*sigh*
All I can ask is WHY? WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY…
It’s not bloody fair, sometimes this Universtity of hard knocks that we get to attend damn well sucks. My heart is breaking for you my sweet friend. For you and your wonderful husband. Cos this makes so bloody sense at all.
Just know that I’m here for you. Through everything.
Please give my friend Sharon some love. She needs it.
I need to share something with you…. something TMI…
I’ve been neglecting the “care” of the lady bits of late but in defense it has been winter and a little extra warmth is always called for…. and it’s not like there has been much action (dildo cam and FET transfer aside) happening down there… and my beautician is in a rather inconvenient location now (she’s on the other side of the city close to where I *used* to work)…. and I have been pretty lazy on this front to be honest…
Ok it’s not like I have not, not been trimming to keep it relatively neat and tidy but when I got out the shower this morning and looked at myself in the mirror I had a visions of this…
And considering that I’m going with my girlfriends to the spa in 2 weeks time, me thinks it is clearly time to get myself to the wax place and I’m not talking Madam Tussauds *cough cough*
I played golf on Sunday with my hubby and his brother in some seriously windy conditions. Man alive, my poor little balls did not stand a chance against the might of the bluster of Mother Nature! The boys still managed to put in a decent enough score despite the wind but what really has me stunned is the amazing blessing that Cliff and I got from his brother and his wife that day…
In as much as we are on a ttc break, we are still in the very real process of paying off IVF and FET # 1 and are also considering how we are going to pay for IVF # 2… The good thing is that I pay my last car repayment in the month of October (yeeha!!) and whilst I at first had visions of going on a HUGE shopping spree with the addtional cash that would give me, I put on my “big girl panties” and thought about how that would really help us start up our IVF fund. I am also trying to get myself a stand at a Christmas fare where I can sell my ceramics and add that cash to the IVF fund as well… but even with this extra cash coming in we’ll still be a few several thousand rands short when push comes to stimulation, and that shortfall was most likely going to have to come out of our mortgage.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m the person in our house who feels that money is just money and that we’ll end up paying it off in good time and it will be money well spent once we get our children, and that God will provide no matter what, but the fact is that I also have to be a mature adult about it and know that if we can save money elsewhere to plump up the fund, then that this is what needs to be done… BUT, I digress…
So at the halfway house during our windy golf game on Sunday while I was eating a boerewors roll that had clearly seen better days, my brother in law casually pipes up that when Cliff and I are ready for our next treatment that he and his wife would like to contibute some money, and that it in no way is it a loan and that one day we’ll be in the position to help someone else in the same way or they will need us to help them out and so on and so forth… well I immediately felt the tears rush to my eyelids and nearly choked on my road kill food when he told us how much they wanted to contribute.
Suffice it to say that it is a really substantial amount of money and I am literally still stunned…
We had dinner with them on Sunday night and thanked them both profusely, but I am still at a complete loss as to how we are going to Thank them for this blessing that we have received. I know that this is God providing for our needs next year and I am so overwhelmed with grattitude that I cannot express it well enough…
How would you thank them?
… that is what Cliff and I are according to our wonderful doc. We finally had our FET post mortem with him last week Thursday (sorry I have been so quiet was on a conference and worked at the annual golf day yesterday – having blog withdrawls) and it went as well as can be expected when you are again facing your FS after a negative result.
We discussed the failed FET and all things considered the negative result was not that surprising to them or us mostly due to the fact that frozen embryo’s lose 50% of their viablility due to the freezing and the clinic considers any pregnancies from FET’s to be extremely special and “lucky”. I asked my doc if I should be worried that my uterus is crap and he told me not to be concerned about that at this stage – they cleared the endo and it looks good and my lining has always been excellent, that is when he dropped the “unlucky” bombshell… According to him we *should* have been pregnant on my fresh cycle cos all things were in our favour, good response to meds, great egg harvest, excellent quality embryos – just bad luck. He is not sitting on his laurels though, cos as he said my age is on their side and he really feels that the “young” girls (I told him not to forget beautiful – young *and* beautiful 
) really should be the “lucky” ones who have first time successful IVF’s, so he has sent me for further blood tests to check that I am not getting a clotting disorder when the embryo’s are transferred which might be killing them… He has sent me for the phospolippid antibodies, ANF and inherited thrombophilia screening tests… (I threw those in there for all of us qualified doctors out there!)
We are as I’ve mentioned before taking a break – he has asked me to go on BCP while we are on the break firstly to keep my ovaries and endo under control an secondly cos (as he so tactfully put it) it is not like we stand much of a chance of trying ourselves when my history is of having over 100 day cycles… so back onto the pill I go for the next three months… On the plus side maybe by me going back on the pill and us not standing much of chance, we can focus on helping our ailing sex life out…
We are planning a holiday to Plettenburg Bay in November and we are going to have a good Christmas and New Year with lots of friends and parties and fun… Then we’ll tackle IVF # 2 in January 2009… so now 2008 conception or baby for me….
