The Blunt Optic

Yesterday I had my first headache.  And I’ve already begun to be weepy.  I’m always amazed at how quickly those hormones get to work on my mood.  I felt like having a little cry at the end of yoga last night, after the relaxation.  Probably not helped by standing across from a very pregnant woman who was rubbing her belly ALL CLASS LONG.  I don’t exactly know why that shits me at the best of times, but it does.  It really gets my goat.

And last night in bed DH said “I’ve got an early start tomorrow – D&C for a miscarriage”  I almost cried for the poor woman, whoever she is.  And then I thought “Shit, that might be me in a couple of months.”  And a feeling of dread crept in a bit.  Not trying to be morbid here, just speaking my mind.

See, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of failure this cycle, in fact, assuming it from the start.  But failure in the sense of a BFN (Big Fat Negative pregnancy test for those of you lucky enough not to know about such initialisms).  Now the reality of the cycle edges closer, I am reminded of the other type of failure: that I may well be pregnant, but only for a short time.  I am ready for a BFN.  But as I discovered last night, I am NOT yet ready for the emotional impact of another miscarriage.  The thought of it brings a lump to my throat and hot tears spring out of my eyes, even as I type this.  I just don’t want to go there.  I’m not ready to muster the strength needed to climb out of that pit of despair.

However, ready or not, the game is in play and the end will be what it will be.  The countdown continues…

Well it is only four hours away in my part of the world, truth be told.  But anyhoo.  I digress already.  Terrible habit.

What I was wanting to say was this: DE IVF cycle is upon us.  Yes, already!

Today is day One (Oh, let me tell you, the first period after ten weeks solid on the pill is NOT an easy one.  No Siree. I had to force myself through today, in the manner of not-quite-boiled enough potato through a fine sieve) and tomorrow I begin the drugs.  2 injections daily- woot! (15 lucrin; 50 puregon) until advised otherwise.  Should be nice and cranky for my (very large and extended) family gathering at Easter.  Might have to ask hubby for a quarter of serapax per day over the weekend just to get everyone ELSE through without bashing my skull in.

So.  Game on.

Transfer may be in the region of the 15th of April, or it may not.  You know how it goes.  And if you don’t have firsthand knowledge, you may well read enough of these blogs to have lived through this vicariously many times over.  The only thing we know for certain is that nothing is certain.

I’ll update when there’s something to tell.  Or if I just feel like having a bitch about the side effects….

So it’s 5am and my husband’s mobile rings.  I’ve been lying awake since 2.45 so it doesn’t bother me that much.  But once upon a time when I was a good sleeper, it would piss me off no end.  You see, I’m not thinking “OMG, there is some kind of disaster – no one would ring at this hour otherwise!”  Nope.  There are two other options to consider first.  One, it’s the hospital (even if  DH is not on call, sometimes he has to go in to assist, especially to give epidurals, and they NEVER come at a reasonable hour of the day.  Why IS that?) but generally they call on the landline so it’s probably not them.

Two, and much more likely, it is a lame-brain from the Eastern States who hasn’t learnt to subtract.  That’s right folks, Australia, surprise surprise, is a BIG country.  So big it has TIME ZONES.  Six of them even, if you count Eucla, which you should, because you don’t want to discriminate against size, do you?  Here’s a handy time zone map for you to refer to when you’re having trouble.  I’m assuming that even though you don’t know how to subtract, you can still use a computer.  I could be giving you more credit than you deserve.

