Fear and Self-loathing.

I weary of the myriad, quotidian concerns of the day and look forward to a new, improved year. Some of my resolutions are to get fit and to only listen to 60s music.

Besides the novels I will be required to teach, I also resolve to read one extra book a month. I say book rather than novel, as I find my addiction to historical biography will not yet wane. In fact, Stella Tillyard's "A Royal Affair" about my favorite Georgian dynasty will be accompanying me on the plane tomorrow to the fair isles of New Zealand, where we have 2 weeks of R, R and R ahead. In addition, I must read Robert Drewe's "Shark Net" and "Twelfth Night", to prepare for my classes next year. As an avid Shakespeare enthusiast, "Miss, how do you understand all this stuff?", I look forward to the melancholy, comic verse of the Bard in a play as yet untaught by myself.

I resolve to only listen to 60s music. Or 60's inspired music, which now broadens the parameters exponentially. Life's too short.

I will be running the 10km Run Melbourne and the 10km run at the Gold Coast marathon the following week. Optimism is not always a bad thing.

Happy New Year.

Youse are all biatches.

Yes, this will be an angry, uncomprehending post, full of sound and fury and I guess, like life, signifying nothing. Christmas does this to the fertility-challenged.

1. Must go to husband's family's Xmas day nightmare where there will be 5 babies. Lord, take me now.

2. Must shop for said 5 babies. Yes, joy of the season, I get to shop for toys and clothes for FIVE OTHER BABIES, YAY!

3. Bosses' Xmas party tonight at which a fucking 40 year old was passing around her phone with her fucking 13 week scan on it. Again I ask, where, when, how, why??? There is no god.

4. I'm still fucking fat from almost 6 years of failed pregnancies and IVF, while all the breeders I know seem to drop their fucking baby weight within months of giving birth. Babies AND thinness, fuck dat!

Merry X-mas.

Infertility Porn, just say no.

I hereby pledge to remove myself from situations in which I may be tempted to continue my association with the nefarious infertility industry, AKA, Infertility Porn. This stuff is not good for my mental health.

I hereby promise not to frequent parenting fora, in particular, the AC sections of said parenting fora. I will not read about people who spent 2 years TTC, then needed IVF to conceive, then popped out a natural bebe 5 minutes after this one, on the grounds that my head might explode. Seems not all infertilities are equal on this planet.

I will not read about celebrity fertiles who manage to pop out 5 spawn within 6 years in their early 40s. (that would be you, Jane Kennedy) How? When? Why? And in fact, what the fucking fuck????

I will no longer make faux-happy social mention of my childlessness, as if it were some wholly planned choice all along. "Yes, we cunningly planned our barrenness in order to travel, drink and otherwise enjoy our lives." Puke.

I will think about converting my blog to the movie-review blog I've always wanted to write.

Giddy-up!

Donation Commotion.

I hereby give warning that the following diatribe may offend anyone who has used any form of donations with which to create their families. Hey, my blog, my shit, right?

So we come to that time in every old, infertile slapper's life, when the only possible way of creating a family is through some sort of donation. You know, some weird sci-fi type shit that isn't really sci-fi anymore, thanks to modern technology. But in my head, it's still playing God n shit, mkay? And this comes from someone who has no concept of a personal god, in any way, shape or form.

I try, I try, I try really hard to come to grips with the fact that having a child, any child at all, is meant to be preferable to having none. But I struggle. I play the guilt angle, you know, why should my husband miss out on the joy of breeding because of my infertility, but at the end of the day, no dice. I still can't get my head around gestating some other woman's child with my husband. I guess my maternal instinct just ain't that strong.

But does it make me less brave? Less courageous? Less worthy of admiration? Because I'm happy to give up without grabbing the gold ring of success, the trophy of motherhood and family? Sometimes it feels this way.

Confusion reigns as sadness rains.

Clomid, Shlomid....

Okay.....sooooooo...................I can now say with all good sense and authority that I have experienced the miracle drug of Clomid. Funnily enough, this has come after about a zillion IVF cycles. I do work backwards, y'all.

