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 →

The reckoning

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Ok, so now I’ve finished my egg freezing cycles, I’ve done what I planned to and totted everything up. Out of interest, out of geekery, out of wondering whether there was any pattern that I could see in terms of the drugs I took and the results I got and the length of the cycle.

I have no idea whether the below will be of any interest to anyone but me, but if you are thinking about egg-freezing, it might give you a realistic idea of what you’ll spend, because when they quote a cycle fee, although it includes all scans, consultations and the procedure, it doesn’t include blood tests, sedation, storage, drugs and, as I discovered, they can mount up… Continue reading →

What a difference a day makes…

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…well two days actually. Today was the day of my final egg collection and, maybe it’s because I’m still feeling the afterglow of a prosecco-fuelled celebratory lunch courtesy of my great friend, J, (N.B. I’m pretty sure medics don’t advise this as the best course of action post a sedated procedure, so do as they advise rather than as I do); or maybe it’s because this final cycle produced seven eggs – as many as my first two cycles put together; or maybe it’s because everyone I saw at the clinic today 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 →

I’ve changed…

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No, really, I have changed. Probably in lots of ways over various periods of time, but for the purposes of this post, the most significant way in which I’ve changed is the way I feel about the egg freezing cycle this time, compared to how I felt about it first time around. Maybe it’s just familiarity breeding, well, not contempt, but certainly a little less respect, or maybe it’s because I’m pretty sure that this is the last time that I’m going to do this, but various things have Continue reading →

A sober wedding

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So I went to the wedding, and I didn’t drink. In fact in one of those beautiful/tragi-comic ironies, I actually drank less than the pregnant women at the wedding. While I watched them treat themselves to a glass or two of champagne, I barely had a token sip during the speeches to avoid looking conspicuous. Looking like you’re drinking when you’re not is hard. Although sparkling water with ice and lemon does a mean imitation of gin and tonic. And it helps if you volunteer to go to the bar – or if one of your friends in the know kindly offers to get you a ‘gin and tonic’ when they go to the bar.

But you know what? Having dated sober, Continue reading →

Imperfect timing

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If I had tried really, really hard to pick a time when I would LEAST like to be not drinking and injecting myself with hormones, it would probably be this week. Which is, of course, why today I’m starting the injections for my third – and final – cycle of egg freezing.

This week I have in my diary: 1 x reunion of old work colleagues, 1 x best friend’s hen do, 1 x best friend’s wedding, 1 x work night out, 1 x boozy Sunday lunch with the girls. I’ve already had to cancel the blow dry I had planned for the morning of the wedding because I have to have my day 5 scan that morning instead.

Why am I doing this? Because there’s never a good time. Because there’s always Continue reading →

Going it alone

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I think I’ve touched briefly in this blog on whether, if I don’t meet someone, I want a child enough to try to get pregnant using donor sperm. It preoccupies me more than it should. Or maybe not more than it should. I found myself lying in bed the other night trying to work out how much money I would have to earn in order to put a child in nursery so that I could work to look after us both.

I know that I’ve been at kids’ birthday parties and watched them blowing out the candles on their cakes with both their parents, and wondered whether, Continue reading →

The Kirstie Allsopp thing…

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I REALLY didn’t want to write this post. To be honest, I didn’t see what I could say that would actually add anything to the reams of newsprint and fuck-tonne of pixels that have already been devoted to supporting/denigrating her and her argument – and my view on that hasn’t really changed. But it’s just not gone away. Nearly a week later and people are still going on about it. Sigh. So I thought I’d write something.

If you’ve been living in the mountains of Tibet, or Jupiter or something, you might not know that last week Continue reading →