Anyway.  I’m just not sure why the Eastern Seaboard has so much difficulty remembering that:
1. Australia has more than one time zone.  Did we not learn this in primary school?
2. Their time zone is NOT THE ONLY ONE in the country.  (see above). Everyone else remembers.  We don’t call THEM at midnight.  Have they noticed?? Is it that superiority complex they suffer from, impeding their memory?  Is it that, on average, Eastern Staters are a few percentage points dimmer than the rest of the country?  Or is it simply that they just don’t give a shit?
3. Their time zone is AHEAD of the other time zones.  Therefore they will need to do SUBTRACTION to work out what time it is in another part of the country. (Is subtracting two or three more difficult than adding two or three?  Is this why it is easier for us in the West, because we just have to add on?)
4. Not every state has daylight saving.  THIS is a big one to remember, and where most of you Easties fall down, I have to say.  That extra hour in the summer, ya know?  WE DONT HAVE IT. Yes, our Government introduced a trial over the last 3 years but we voted it out again, like we always do.  Sorry to confuse you there for a few years, but if you are unsure, there are plenty of search engines that will help you clarify the situation.
5. If you are unsure of the time zone you are calling, you can USE one of those handy search engines before you dial.  Is my sleep not worth five seconds of your precious time?

Now, before all you Eastern Staters jump all over me, claiming that YOU have never been guilty of this crime, I will tell you that SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE EASTERN STATERS (You might also be pleased to know that some of my best friends are also gay, black, Jewish, paraplegic, infertile, and hideously politically incorrect).  And these Eastern friends of mine can mostly count and mostly remember to count before they dial.  So this is how I know it is possible to achieve such a feat, and I will believe you when you tell me you always get it right.

Because we’re not talking about the upper percentile on the bell curve here, we’re talking about the other end.  Although, from the amount of calls we get (mostly from businesses), it would seem that the other end is heavily skewed.  How many people can hold down a job, but not successfully subtract two or three from a given number?  Far, far too many, it would seem.   Natural selection is clearly lagging on fulfilling its remit.

Now, I know that this post will not, in any way, shape or form, reduce the number of calls we get at 5am from idiots who cannot count.  But I’ve used my no-sleep time productively, the sun is coming up and I am ready for breakfast, and most of all, I feel better now.

Thank you for listening to my rant.

First of all, a BIG thank you to my wonderful commenters.  I always feel so heartened to hear your kind words of support.  That you are always here for me means so much.

Friday night was even better than I’d hoped.  The pizza base was the best I’ve made yet, and I got a delightful surprise in the topping department.  As I made my way to the post office before coming home I noticed a Blue Cow delivery truck at the local gourmet shop and thought to myself “Well there is always a chance that it has delivered some bocconcini, so it’s worth a quick look.”  Having been disappointed there was no decent mozzarella to be had in town, that was going to be my next best option.  I hadn’t bargained for an even better option, but this is what appeared.  Shaw River Buffalo Mozzarella.  They don’t actually stock this for customers as it is hideously expensive and no one except me would buy it (and not even then on a very regular basis).  However, one of the owners is a good friend of mine, and she sometimes gets a 1.5 litre bucket and shares it between a few people on the ‘black market’.  On Friday, she’d ordered a bucket for some tasting demo the group were putting on Saturday night, so she let me take the whole bucket down to one of the cafes, ask the owner to transfer 2 balls to a container for me, and then she collected the rest of the bucket later on.  I’ll pay her when I see her next.  How amazing is that?  I didn’t even dare to ask the Universe for such good fortune, and yet it appeared.  I actually felt blessed and skipped all the way home.

On the way I stopped at the local DVD rental shop, where I’d spent hours perusing in vain over the last week or so, hoping that I could find something fairly light, with a good plot, good acting, and some substance to the script.  What an ask.  Yet I didn’t spend long looking, randomly pulled something off the shelf, only half read the back and thought “I’m not sure why I’m choosing this, but I just am”.  Turned out to be just the thing.  The Brothers’ Bloom.  A grand romp.

When I arrived home, I put my shopping away and opened itunes ready for radio streaming some groovy pizza cooking tunes, and I checked my email while I was at it, like I do about five times a day.  There in my inbox was a reply to a plea I put out on a site called bub hub, for a gestational surrogate.  I’ve had a few of these replies over the past six months and I haven’t written much about how my search is going because, quite frankly, it’s not going that well.  I haven’t been particularly hard-arsed about plugging my wares or pleading my case in every nook and cranny of the internet, preferring to take the approach of “if it happens, it happens”.  And it hasn’t been happening.  A few women would reply to me and say their husbands had forbid them to do surrogacy and they wished me the best in my search, but more often they would send me an email asking if I was still interested in using a surrogate, and when I replied in the affirmative and brought them up to speed on my situation, I just never heard from them again.  Frankly, it’s been somewhat disheartening.