Clomid is a demon drug. The first month I used it will go down in history as the Hunter Valley Wedding Shemozzle of 2009. In which, on my first ever cycle of clomid , I had a hugely embarrassing meltdown of epic proportions at a wedding in NSW, at which every single guest was either preggers, or had a large suite of bebe, with which to taunt moi, el infertilito.

Apart from the minor behavioural disorders, my months on Clomid have been relatively benign. This will be month no. 3 and month no. last. I said I'd do 3 Clomid cycles, and this is it, baby. I've done an early HPT, so know it didn't succeed. I do know that Clomid made me ovulate. In fact, these 3 months are the only times my test lines have been stronger than the control lines. Clearly, I have not been ovulating regularly in the past.

I am still completely, fucking unexplained.

Oi, Aussies!

The life of a DINK throws forth some mighty challenges, not least of which is just where to jet off to 3 times a year for some R, R and our other friend, R. (That would be rest, relaxation and recreation)

This time, we chose Vanuatu, which thanks to the Garish Fish Catcher, was about half price since the last time we perused this option (and settled then on Fiji). It's a pretty cool place, all in all. Fabbo food, beautiful beaches, chilled peeps and everyone speaks Anglais. In fact, this is partly because every damn tourist and business owner there is a damn Aussie. Wayyyyyy too many of those nasal tones greeting these old ears. And apparently, there are no taxes in Vanuatu, thusly leading to a veritable explosion of Aussie small-business people.

Being the socially conscious git that I am, I find this vaguely disquieting, almost akin to a past, colonial era when the white man spread his exploitative tentacles across the globe in search of gold, minerals and arable land. Notwithstanding the socialistic murmurings within my chest, we came to a few conclusions regarding this whole baby caper.

Stay tuned.

Well, what do you know?

Not much, really.

I'm not a creative person. I'll say this and be greeted with howls of dissent by colleagues who point to some interesting new idea I've whipped up for some subject or whatever. But truly, I'm not awfully creative. Not for me the younger classes with their posters and power points, give me the older kids any day. I can teach them to structure an analysis, no problem, just don't ask me to encourage creative writing. Even when the 40th essay earnestly and erroneously tells me that Atticus didn't change a thing in Maycomb, I push on. Creative writing, sure, I'll give them the standard, "show, don't tell", use lots of adverbs/adjectives, vary sentence length, introduce dialogue, blah blah blah. And when imagination withers, yellows and fails, out comes that old cliche, beloved of the teacher with nothing else to offer:

Write about what you know.

Always slightly surreal telling 16 year olds to write about what they know. Looking back on my life, I can't say I knew a damn thing of import back in that day.

Write about what you know.

I'd like to say goodbye, finally to this stage in my life. I can't see myself continuing to blog about this much, or anything else. Exhaustion presses down on my weary shoulders, yet I ambivalently look around for a light, a path, a solution....anything.

I'm embarrassingly aware of the fact that most Infertility blogs end on a high note, with a BFP, final success, pregnancy and the birth of a kidlet or quite often two, leaving no real need for the continuation of IF-blog-catharsis syndrome.

I'd like to say goodbye, but I guess I still need the outlet.

There is a light that never goes out.....

.....yet I sometimes wish it would. It's not a brilliant light; it's desperate and flickers with fraught, anxious emotion. It's the murky scintilla of hope that draws back the determined, time and again. Some may call us foolhardy. Whatever it is, the primal urge to procreate is so ludicrously unyielding that it leaves me breathless at times. Some of us long-time ACers talk about the goalposts constantly shifting with each failed, despairing attempt.

My goalposts are now so far outta the footy field, that I'd need binoculars to spy them.

Eggs or body? The great unexplained.

If body, I can stim yet again with the hope of getting enough to freeze so I can look for a surrogate, one way or the other.

If eggs, maybe it's time to source a donor.

I dunno.

A Day in the Life.

Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head....

Well, sorta.

I very nearly called this instalment Life on Mars coz it kinda is. It's somewhat akin to a prolonged, slightly uncomfortable but rather easy, phase in one's twenties. Being childless, that is.

For your edification, may I present An Infertility Friend's production of, ChildlessOldCrones.com.

Wake up, go to work. Finish work, hang out, have a glass or two of cheap vino. Hey, we teachers earn crud, y'all.

