Tag Archives: getting pregnant

Giving it another go…?

Posted on by

I wondered whether the miscarriage would make us more or less enthusiastic about trying again. In my case, nothing had really changed, all my reasons for wanting a sibling for my son were still there, and his charmingly demanding presence just hadn’t given me the opportunity to dwell on the miscarriage or wallow as I might have done. And I think B probably felt the same.

The only thing was my cycle was, well, not exactly what you’d call regular. It had fleetingly slipped into some sort of a monthly-ish pattern after I stopped breastfeeding, but given that at points I was on “day 57”, I didn’t really feel I was in a position to hang around and so I convinced the clinic that while they would have liked me to have a “normal period” before embarking on another cycle, they should let me just crack on, assuming everything on the scan looked OK. And yet at the same time as really wanting this to happen, I also didn’t want to put our lives on hold, I didn’t want to miss out on my living, breathing child because I was so preoccupied with one that didn’t yet exist. And so we made plans, and booked holidays.

And — of course, of COURSE — the timing of my period, when it eventually came, suggested that I’d need a scan while I was away. And so I organised this, and learnt how to ask for the images and information that I needed in a foreign language, and took a whole load of medication away with me. And having got the images and the information that I needed and sent them through to my clinic, I tried not to panic when I got a call from them telling me I needed to start taking the medication there and then, and could I please be back for an embryo transfer four days later, slap bang in the middle of our two week holiday.

And so I got on a plane, the day before, and had a little 48 hour mini-break at home, before flying back out to continue my holiday, feeling like I couldn’t NOT have done exactly what I did, but also fully expecting it to have been a waste of time and money. (I mean I say mini break, I will never forget the pain of having a bladder that felt fuller than it had ever been before in my life. Because the last transfer I did had had to be delayed because I hadn’t drunk enough water and I was determined that that wouldn’t happen again, I drank what felt like gallons of the stuff. And then they were running late. And I could barely exchange pleasantries with the consultant who was doing the transfer because I just wanted him to hurry the fuck up so I could go and wee.)

In the middle…

Posted on by

Last year when I got pregnant naturally and accidentally, I felt a sense of almost guilt about being such a cliché. Woman stops trying to get pregnant, gets pregnant, here’s the Hollywood ending (that I always secretly hated and resented when I heard it in others’ stories.)

Continue reading →

Talking and telling…

Posted on by

Now that I’m at the point where, despite what I thought was clever dressing to conceal my bump, I am very obviously, it appears, pregnant, I am confronted by yet another issue. How much do I say about our baby’s origins?

Continue reading →

What happens next…

Posted on by

It’s hard to know what this blog – which has been all about trying to get pregnant – should be about now I’m actually pregnant. And I suppose that sentence alone is something that speaks volumes. I didn’t start this as a blog about trying to get pregnant. When I started it, it was a blog about freezing my eggs. And when, later, I came back to it, I thought it was going to be a blog about being a solo mother. But life has other plans. And so I suppose now it’s a blog about being pregnant with a donor egg after trying to get pregnant for so long.

Continue reading →

Tempting fate…

Posted on by

You know I’m not superstitious. But perhaps inevitably I can’t help being with this. Given everything that’s gone before, I don’t know how I couldn’t be. How I could ever be someone who would assume it would all be fine. Despite all the scans that told me otherwise.

Because we’d had that six week scan, and then our clinic offered us an early scan at eight weeks, and then because we wanted to do the Harmony test (a blood test that looks for three different chromosomal abnormalities and can be done from ten weeks onwards. It’s sometimes offered on the NHS but if it is, it’s usually at a later stage) we booked a private package that combined a 10-week scan, the Harmony test and a 12-week scan. And all of them were fine. In all of them, the measurements were what they should be. The things they were meant to be able to see, they could see. Everything looked normal.

Continue reading →

A thing but not a thing

Posted on by

And so, as you might reasonably have expected, and as I might have slightly given away in my last post, given how contrarily these things go, the fact that I was so convinced it wasn’t going to work meant that when, on the morning we were going away for the weekend, and I did a precautionary First Response test, it showed the faintest of faint – but still very definitely there – lines.

Or, as I put it to B when I walked back into the bedroom “Well I’m not ‘Not Pregnant’.” But I wasn’t going to get too excited. It was early. It could be a chemical pregnancy. It wasn’t a thing until it was a thing.

But then, when I did another test 48 hours later, that line was definitely darker. And 48 hours after that, the blood test confirmed that, that day at least, I was pregnant. Because that was how I thought of it. That’s how I’ve continued to think about it. On those fertility forums I despise, I’ve seen women talk about being “PUPO” – Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise, but after the miscarriage, after everything we’ve been through, I feel quite the opposite. I feel like “that day I know I was definitely pregnant but until the next blood test / scan, I can’t assume I still am.”

Continue reading →

What do I do now…?

Posted on by

Working women often talk about how they feel that whatever they’re doing is wrong. They feel permanently guilty that they’re not doing “enough” for either their children or their careers. Finding out that I was pregnant catapulted me into a host of similar dilemmas. Did I carry on exercising as I had been? Or stop entirely? Should I contact my old clinic and ask them to prescribe more of the progesterone injections, the clexane blood thinners, the whatever the fuck else they throw at the women who manage to get pregnant on a wing and a prayer and want to stay pregnant? Or just carry on taking the Pregnacare Max that I’ve been taking for years as if it were a multivitamin?

Continue reading →

I ran away…

Posted on by

I ran away in January. To a place that I didn’t associate with trying and not succeeding. Somewhere I drank wine and stopped worrying about whether I was eating enough vegetables. (I wasn’t.) Somewhere I stopped caring if food was packaged in plastic (it was), or whether the tomatoes were organic (they weren’t). Somewhere my life wasn’t measured out in blood tests and supplements and scans and injections. Where I rudely

Continue reading →

So this is Christmas…

Posted on by

…And I thought I’d give you an update. Quite a long one. It’s not very Christmassy, sorry. There are no babies in mangers. Quite the opposite, in fact. But something happened yesterday that made me want to write again, so here I am.

First the good news. We’re still together. Nearly two years after we first met, we’re still together — living together, buying property together, trying to have a child together.

I’m not going to pretend it’s all hearts and flowers. Enmeshing two lives is never straightforward. Especially when you’re not 25 any more. And to be fair, it’s not me that has taken the brunt of the upheaval. I’m still living in the same house that I’ve been living in for nearly 15 years, surrounded by my friends.

He’s the one who turned his life upside down. Continue reading →

The Plan…

Posted on by

I rather feel like I’ve bigged up this Plan so I hope you’re not disappointed by it. Basically, The Plan came about when I went to see my consultant to have the post-unsuccessful IVF debrief — or the “what the fuck went wrong chat” as I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it called on other blogs.

Anyway, I sat in front of my consultant and said, “So, we had one grade 1 embryo and it failed to implant. And I understand that there may be many reasons for this, but what can we do minimise the likelihood of these being reasons why the same thing doesn’t happen again?”

And that was when she told me about Continue reading →