Flow Chart

I’ve never quite seen a flow chart as accurate as this one, so I HAD to share…

When top level guys look down, they see only shit;
When bottom level guys look up, they see only assholes…

Forgiveness & Moving Forward

Since my GIFT failed so miserably, I’ve been punishing my body in the only way I know how.  I’ve punished my pcos ovaries and empty uterus by over eating, over drinking and not exercising.  I’ve put on more weight than I care to admit in this push to punish my body.  The weight  – it’s fed my insecurities and has my self esteem at an all time low.

It felt good to punish my body. 

Because the one thing my body knows how to do is take all that extra food and drink and store it.  It’ KNOWS how to do something naturally.  Something that it is supposed to do in these circumstances.  And if it can’t work on it’s own to create a baby, then at least it can work on it’s own to make me fat.

Today I’ve decided enough is enough.  It’s time to stop punishing my body and for me to accept that it just does not work the way it is supposed to when it comes to fertility.  That knowing the only way I’ll ever conceive is in a laboratory is ok.  This is my body.  It’s the only one I’ve got and I’ve been treating it so badly in the last few months.  It’s doing the best it can under the circumstances and it’s time to stop being a bitch to my body.

So I’m moving towards forgiveness.  Forgiveness for my body that I’ve hated and punished for failing me.  I know it’s not going to be easy to break this habit I’ve got myself into.   But if and when we decide to try another IVF I don’t want to be in the place where I question my body quality.

So moving forward I’ve dug out my dietician plan.  I’m going to shop according to it and eat according to it again.  I’m going to cut down drastically on the wine.  And I’ve dug out my running shoes from the depths of my cupboards. 

I’m going to enter a 21km race.  And I’m going to slowly train for that race.  I’m going to move forward to a healthier me and in that process I will hopefully learn to forgive my body completely.  Who knows perhaps through this process I’ll even learn to love it a bit again.

We’ve made no plans for another treatment except in that we’re quietly squirreling any extra money away for one.  When we’ll do it, we have NO idea.  But we know that there will be a next one.  One last attempt at becoming a family that has human kids.

Someone once said “forgivenss is freedom”.  I’m keen to get myself closer to freedom again.  And I think at the end of it all my body, this poor fat punished body is going to thank me for it.

Seeing things in wood

When I dry my hair every morning I flip my head over and am faced with my beautiful wooden floors in our bedroom.  I’ve always loved finding pictures in in-animate objects.  Seeing a dragon in the clouds in the sky.  Watching a sleeping giant in a mountain range on a long car ride.  And so on and so forth.

So it’s no big surprise that I found some pictures in my wooden floor morning after morning of blow drying my hair.

Here are some of my finds:

Can you see the alien baby?

What about the alien fertility goddess?

This one always reminds me of a squashed gecko!

Careful! My heart is on the floor 😉

Skeletor Lives!!!

Tortie the Tortoise haunts me every day! See his sad face...

Do you find pictures in the mundane?  I hope you do cos to me it’ keeps the child in each of us alive.

And that my friends is always a great thing!

Home Decor al la Cliff & Sam

A few weeks ago a friend of mine put out an announcement on FB that she was selling a few pieces of furniture that did not quite fit into her newly built home.  One of the pieces was a beautiful antique table that I had admired when we’d visited her home.  I was tickled at the chance of owning it.  We discussed it and we bought it.

We fetched it on Saturday morning.  Its stunning – I love it!  And it fits just perfectly under our stairs that we renovated a while back.

In anticipation of getting our new antique table, I bought some roughed up frames and had huge plans of how I wanted them to go.   It did not work out quite like I had planned in my head but I am SUPER chuffed with what we did end up with…

Right hand side of the whole view

Middle piece of the whole view

Left hand side of the whole view

What it looks like all together 🙂

My hubby suggested that we get a nice brass plaque to put onto the frame with a picture of my Dad.  It will have his birth date and his death date on it with his name.  I can’t wait to get it so we can put it onto the frame – it’s such a stunning idea.  Proves to me yet again why I love this man I’ve been blessed with.

My Dad was so handsome in his younger years.  I miss him.

