

One.

Only one.

Everything else either died at thaw, and I have never lost a single embryo at thaw before, ever, or arrested.

One.

THIS close to not getting a transfer at all. It’s not an embryonic supermodel either, but I’ll take what I can get.

One. Out of six.

Urgh.

I have to admit one was a big fat letdown.

I was hoping for at least three to choose from and re-freeze because now? I have zip in the can.

Anyone care to punt which way the dice shall rolleth?

Sucked.

Scan sucked.

I’d type more, but I’m screaming inside about the bit afterwards where the clinic nurse rang me up presumably to find out what was happening because nobody communicates within that joint, and in responded to my ‘no, nothing is happening’, ‘no, I don’t need bloods because NOTHING is happening’, ‘No, I don’t need another appointment right now because, um, nothing is happening’ with ‘Fabulous!’, ‘Great!’, ‘WONDERFUL’, and (my personal favourite) ‘You have a GREAT weekend!’.

Thanks, I think.

Hope she actually listened to what I was saying and isn’t thawing embryos as I type since that’s about the only way this cycle could get more painful right now.

Another scan Tuesday it is and then the options are A: Bin B: Up the dose and just pop out half a dozen eggs and hope for lightening to not have a ironic sense with regards to multiple spontaneous conceptions.

Ha. I make myself laugh sometimes.

What amuses me more is that my notoriously conservative RE is now prepared to accept that option.

Pfffffft.

Inspiration.

Ladies and, well, probably only ladies of the Internet, I pop my virtual head (and ovaries I guess since I am technically stimming and stuff)  up today to tell you two things, namely:

1. I am still barely past baseline but apparently something on my right ovary is possibly thinking about the concept of generally doing something and MAYBE getting designs on leading the show. I have another scan Friday, and if this is indeed the case then you shall all hear the whoops of joy followed by the terrified nail biting of a woman who is risking everything on three year old frozen embryos making it to day five, something my clinic does not often do. I mean, it’s becoming increasingly REAL that I may very well have nothing to transfer and because I am not exactly a genius with words I’ll just observe that THAT eventuality shall deeply, deeply suck. Oddly enough, the fourth go around means I no longer give a toss about the measurement of my follicles to the millimetre, the day number of stims I am on, how much pure.gon I should have left in my pen and what my bloods were in NUMBERS because ‘good’ used to shite me to tears. No longer. This time around I am on stim day ‘something’, I am keeping no diary, my injection pen still seems to make with the goods and, well, I am busy keeping my head as far in the sand as I possibly can.

If this cycle works and anybody tells me it was because I was relaxed, I may just issue a retaliatory nipple cripple. Fair warning and all of that.

2. I am sick of the staff at my clinic cooing over the twins and telling me how ‘inspirational’ it is for other patients to see living, breathing totsicles. It isn’t.

They really can’t have the foggiest about the emotional experience of the average IVF patient if for a second they believe that sort of rubbish. It looks greedy, and it’s cruel. My god but I feel like the biggest arse on the planet because the number of times I’ve watched a folder-clutching (see point one and meticulous record keeping the first few goes around) woman go all tight across the mouth, look down and then carefully move away to sit on the other side of the room lately when I barge in with an enormous stroller and screaming spawn.

I really am sorry. Children have no place in the clinic.

Yawn.

I think my clinic’s terror at my newly discovered  AMH of 49, a disturbingly abundant number for an ageing old mare (an age I shan’t be confessing here thank-you-very-muchly) like myself and my own RE’s natural tendency to caution at the best of times have really conspired against me with this cycle.

That’s the only rational explanation I have for the farce of driving an hour each way for a monitoring scan on day four of injecting a piddling 33 IU of the good stuff into my locale of current choice, my thighs.

My stretched out abdomen keeps bleeding like stink and I am sick of looking like a badly-aimed junkie. Also, it hurts to rest my guts on the bench and fold my head quietly over in misery on nightshift and I have enough troubles with nightshift as it is.

In other words, and in case you were wondering, I shall get to the point. I was more worried I would bleed to death over the famous d.ildo cam than actually turn up with multiple follices of a size greater than ‘yawn’.

I mean, in the interests of honesty, I DO have lots of the buggers at ‘yawn’ and one at 10mm but I hardly call THAT time to get the transfer party started.

I think I’ll be ready to transfer sometime next year at the rate this will take but I also agree with my RE that if we up the dose I’ll end up canned. Upon reflection, that would suck the chrome off of a towbar so I guess I’ll just have to suck it up and keep asking for more pure.gon needles on accounts of you only get half a dozen in a pack and my current vial is scheduled to last eleventy million injections.

Give or take.

33 IU it is until something happens. Are you as bored as I am?

Regardless, stripping off for aforementioned lubricated shenanigans with twins intently watching is an experience, let me tell you.