Imagine my surprise when, scant minutes after I replied in the affirmative to this Friday night email, a reply came back!  We e-mailed a couple more times before I had to go and attend to my pizza, and she to her childrens’ bathtime.  Unprecedented.  I was stunned.  We ‘friended’ each other on facebook, and I discovered she lives in Perth -wow – to not have to factor in interstate travel would be such a boon.  I feel a strong connection with her already: she seems like a genuine, straightforward, honest, kind person, and I haven’t felt an immediate attachment to any potential surrogate in this way since the first one I met six months ago, and missed out on by a week because she’d already agreed to go with a couple in Queensland (even though she was also from Perth).

So not only had the Universe delivered me some unasked-for top-of-the-range mozzarella, it surpassed all expectations and delivered me a big bag of hope.  Yes, hope.  The ‘confident expectation’ kind of hope.  See, if we can get through all the tedious and (apparently very difficult) legal hoopla that surrounds surrogacy in this State, then it is possible for me to believe I could actually take home a child at some point in the next year or two.  With a womb that has a good proven track record, and eggs that also have a good proven track record, I could stand as good a chance as any fertile at a live birth.

And in this way, I can begin to imagine a Disney ending for myself.  I can’t tell you how precious that kind of real hope feels.  Even if, for whatever reason, we don’t end up pulling it off, just to be able to genuinely imagine that it really is possible – that opens so many doors in my heart that might allow me to live a little happier while the future unfolds, that it is a gift in itself.

I haven’t been sleeping all that well lately.  I keep waking up in the middle of the night and just lying there. I don’t mind when this happens on the odd occasion, but three weeks of it is definitely enough.  I’m not stressed or anxious, I’m not ruminating over anything, I feel tired enough when I go to bed, I’m getting enough exercise, I’m not watching TV or on the computer for hours before bedtime, nor am I boozing or consuming caffeine.  I’m not even dreading going to bed because I know I won’t sleep, thus creating my own reality, I just go to bed every night without thinking too much about it, but wake up at 3am anyway and lay awake for two hours, then just drift lightly from 5.30am.  So what the fuck is going on?

The only thing I can attribute this to is my thyroid medication, so I have taken myself down 10mcg from 40 to 30 per day.  It’s been two days, and no change yet, but I’ll give it a couple of weeks and see if that changes my sleep pattern.  I’m loathe to meddle too much with the thyroid meds just weeks out from the start of IVF, ya know?  So if 30mcg per day doesn’t fix it, I won’t go lower, and I’ll just have to think of something else.  But by then I’ll be on IVF meds which may well put my sleep out of whack (they have in the past created just this scenario) so it will be hard to tell.

Also, my egg donor is currently having the same sleeping pattern.  She’s waking up at 4am, but instead of lying there, she’s just getting up and doing her housework and teaching prep!  Could it be the contraceptive pill is doing this to us?  That’s all we have in common.  Otherwise, I guess it’s just a crazy coincidence.

Oh well.  I guess it will pass in its own time.  Meanwhile, perhaps some sleepytime chamomile before bed. Yuk.

Today is my EDD for lucky number seven.  Can you believe how that last nine months has flown?

What I can’t believe is how women can get pregnant and calculate the due date and actually get a baby at the end of it.  Or even more unbelievable, that they can get pregnant and blithely assume (correctly) that they’ll get a real live baby at the end of their term.  I just can’t imagine what having that belief would be like.  It is as alien to me as holocaust denial.  Nope, I cannot get my head around it no matter how hard I try.

This time around I didn’t bother hoping I would be pregnant again before the EDD, like I had hoped in the past.  In fact, I especially didn’t want to be pregnant again before my DE IVF because God knows like I needed another thing to throw a spanner in the works.

