Sorry, been a bit quiet lately. When I’ve not been busy I’ve been either asleep or too tired to blog. Anyway, thought you might like to see some pictures of my beautiful daughter at 20 weeks. Yes, she’s becoming a little more real now :D
xxx
Thanks you for all your amazing comments, this news still hasn’t sunk in yet, it’s all fantasy talk!
Just a quick update really to say everything’s fine. I’m 16 1/2 weeks pregnant now. We went to see the midwife this lunchtime, and got to hear Midget’s heartbeat. All of my worries (of which there are bucketloads) flew out of the window for that minute or so. Over the past few days I’ve been having a few tummy flutters that I’m becoming more and more convinced are Midget moving around. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t feel a 12cm baby a bit more, but I suppose I’ll soon be getting kicked from the inside and wishing myself back to these days of vague flutters :D
Thank you again for all your support and prayers
xxx
Lemly, Daddy and Midget
Thought I’d better properly introduce Midget with a photo and all, it’s actually 3 weeks old by now (scan at 11 weeks, now 14 weeks) but I’m hopefully not going to need another one until 20 weeks, so this is the best I can do.
Midget
Pretty good best though, eh?
In answer to questions that’s crossed legs, not a dolphin tail or a mermaid, and if you think Midge looks like a Klingon in this one you should see the one I didn’t post!
Life otherwise is fine, lots of tiredness, but a lovely Christmas and New Year nevertheless. Looking forward to seeing parents who had to delay their New Year visit after they both came down with post Christmas flu.
Am sad that David Tennant is no longer The Doctor, but looking forward to Matt Smith, also looking forward to Neighbours being back today after a 3 week break – hooray!
Hope you all have a great 2010, we know we will :)
… I’m as of today twelve weeks and one day pregnant.
I’m sure all of your prayers, thoughts and comments made all of the difference this time. The support we have seen through from that first post outlining the situation has been massive, and we know that we’ve always had someone we could talk to. The delays and long silences stop here. Thank you for putting up with them, but they were very necessary. Really a big thank you for everything, please don’t stop praying yet though, we have a good six months to go before we even meet the child currently known as Midget (Jones), and I’m sure we’ll need your support afterwards too!
So to fill you in on the last couple of months (the delay in posting was 3 weeks, 3 days by the way), we had a positive pregnancy test on the 29th October, after which we were told we had to sit tight, keep taking the medication and wait for a scan in 3 weeks time. This is a special advance scan given to IVF people, normally pregnant women have to wait 10 weeks. We had the scan after 2 weeks as I was having lots of cramps (probably caused by the medications). At that stage I was pregnant with twins, both with heartbeats and doing fine. I was scheduled for another scan in another couple of weeks, where one twin was shown not to have made it (this is very common, most women would never know the other twin was there, it was only that I’d had the early scan that it showed). Midget, however was declared ‘perfect’ so that was some compensation to the huge sadness of that day. Gradually we learned to concentrate more on what we had than what we had lost. After that we got caught up in the hubbub of midwife appointments, dating scans etc, plus a couple of trips to the Early Pregnancy Unit after some slight bleeding, but really everything is fine. I am overly paranoid about this whole thing, I will freely admit that, but it has taken so long to get this far that I think I have the right to be a little more neurotic than I might otherwise be. Morning sickness pretty much came and went with our lost twin, odd moment aside, so my only real symptom now is tiredness. But I’m happy, being able to finally tell people, and have proper conversations without avoiding any elephants in the room is such luxury. This amount of emotional baggage can never be truly left behind, but the lightening of the load has been immense.
We’re now getting ready for a lovely family Christmas and New Year, with people coming to us so we’re not travelling at all really.
Hope you all have wonderful Christmases too.
Thank you again
xxx
Infertility is a long, long journey. From first suspicions that things are not going as smoothly to even the first medical consultation is such a big step it can take years. Like many traumatic events in life it is necessary to work through the stages of grief. Not just once, but with almost every new progression and setback from first inklings to every failed attempt at treatment.
Somewhere along this path, often quite late on comes the acknowledgement that this is not a journey to be made alone. There is support, there are many, many others going through this same thing at the same time. And of course there are internet forums where all of these many people can provide mutual help, advice, support and sometimes a virtual shoulder to cry on.
These are not medical professionals, neither are they close friends (in fact many people will very much protect their identity, more so than anywhere else whilst posting on these boards). What they are though is a mass of people who immediately understand, no explanation needed, and a community where infertility is the norm. The importance of this can never be underestimated.
The most popular forum in Britain, and one that I anonymously frequent is here, but there are many more across the world. It takes a while to work around the conventions, bubbles, fairydust, many many acronyms, but for those at any stage on this journey it can make a lot of difference.
And remember – You Are Not Alone.
(Edited to add, sorry just okayed a couple of comments I thought I had approved ages ago that were still in my pending file. Oops, sorry guys, and thanks xxx)
I want to start this post by reassuring you all that you have been most excellent companions on this IVF journey. Your support and prayers have made more difference than you will ever know, and we will always be grateful.