 Especially when it turns out by dint of experiment that shutting the curtain in order to remove one’s undies in private results in a flurry of panicked running, impassioned leg clinging and general whininess in case I disappear forever. I had to get starkers from the waist down in full RE view. With a twin on either leg.

Noice, eh?

Not often.

Ladies and gentleman (actually, I fully expect more ladies rather than unusually metrosexual gentleman interested in the feelings of the, uh, more delicate and haemorrhagic sex as such) of the Internet, do take note.

It is not very often that I am excited to see my period but TODAY is cycle day ONE and I am kind of giddy. No, not from the blood loss, although that would not be entirely surprising considering I seem to be shedding about four feet of endometrium, but from the fact that I am not officially Off To The (Slow, oh so painfuuuuly slow) Races.

I give so little a toss about my privacy these days that I phoned in to share the good news about my womanly status to the IVF clinic at work at a public desk.

I just couldn’t be arsed moving and I doubt any of the patients, demented and nursing home bound as they largely are (if not simply young and incapable of understanding on the basis of incurable stupidity) understood my drift.

I have to say that I was somewhat taken aback by my clinic’s new friendly ‘what’s your credit card numbers (kerr-ching!)?’ approach to the news.

I was also a little on the disappointed side that they’ve got my indefinite referral marked down as having expired two bleeping years ago and so won’t do anything much about my cycle until they un-screw it up on Monday. It is a matter that clearly cannot be sorted over the weekend, but beggers can’t be choosers when it comes to administrative accuracy.

Also, I can always just re-refer myself. There are some perks to being a doctor although not as many as you’d think. It doesn’t help with carparking anywhere good, for a start.

The thing that really had be a bit worried was when the fertility nurse, an individual who I would charitably like to assume has some bleeping idea about the general gist of IVF and transfer protocols in specific first rattled on about rocking up for a cycle 10 day scan to see when I was likely to ovulate. Yes, I had told her I have PCO and irregular to absent menstrual ‘cycles’ that break the wheel.

Oh, and that was AFTER I already had to correct her and point out I was down for a blastocyst transfer and not a day 2 on accounts of I have better things to do with my aging ovaries than transfer half a dozen day 2 embryos one-to-two at a time over the next half a year.

I had to physically stop her babble because my brain was hurting.

It really is a bit on the worrying side when one finds oneself explaining that anovulatory patients who have failed previous artificial/HRT cycles in dramatic fashion need to use drugs to pop ovum and score a transfer and that I already HAVE aforementioned drugs and even better than that know my dosage AND which end of the needle to shove inwards, and so could she just read the bleeping paperwork and tell me which day to start jabbing?

Clearly trying to think was not her strong suit, so I was not surprised with the confused chorus of ‘oh’s’ when I regale my messy ART history.

The flattery of her following remark ‘Oh, goodness didn’t YOU do very well to make so many embryos and have twins and this many left?’ did kind of salve my bruised faith in the Fertility Nurse experience, but I bet she talks to all the cranky old ones like that.

Regardless, a 33 IU of pure.gon ovulation (I bloody hope of ONE egg and one egg only or I am canned) induction it is. Probably. Starting SOON.

Like I said, off to the races, chaps.

PS. They’ve lost the results of my 15 vials of bloods. I do not really need to shed extra blood from anywhere right now, trust me on this point, so they better un-lose them. Soon.

Forefront.

After many years spent swearing at my dial up/causing swearing and rapid securing of wireless access points far and wide (I leave it to you, dear reader, to choose which option is the more probable of the two presented), I have made the leap.

Don’t worry, I’m a prototypical slow converter to new technology, and it’s only ADSL but after a lifetime of horse and cart make a cup of tea while the page loads access, I am thoroughly enjoying the heady freeway cruising speed of a virtual toyota corrola. Complete with lack of beverage breaks.

Chez MII now comes even faster and whinier at you with bonus ADSL, and I’d just about vomit with excitement except that I’m too busy illegally downloading five movies, fifty songs and updating my online photo albums with fifty bazillion megagagawhatsis of photos.

At once.

Kidding, clearly. After all, I listen to AM radio these days.

Regardless, due to a certain cancellation appointment becoming available for a certain near and dear’s RE, I can however tell you at lightning fast access speed that, well, urgh.

There’s bossy and there’s ‘I’m not going to tell you anything about why I think your near and dear must use donor egg and now you shall make THIS appointment and THIS appointment and leave fifty litres of blood for THESE specialised tests and I shall see you in eight weeks for the start of your cycle’.

Um, can I suggest fuckoff, lady?

I’m not quite ready for that particular train to depart the crazy station before my sib finishes her own last ditch own ovum go-around. Or, you know, I get my own FET out of the way. Also, nothing says ‘creastfallen downing of a bottle of wine’ and ‘distinct lack of faith re:outcome’ like telling your aforementioned stimming sister that her very own RE is already booking in the donor cycle before she’s even got to egg retrieval.