So here I am, wholly unpregnant, (still on the pill, in fact, and weighing about 40 pounds/18kgs less than I would have had I been full term today) and congratulating at least three friends on their births/impending births during the last few weeks.  Part of me wants to think, “That could have been me” but a much larger part has no idea how to imagine how on earth that could ever be me.  It’s like fantasising about extreme wealth or fame, or being an astronaut in space – you can toy with the idea but you can’t think about it as though it could ever be a reality.  How it could ever happen to you. Or, more accurately, me.

I am having a go-slow, self-indulgent day today.  So far I’ve had coffee and toast for breakfast (caffeine and wheat, OMG!), and skipped my morning yoga (though I did some meditation in bed).  I’m planning pizza for dinner (MORE wheat! and fatty meats!!) and have made the dough already, giving it all day to rise several times, becoming airy and gorgeous.  I even plan to have a glass of red wine with dinner.  (Alcohol! Gasp!)

Weight training is at 10.30am, and I have a shiatsu appointment at 1pm.  Apart from that, my day is as free as a bird.  All my chores are up to date (I even got the mending done yesterday, a job I had not previously found time for during the last 3 months) so I don’t even have to feel guilty about not doing something in particular.  Having nothing planed to fill in the gaps leaves some place for mystery and spontaneity, which is a rare treat around here.

If only the mystery and spontaneity of today could have been a live birth.  But the notion of that seems so far fetched as to be ridiculous.  Stretching the bounds of credulity.  Mystery and spontaneity don’t stretch to the impossible, like the kind of thing you’d find in a corny plot in a cheesy novel.  This (to date) endless failing to produce a live child seem so much more real than the alternative (Disney ending) ever could now.

Today is about what could have been, and what isn’t.  It’s about someone who isn’t here, and could have been.  I can’t help but compare that situation to those children who, equally, could also have been here this month, but who actually arrived.  I know it is fruitless to question why that is so, but it doesn’t stop my mind from wandering through that ugly tangle from time to time.  Especially on days such as this.

In order to ease the pain ever so slightly, [well, I don’t know that it actually eases the pain, maybe it just takes my sad feelings and puts them into a less difficult (read: avoidant) way of dealing with them.]  I find it comforting and easy to poke fun at those more fortunate than myself.  It seems a very human thing to do, so I am glad I am not alone in this response to jealousy.  Today I make no apologies for my self indulgence, in this, or any other regard.  And so I leave you with Pregnant Women are Smug.  [Thanks to We Are What We Repeatedly Do for posting this a few hours ago, thus bringing it to my attention.]

Because it made me laugh when I didn’t really feel much like laughing.

“>

Everything is really good at the moment.

Had haircut last week, it looks great.  I’m easily maintaining my weight at around 51kg (112.5lb), and still not eating sugar.  I fit into ALL my clothes (well, except for the ones that are now too big for me). We have extra money in the bank even after the tax bill and my recent spending spree.  Just bought a new sexy and very large fridge that doesn’t leak or make the cheese go mouldy.  Next week is our final pre-donor egg cycle counselling session, and then we’re meeting with the clinic nurse to get our orders for the IVF cycle.  I got (most of) my [40th] birthday invites out last week.

The housework is under control.  I finally finished my house-wide clear out (and BFF took most of the crap down the markets, made good money on it and gave me a decent cut!).  I’m doing my daily drawing homework.  Today I spent 2.5hrs on some painting homework.  I put my weights up in pump about a month ago and this week they finally felt bearable.  I’m getting stronger.  I’m meditating at least 5 days a week. My skin has settled down after a month on the pill (though as I am suppressing my period, waiting for donor to catch up, I am experiencing mild pre-menstrual type cramps from time to time and am noticing that I am ever so slightly cranky).

Perhaps it is this last item that is contributing to my flatness, as it is difficult to pinpoint anything else that is wrong in my life (apart from the obvious).  I’ve been ‘blah’ all day.  A great yoga session didn’t shift it, nor did an enjoyable painting session or the fact that I ‘allowed’ myself a totally chore free day, and didn’t touch the memoir project or the decking oil.  I haven’t tried to shift it.  I’ve just tried to keep checking in on my mood, and noticing that it has remained stable at ‘dull’ all day.  And I’ve also noticed that my desire to eat to soothe myself has been prominent.  Also my desire to ‘escape’.  I watched a DVD, and ate a few things I didn’t need to.  I didn’t judge myself for giving in, but neither did giving in make me any happier.

