IVF Cycle One.

Let me start this off by saying - I had ALL of my eggs (fertility joke) in the one basket when it came to IVF - I thought it was going to be the quick (yet expensive, invasive and painful) solution to my path to having a child, what unfolded was a lesson in what was not right for me.

Follicle Stimulation:

Straight off the back of a miscarriage from a natural conception I was encouraged to start IVF to beat my age ‘time bomb’ and the endometriosis and my myriad of health issues.

After signing all the paperwork, we were shown through the various hormones and had blood tests to confirm I was ready to start at the beginning of my next period.

In the hours prior to your first round, there’s something about knowing you are about to go home and insert needles into your stomach that’s hard to get your head around.

Before each injection my partner would say ‘are you ready’? I would breathe out, he would give me a big kiss and we would say ‘love you’ to each other before he would inject me. It was a rather bonding experience in a scientific way, although my partner hated the idea of inserting needles and potentially putting me through pain. I was always a little nervous he was going insert at the wrong angle or not release the bubbles from the needle and kill me.

This process is to be done at the same time every night, so it does make you plan your life for the month, which can be hard when there is a world still turning outside. I feel for people who do the IVF process month in month out. It is such a commitment. The first needles feel monumental but after that it does kind of become routine but with a weighted breathe each time.

Once the visits to the clinic for check-ups started, I found this harder in some ways. Sitting in the waiting room amongst twenty girls at a time, women of all walks of life, there was never any eye contact. The clinical and cold atmosphere in the waiting room was enough to throw both you and your nerves out the window. It was an isolating experience.

Lucky me, I had a great response to the treatment, as they would tell me. Look at all those eggs you have produced they would say. It sounded so promising - everything was going just as planned and I was given every belief that it was all working and I was soon going to be pregnant.

The collection of eggs:

This is where it all gets very clinical and I found this part the hardest. You have to take a day off work (possibly lie if you don’t want work to know) and sit around until it’s your turn. You sit in a little box of a room in your scrubs and all I could do was reflect on the last couple of weeks – was I good enough over the last two weeks? how was my diet? how did I handle the stress? And how does me sitting in scrubs in a box, possibly make me a mum? A quick visit from your specialist who tells you what is coming up, so fast that you nod your head and then promptly forget, as they whisk through your little box curtain…then it’s bright lights!

No quicker are you lying on the hospital bed, then it’s ‘lights out’. You wake up egg free with a number on your hand. For those seconds from when you wake up - to when you look at your number for the first time, you have a rare moment of not knowing what is ahead - was this a success?.

The number 14 was written on some tape. 14 eggs – surprise swelled. 14 potential X and Y children running around at my feet, laughing and playing. After some juice and a cracker your partner arrives and your’e good to go. Whilst leaving, you can’t help but think about the clinical-ness of it all. You leave very unsure of what is about to come. You’re groggy from being under, you’re lighter for the 14 eggs that you left behind and somehow this could be the start of your family….except that you just left them behind in a day hospital for someone else to mind.

You then live by your phone over the next 24 hours and following days as you await news about your egg activity and realise just how quickly you can see 14 healthy eggs whittled down to 1 viable egg for transfer. I hear some people get none. It is at this point that IVF started to break me. I signed a dotted line for $8,000 that morning to get one viable egg and for some people none. For what? The experience? And to do that over and over again until you get lucky or run out of money. I cannot stress enough how hard this part of the IVF journey starts to get. Imagine handing an $8,000 cheque over for a car every month yet finding yourself walking home every day for the rest of your life, never once seeing your car. You wouldn’t do it would you? Crazy yeah? But here we are…doing it.

The Transfer:

I had my one viable egg transferred and went back to work. I was a paranoid lunatic for the next two weeks. I didn’t know what to expect, how to handle myself, the two week wait is always murderous, when you are carrying an $8k embryo around, it makes even more strange, confusing and frightening.

The weekend before my blood test to check if I was pregnant, my partner left for South America for a once in a lifetime trip. Soon after he left, I noticed blood spotting. This…was not good. I freaked out and was angry that my partner was up in the sky somewhere and I couldn’t even call him. I felt really alone. I googled anything I could to find a positive news story somewhere…the after hours number told me there wasn’t really anything they could do to help.

Across the day the spotting turned to bleeding. The evidence was building that I was not pregnant.

Eventually I called my sister. I cried and howled the hardest, angriest, fat tears I had ever felt. I was raging and mourning all at the same time. My sister was helpless on the other side of the call, she had never heard me like this. On the Monday I got the call from the nurses that I had been expecting to confirm what I already knew. I wasn’t pregnant.

I find the call the hardest part of the whole process. Yes it is the call that could potentially make you a mother but it is also the call that tells you the opposite.

I have a real issue that you are not the first to find out if you are pregnant. That ‘you’ and ‘your’ situation have already been discussed, that the call comes with a ‘sympathetic’ – ‘I’m sorry’ yet I just found this tone condescending, it was whispered to me as if they were almost embarrassed to tell me. I wanted to yell and scream, kick and punch like a toddler having their biggest and most epic meltdown of all time. I didn’t even want to say a reply, I wanted to throw the phone and rip it into a million pieces, just like my heart and expectations had. This was a crushing blow to me and I was all alone. I had no one to tell and no one could possibly understand the raw grief that I felt.