When we are ready for our next cycle, we will follow the exact same protocol as we did for our first, simply cos it worked so well for us… the only thing we will alter is we will have a day 5 transfer and not a day 3 transfer…
So that is our plan!
I’ll still be blogging about inane stuff and hope you will all continue to follow my life and journey! But for now, it is time to live life as Sam the woman and friend, not just as Sam the infertility patient…
I’m actually looking forward to it… good times are ahead… just you wait and see 
“Cautiously” still counting cos this morning when inserting my morning dose of cyclogest I noticed some teeny brown flecks in my cervical mucous… *sigh*
Naturally this freaked me out BIG time and I am now the most obsessive compulsive panty checker you have *ever* come across and have to physically stop myself from doing a cervical mucous check EVERY time I go to the bloody (no pun intended) loo… I cannot classify the little brown flecks as spotting really but they have completley ruined my up to now rose tinted view of this FET… Having just gone to the loo about 2 nano seconds ago, I can say that I have not seen anymore brown flecks but this is probably because I forced myself to not do any unecessary erm, digging around in there…
I called my Mom on the way to work this morning and had a good drizz and lamented about how unfair the whole thing is, and moaned about the fact that drug addicts and alcoholics get to fall pregnant and get to experience the miracle of life but that stable loving people like Cliff and I can’t seem to get it right… She (I love my Mom she is the BEST) reminded me that it is not for me to judge why others get their miracles and told me to remember that I am in a blood covenant with God and that blood is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact the blood that washed me is a GREAT thing. It calmed me down and now I am only mildly terrified that this could be all over. Again.
I have had lower back pain the whole week and some might think that is a good sign, but I am not counting any chickens just yet – in fact the only thing I am counting right now are the minutes of each hour till I can get the blood draw over and done with and know one way or the other if this *is* going to be the summer of my season.
I’m praying with every fibre of my being that it will be.
Today I had planned to wake up possibly use my FMU to do a HPT *looks over shoulder guiltily*
I have to state for the record that I usually hate HPT’s, I think that they have powers… they cause us to squint, to see things that no-one else could ever be asked to see and openly admit and drive us generally batty. BUT I was going to give in to the call of the dreaded HPT this morning. Cos today, today I am 7DP5DT – effectively 12DPO… Naturally I did not just select this ausipicious date out of nowhere, I had done my research and there are a LOT of girls out there that have tested on this day and have seen two lines (not imagined) and in my clouded state after the negative fresh cycle, I had bought TWO HPT’s which are now snuggled in tight behind the bog roll in my bathroom cabinet… One would think that one may as well use them…. right?
I discussed my covert operation plans with a friendvia msn (who btw is a complete POAS addict herself!) and her sage advice of “it could be too early to get a postive”, “try and hold out a bit longer”, “pass the fail point of your fresh cycle before testing on this cycle” won over and I put the peeing plans on hold… but because I put the pee on hold, I had to find something else to get me through this day which in my mind is the first pass fail point of this FET cycle…
Findings as follows:
FRESH CYCLE
∞ Total 29 days in length
∞ ET done on CD 20
∞ Dream over CD 29 (9DP3DT or 12DPO)
FROZEN CYCLE
∞ Total 31 days and counting =)
∞ ET done on CD 24
∞ Dream still continues CD 31 (7DP5DT or 12 DPO)
So *effectively* at the same point I am still in the running… At least that is the way it feels to me. I think in my heart of hearts though I mentally need to get past 9DPT as that was the “day” it all fell apart on our fresh cycle. I just really don’t know anymore… 7 more days to go until official beta day (why oh why do we need to test so darn late???)
The scientific findings prove without a doubt that I am completely nuts, just a tiny bit OCD, and probably going to break down and pee on something in the next week before my beta – provided that I don’t fail the pass fail point of last time of course…
They say that you should project into the universe what you want and it will come back to you… I personally believe that God already knows the desire of my heart and when His time is perfect I will get it, but it can’t hurt to put it out there right now – this is what I so desperately want to see soon:
And the madness begins…
At only 3DP5DT I am aleady in the horrible rut of “this just might have worked” vs “aw crap, there is no way this has worked”… *sigh* I am driving myself nuts. I *know* that I just need to have faith and that I need to trust that the outcome is already determined and no amount of worrying and obsessing about it can change that, and yet, here I am again, in the cess pool of 2ww madness… As soon as I feel myself slipping into the cess pool I sharply remind myself that I need to trust my God and I feel fine again…so I guess I’ll be being sharp with myself quite a bit the next 11 days If that does not work, I guess I’ll have to hack at myself with a spoon….