So maybe it’s the thing where when there are no problems to solve, nothing to worry about, and everything is plain sailing and nothing really needs my attention, then the awareness that I have a gaping hole of sadness or emptiness in my life starts to bubble through.  It is unsettling.  I am aware that it would be helpful to sit with it and face it, but as yet I haven’t found the wherewithal.  It generally passes, so I get lazy and don’t do the work.  But it always comes back.

Now it is Sunday, and predictably, the flat mood has passed.  Today I feel quite energised and motivated.  Did an hour of memoirs, and 4.5hrs of oiling the deck & railikngs (North and West sides).  After this writing I will go and fit my meditation in before heading off to a friend’s place for afternoon drinks and nibbles.  It is hot, and I have hard enough of hard work.

DH is banging away over at the guest cottage, doing the insulation and rodent-proofing project.  We have a huge contingent of guests coming this weekend, for the aikido workshop, and on tomorrow’s list of things to do is get the hoover out and clean up the mess he’s made over there so we can use it as accommodation.  Plus I still need to clean out the old fridge [that a hippie mate is (hopefully) coming to take away tomorrow afternoon.  We’ll see.  You can’t really trust hippies to be reliable].  And then I will oil the East side and the second story (off-the-bedroom-balcony).  Plus a yoga class.  I desperately want to get into my potting shed to clean out and organise boxes of jars (the quinces are pretty well ready to pick and I’ll be making preserves again soon) and time keeps flying by with no broccoli, beetroot or dill sown.  Sigh.

But, you know, if I wasn’t this busy I’d probably just be sitting around moping.  So it’s all good.

So DH and I have had this camping trip planned, to the block at Injidup, for a couple of months now.  We try to make it over there once a summer.  Ok, it is only 2 hrs away, but organising, shopping/cooking/packing/unpacking/washing/putting away for it is a big schlepp, and we have to be motivated, and pre-prepared, to do it.

Friday we left in good spirits, arrived with daylight to spare, set up the tent and extraneous equipment, and discovered we were without cooking facilities for the chicken curry I had prepared.    Mum had told me there was a cooker there, so we just needed a gas bottle.  Well, there was a BBQ there, which required a different sized gas bottle from the cooker we thought was there. So we ate some cold snacks instead, and went across the road to borrow a gas bottle.  So happens that these folk are DH’s long-time friends from med school (you’d not be surprised if you lived in Western Australia – we are less than 2 degrees of separation over here, no matter where you are in the state!)  So we stayed and chatted, then headed back to camp at about 9-ish, read til 10-ish, lights out, and then about 11-ish DH sits bolt upright and says: I think I have gastro!


And that, my friends, was both the beginning and the end, of our weekend camping.  He spent the entire night up vomiting (and the rest) groaning and moaning and lying feebly trying to catch some sleep in between attacks.  There was nothing I could do to help, and I got little sleep with all the

‘seventeen zips open, stumble, puke, blergh, get lost in the bush, stumble, seventeen zips close, oh no! seventeen zips open’: rinse and repeat until 4.30am.

He’d had a zofran wafer AND given himself a stematil injection (yes, we take this kind of thing camping, doesn’t everyone? [Actually, we just happened to have the medical bag in the car, which often we take out when we go away]) to absolutely no avail, so I knew it was a vicious bug.

I rose at 6.30 as is my normal time, ate and took my important pills in case I was about to come down with it, and tried to doze on and off from 9am, hoping DH might come good and we could still salvage Sunday.  By 3pm he wasn’t vomiting anymore, but was hopelessly lacklustre (the worst I have seen him with any illness in many many years ) so I called it and started to pack up.

