Monthly Archives: April 2014

The protocol

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Protocol: this is what they call the regime of drugs that they plan for you. They base this – apparently – on a number of things – your height and weight, the amount of bloodflow they can see going to your ovaries, your AMH results, all that sort of shiz. At least that’s what they told me, it could be that they just pluck an idea out of nowhere and go with it.

And, despite my sub-par AMH results, my scans were all good. In fact they told me that if I hadn’t told them I’d had endometriosis they’d never have known, everything looked normal. Hurrah, well done ovaries, uterus etc etc. I am, by the way, skipping over various bits of the story, like the fact that I cried Continue reading →

Testing, testing

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It was my consultation with the guru what swung it. She told me that I was only 36 (hurrah), she’d recommend a fertility MOT with a few tests to see where I was at and if it all looked normal, well why not wait six months to a year and see what happened? Yay, someone who didn’t want to prey on my insecurities and relieve of me of thousands of pounds just for the hell of it. Oh, and then I dropped into conversation that I’d had an endometrioma about seven years ago and she looked a LOT more worried.

Brief medical aside: Endometriosis is when cells that should be lining your womb end up elsewhere – in my case, in my abdominal cavity. Nobody really knows Continue reading →

Choosing a clinic

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You might have thought that once I’d decided to freeze my eggs, picking a clinic would be really easy. Wrong. At least not for me. The thing is, I’m a bit of data junkie, I tend to make decisions based on evidence. If I want to buy a vacuum cleaner, I’ll look at the Which? report; if I’m booking a holiday, I’ll check out reviews from people I trust (not those idiots on TripAdvisor, never them) and so for a Statto like me, it should have been as easy as looking at the success rates and going with the best one.

Except it’s so not. Because those success rates are pretty much bollocks. You don’t know if clinics are selective, only picking patients who Continue reading →

Decision made

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So once it had dawned on me that actually, having children was more important to me than I might have cared to admit, the next question was what I was going to do about it. Going out and shagging randomers in the hope of getting knocked up didn’t really appeal (I know, weird, right? But I’m kind of picky about the genetics of my potential offspring like that…) I didn’t have any male friends, gay or straight, who I thought might like to parent in an involved or otherwise way (and let’s not even begin to think about the complications of that) – and also, I was only 36. I didn’t think it was unreasonable Continue reading →

How did I get here?

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This isn’t an existentialist – or biological – question but it is a bit navel-gazing – literally. Because that’s the question that I was asking when I found myself 36, single, sitting at the kitchen table with a syringe in my hand, gazing at my navel, before stabbing my stomach with follicle stimulating hormone. Vignettes like that tend to prompt a little bit of self-questioning…

I’ve never been one of those women who were desperate for kids. In fact as a teenager I always thought I didn’t really want them – I used to joke that they might end up like me and my sister and who’d want that? I don’t think we were particularly difficult kids, but equally, my mum didn’t make it look particularly easy – or fun.

Then at 26, the boyfriend I’d spent six years with said Continue reading →

Who am I?

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I’m 36, single and I live in London, but apart from that, I’m anonymous. Why? I suppose it boils down to the fact that I don’t think that this is anybody’s business but mine. (To be fair, my parents don’t even know that I’m doing this so I’m certainly not about to broadcast it to the rest of the world.)

My sister knows and a handful of my friends know – the ones I can trust, the ones who I know will get it, and will support me without patronising me, or pitying me, or making me the topic of their gossip.

Maybe I’m doing a lot of my friends Continue reading →

Egged On

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It’s a crap pun, I know, but it was the least crap pun I could come up with. (Honestly, when it comes to egg freezing the pun potential is huge.) But I did feel egged on – in the best possible way, by some lovely friends – not just to freeze my eggs in the first place, but also to write about it.

I did my first cycle of egg freezing in January 2014 and I’m about to start my second. Part of me wishes I’d started writing about it from the start, but I didn’t, so the first few posts in this blog will hopefully explain a little bit about everything up until now (I don’t know why but I sort of feel that that scene-setting is important – maybe it’s not) and then you’ll get normal real-time blogging.

So why write? Partly because Continue reading →