Before we were called to our appointment, I took the time to have a look at the people we were sharing the waiting room with. It was strangely calming to see people just like us, sitting in their little sections, reading magazines, drinking coffee, smirking at tests. I felt like we were part of a club – the Assisted Pregnancy Club. Not quite the same as the Mile High club – neither are groups I would like to join, but the former we have found ourselves involuntarily fully paid up members of. The latter you could not pay me enough to become a member of.
Sometimes (a lot of the time) I feel like I stick out like a sore thumb. In the company of my friends in Hong Kong I am one of the few mums with only one child. When their second children were small babies it didn’t seem to matter, but now that they are growing up, having their own play dates with the siblings of the children that are my sons age, I feel more and more like I am the odd one out – being left behind. People are announcing pregnancies at a rate of knots; so far I have shared due dates with 3 people, 2 of whom have gone on to have their babies, one of whom is still pregnant. I have watched their their bumps grow, heard the stories of their births and wondered what it was I did in a past life to not only lose our babies, but have to watch other people follow the path we were at one time on? Luckily they are all people I love dearly so after the initial upset, it’s easy to forget our loss and focus on their joy and enjoy their little bundles, but Mother Nature doesn’t know that and I think she could have been a little more lenient.
As our son grows up, more and more milestones remind me that this is not how we planned it. For example, he has just started pre-school. He goes 5 mornings a week for 3 hours. He loves it. I hate it. I had always thought that by this time in our life, he would be at school and I would be at home looking after a new baby. Never did I think that I would be coming home to an empty house. Silence and emptiness do nothing to help the mood, which I suppose is another reason I am blogging. It gives me something to do.
Anyway, back to the meeting room and I felt at ease and ready for our appointment. When Dr UK IVF came to call us in I was immediately a fan. He was a normal, nice, family man who frankly could have been a banker, accountant, brain surgeon, or any other profession that did not require looking at my private parts and talking about periods and cycles. It can be exceptionally uncomfortable and embarrassing discussing such personal aspects of your life with a stranger, but Dr UK IVF immediately made us feel relaxed and I only semi cringed when I remembered the fully comprehensive questionnaire we’d filled in and I knew he’d read. Words like period (which sends my Dad scurrying into his study faster than Jenson Button to the chequered flag) and sperm were just words, and it was easy to be frank with him. The AMH levels were discussed immediately – and again we were reassured that the test is not entirely reliable, I had had it 2 days after my ERCP which could have impacted it, and anyway it didn’t matter as I had a good number of follicles.
Then we got down to the nitty gritty. Dr UK IVF talked us through the process of IVF and of Array CHG - Chromosomal screening. I tried very hard to take it all in but there was so much to listen too and I have to be honest, I wanted to fast forward that bit and just have it done. Again, slap dash as Mum would say, impatient. He used lots of long words and had a flow chart, which for a stay at home Mum was about the most intellectually stimulating topic of conversation I’d had in a long time and I was struggling to keep up. I understood the timeline of injecting hormones into myself to control the ovaries and then a week later start injecting a stimulating drug to make the ovaries ovulate, more blood tests at this point and daily or alternate day scans to see what’s up (brilliant – my friend the probe makes his entrance again). A different type of hormone is injected a week after the ovulating injections, and then 36 hours later I have my eggs harvested. It sounded fairly invasive and intense but when it comes to all things medical I am no shrinking violet and am more than equipped to deal with any of this. I’ve spent more or less my whole life under the watchful eye of some doctor or another mainly due to degenerate discs in my back, hospitals don’t scare me, in fact I find it probably a bit too easy to sign myself over to the men and women in white coats. I couldn’t keep track of the number of injections but I knew it was a lot and I may be doing them myself, but as a Nearly Doctor that’s no biggie and I’d already been injecting myself with steroids for the last pregnancy so I could tick that off the list. The bit of the process however that started another wobble was the egg harvest. Rewind to AMH levels and 6 miscarriages, all chromosomal abnormalities, and here’s our next roadblock. Will they get any eggs? Will they find one that they can use? Will they all have gone bad? What if we do all the injections, complete the process and find we’ve got nothing to work with? Even as I type this I start to panic. When you involve scientists, there is no hiding from the truth. Dr UK IVF was saying that there was a problem and we needed to find out what it was before we could possibly have success. A list of 20 blood tests was put on a sheet of paper in front of us, testing literally everything. My chromosomes, my husbands, my liver function, protein level’s, HIV, thyroid, a blood clotting disease that I had already had tested the previous summer and come back with a ‘mutation’ which is the most hideous word. Some that I cant pronounce and have no recollection of what they were, but one tested my immune system which is a dreadfully scary test to have – have I got cancer? Is there some deadly disease coursing through my body that I do not know about? I felt like I was being bombarded with too many issues to deal with, the major one being the IVF, the secondary one being my general health. To date, not all of the tests have come back, luckily the ones that have are ok, we have 3 more weeks to wait for the full compliment to be in and we will know what we are dealing with, totaling 9 weeks of the unknown. I wake up in the night in a total panic from a dream where I am being told I have some horrible disease, or that its not possible to go ahead with the IVF, or on a really bad night, both. The waiting is intense. I was so worried our hedonist lifestyle in Hong Kong (over here we are all very lucky to have live in domestic help – babysitters are not a problem which means going out is very very easy. Add that to an extremely social ex-pat life and you have a recipe for dialysis) and the impact it would have on our chances, I swore I would not drink between then and the treatment, which I have stuck to if you ignore Christmas that got rather in the way a week after we returned. I found and still find myself making deals with God – I’m not even particularly religious but I prayed and pray, asking that if He would help us get through this I would do charitable work, go totally organic, be kind to even the most irritating people and generally turn myself into a modern day Mother Teresa. I think God probably has the foresight to see that with all the good will in the world, that’s pushing it a bit but I hope he sees that I am trying to adopt a more tolerant and caring approach to life.
I had 20 vials of blood taken that day, my husband had 5. The upside said the nurse, was that I could have a Kitkat afterwards to bring my sugar levels back up. I don’t like chocolate, so my upside was somewhat of a let down.
We left our appointment with a potential time of April for IVF, when hopefully all the ‘retained product’ of the last miscarriage had gone. We had tones of literature to read about Array CGH (more about the technicalities later as I feel this is a ludicrously long blog and very confusing!). I was allowed to exercise again, and I resolved to get my back and pelvis (somewhat shot from my last pregnancy) in tiptop condition, lose the stone or so I had put on throughout the pregnancies, and we would treat our bodies like temples. In the car on the way to Heathrow we were quiet and reflective. More than ever we had been made aware that IVF is not a given, it is a delicate and fragile process that has no guarantee’s. It is not always the answer, as I had naively thought, and for the next 4 months we would be in no mans land. For a control freak such as me, getting to April was going to be another test. Because even thought we’d had 6 miscarriages, Mother Nature thought we could do with another test. She and I are on no speaks by the way, although I try as part of my bargaining with the Big Man to believe she does mean well.
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