I did humour the bossy woman by leaving another seven vials of blood behind. Deep down I’ve always wondered just what my karyotype was and now I shall hopefully find out that it does, after all, involve the numbers ’44′ and letters ‘XX’.

At least I hope it does. 

The total count of vials of blood I have casually and liberally shed in local pathology laboratories in recent weeks is now a heady twenty one, in case you wondered. I get about.

Also, this morning I realised that the old pack of stop-gap pill I’ve been taking while I wait an eternity for LS’s police check to emerge expired in, deary me I hate to confess this because I kept the packet since I tossed the pill back in 2004 and so I should have worked this one out before now, 2007.

I am amazed that I have not bled for my nation as yet but apparently the little buggers are still good.

Now, where the feck is that police check?

I got my pure.gon accidentally really cheap due to screw up on part of pharmacist and careful poker face on part of elated patient and I am positively itching to stab myself with 33 units a day until either A: everybody gets bored or B: I ovulate and get to (I hope because if they all cark it after this many years of storage fees I am going to demand a refund due to serious consumer dissatisfaction) transfer me some embryos.

Want.

On the will-I-ever-slay-the-red-tape-in-time? fringe of yet another IVF, I’m drawing a blank.

I want this to work. So very badly.

It’s visceral.

I can’t explain where the urge comes from, or for that matter just how much watching all my friends have their easily conceived second, okay, third babies stings like merry hell and makes me cry and withdraw since I have my two lucky-beyond-belief healthy ICSI pixies, but it does.

It aches.

The clothes I have put away, probably never to be worn by another child but yet unable to be parted with.

The empty bedroom.

My empty arms. The space in my heart for the completion to what feels like the incomplete. I am not done.

Does it ever get any easier?

Because if this fails just how do I justify the time, emotional exhaustion and money that so badly needs to be spent elsewhere on the pipe dream of another warm, wriggly new life?

How?

I guess I can’t, not really. It’s selfish.

G

The calm before the storm.

….or is it the lead up before the expensive race?

I don’t really know.

All I know is that work is kicking my arse in an ‘I get to tell people their mother is dying and they should come to hospital NOW and duly make them cry a river on a daily basis’ kind of way.

If it isn’t that, it’s trying not to lose my own shit on the real fun times like when I get to see women who’ve just had a godawful full term still birth after three days of induction to deliver a dead baby, only to come back the very next day with both a womb infection and a pulmonary embolism.

Life really has it in for some people.

I’m really feeling kind of blah, and it isn’t just the fact that for the first time in the last six years I have resorted to taking the pill because of the twisted Cycle Logic of IVF and ungodly work related time restrictions meaning that I just cannot be fecked with an inevitable stress-induced ironic  one-hundred day break from tampons right now. Because if THAT happens, then I ain’t cycling at all this year.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve just realised I’m pissing away thousands of dollars and I may not even end up with any embryo(s) to transfer after all. Or I may overstimulate and be cancelled. Or I may transfer and more likely than not fail to get pregnant. If I do, well, I have a risk of yet another neural tube defect affected pregnancy.

All of these scenarios are probably statistically better than the odds of a real, live baby in 40 something weeks. I just can’t get my head around that possibility any more.

Please let this work.

I don’t know what else to say.

I need it to.

Enough that, despite my less than stellar multiple pregnancy history, I think if I am lucky enough to have two embryos I am going to be utterly mental and transfer them both. I do not want to do this again, ever.

I’m exhausted.

Things I hadn’t considered

Oh denizens of the Internet,

I did not mean to leave you hanging so (well those of you who remembered that teeny-tiny RE appt I have been hiding in my back pocket), really I did not.

It was just that I have been kind of busy stitching knife wounds in tricky crevices of rather inconveniently uncooperative six year olds and dealing with the  simply never-ending procession of privately insured elderly-with-new-confusion-who-need-fibbing-enthusiastic-selling-to-private-physician types in the days since my appointment. I haven’t really had time to write.

Also, could all the daft sods with mild headaches PLEASE at least try a panadol before coming to the emergency department? I’m kind of sick of keeping a polite expression when I find the answer to ‘and so what have you tried for this terrible headache?’ is ‘Oh NOTHING, Doctor, I didn’t think it was that bad’.

Go Home, then.

Please tell me that you wouldn’t all do that to me, clever readers?

I am relying on you all to reassure me that there is some common sense left in the world because my cynic-lenses are set to Jaundice at the moment….and no, I’m not talking about the bemused bright yellow 80 year old who probably had cancer when I say that, either.

I’m taking about the people who need a big flashing sign that says ‘Fishing for sick certificate’ so I can stop wasting both of our times.

If you will permit a small on-topic digression, after much priming with the sounds ‘B’, ‘BUHHHH’, ‘BAYYYYHHHHH’ and so on, Saag and Naan now chant ‘BAYYYYYHHHBEEE’ at LS whenever they see him. I think he is getting the shape of his inevitable future.