So that’s it friends, home decor al la Cliff & Sam 🙂

Friday Blessing

I’ve not done one of these in a while but today I am extremely grateful for the following blessing:

Mine has cooked three nights in a row this week.  I’m SO blessed and lucky to have a hubby who cooks, I cannot imagine how working women whose hubby’s don’t cook do it.  I could never face having to only get home after 18h00 after battling traffic to only then have to put food on the stove every night.  Admittedly this is what happens on the evenings I do cook but  most of the time by the time I get home hubby has already got our evening meal on the go.

Thanks my love!  You’ve come a long way 🙂

My Kind of IT

Thank you for your sweet words yesterday, your love and support makes me feel better everytime.  Still feeling silly and dumb about it all but anyways…

Got this in my in box today and it made me smile, so thought I would share the love!  SO my kind of IT 🙂

Feeling a bit silly

You know what today is?  CD 59.  It’s also my 6th day of being back on the pill.  I’m mostly ok with it.  But let me back track a bit. 

At our last WTF appointment my lovely doc had told me that he did not want me on any form of meds for 3 months – we felt that my body needed a break from artificial hormones for a while.  We agreed that whilst I needed to not be on meds, I also needed to have a regular period so if I had not had a bleed by the 28th April (CD53) I was to contact him and we would decide a way forward.

28th April dawned and still no bloody period.  So I popped my FS an email and asked him what he wanted to do.  He wanted me to go in for a scan the next day and based on that we would decide our course of action. 

I can’t tell you how weird anxious sad scared heartbroken odd I felt walking into the clinic again.  It was hectically busy and there were so many new faces.  New faces filled with hope and excitement.  While mine was set in stone.  New faces whose hearts were thumping in excited anticipation.   While mine was constricted and did not want to beat.  I was greeted by name by all the staff there and chatted a bit with some of them while waiting my turn.  A new face asked me if I was there to have my second baby cos they all knew me so well.  I said no I was still trying for my first.  She asked how long I’d been trying.  I told her 6 years.  She asked how many times I’ve done this.  I told her five.  She mumbled something and turned away from me. 

Oops I did it again, I made another one scared and nervous. *sigh*

So into the scan room I went with a thumping heart.  I don’t know why I was so scared… actually I’m fibbing.  I do know.  In the smallest region of my heart I was secretly hoping that I would be one of *those* women.  You know the ones right?  The ones who after 6 years of infertility and several failed IVF’s miraculously spontaneously fall pregnant all.on.their.own. 

I know I should have known better.  My body?  It’s not known for its regularity in ovulation.  It’s not known for its perky little 28 day cycles.  What it is known for are my over 100 day cycles and that record-breaking 198 day cycle.  It is certainly not known for its ability to miraculously fall pregnant.  But a teensy weensy part of me could not forget that we had got it on on CD15.  And that silly little teensy weensy part of me could not help but hope that I might be legend.

Clearly I should know to know better.  My FS was all excited cos he found a corpus luteum cyst and thought my period would come all on its own but just to be sure he sent me for some bloods to check my E2 and progesterone levels.  My levels were so low they were through the floor.  So even if my wonderfully PCOS body had somehow managed to create a follie and release it, my wonderfully PCOS body could not manage to keep it going.  Great. 

So here I sit dutifully popping my daily pill feeling a bit silly.  A lot dumb.  And very, very broken.  I’ve been trying so hard to get myself back into a positive frame of mind about this journey we’re on.  I’ve been immersing myself in my relationship with God (which is still tenuous at best but it’s slowly getting better) and just really trying to focus on all the good I have in my life.  I’ve been looking within and willing myself to find strength to keep believing that this can happen for us.

I think that the fact I was secretly a teensy bit hopeful at that scan shows that I *can* dredge up the strength and hope to do this again.  I think it shows that sometime in the future my fighting spirit will rise again.

But today?  Right now as my fingers fly across this keyboard?  I feel so silly and so dumb for believing.  I feel so unbelievably stupid for having believed that *my* body (whose track record has been far from sterling) could actually work.

And I would give anything for that feeling to be gone.