Drive home, boil some pasta or whatever, fix a friendly brandy, lime and soda, sit in bed with my laptop and TV. Sleep.

Repeat X 5. Then, weekend. Sleep in till 10, turn on ducted heating, stroll down the street and get the paper. Turn on iPod, think about doing some housework but go shopping down Brunswick St instead. Buy some stunning clothes for the next special occasion, grab a large dish of latte with free biscotti from Retro bar, head home to chill some more. Catch up with season 3 of The Tudors on my foxtel IQ, open a bottle of Sauv blanc, toss some pasta through pesto and relax. Think about trip to Vanuatu in 2 weeks.

This is a typical week for me. I don't miss the kid thing in reality, because as much as I attempt to, I have no real idea what it entails. It's all a wee bit hypothetical, particularly as it will truly always be a day in someone else's life.

Gotta see the babeee?

I proffer, most humbly, to my kind readers, abject apologies for the now, dramatic irony inherent in the nomenclature of this here blog. I just dunno how to change it! Clearly, no-one is gonna see a baby here, any time soon.

It's a strange place to be in. Last night I tossed and turned and fretted. In the morning, it occurred to me that miscarriage #5 would have been due right about now. Bummer.

I don't know where to fit in. The women at my work who have plugged the career-climbing gap in my 4-years interstate leave are actually slightly younger than me now. Yet, I sense some suspicion from that direction. Not for me the daily run from the office at 3.15 to pick up school-aged kids. I can easily hang around till 6.30 working, networking etc, and most days I do. It has been suggested to me by an older, childless colleague that I am regarded with tentative concern by these women, who have no idea where I fit in. Just what do you make of a 40-year-old without kids? Sadly, I can't help them there.

The other 2 "older" childless women profess proudly that they never wanted kids. I'm not yet at that stage of justification or subterfuge. Still I say, "it doesn't happen for everyone", with a knowing stare, daring people to query further. They never do, anymore.

Update from a Batcoat.

Yes, I am. Just a wee bit, but that's okay, man. Just because I'm so popular, yuk yuk.

It's been a while. I've been super duper busy. I am back to teaching at my old school, full-time. I LOVE my classes. I want to teach them forever, they are not only the bomb but even, somewhat embarrassingly, extend to being da bomb. I feel useful, stimulated, engaged. I have the footy boys in Year 10 quoting Macbeth. ["Miss, should I use 'Stars hide your fires, Let not light see my black and deep desires' to show how Macbeth is sinking more into evil?"] I LOVE teaching literature.

And all is well, unless I think of how I've ended up a childless, batcoat, old crone.

PGD crashed and burned. Sadly, my over/high-stimming smugness has been shot down in a metaphorical ring of peri-menopausal fire. Two fucking eggs. Not even enough to biopsy. Did a day 2 X 2 Tx, just for shizz and gigglez and to say I've tried day 2, since those fucking perfect blasts never got me nowhere, dude. This was in June, when I was way too busy to blog. I've also been horrendously ill for most of the year with my usual chesty ailments, certainly not assisted by shutting down my entire immune system in the name of Colorado.

This was the one. You know when they say you should stop IVF when the pain of doing it exceeds the pain of being childless? That was the one. Technically, stim cycle 6. I never had implantation in a stim, yet conceived naturally 3 times and on 2 out of 3 natural Fets. I still don't know why I'm infertile. Science can't tell me, and I'm too old to benefit from any miraculous discoveries in the next few years. FSH is now 9.9 on CD4 and AMH is 6.7, standard for an almost 40-year-old and not so good, fertility wise.

And just because I basically crack myself up, consistently, I saw a naturopath who thinks she can regulate my hormones and help me conceive. Insert mega rolleyes here, if you please! And to add to the general jocularity, I asked my FS for a script for Clomid, yay! Gotta exhaust all options, I say.

I have had moments of deep, dark sadness; just for a moment though. I won't wallow; there are social events to attend, career ladders to climb, countries to travel and teenagers to inspire. No time for self-pity.

Stay tuned?

Age shall not weary me.

Yet it does. Getting some sort of weird sciatic pain after bending over to scrub the shower is surely a sign of things to come. But I won't digress into that potentially distressing topic.