I guess it would carry rather more weight if they did not also shout ‘NAKKKKKKEEEEDDD!’ with such abandon and insist on widdling all over my bloody bed in a NO PJ’S NO NAPPY NO MAMA! post-shower nudey run fiesta, but almost-two year olds are not really noted for trustworthy verbal output.

I had to dress them backwards and that will work right up until they figure out how to unzip each other. Tomorrow.

Regardless, The Appointment.

My RE insisted on referring to ‘premature menopause’ and ‘DOR’ rather more than I would have liked. She also folded on a day 5 transfer of whatever makes it from the half a dozen frosties I have with a view to earlier rather than later stim cycle, even before I leave half a gallon of repeat FSH-it’s-been-a-while bloods with the phlebotomist. That didn’t freak me out a ALL, I promise you, and the only thing less freaky was finding that my RE and I can now quite comfortably share breastfeeding war stories and the like.

I could have compared suckage at boob suckage notes for HOURS.

Also, it is not every day you can tell your children they are going to meet their maker and MEAN it without the slightest sense of irony.

Anyway, I am now going to spend about the next six weeks jumping through newly created legal hoops to prove I have not become and axe murderer since I created those aforementioned embryos and then I aim to transfer asap. In case my own ovaries are heading into snooze mode because I really hadn’t thought of that possibility.

In the meantime I shall keep the new patient appointment on behalf of my certain nearanddear and insist she see somebody at my clinic for a second opinion. I remain resolute on that point and I know that acting in the best interest of somebody you care about does not always mean that they will be happy with you NOW.

Also, I am a brittle responder and I would rather the FSH doser didn’t have me explode. My clinic know about my gonads, their habits, and the fact that for ME a LH of 25 is kind of boring.

I still have to tell my sib all of that, though.

G

Load up your tomatoes.

Oh, boy but you should all get a jolly great big free pass to pass judgement on my pathetic soul this time, really you should. Stocks and tomatoes included, on the house.

I’m a selfish asshat and I hate to admit that fact, but don’t dare protest at your monitor. I fear by the end of this post any polite mutterings that Of Course I Am Nice and shouldn’t label myself so will have dissipated rapidly. You’ll be in the vegetable aisle before you know it.

Internet, forgive me, but I seem to be nothing but a pathetic shit.

Here’s the deal.

I was more than happy to help my only sister FINALLY have a family by donating my eggs. She sounded in no especial rush. Okay, so clearly my own memory of infertility has faded if I was fooled by the casual tone but I really did think there was no especial hurry. Nothing seemed to be on fire.

I figured that I had time for an, ahem, productive cycle or two before loaning the fruits of my proverbials. You know I really want another one of those baby creatures oh so badly.

I’d told her that my SOLE precondition was that she get a  solid second opinion from a RE with experience in recurrent miscarriage that her own eggs really were kaput. Past their use by. Toasted prematurely. She’s younger than I am by several years and fried eggs in the under thirty set are uncommon. I do not want the regret of the what-if to bite her in the ass for the rest of her life if she DOESN’T go into this fully informed.

Using donor gametes is a big decision and the emotional overlay smothers the rational sometimes. She wouldn’t be the first woman to be told that donor was the way to go only to succeed on her tod. Conversely, what if she uses my eggs and it turned out surprise! to be an immunological issue or a sperm problem?

That’s just heartache with an interst rate.

Although I am a doctor and pretty familiar with IVF, I am NOT my sister’s treating practitioner and have no earthly idea about the technicalities of her treatments and problems except of course in the very general second-hand way that a non-medico can express. She needed to get her records to somebody appropriate and make jolly well SURE.

But she didn’t.

What she DID do is get a referral from her GP to a random RE at another clinic. That’s like changing your toilet paper from the one with patterns to the quilted kind, and not precisely representing a functional difference in the handling of the net output if you get my drift.

Then she didn’t even make the appointment.

Now she’s mentioned she wants to cycle soon, but HER clinic insist on registering me as a new patient and giving me IVF 101 on top of all the donor counselling. That’s just, if you shall excuse my language , utter unadulterated bulldust.

Not only have I done this before three goddamn times, but I have that minor medical degree that makes injection training a bit retarded. I am more than happy to compromise by stimming, donating, and then transfer my OWN embryos while my sister and her husband transfer whatever my donated eggs generate. I am not happy to sit around for months doing pointless red-tape jumping before I pass ‘go’.

Not when I was THIS close to cycling for ME, NOW.

What pisses me off the MOST, however, is that I have an appointment for a thaw cycle for ME at MY clinic in just over a week and now if I want to help my sister out, I have to junk my plans. For somebody who isn’t really approaching this with the caution they damn well should and didn’t do the only thing I asked.

I love my sister and I want this for her so badly, but I can’t help but feel cheated. Let down.

I’ll be lucky to transfer for myself in six months now when in six WEEKS I could have been pregnant.

