The Royal Wedding

Well, in case you hadn't noticed, there's a bit of an event occurring in London tomorrow. Not fussed either way, but hey ho, we get a day off work, so great!

I will be spending the day with my two bridesmaids-to-be making eating scones and jam and making bunting for my own wedding in September.

This wedding has got me thinking though. The media are going on about it (as one would expect), but I think they will be worse after the wedding. Poor Kate, she will be the most watched newlywed in the world. "Is she?" "Isn't she?", what if she puts on a few pounds during the honeymoon? Will she be offended that the press are speculating about whether or not she is pregnant? Then my biggest fear of all, that she does fall pregnant immediately. Then we will have months of pregnancy bump photos etc- Kate stroking her bump, Wills and Kate holding hands, walking on the beach- bump proudly displayed, Wills stroking Kate's bump. Urgh. Pass me the sick bucket.

I myself am dreading this part of married life. I remember when my partner's brother got married, everyone was constantly looking at his wife's stomach and making comments behind her back or noticing if she wasn't drinking. This speculation went on for 3 years (that's how long it took her to get pregnant).

Before we were engaged we were constantly getting asked when we were going to start a family. My mum would say things like, "don't leave it too long, it might be too late"... (sadly she may be right :-/). I would always coyly say, "oh, sometime in the future" rather than, "we're trying it's not happening, it's got nothing to do with you, so PISS OFF!". Worse than this is my other half's Mum. We have loads of neices and nephews now, whenever I hold them or play with them I get comments like, "that suits you", "you're a natural" or the most hurtful of all, "you'd make a good mum". I am sure I would, I wish/hope that one day I will get the chance to be. I can never say this, just smile politely and change the subject.

Now we are engaged, the pressure is off for now, but I know it will be back on the minute we step out of that register office. A (male) colleague made a comment along the lines of "after you get married, it won't be long before you are the familiy way". If only it was that simple.

I don't want infertility to ruin my "marriage".

Marriage is in quotation marks because my fiance and I are not yet married, but I call this a marriage as I feel we have been married for years.

I have recently started to read infertility blogs and one theme that crops up a lot is the pressure and strain it puts on a relationship. I can totally see why and it started to happen to us last year. Women and men have different outlooks on infertility. My boyfriend seems to think that we should be getting on with our lives and not dwelling on things. I would LOVE to do that, but it is easier said than done. Sometimes I think that he is being selfish when he doesn't want to listen, but the realist in my knows that he is just sick and tired of hearing it and it is selfish of me to be going on about it.

If I really think about it, and remember why we are together and how we used to be, I know that I love him more than I love the idea of having a baby. If it came down to it I had to choose- him or a baby, I would choose him.

That doesn't make this process any easier though. Here is my list of things to do to distract you from TTC*:

-Knitting, I spent all of last year dreaming about what I could make for our baby, this year I have given up such thoughts and am concentrating on making adult jumpers. They take ages but at least they will be worn.

-Training for a marathon/half marathon- Last year I signed up for an October half marathon in February. I secretly hoped I would fall pregnant and be able to use this an excuse for not doing the thing. Unfortunately nothing doing, so I had to train. I trained too hard too fast, gave myself shin splints and had to stop training 4 weeks before the run. Therefore when I did the run I had fallen out of shape and did very badly. So badly I wanted to call my Mum to pick me up (my fiance wouldn't let me- he was running with me- he said if I did that it would be "pathetic" and I should keep going). I did finish, but I am so embarrassed about the time I got that I am not going to publish it here.

-Gardening, I live in a flat in London and have no garden to speak of, just a small yard (with a container garden). In 2009 I was feeling industrious and decided to set up a Community Allotment. The council were rubbish and they gave us permission at the end of the summer last year (so too late to plant anything). This year they offered us a Community Payback (or what I very politically correctly call a "chain gang") to dig it for free. They were meant to come in February, but, the council being the council, work actually began 2 weeks ago. Now it is all becoming real and I am scared! What if it gets destroyed by vandals? What if our plants don't grow?

