Category Archives: Uncategorized

Sperm banks (Part 1)…

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So how did you spend that bit between Christmas & New Year? Tidying up the house? Hanging out with your friends? Me? Oh, y’know, the usual, just obsessively researching sperm banks, learning about the difference between the regulations about sperm donation in the US and the UK, emailing random women in America to get their recommendations for ethical sperm banks, downloading eBooks from ChoiceMoms.org (while I totally applaud what they’re doing and saying, for some reason — maybe many reasons — I have a real issue with the name of that organisation. It actually sets my teeth on edge even writing the name of their website).

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing, so, yeah, I now know way more about sperm banks than I EVER thought I would. (You might have gathered that from the fact that this post is “Sperm banks (Part 1)”. Yes, there will be a Part 2, there’s quite a bit to say…) Continue reading →

Blood tests, and acronyms…

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Ugh I just found this in my drafts – it’s from about a month ago, sorry about that, but you know, read it, then you’re pretty much up to date… 

So, of course it wasn’t that straightforward, like I said, these things never are. Before I left the clinic my consultant sent me for a blood test to test my thyroid levels. Yet another of those things that you never even think about, but apparently your thyroid has to be operating at a certain level to create optimum conditions for pregnancy.

And whaddaya know, mine wasn’t. My blood test showed that my Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) levels were at around 5. The top end of normal in the regular population is 4.5 (although other people will say that normal can go up to 10) but crucially if you want to get pregnant with IVF, they want it closer to 2.5. The solution: daily pills of a drug called levothyroxine, which I have to take for three weeks or so and then get tested again to see if it’s doing what it needs to, or if I need a higher dose. Continue reading →

Tired…

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Allow me a small diversion from the whole egg / baby thing — although it is kind of related…

I’ve spoken before about how I really resent arbitrary divisions being made between people — and particularly between women — defining individuals as single or part of a couple, pitting mothers against non-mothers and so on. And, with respect to the latter, one of the things I have real beef with is the idea that “until you’re a mum you have no idea what X means” where X is equal to “love”, “exhaustion”, “worry”, “fear” etc etc. Ultimately I think it’s hugely insulting to anyone to undermine their emotion by telling them that because they’re not a parent, there’s no value in what they feel.

Continue reading →

Defrosting…

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So, I went to the clinic, and I talked to my consultant and I had a scan, and it mostly looked fine, and so we discussed a few things, like whether we’d try IUI (Intra Uterine Insemination – or what I like to think of as PTB — Posh Turkey Baster — where you get the sperm and stick it in and hope for the best…) or IVF (In Vitro Fertilisation — where the egg and sperm meet in a test tube (actually a dish rather than a tube I think) and mix there to make the embryo which is then put inside you. Continue reading →

I’m back (again)….

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It’s almost Easter, which can mean only one thing… actually, no, I can’t. I think I eggshausted all my egg-based puns two years ago. So that’s not why I’m back. I’m back because I’m taking the next step. Or at least preparing to. More putting on my shoes and thinking about lacing them up, rather than Continue reading →

Mothers vs Non-mothers

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It’s Easter, so given my penchant for puns, I should probably post something eggciting. But since I have pretty low levels of egg chat at the moment — ummm, they’re still frozen… — I thought maybe I’d write about motherhood and a few things that have caught my eye recently.

Firstly, we’ve all got the Facebook friends who sort of ended up there a bit by accident — The New Yorker was quite funny on this recently — actually maybe that’s a little unfair (as much as anything because a) I refuse to accept friend requests from people who were bitches Continue reading →

Baby rush

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Ah, autumn, season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and … a fucktonne of new babies. As Keats might have said if he’d been friends with my friends. I am not kidding. Forget spring being the time when new life bursts forth, September is baby boomtime. In the last few weeks, four good friends have added to their families, and there are another three due imminently, not to mention the handful of acquaintances whose new offspring find their way into my social media feeds.

My life is currently a never-ending cycle of liking new baby pictures on Facebook, buying and sending “Congratulations on your new baby!” cards, buying and sending gifts for new babies, and furiously Continue reading →

I’m back…

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Since I finished the freezing process, I haven’t really had much inclination to write. I think partly that’s because so much of it had been about my personal experience that, once it was all over, I wasn’t really sure what I was meant to be writing. But also, because I wanted to luxuriate in not having to think about Gonal-F, and cycles and scans and all that sort of thing.

Instead, I’ve spent the last few months drinking recklessly, flirting with abandon, buying clothes that I would never have dreamed of buying a year ago because Continue reading →

A little more conversation…

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Today I cried at the clinic. Nothing had gone drastically wrong, I wasn’t hurt, nobody had been horrible to me, nobody had been unbearably kind to me. Maybe it was the hormones finally kicking in which resulted in a disproportionately emotional response, but basically I cried because I was treated like an idiot, and treated like a number, and treated like a cash cow, rather than a person.

And I’m pretty sure that the person who made me feel like that didn’t mean to make me feel like that, but it did make me think Continue reading →

Eggs or embryos?

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When I first embarked on this whole thing, in my head, I was going to do one cycle of egg freezing, end up with 20 eggs and freeze half of them as eggs and and get the other half fertilised with donor sperm and freeze them as embryos. (Oh the naivety of ignorance. Basically I didn’t really have a fucking clue.)

The thing was, I’d done a (negligible) bit of research and it looked like the success rates from embryos were better than the success rates from eggs, and I figured that if, in X years time (where X is a number I haven’t yet decided upon) I was still single and decided to Continue reading →