I am a horrible person because the tears I’m crying right now are of pure frustration. This just sucks.

Break out.

Dear Internet,

Geepers, but I think there’s cobwebs on my keyboard.

However. 

Rather than merely apologising profusely yet again (because I know how dull that is) about how much my busy arse fails you all these days when it comes to moaning to the world at large about how much my life happens to damn well suck the chrome off a towbar right now, I bring you important news.

Huzzah, for I have but two covershits to go in the Land Of Bum.

Yes, I am aware that I left an ‘f’ out of covershift and it was Utterly On Purpose.

Let’s not bother to pretend that anybody is shocked at this point if I disclose how much I hate busy ward cover when I should by rights be eating copious amounts of chocolate in the resident’s quarters while surfing the ‘net except I can’t because people who really could do with some iodine in their diet keep shitting me to tears all damn day  HAVING A LIFE.

I am here chasing spiderlings out of my figurative online space to say that in two days my official hours shall halve.

Okay, so UNOFFICIALLY they won’t and I AM kind of working a circadian-breaking ungodly amount of rotating nightshifts, but hey, I have twins. I am good at getting my underwear on after two hours’ sleep.

Just don’t expect it to be on the right way around is all,  and if I am frowning when I am asking about your chest pains it’s because the tag is running my c-section scar red raw and I can’t scratch my crotch until I’m out of eyesight, okay?

In the meantime, I leave you with the following newsflashes:

1. Putting an IV in a demented man who is doing his best to bleed to death out of his arse at 10 pm plain old sucks. Especially when you have to resort to IM sedation retrieved from the psych ward to avoid having your head knocked off while doing so. Also, when performing a rigid sigmoidoscopy on such a patient KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT at all times. Just saying.

Don’t google that term, please.

2. No, I didn’t put a catheter in him, even though I should have. He went apeshit when I went near his ARM for sweet christ’s sake, can you imagine what would have happened if I went for his penis?

3. The surgical ward is a Very Bad Place in which to have a heart attack. THAT by the way was only detected because I figured that bleeding freely out of one’s arse shouldn’t result in such combative behaviour and went hunting for other explanations.

The sad thing is that in regards to number three above, my boss was most unimpressed and ask I refrain from looking for trouble in the future.

See you on the flipside,

G (with the IVF appointment in a few weeks. Eep!)

PS. Also, despite claiming every second I was at work as paid overtime (instead of the traditional medical model of being paid in bitch and moan and bitter thoughts in hope of climbing the greasy pole to Better Things) and being paid a budget breaking mint as a result, guess who got first class feedback for services sleepily rendered and was asked to consider changing well-laid plans to enter OB training next year in favour of surgical training?

So much for the rumours that claiming overtime was instant career suicide. I have three new referees who all want to give me a job.

Don’t laugh, that really was what happened to me.

Go figure, eh? When you really have nothing to lose, people go and like you anyway.

In case you wondered.

….I thought I better emerge mascara-under-eyes-grey-faced-and-clutching-coffee from the fog of working the last fortnight straight for 10-15 hours a day (and, yes, I am serious about those hours, I’m simply too tired to bother exaggerating) and let any of you who were perhaps occasionally checking back on the Now-With-Bonus-Two-Week-Wait-Nonblogger-Woman down.

Gently.

Are you ready? Seated?

It didn’t work.

Also, I have a buttload of dirty laundry to do, some of it bloodstained and THAT my friends is adding insult to injury.

I got my period about one day after I wrote my last post and have been a combination of too dispirited and too bloody tired to write much about how that makes me feel, although I guess typing ‘shitty. crampy. send chocolate at ONCE’ wouldn’t have taken all that long to achieve.

Especially without capitals.

My sincerest advice to you all is Don’t Mention The Period or it finds you. I can only assume MINE must have heard me talking about it and decided to pay me a visit to straighten a few damn things right OUT. It may disappear for months on end but unless my husband acquires working spermatozoa, my ovaries decide that a luteal phase is not in fact a sprint event or a clinic appointment is involved (you choose the more probable option out of that delightful field) it isn’t going away for forty-plus-or-minus-a-bit weeks.

Now way, no how.

I don’t know why that is as dispiriting to me as it is since we first figured out all this schizen news, um, five years ago now but I must be a slow learner or something.

There’s simply nothing like being scrubbed in theatre and wearing out your weeny biceps holding a retractor just so for simply hours on end in a Horrendoplasty with Bonus Surprise Cancer and realising that you’re feeling a bit damp because Niagara Falls has with truly impeccable timing decided to let loose. In your undies. Mostly because there isn’t much one can do about it, really.

Thank g-d the mask means that nobody can SEE the expressions that go with the increasingly icky sensation.

Now if you shall kindly excuse me, I need another block of chocolate. Stat.

Two week what?

Yeah, that titles surprises the heck outta ME too, but I think in so far as I can tell I might have entered what is known as the two week wait, almost completely accidentally.