-Planning a wedding, getting married in September and I am making the decorations myself- bunting, fabric hearts, place cards, table numbers, seating plans. I am OK on a sewing machine and I love making things. I have bought a vintage dress that I cannot wear if I get pregnant before then. But, and how sick is this, I don't care. I would be happy, I wouldn't care if I was a pregnant bride, I would wear a sack, if I were pregnant this would not bother me! Nor would the fact that I couldn't drink at my own wedding. Every month, I try to tell myself that it doesn't matter, and it is a good thing that I am not pregnant, as, at least I will be thin on my wedding day and be able to wear the dress. Deep down, I do care and will happily be a fat bride if I am preggers.

*by distract, read, slightly occupy and let people think that you are getting on with other things but really your mind comes back to the same thing.

general thoughts and musings on getting pregnant

At school we are taught, if you EVER have sex without protection YOU WILL get pregnant straight away and it will ruin your life forever.

Before we started trying, I assumed it would happen for us straight away. Of course, I had heard of people having trouble conceiving, but that was them not us. We were in our late twenties, had the correct BMI, healthy, liked exercising and no-one in either family had fertility problems to the best of our knowledge. When we tried, we would fall quickly, I would have a trouble-free pregnancy and a quick birth.

Getting pregnant is not always easy. It is easy for most but not all. I should have known we would have problems. It is just typical.

We have been a couple for 10 years now, why the hell did we not start trying 5 years ago? Oh the arrogance of youth. I remember saying to him (a year before we started trying), "I think we should try in January, that way we can have the baby before Christmas, I don't want to be pregnant over Christmas."

Now, I don't care when I am pregnant as long as it happens. I really hope it does and that this is a blog with a happy ending.

Egg sharing

So, I have filled you all in on my story so far. Well, most of it.

I was shocked that the next step for us is IVF. Since looking into it more, I have got used to the idea and actually want to get started on it as soon as possible.

I live in London, and I have spotted ads on the tube offering free IVF for egg sharers. At first the idea appalled me. It almost seemed that it was a way around selling a baby. The more I investigated, the more I realised that this is not really the case. There are women who have had chemo or are going through early menopause who would otherwise have no chance of having a baby. It is a collection of cells and DNA and, not really different from donating sperm. The recipient would grow the baby herself and the baby would take nourishment from her. And so, it really wouldn't be my baby at all, but the recipients.

The conclusion I came to was that I really want to give this a go, and would like to start sooner rather than later. My fiance however, would take some convincing. And now we come to the lowest part of my life so far.

I came home from work and said, "I want to talk to you about IVF." He said, "To be honest, I just wish that you would forget about it." This started the mother of all arguments. We had to leave the flat as my brother was staying with us and we didn't want him to see us.

And so that is how we came to be sitting by the Thames rowing. My fiance in dispair, I in dispair. The chill wind throwing my hair around my shoulders, freezing us to our bones and making the row all the more unpleasant. I have never felt as low as I did then. I just wanted to jump in the river. All I wanted was to be able to openly discuss my hopes and fears and for him to offer me comfort. Now I think that I was a little selfish. No-one has endless patience to listen to the same moaning over and over. I am always speculating and wondering, he prefers not to think about it. I told him that those times when I don't mention it (and I can go like this for weeks) it is not far from my mind and I am doing all I can to distract myself from my main fear. The fear that we will never have children. If we don't, will we get over it and have happy lives?

fertility investigations

Immediately after the ectopic I relaxed. I thought, "if we have done it once, we can do it again!". Here the curse of the forum strikes. I noticed that a lot of people who had ectopics fell pregnant again really quickly (within months). I convinced myself that it will happen soon and if that it didn't, it would not happen at all.

4 months later,and nothing happened. That 4th month, I was late and thought we had done it. Sadly it was just the case that my period was late. Tears ensued and my poor fiance (we got engaged September 2010, 9 months after we had started trying) by then had run out of things to say. It was 10 months since we had started trying and I had become a different person. Crying at the drop of a hat, moody and sometimes withdrawn.

He insisted that I go to the doctors for tests and so I did. My hormones showed that I was ovulating, his sperm analysis was fine. I had no signs of disease, my remaining tube was clear (I had the dreaded HSG- oh how undignified).

I very much appreciate the NHS, and the fact that it is free (they were excellent at treating my ectopic) but I spent a lot of time waiting around in waiting rooms. If you make an appointment with the hospital for a certain time, it is highly unlikely that you will get seen at that time. Usually I had to wait between 40-60 minutes. When I finally got in to see the doctor, he would talk at me for 5 minutes, then I would be dismissed.

