Tag Archives: fertility

The nuts and bolts…

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I’m about to write another post about what I think of as the slightly boring (for you) minutiae of appointments and numbers and stuff, and I’m not really sure if this is for you or for me, or just for the sake of completeness because I’m a bit obsessive like that. If I were you, I’d be more interested in the emotional fuckwittery, but maybe you’re interested — anyway, consider yourself duly warned.

So, before the cycle started, I had my TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) levels checked Continue reading →

One day at a time…

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“When exactly ARE you going to tell Mum and Dad?” my sister asked me the other day when we were discussing my latest scan. “Dunno,” I replied, “I’ll worry about it at the time. I might get you to do it.” (I wasn’t entirely joking.) “You could just send them your blog,” she said. “I’m not sure THAT’s a good idea…”

It’s not that I’m cavalier about it, it’s just that it’s really not a significant concern of mine right now. Partly because I’m not really worried about what they’ll say, but also because it’s SOOOOOOOOOOO far away.

Before I get to the point where 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 →

Cognitive dissonance…

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I was recently talking to a friend of mine, who had been going through IVF, about her experiences, and she was talking about the cognitive dissonance that seems inherent in all this.

You might never have done IVF, and you might not call it cognitive dissonance, but if you’ve ever been a teenager, you’ll know what she’s on about.

Maybe it was just me (I assumed it was everyone) who, as a teenager,  Continue reading →

Permission to procrastinate…

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So I wrote about the fact that I was going back to the clinic on a bit of a fact-finding mission. And that’s exactly what I did. I’d made a point of booking to see the consultant that I’d really liked when I was freezing my eggs. I didn’t just trust her from a medical perspective, but from an emotional one. (She’s the one that I cried on in all of my first three consultations.) I felt like she totally understood my reasons for freezing my eggs, and she was really positive about what I was doing.

And, when I saw her, I felt totally vindicated Continue reading →

Have I been exploited?

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The title of this post is a bit of a rhetorical question. Or, as some would have it, when referring to headlines in a certain newspaper (“Are immigrants causing cancer?” “Could this £10 pill cure obesity?” “Would YOU wear a dress made from fish guts?” etc etc) QTWTAIN (Questions To Which The Answer Is No). Because no, I don’t think I have been exploited, but undoubtedly some people would.

Front page headline on The Times today “Top clinics exploiting women who freeze eggs”

Women who freeze their eggs in the hope of having children are being exploited by clinics which fail to disclose that the chances of pregnancy are “scarily” small, a leading fertility expert warned yesterday.

The piece went on to talk about people being charged Continue reading →

I love Jennifer Aniston

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Honestly, I didn’t used to. I think she’s a good comedy actress, but she wasn’t on my list of ‘People I Think Are Awesome And Would Like To Have A Drink With.’ OK, that list doesn’t actually exist, that would be weird. But you know what I mean, she was just an actress who didn’t make much of an impression on me.

And then she’s interviewed in Allure magazine and she says this: Continue reading →

In the news…

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If you’ve found this blog via my Stella magazine piece, hello! How lovely of you to pop by. I should warn you that if you’re after regular updates and constant positivity, or are offended by swearing, you’re probably going to be disappointed, but I like to think I do a good line in telling it how it is, occasional ranting and slightly belated responses to relevant news stories. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the topic of today’s post. Because it’s not just me that’s been in the news. Over the last week or so there

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 →

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 →