Well, apart from the sex, and don’t ask me how THAT happened because I’m working a 70 hour week and I’m scratching my head about that bit, too, personally.

As for my complete work-life-rectal-foreign-body imbalance situation?

I checked because I simply couldn’t believe my eyes when my rostered time, excluding overtime,  for the fortnight totalled one hundred and forty miserable fucking hours and so I cracked out a calculator.

When you work those sort of hours, you tend to assume that you can no longer count right, let alone get your underwear on the right way round and have the damn tag rub your privates the wrong way for half the day until you figure it out in a rare blessed urination break (don’t ask, okay?) but apparently I am really working that goddamn much these days.

No wonder I never get a change to blog about what a fucking bitch that haematology resident was and how much I hate my job.

In three short weeks, I rotate back to emergency and not only will I see much less of people with anal cancer and those with plain old anal over-interest, but I’m capped at 40-50ish hours a week.

On the plus side, drinks are hereby on ME, Internet. I claimeth my overtime.

Oh, and don’t worry that you might see a birth announcement in about 40 weeks or so, for the record we have severe male factor and I am noted to have a luteal phase of about 7 days unaided. Ain’t happening.

I can keep dreaming about maternity leave all I like but survey says I’ll be working my arse off again NEXT year, too.

Not making this shit up.

Okay,

First of all, the almost five billion personal email and comments you all sent that I finally was able to read today after finishing work (after yet another pathetic 12 hour shift in which my colleagues and I were most unhelpfully picked to shreds by Professor Bow Tie in yet another kill-me-now all-day ward round) moved me to tears.

Thank you. Each and every one of you who commented, read, stopped to look at the bloggy car crash and generally thought nice things in my general direction.

Thank you.

I don’t mind when nice people make me cry for the right reasons, but I REFUSE to cry at work just because somebody is an utter asshole.

I may be a girl, but I am not soft and they shall not make me cry. Not even in the toilets. It’s a point of pride and about the only thing I am hanging on to right now.

Remind me I said that when I am up until the wee small hours tomorrow frantically preparing a ‘presentation’ for another Bullshit Big Meeting on the back of a bloody long cover shift, will you? As it is, I was THIS close to either weeping or doing something violent with a discarded proctoscope when the Arsey Fellow decided to talk to me like a naughty two year old yesterday, the fucker.

Trust me, I know how that goes. I have two of ‘em.

They’re all assholes and I just have to hang on to the knowledge that I am far from incompetent and this is just a particularly toxic and unpleasant job in which every else’s omission becomes my problem. It’s kind of like a medical game of hot-potato where the pathology sister decides she can’t be bothered taking blood today because her inclination to do so is inversely proportional to the hour of effort I expended running around the wards before the long weekend putting slips in path boxes.

I cop the yelling.

I swear I keep expecting a fat man with Telly Hair and an obnoxiously large microphone to pop up from behind the ward clerk and announce in a big, fat shout:

‘Surrrrrr-prise! Who would like to be yelled at for the transplant patient not having their immunosuppressant levels taken for three days?’,

…. and I will pipe back in my best nervous game-show-contestant-squeak: 

‘Not me, But ONLY because I am HANGING OUT to be red-pokered rectally over the septic patient not getting any antibiotics for FOUR because the infectious disease team like their weekends undisturbed by all that messy work stuff’.

I’m sick like that.

I now just assume that I shall be treated like a moron, albeit a moron who wonders just how somebody loses not only a big, black dildo but also the goddamn remote control so high up their anus  it needs surgery to get it back and THEN has the gall to complain about their sore hemorrhoids afterwards.

Please tell me they don’t return it on discharge.

Anyway, LS is phoning in about a billion times per shift from work begging me not to throw everything away, although he does go and ruin the sentiment by ALSO telling me I need to shape up. There’s an interesting side order of increased inclination in the general direction of Takeaway 3.0 (um, Bhaji?) but I don’t think I’ll believe THAT rumour until I see a clinic booking and, besides, I think there may be other relationship fish to fry first.

The rings, multi-carat rings I adore, like the metaphorical gloves, are OFF. For now. It will take a lot for them to ever go back on again.

Also, I am Not Making This Shit Up, but would you believe it my multiple IVF failure sister needs an egg donor.

She’s asked me and I need to be extremely not pregnant to do it.

The irony. Also, I’m humbled.

G

Sometimes, it’s all about tact.

You will have to excuse a heady combination of near-terminal fatigue and plain back-asswards laziness on my part for not checking my archives to back this statement up, but I’m pretty sure that I recently had a moan here about being the victim of three consecutive pregnancy announcements in a week.

I was pregnancy roadkill for a few days there.

Anyway, if my nasty habit of getting home from work at 2am and being up with Saag and Naan by 7am has finally sent me right round the sleep-deprived twist as many of you have grimly predicted it would, and I merely dreamed about bitching uncharitably online over the happiness of others, I do apologise.