Which is when I began to feel queasy.  And then nervous, wondering if I could do a one hour pack up and 2 hr drive before vomit-ville hit me.  DH was in no condition to drive, and I could only gamble on my own condition remaining stable, knowing the drugs we had wouldn’t help me a bit.  I gambled, thinking “I only need to get to Nannup, where they have a hospital, and the drug that WILL work, and although they don’t have a doctor there, DH can order it for me”. GO!

So I went, and I drove sensibly, and we got stuck behind a few slow pokes, of course, and I kept my temper, and DH slumped next to me occasionally asking after my health and telling me I was doing a good job.  We made it to Nannup, and I still felt only queasy, so I pushed on the extra miles and got home.  DH fell on the sofa at 5.30, put himself to bed in the spare room at about 7-ish, while I unpacked the food, bedding and clothes (these straight into the machine to wash off the bugs), then crawled into bed myself.  Still no vomiting.  I began to think I might just be a victim of hysteria.  I am very ‘suggestible’ as DH likes to put it.  Oh dear.  That’s a bit lame of me, isn’t it?

Woke up Sunday, felt feeble.  Nausea, listlessness, weak.  Very much like early pregnancy symptoms to be honest.  Although since I have not had sex nor ovulated this cycle, AND I am on the birth control pill, this option did seem very unlikely.  Developed the nasty headache somewhere after lunch.  Continued to do nothing all day (ok watched DVDs and read magazines).  Thought since I hadn’t had the gastro explosions I ought to come good by Monday.

Monday came, and with it, DH was up and about, with not his usual energy, but still being productive.  Me: struggling to complete some outstanding chores I wanted done before art classes begin tomorrow.  Like, washing off the line; boxing up the mess I made in the spare room last week with all my compulsive ‘chucking’ of possessions; ironing; shopping; finishing off disc B of Grandfather’s memoirs.  Instead: more DVD watching, and bean bag slouching (ok, I did get the first two items on the list done, and DH did the shopping).  Still no explosions, still feeling run over by a bus, still unsettled in the tum tum.  (STILL haven’t seen BFF either, as now I want to protect her from this new evil).

And here I am.  A whole weekend down the toilet (kind of), and nothing to show for it.  You could argue that I have been so busy lately my body was forcing me to have a rest – but I had already PLANNED that rest and was in the middle of executing it.  So raspberries to that theory.

Nope, it is, as always, just life.  In all its glory, randomness and un-wisdom.  It was just the bug’s vigorously normal attempts at reproduction via the 18 month old baby DH treated for severe gastro on Thursday night.  Passed on through respiratory droplets, it was hard for DH to avoid, given the copious amounts of fluid the poor thing was discharging at either end.  How my immune system managed to stave off the worst effects, I don’t know.  Maybe I got a lower inoculation because I didn’t get close to DH once we knew what was going on.  Or maybe I just got lucky.

Whatever it is, I am thankful it didn’t leave me feeling worse, but will be grateful also when I am feeling a heck of a lot better.  And I hope that time is soon.  Like, tomorrow morning.

Started my bridge class this afternoon.  In the middle of it all BFF rang to say she was driving, 10 mins from town, and haemorrhaging badly.  Could I organise for a doctor to meet her at the hospital?  Yes, I could, and did.  She was admitted, given some treatment to stop the bleeding, and rang me 5 hrs later, just before my counselling session to say the bleeding hadn’t stopped and she wanted to be transferred to a bigger hospital an hour away, just ‘in case’.  I advised her to discuss her concerns with her doctor, so she could make a plan she was comfortable with, and found a text after counselling was over, to say she’d transferred herself.

Bloody hell.  I hope she’s alright.  She sounded really scared, and I’m nervous.

ETA- Thanks for all your well-wishes.  The bleeding has eased and she’s feeling much better.  Coming home today, if the scan gives the all-clear.  Phew.  No more reproductive dramas for a while now, if you don’t mind.  I need a rest.

Went to felting workshop, learned quite a few useful tips, had fun, started feeling unwell with a headache and when the hot flashes began I quickly packed my gear and fled for home and a zofran wafer before the vomiting began.  Saved in the nick of time, but still jolly under par.  I hate migraines.  Think I must have overdone it on the work front yesterday.  Punishment duly meted.