That afternoon I spoke to my partner overseas and could hardly tell him, I was so angry and broken that I had lost my voice. As I told him the story, all he could hear was massive sobs on the other side of the globe and could not do one thing to help me.

I can almost say that was my lowest point in my life, until I went through IVF round 2. That I think….was rock bottom for me.

IVF round two.JPG

IVF Cycle Two:

After the unsuccessful first attempt with it’s rush to start, the unsuccessful attempt and loss of savings, I was in a bit of turmoil and had a bitter taste in my mouth about the whole experience. That was Sept/October 2015 (2 months after we had first started TTC).

A new treatment:

After a month or so my specialist called me and said she wanted me to do the next cycle but attributed my lack of success previously due to ‘Killer cells’ . She suggested we try again with a similar process but add what is known as the ‘Bondi Protocol’. This process is the brainchild of a Bondi IVF specialist that was a little radical in his approach but had managed to have some mixed success in the IVF world : https://www.ivf.com.au/bondi-protocol

Sounded good enough to me and I could see with my history of health, this may be the holy grail!

But the timing didn’t seem right, the last experience still fresh in our minds, I had stepped it up with treatment of my gut, supplements and wellness with my fertility naturopath and we decided to pause on anymore treatment.

In January the following year, my IVF specialist called again and asked where we were at. I explained I was working on getting healthy through my naturopath (who had told me she didn’t think i needed IVF). My IVF specialist warned me over the phone ‘Don’t wait too long, I have seen women do this, they try to get healthy and then when they do IVF it is too late - your eggs are still ageing and they have had to get donor eggs to fall pregnant’. This stung me for a few reasons. I didn’t want to have donor eggs. I had already decided in my mind that I would’t forge ahead with plans to have a baby if it was a donor egg. For my own selfish reasons I wanted my own child.

I felt like she was throwing a spanner to where it hurts, I just wanted a couple of months, surely that wasn’t going to change my egg status too much? She said that my eggs may already be of bad quality and that’s why I was having miscarriages and an unsuccessful IVF cycle. This obviously got me thinking…..

My partner and I started talking about changing to a cheaper IVF clinic. My naturopath cautioned against moving clinics and advised that my IVF specialist was one of the best. I felt stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The next month, I had what is called a chemical pregnancy (a very early pregnancy loss) and with some pressure to get started from our IVF clinic and a lot of indecision on my behalf, we went through a second cycle of IVF. Even on the first day I saw red flags waving at me. We missed the time to get my bloods done and had to quickly drive 40 minutes away, to the only clinic still open - the whole drive I was unsure. It had only been days earlier I thought I had a successful pregnancy and then now on this drive I found out a friend from my past had died. Not ideal mental preparation however in the lead up to this day, I had been watching ‘You Tube’ meditations, practising with breathe and my diet was spot on. I was much more mentally prepared compared to the last attempt.

An element of the Bondi Protocol is you have to inject blood thinner each night, following the other injections. This one stings when it goes in, burns as it starts to go into your system and leaves messy bruising all around the injection areas. Short term pain - long term gain right?! It was the height of summer and I had to buy new swimwear as my midriff looked like it had been in a late night fist fight. Bruised and battered.

The second element to the Bondi Protocol is taking the steroid - Prednisolone. The dosage is increased every couple of days. The side effects vary from person to person and at first I felt fine, however as it increased, I felt things go a little haywire. I started to have panic attacks, dizziness, headaches, nervousness and insomnia. Not nice things to happen when you are trying to grow a human! I felt out of control and a little crazy.

I felt semi confident in the lead up to the pregnancy test. A tiny bit of spotting but also a few symptoms I thought could be pregnancy symptoms.

Yet on the day of the final blood tests, the call from the nurse came in the same whisper as the first round starting once again with “I am sorry’……..I don’t think I heard anything after that. It just became white noise and I didn’t want her condolences. All the anger, tears, frustration and emotional turmoil and grief came back harder and stronger than the time before. This time my partner was in Australia but in Melbourne for the day. I was standing out on a quiet street one block away from work. Except for my angry grief driven sobs. I remember I could hardly breathe, it was like someone had punched my lungs and kept punching until I was down on the ground. Once again my partner was struck by my emotional outburst that he could not console. He had already prepared for the worst. He knew the odds were not in my favour from the day he signed the forms. He was doing this round for me. But he was not prepared for my guttural outpouring of grief. It was so bad that a lady from the building across the street, started yelling at me to move away. It seemed that nowhere was appropriate for my outpouring of grief!

Once again I felt alone and words couldn’t describe just devastated I felt. Anymore IVF plans were put on hold. We couldn’t even discuss it.

We had 3 viable embryos from this IVF - ‘A grade’ quality. A much better result than the first time and a small win is that 2 were frozen for future cycles….but we were done and not sure what the future held for us moving forward.

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