Let me tell you now, it sucked.

But. Here’s the thing.

Now that I’ve had time to let the information percolate, I’m not so much pissed that three women I know actually got knocked up without paying for the privilege and were HAPPY about it (unlike many of my patients) as I am in the manner in which I was told.

Really. I get it. They’re happy. I’m happy for them.

Who wouldn’t want to be able to gleefully upgrade their buy-one-get-one-free beer gut  residue from baby number one into a more flattering and No Crunches Required  ’bump’ and crack out the elastic waists without judgement?  Yes, even at six weeks.

They could rub the bloody thing less, though. It wobbles, for a start.

Anyway, I’m actually going to be mildly serious for a moment.

I don’t expect the world to defer to those of us who suffer from infertility and duly spend every waking moment in fits of anxiety about not  upsetting our delicate baby-free constitutions. Firstly I like to think that we’re all tougher than that, and secondly the next thing you know we’ll all be back to campaigning for land right for gay whales and that is so 80′s, people.

While I am on that theme, it is okay to be an actRESS. That’s what people with vaginas who appear in movies actually are. Own it. Giving words their proper gender does not demean anybody or make them less valid or somehow sullied. It’s just a word.

Coming back to my point, I don’t expect special consideration from the world at large. Please don’t howl me down in a sea of ‘but it isn’t fair!’ because I know it’s not.

Infertility is miserable, but we exist is a stew of human misery. Only yesterday I treated a very conservatively raised newly batshit-raving-psychotic lady who had done nothing to deserve the hell of stone-cold believing she was pregnant with sa.tan’s sp.awn because the voices commanded her to ask her husband to e.jaculate on her face.

Not that I really know how to make such a judgement call, because I guess even Hit.ler’s mother loved him. All I know is that this poor woman  watched her baby die and then if that wasn’t awful enough she lost her mind, her job, and the whole g-ddamn kit and caboodle. 

Not her fault.

It’s not fair that anybody suffers from infertility. It’s also not fair that people get hit by cars and end up in wheelchairs. Or get pancreatic cancer. It’s just life and shit happens pretty indiscriminately. Tha proverbial fan is a pretty even sprayer.

However. Here’s my point.

There is such a thing as human decency. Manners. Politeness. Consideration.

Basically, just in the same way I did not recoil, snigger or laugh and treated that poor woman like she was a human being deserving of care in the best way I could, I expect the same from others.

It’s quite simple, really.

If you’re pregnant and you damn well KNOW you have this friend who has one dead baby, a set of IVF twins and no further pregnancies to date on her scorecard, a rushed ‘GUESS WHATTT!!!!!!’ email with punctuation abuse is probably not the most sensitive way to break the news.

For the love of all that’s holy, world, it’s called empathy.

I can’t expect people who don’t know me to be more circumspect, I don’t believe in ESP, but I should damn well be able to expect it from my friends. That’s not special consideration, it’s tact.

Full stop.

PS. Highpoint, if you like to call it that, of yesterday? A married, functional, employed 19 week pregnant woman with a toddler who rocked up wanting an a.bortion of her perfectly healthy pregnancy just because it was inconvenient. Yes, I think I should be able to judge behaviour like that, hypocritical as it sounds.

G

Psst…

It’s been some time coming, but I’ve finally figured out how to fix our overloaded public health system.

Put simply, yesterday was vile.  

When I arrived at work the collective unwell were positively climbing the WALLS in the waiting room, we had ambulance trolleys backed up halfway down the street and people queuing out the damn front door waiting to be triaged.

It was ugly. Very seriously ugly.

I have no earthly idea why people all seem to get together and decide that TODAY they are sick enough to wait six hours to be seen and duly all rock up at once to hospital to whine about some funny lumps they’ve had on their arms that aren’t even visible to the naked eye, but they do.

Boy do they get pissed about the wait, though. I mean, I know dirty looks can’t kill or I’d be about cremated by now.

Several times I was glad that nobody seemed to be packing weapons, because as it was I nearly died of bitch-face and death-glare (or possibly even some nasty stink-eye) when I resorted to seeing patients in the waiting room to deal with the horrendous Sick Person Surplus Situation, draped over our furniture in various poses of ill health as they were.

I mean, more than once I had to crush suddenly-rapidly-upwardly-moving dreams of an uncomfortable metal bed with a plastic mattress and the machine that goes beep on accounts of The House Is Already Full (sorry) before somebody else took their damn seat. It’s like doing something nasty to particularly whiny baby seals, really it is.

Anyway, I’ve figured out the solution to the problem.

It’s quite easy.

If you let the man who has virulent gastro and doesn’t want to stay any more on accounts of he needs to score drugs follow through on his threat to leave his treatment cubicle and help him head back out the the malestrom then he shall kindly reward your actions by vomiting profusely and malodourously all over the place. Very rapidly most people within blast radius will decide that they aren’t sick enough to wait around covered in vomit and will actually bugger off and tell their GP about their banged knee tomorrow like good boys and girls.

