.... all that motivated me was to do well at work and to have fun out of work. But as soon as we started trying to have children, it became my sole obsession. By nature I'm a planner and organiser and I've never been great at handing over control to someone else. And there's no greater loss of control than when you realise that you can't just click your fingers and get pregnant (and before anyone says it, I do know that there's more to getting pregnant naturally than clicking my fingers so that wasn't the problem!).
And up to this point, I was someone for whom failure was not an option - at least not often. Everything had always come easily to me with little effort and, although I had a successful and exciting career, I had never really tried too hard.
So I had now "failed" 3 times at the IUI 'test'. I had pumped myself full of drugs to stimulate the ovaries and had undergone countless scans - including, on one occasion, walking from one side of London to the other to get from work to hospital for a scan because there was no public transport due to the 7/7 bombings. And poor Muddled Hubby had gone through the indignity of producing a sample for numerous tests and for the 3 IUI attempts.
Did we want to continue with more treatment? Was it worth the money, emotional stress and physical 'abuse'? The answer fro me - the eternal optimist - was definitely yes. And for Muddled Hubby - the slight pessimist - was "whatever makes you happy".
So 6 months after our first appointment, we were back at the hospital for another consultation. The inevitable next step was to start IVF. If we thought the drug regime was bad for IUI, for IVF it was a nightmare - although for me, the nightmare was really the number of drugs we had to take and the schedule for doing so. At least I wasn't like a normally very calm friend of mine who had extreme mood swings when taking her IVF drugs and broke her hand punching her husband for some perceived slight!
We had 11 days of tablets, nasal sprays four times a day, scans everyday for 3 days, self-injections in the tummy every day and then more nasal spray. Then I had blood tests and scans every other days plus a chromosomal test for abnormalities and Muddled Hubby had a semen culture test.
In amongst all of this, the doctors did a dummy run for the embryo transfer to see how it should be done by mapping out the route they would take. I felt like I had the most interfered with and well-known ovaries and uterus in the world!
Into the 2nd month of the drug regime, I had been noticing ongoing bleeding which was a bit worrying but which I put down to all the drugs I was taking. The doctor doing our scan was also fairly dismissive so we tried to stop worrying about it. And so it came to the final injection, 36 hours before the egg collection. And then the big day itself.
Egg collection is done under light sedation but that didn't stop me hearing the consultant during the procedure telling his colleagues that there was bleeding and that this wasn't normal. Even sedated, I was outraged and started telling him that we'd been saying this for weeks and had been told that everything was OK. I think at that point, the anaesthetist gave me more drugs to knock me out completely! In any event, they managed to collect around 10 eggs which were fertilised to create 5 embryos. And I had yet another scan to determine the cause of the bleeding and to decide on next steps.
Looking back, I can't believe that we handled all this so calmly and patiently - we didn't argue massively or have huge emotional moments. We continued going to work everyday - both of us in stressful and busy jobs (and I had only recently been promoted so was learning a new job too). But we put the rest of life pretty much on hold in the interests of healthy living and relaxation. And we certainly weren't going to let all this hard work go to waste at such a late stage.
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