At my last appointment (February 2011), he said that as they could find nothing wrong with us, we have "unexplained infertility" and I am being referred for IVF.

So here we are, I have been referred for IVF. The list in my area is around 2 years apparently. My first appointment in on the 23rd May. I expect them to ask us to complete a form and to tell us that we will be waiting around for 2 years.

ectopic pregnancy

I had a period only 16 days after my last one started. I was very worried indeed. There must have been something wrong with my hormones. I went to see the doctor.

She was reassuring and told me that it was probably the stress of ttc messing up my hormones. Nevertheless, she would refer me for blood tests to make sure that everything  is OK. I went for the tests a week later, but have to wait 1 week for the results.

In the meantime, I realised that this "period" has lasted for much much longer than usual, and it was really light (barely filling a tampon). I also noticed that my breasts were really sore and I that I felt bloated. I wondered if I was pregnant and that the bleeding was pregnancy related. I did a test and it was positive. I was excited and apprehensive all at once. What could this mean? Was I pregnant? Was I miscarrying?

I did the test during a bank (public) holiday and had to wait for a few days for the doctors to be open. I saw the same doctor as before. She looked at me as if to say, "and what do you want THIS time?". I told her what happened and she referred me to the Early Pregnancy Unit. I would not be able to go until the next morning. I called my partner then went into work.

There followed a week of blood tests. My hCG levels were too low for them to scan me, and the tests told us that I was having a failing pregnancy. I was still bleeding lightly and I had noticed a tingling sensation on my right side. I had a horrible feeling that I was having an ectopic pregnancy. At my last appointment, the nurse was unhappy, my miscarriage was not resolving itself, I had been bleeding lightly for 14 days. A scan revealed a mass in my right tube, they were 99% sure that it was a tubal pregnancy.

From this scan, things moved very quickly. Within a couple of hours I was having keyhole surgery to remove the pregnancy and my right tube. And so it was, that at the beginning of May 2010, I went from having two fallopian tubes to one.

After the surgery I was told that my chances of conceiving were not greatly reduced. I still had 2 ovaries and it is possible for you to ovulate from the right and have the egg travel down the left tube. This was very good news. I went off on holiday and awaited my period so that we could try again...

quickly obsessive- the danger of ttc websites

I don't know how it is for other ladies who decide to try for a baby, but in my case, the minute we decided, I suddenly wanted a baby straight away. I wanted it to happen quickly.

I started to go on TTC (trying to conceive) websites simply to get tips as to how to get it to happen quickly. Unfortunately, I am the type of person who gets addicted to web forums. Before I could say "ovualtion kit" I was checking the forums several times a day.

I can honestly say that I really wish that I had never done this. I become obsessive, and every month that ticked by, I become convinced that something was wrong with me. These websites have every kind of ttc lady on there from the young, lithe 22 year old who falls really quickly (and tells everyone about it) to the 30-something who has PCOS and a partner with abnormal sperm. The "actively trying" boards are fast moving and get posted on every minute of the day. Therefore, on any given day, you get a girls posting their "BFP"s (Big Fat Positive) amongst posts of girls who have been waiting anything from 3-34 months for their positive pregnancy test.

After 4 months, I was convinced that there was something wrong with me. Then I had a period only 16 days after my last one. I went to the doctor.

...and so it begins...

So, it's January 2010. I am 28. My boyfriend and I are in a very happy relationship. We had been together for 9 years and had openly discussed having children at some point in the near future.

Ideally, I would have liked to have been married before children came along, but (as I did not want to pop the question about marriage myself) I thought I would just ask.

So New Year's Day, 1st January 2010, I turned to my partner and said, "Do you fancy trying for children?".
My partner turned to me with a grin and said, "I would love to..."

And so it began.

Sobbing by the Thames

Two weeks ago, I reached the lowest point in my life so far.

I was sitting by the Thames on a cold metal bench, the wind beating my miserable face, sobbing and shaking, like I have never done before in public (as an adult at least).

The despair and hopelessness seemed like it would never end, I felt wretched and my husband-to-be watched on helplessly.

"I don't even know if I want children anymore. Look at what this has done to you, look at what you have become. I alone can't make you happy. You will never be happy until you have a baby." he said rather coldly.

How did I get here? I shall explain gradually in this blog, and update whenever I feel necessary. I only hope that this infertility blog is one with a happy ending.