Aah. Bliss. I should have thought of that sooner.

Also, I am back for eleven hours today, I have had sod-all sleep lately, I haven’t seen Saag or Naan in three days and counting and quite frankly my tits hurt like mofo’s and I broke my no pee rule to no avail.

Argh.

Three years

If you can graciously allow me the artistic licence of giving or taking a small amount of time, three years ago was probably one of the very lowest points in my life to date. I was bleeding, alone, and sad beyond belief.

In the space of one short week I went from increasingly optimistic about my nursery colour scheme  to having my world crash around my feet in about a million ugly pieces. I’d just terminated my pregnancy, a pregnancy  fiercely wanted, because my baby had a particular form of lethal prognosis birth defect known as anencephaly.

I’m not the only person to have ever been faced with the choice of what to do when you find out your baby has no chance of survival whatsoever and doesn’t even have the potential to achieve awareness, however brief, bittersweet and short-lived, and I’m not the first infertile blogger to terminate a much wanted baby.

I’m not competing here, not in the least.

Many of you have much more harrowing stories to tell, stories that make me almost lose my shit just reading them. I categorically cannot and would not compare my experience to another, ever, but I can say without a doubt that for ME choosing between a termination and a stillbirth  was the  worst choice I ever had to make. It isn’t even really relevant to the point I’m making WHICH choice I made. I’m not talking about the abotion issue here, either.

I hope never to have to make it again and I wish even harder that nobody else ever has to make a similar decision, but sadly that isn’t the case. Life is not always kind to us.

This isn’t a post about sympathy, or one about grief. I don’t need condolences on my loss, it was three years ago now and I have been lucky enough to be blessed with two rudely and robustly healthy children since that time. You know all about their exploits and this post is not about them, either.

What I DO want to do is make sure that ALL of you, whatever your situation, are taking folate.

I don’t actually care whether you’re still actively trying to become pregnant, pretending to ignore the possibility and hoping for the best, have given it all up in despair, or have moved on to other pastures entirely. It doesn’t matter here. Even infertile women get pregnant spontaneously.

Take your folate.

Taking folate BEFORE you become pregnant is one of the simplest and most powerful things you can do for your someday-baby, it’s really that simple. If you’re in a higher risk group either by dint of having an affected baby, taking certain antiepileptics or with an affected close relative then take the higher dose.

Do it, please.

Don’t piss about with fancy lubricants, headstanding and pre-conception Scandinavian hot sauna fish-whacking to maximise your odds of pregnancy, invest your money where it matters. You don’t even have to fork out for the fancy prenatals, although you can if you like. 

Generic folate is dead cheap. Dead babies are just dead.

No, it won’t completely eradicate the possibility of something bad and sad happening, but it is extremely clear cut that for the majority of women it does enormously reduce that risk.

 The end.

Yup, still stings.

Here’s the post where I have to apologise profusely and generally perform a humble manual extraction of my head from my arse for EVER moaning on about how much worse primary infertility was than second and generally carrying on with much self-indulgent whining about how anybody possessing living children was were about a billion times better off than I was with my dead one and no live births on my scorecard as yet.

Okay, so I do still think that I am objectively much better off with two live, healthy children that I adore to bits and would really generally miss terribly (except possibly when they are teething because MAN Naan is a notoriously pissy teether) should I misplace them, but I was an utter arse to think that this meant that I therefore wasn’t allowed to feel utterly shit and miserable when three of my closest friends all one after another- POP!- announce that they’ve just had a 12 week scan for a pregnancy that I’d never heard about before.

I didn’t even know any of them had tossed the pill.

I must be a bitch, but feck it’s so damn hard to plaster a shit-eating grin on my face and choke out congratulations in a convincing fashion when I’ve just been blindsided for the third fucking time in a week.

Also, hearing all the happy chatter about names, gender, nursery preparations and looking at bumps still just blows.

I’m jealous and sad and mopey and working a run of night-shift which has included such high points as tending to the empty suicidal threats of a personality disordered intoxicated IV drug abusing prostitute who also turned out to be pregnant when I ran her bloods, even though she said there was NO WAY it was possible.

Ha.

Mind you, she also said she’d taken 80 xanax four hours ago and was still upright  and perfectly lucid and clearly not about to develop a disinclination to breathing any time soon, so I doubted that anything she said was reliable in the least to begin with. I guess that baby number 8 will duly be handed over to social services in about eight months time, too.

Now if you will excuse me, it’s time to go to work again and hopefully nobody else comes in with a testicle the size of a tennis ball that they claim to only just noticed that night. The mind boggles about the powers of observation of some people and, additionally, I am not a fan of looking at scrotums in great detail at 3am.

Or any time, I suppose. It’s nobody’s best angle.