So, finally the PGD co-ordinator at the new clinic has rung me for a chat, while I was out and about, of course. I hope the girls in the Myer shoe dept enjoyed my recital of my loss history amongst the Diana Ferraris. Hey, you gotta laugh. I'm not quite sure what the whole chain of command is there, it seems that she consults with a geneticist to see if we're likely candidates, then calls me back in a few weeks. Apparently I'm still not old in IVF terms, which is exhausting to constantly hear. Possibly it won't lead to closure as there's always the potential of finding out that most of the embies are normal and still not conceiving. I wouldn't at all be surprised if this were to be my fate. At this stage, I think I'd rather know that the majority are bung......I need answers!!!

There's still the required ring around to find a FS and the referral etc.....kind of putting these things off for a bit. I think I mentally need to not do IVF for a few months, not to mention physically. My wacko New Year's fad diet seems to be working for now, so I'd like to be in optimal shape before pumping myself full of those horror hormones again.

Hopefully Dr Suave has the results of the placental testing on last week's loss but who knows with this FC...

I'm moving soon and won't have net access for ages, so I foresee a reasonably long break from blogging. Buh-bye for now!

Stuck in the Middle with no Clue......

It's at the hour before dawn that I stare at the rays peeping cheekily out from the curtain's periphery and ponder my deepest thoughts. Just for a change, they revolve around fertility, AKA, what the fuck do I do now? I say this fully cognizant of the inherent irony, but sometimes I feel that I'm still too young and 'fertile' to give up now.

If I were one of those 39 year olds who couldn't even respond to 600iu of stims, had one lousy follie which yielded one cruddy egg (if I was lucky), which then became a sickly looking fragmented embie which was dying on day 2, sure, perhaps it would be time to let go. In fact, I've met 3 of these women in the past year, and they're all moving onto donor eggs now. With each failed cycle, I'm starting to get the donor eggs questions and I really can't answer honestly without offending those who are moving in this direction; suffice it to say that I won't be gestating another woman's child with my husband inside this body, and that's about as much as I want to say on this topic. For me, the need to breed stops with my DNA.

It's really difficult. Never have I been clucky. I'll put it out there, even through these past five horror years of trying, I actually don't get clucky. I never really thought of children, except in a theoretical, oh, maybe when I'm 35 type way. When I started thinking about it, I decided I wanted one and no more. In fact, I recall at the start of this whole shebang, advising DH that I'd go through pregnancy once (hold me back, dear irony!) and that's it, that one child is perfect and enables you to continue being an individual and having, dare I say it, a LIFE. He demurred and requested 2, on the "only children are weirdos" theory, and this was to be our big negotiation.

ONE. I only wanted ONE, FFS. No greed here. No pumping out 4 in 4 years like Kate Lang.broek and other celebrity late-breeders et al. JUST ONE.

So, it's a delicate balance. Kind of, how much more treatment can I bear vs can I stand to stop when I literally probably have a year of 'fertility' left.

Dusk is Dawn is Day.

Today: dilation and curette no: 3. Buh-bye. I must admit that as I lie in recovery, groggy and bleeding time after time, I swear that this journey isn't worth continuing. I guess I just forget.

Two Days Ago: scan shows sac and yolk measuring 5 weeks, 1.5 weeks behind. Dr Suave has no answers for me and admits that he can't help me. He knows that something is wrong but just doesn't know what. I grill him about PGD but he does everything to convince me that it's pointless. That unless you know what you're actually testing for, they can only check for 6 chromosomes which only comprise 60% of fetal abnormalities. Knowing how I like to google stuff for proof, he even shows me the latest clinical study which concludes that PGD is not efficacious in unexplained cases. I have no idea why he's so negative. I know I'm fucking up their stats, but so what? My money's as good as anyone's right? Luckily I'm moving as I no longer have confidence in this huge, impersonal, supermarket of a clinic. DH wants to try the pre-eminent PGD clinic in the world, the one which supplies 10% of the world's PGD babies. Fortuitously, it's in our home town.