I had a VERY relaxing weekend… Took the day off on Friday so that I could chill out after the transfer (which went much better this time round – no ute claming required thank you very much {have I mentioned how much I love my Dr V?}). I slept for a few hours on Friday afternoon, watched Oprah (have not done that in a while) and chilled with my furry girlies… oh and cooked dinner… Cliff played golf on Saturday and I met a friend for coffee (decaf of course) and breakfast and again just chilled out. Read my book and lay down quite a lot… Yesterday was church, breakfast with my Mom, sister and neice at home and then cooked lunch waiting for Cliff to get home from the 702 Walk the Talk. He got to walk the 5km’s with our hounds and my friend Marce who was my understudy stand in cos I was not allowed to walk due to a certain number of cellular beings that are hopefully growing in my tummy… I had a Sunday afternoon nap and then chilled out in front of the TV last night… I liked chilling out, but I was glad to get to work today adn finally get some “action”…Hahaha! (Am alone in office, mostly everyone is off and I am B.O.R.E.D, so B.O.R.E.D)
I mean I’m the first person in the world who advocates pajama days and I truly believe that weekends are for refueling after a long week at work, but all this doing absolutley nothing for three days straight was kinda tiring in and on its own… I cannot imagine how you girls on bed rest for weeks on end do it… Don’t get me wrong I would lie around for months if it meant a healthy baby for us, but I would surely drive myself even more nutty than I already am…
So how do you girls do it? WHAT do you do to pass the time? I mean (and I cannot believe I’m about to say this AT ALL) there is only so much sleeping one can do right? PSP or DS pop to mind, but I am not much of a gamer and I cannot sew to save my life (I saw one girl on bed rest made a blanket – hand stitched – kudos to her)… Not that I am on bed rest or have any reason at all to be wondering, but my interest was peaked…
If you’ve managed to read all the way through this worthless drivel post, I would be most interested to hear your thoughts on what one does to pass the time while on bed rest???
Our little popsicles outdid themselves overnight! We ended up with three (yes 3, drie, tres) to transfer this morning I was so surprised, I was expecting to only have 2 at most (was worried again that they would not make it overnight – oh me of little faith) and when we had the embryo chat before transfer we were very pleased to hear that we had 3 to transfer…
Popsicle # 1 was pretty sad, even our untrained eyes could see that this little one was not doing so well, and I had a little pang in my heart for that little one who was not going to make it…
Popsicle # 2 decided to grow from 6 cells to 10 cells overnight and was looking really good
Popsicle #’s 3 & 4 were both compacting and we were very happy with that – one step away from blast stage – both of them
All our popsicles were given assisted hatching cos according to Dr J, the frozen ones sometimes have issues hatching out of the walls cos the outer shells get hard from being cryogenically preserved… Transfer went MUCH better this time round – no pulling my ute out to get the catheter in so I was a happy camper! Flash!! and in went our three (3, drie, tres!) little popsicles…
So now little popsicles, Mom and Dad are asking you really nicely to decide to stick around for a while! We would LOVE for you to implant and grow and to make us happy parents… K? I promise to give you nice ice cream with sugar stars sprinkled on top when you get big enough…
Bring on the 2ww I’m ready for 08.08.08!!! (Test date y’all…)
Out of the four popsicles, we have two that have started growing again.
Yay!!!
I am SO relieved, I cannot explain it… I was so worried that none of them would make it… so will be at the clinic tomorrow morning for the transfer and then smack bang into the 2ww… I thank God for taking care of our little ones to this stage and am praying hard for them to stick around for oh, 9 months or so…
Stayed tuned for the next popsicle episode tomorrow
Today is a big day for our little popsicles… they get taken out of their safe ice palace and are slowly expected to melt and start dividing again.
Now I am not one who condones putting pressure on one’s kids to excel (ok maybe just a little but only if it is something they like doing and show a natural affinity for), but in this case I find that I am wanting our little popsicles to excel… I want them to win gold in the thawing race and I want them to grow well throughout the day and night so that when I make that all important call tomorrow morning at 11h00, I’ll have some good news to share…
I’m hoping for a cracking domino effect…. Good thaw – bump – good divide – bump – good blasts – bump – good transfer – bump – good 2ww (hahahahahahahaha) – bump – good blood test – bump – good heartbeat – bump – good development and so on and so forth… Can one really expect a good thaw to result in a good baby? I sure do…but at the end of the day I know that I need to trust my God. I know that He has it all under control and what ever will be will be in His time, according to His perfect plan…I’m just hoping that the plan is now
Last night I had a weird dream (maybe it was helped along by the cyclogest I started taking yesterday and the comment made by Super Mabout ice cream trucks, but it was kinda strange…). I dreamt that our popsicles were stored in an ice cream truck and that they were ensconsed by yummy vanilla ice cream, but the ice cream was melting and the ice cream man (dressed in his swanky lab coat) was turning out cone after cone in an effort to not make an all consuming mess of his ice cream truck… I was worried that our popsicles would end up in someones tummy as part of their delicious cone when all of a sudden stars started shooting out of the melting pot and then started dividing – stars, stars everywhere… I ran into the middle of the stars and they stuck to my body turning me into a human glitterball… then I woke up to the sound of my alarm so alas, I cannot tell you how this dream ended (ie: did I have a star baby or not) but I am really really really hoping for one….
Can you tell that my obsessed mind is losing it? Heh…
Till tomorrow – here’s to my dividing stars!
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