Another link today, and it’s unfortunately one I wish I could put under the noses of one or two people that have not helped in our various dalliances with fertility treatment. I repeat it’s absolutely not getting at anyone here, I partly link it because it’s so well written and provides many brilliant insights, but partly because a lot of it just needs to be out there as much as possible.
How to be good friends with an infertile
Have a good week.
xx
Surfer has tagged me as a ‘gorgeous blog’ (thanks sweetie). This means I get to write six things about me that aren’t generally known and then tag some other people… ok then.
1, I have a huge collection of children’s books. Some are the ones I couldn’t part with as a child, but many have been bought as an adult. They are kept seperately from my other books, and any visiting children are welcome to use my house as a library.
2, I shout at the telly quite frequently (especially Wales Today and its attempts to pass off uninteresting facts as news for half an hour most weeknights).
3, My shoes and boots always get scuffed on top of the toes and on the inside left ankle. I probably walk funny.
4, Despite thinking for years that the best accompaniment to eggy bread was tomato ketchup, I have conceeded that maple syrup is miles better. My Brownies agree.
5, I have seven cousins, four of them live in Australia. I’ve occasionally been tempted to emigrate there, but on the whole prefer Britain.
6, I always do handmade Christmas cards, but have no design ideas at all this year, and not much time either.
Five blogs that could be absolutely gorgeous if they updated more often are:
Confessions of a Bamphire Mother
and Backburner
OK, slightly bending the rules there, but let’s hope to get at least one of these people blogging soonish!
Thank you again for all of your wonderful and encouraging comments both on this blog and elsewhere, and for your continued prayers and support. As I explained in the last post my story is on hold for the time being, but I am taking the opportunity to explore more widely around the issue of infertility.
Starting off then with a couple of videos. There are, if you look around the web, and elsewhere more than a few songs / videoes about infertility, but I chose these two because they have both meant something to me at more than one point in my experiences. Rather than give lengthy introductions or explanations I will let each speak for themselves.
That’s all for this week, will try to post weekly on Monday mornings as much as is possible.
I didn’t expect to get this far, I don’t know what comes next, but I won’t be ready to tell whatever the outcome for a while yet. I am not abandoning this blog, just putting it on hold until the right time comes to let the world know what happened next. When it comes down to it I don’t know who is reading this blog, and while I very much value you all and thank you for sticking with this story and for all your prayers and comments along the way I do need to move towards a phase where I control who knows what.
This blog will continue in the meantime by telling a less personal tale, it’s not just me who has gone through this, and I’d love to use this space to highlight some of the other stories out there. Please do stick around, this story has not ended yet, and will have an ending of some form, just not quite yet.
*Disclaimer – this post was not written this morning, I am deliberately posting these entries on different dates so that I can be fully open about this IVF stuff without people knowing exactly what is happening when. It’s a self preservation thing, with all of the injected hormones I become a bit of an emotional wreck, and am saving myself the pressure of people curious to know outcomes before I’m ready to tell.
You might think that the two week wait is a bit of a misnomer, surely there are better things to do than wait, even metaphorically, for a whole fortnight. Except it has gained it’s name because that’s exactly what it is. There is very little I can do to help things happen. I can keep up with my pills and injections, not drink alcohol or caffeine, not lift anything heavy, and a million other bits, but the main thing I have to do is wait. And try not to obsess.
The likelihood of any symptom of pregnancy hitting in before the day of the test is low, and even lower is the chance of me correctly recognising it. The amount of extra hormones I’ve been taking means that my body is all over the place in those terms anyway. I had morning sickness well before the embryos were transferred, and have felt bloated all the way through, and as for food cravings, anything salty especially Marmite and anchovies has been for the win for a few weeks now.
But all we can do is wait. I was never good at waiting. It’s so so frustrating, trying not to get our hopes up too high, but not being so cynical about our chances that negative thinking gets in the way. And it’s like all those many many times before, hoping that my period won’t come, knowing that it probably will, and trying not to think about it, but with something this big, that takes over this much of your life, what else is there to think about?
It always strikes me at this point that even with all the advances to modern science, most of this process is left to God. Yes I took injections to control my hormones and release the eggs at the right time, but God made the eggs, and the hormones that reacted at the right time. Yes the embryos were made in a petri-dish (no, it was never a test tube, test tube babies are a misnomer), but God alone knows how to fuse the eggs and sperm and make those potential bundles of life. Yes, the embryos were treated with lasers, but hatched by God, and finally transferred back into my womb where God, if he so chooses can help them to implant (about a couple of days ago if it happened), and grow. The medications I am taking might help to support it, but God alone can make life.
This was made even clearer last night when the injection went a bit wrong and we reckon between a quarter and half of the fluid leaked straight back out of the injection site. We called the out of hours hotline to the consultant in a complete panic, his response was that we should do whatever we were comfortable with, another injection of a whole or half an ampoule, or leave it and do tomorrow’s injection as normal, basically we could do the injection every other day and it would still have the same effect. A lot of this ‘hard science’ is just guesswork, and we just have to trust that the clinic are working towards a common good, after all they have their statistics to think of as well as our happiness. Needless to say we took the option of leaving it until tonight for the next injection, one buttock stabbing per night is quite enough for me thanks. :)