Two Months Ago: review appointment after failed stim 4 cycle where I told Dr. Suave I was pulling the pin on IVF. He doesn't argue with me, just reminds me of his graph, the one where your chance of conceiving climbs with each cycle up to stim 4, then slams viciously down to earth. I ask what he would recommend if I were one of those delusionoids who was prepared to do cycle after cycle, he says the next step would probably be PGD. I walk away thinking, yeah right, my blasts are perfect! Ha.

The Twelve Surgeries of Mez.

In the spirit of the festive season, let's sing a song of joy, shall we?

On the last day of my cycle, my FS gave to me,

12 blasties transferred
11 days till BT
10 eggs per stim
9 Surgeriesssss

8 eggs fertilised
7 IVF cycles
6 brandy sours
5 pregnanciessss

4 miscarriages
3 D+Cs
2 gene mutations
and an ectopic salpingectomeeeeee


Or maybe I'll just try to disappear like Joni Mitchell.


http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=bVwo9IQMWM0&feature=related

Numb and Number.

I haven't blogged for ages. In fact, I closed this blog during Stim 4 as a means of waving goodbye to my years of Infertility and returning to normality. Also the psycho stalker angle, yet I assure these peeps that they will receive unpleasant legal letters if they continue to libel me on their blogs.

I'm stopping AC and going back to work full-time. The carnival's over and this clown can cry no more.

Only.....as always, a scintilla of hope enters the battered, sludge-covered heart once again. Is it possible to have 5 pregnancy losses? I didn't think so....so I guess that means I'm good at something, right? Ha ha.

Well, a few weeks ago I did a sneaky natural FET to use up my frosties before I move states again. One didn't make the thaw, but the last 2 did, so in they went. Absolutely no expectations as IVF doesn't work for me. So, at 11dpo, shockingly, unexpectedly, I get a feint pos on a stick, which gets darker till my BT at 14dpo. HCG was 84, a bit low, p4 was a crazy 162. I dared to hope....a bit of brown spotting that night which I took to be implantation bleeding, as I'm on man-strength clexane AND aspirin, for the first time. (my M/C guy's recommendations, also no prednisolone as he doesn't think I need it)

2 days later, HCG only 111, p4 174. I tried to convince myself there was a very early vanishing twin, making one blast a CP and explaining the spotting, high p4 plus non-doubling beta.

Then we go OS for Xmas. I am ridiculously bloated, tender boobs and spewed twice. No booze in Honkers!

Come home and have BT yesterday, I should be 5.5 weeks and around 3000-5000 HCG. It's only 575 and p4 has halved to 82. I'm so exhausted that I've had 5 losses and I don't even know why. I'm too tired to cry even. This time, I don't think it was implantation. My blood is so thin, I'm covered in massive bruises and the clexane should have stopped that. I'm waiting for the scan next week and praying there's no sac as I really want to avoid another D+C after last time's scar tissue problem on my cervix.

I'm starting to think that my perfect blasts have maternal-age-related chromosomal problems and something like 80% of my blasts are abnormal. It's just a theory, because I know that the fetus in January's loss was normal through testing. But I suspect that my first loss in 2005 may have been abnormal. I had massive, normal PG symptoms up until 8 weeks, the likes of which I've never since experienced, which then stopped suddenly. This was in my clueless days when I didn't do BTs or even dating/hb scans. I just found out at the 12 week NF scan that the sac was empty and had stopped growing at 8 weeks, which suggests to me that there may have been a heartbeart, then it stopped developing, which is what happens to abnormal fetuses.

My second loss could have been an implantation issue....again, no BTs but I hemorrhaged and passed it in the toilet at work one day at 5.5 weeks. I'm pretty sure my HCG didn't get very high for that one at all as it was down to 30ish around the time of it passing.

The ectopic doesn't count, I guess. Murphy (or Mez's law) suggests that it was probably normal.

Well, this is a long-winded way of saying I'm really confused. Am I right to suspect that there is something wrong with a large proportion of my eggs? DH and I came up normal on karotyping and chromosomal testing, but I'm thinking these are random, age-related abnormalities that just happen. I'm back to tossing and turning and insomnia, trying to make sense of it, come to conclusions.

In which case, we have started talking about PGD, despite me not wanting to cycle again. We kind of want closure, like not going to my grave wondering why I couldn't keep a pregnancy.