I am back on the IVF medication this week, and I have to say, I am starting to feel the side effects already. It is awful stuff, makes me feel cranky and irritable all the time, though some might say this is just a natural state for me 😐 I have been taking one hormone or other for nearly three years now. I am sick and tired of living my life as though I could be, maybe, but probably am not pregnant. I dont smoke, dont drink coffee or coke, avoid all the toxic paint fumes that I used to suck up for hours on end. I have always done exactly what they told me to, and I am just sick of it. It would be nice just to feel like I can just LIVE for a bit, without a tonne of restrictions hanging over my head.

I guess another frozen embryo transfer is in my near future, and I am not sure how I feel about it. I feel quite strongly that I want to continue trying to have children, but now I am fully aware of my history of miscarriage, and am going to have to steel myself at the end of the cycle against either result! Getting a negative will be just as disappointing as always, but getting the positive I have been hoping for all this time is just going to be a nightmare. It will be a horrible waiting game for a 10 week scan to see if the situation is viable. So now I find I am not looking forward to getting a positive result either! So, kinda emotionally screwed either way really – fabulous, can’t hardly wait. 🙁

Hubby doesn’t seem to share this perspective, I dont think he has thought about it much at all really. I guess he is reather occupied with his impending resignation from the arsehole company he has been working for. I hope he quits today actually, I hate the idea that he is going off to work everyday and hating it.

I went to see my IVF doctor yesterday, and he was going over my file, trying to look back over my history and see if there is anything we might have missed. He told me that I had now had two miscarriages. I can’t tell you how stunned I was to hear him say this. What he was referring to was the very first appointment I had with him in Jan 2000. I had had a positve pregnancy test, which had been followed up by a HCG blood test that had come back as negative. So I had been referred to him as an obstetric patient. He did a scan and told me that I had polycystic ovaries, and that I was not pregnant, and while it wasn’t impossible for me to fall pregnant, I would require some assisted fertility treatment. Basically not so much totally infertile as ‘subfertile’. I guess when he told me my hormones are all screwed up, I just thought I had had a really long period. So I kinda classified the incident in the back of my brain as a ‘false positive’, and didn’t think on it much more.

Except that it made me think about what happened when I was just 20. I was on again off again with Number1Boyfriend in 1990 and we had a positive pregnancy test. We didn’t have alot of money, so I was planning on going to the QEII public hospital. I don’t know why, but they didn’t scan me or anything, maybe that wasn’t a routine thing for women my age back then. Well eventually I got a bleed, and the doctors told me that I had miscarried. They never investigated further, which is unfortunate, as I might have found out about the PCOS earlier. Anyway, when I had the ‘false positive’ in Jan 2000, I got used to the idea that perhaps the incident 10 years previous was a similar thing, and that it wasn’t a miscarriage at all.

Only now, after talking to IVF Dr yesterday, I realise I have actually had THREE miscarriages. How can I have been so confused and ignorant about my own medical history? I have always been one of those really annoying patients who asked a gazillion questions and demand second opinions. The scary thing is, that I know Ihave a better understanding of all this stuff than most women I have met who have undergone IVF, they seem to blindly accept everything that they get told. They don’t even know what drugs they are on half the time, or what they do to you. Yet here I am, absolutely shocked and stunned to discover that I have had three miscarriages, not one!

So to make things even more confusing, I find myself thinking that my reaction to this latest miscarriage is totally unsupportable and kinda nonsensical – how can I be so upset about this, when the second time it happened to me, being somewhat incognisant of the facts, I barely batted an eyelid. Now I find myself being fully aware of just how dire the situation is, I feel quite ten times more hopelessness than I did just the day before last. Hubby seem shocked when I told him all about it last night. But hasn’t said boo since. He tends to take things in his stride quite readily, whereas I tend to worry away at things far more than is perhaps necessary.

Well, I guess it is no surprise really. It has been two weeks since I lost the baby, and hardly anyone has asked me how I am coping. Other than Mr K, the only people who seem concerned about how I am getting along are MajDazzles, Equinom and Flip. Which no doubt makes me luckier than some people. But even then, Equinom isn’t someone I really confide in. I mean I can talk to her about men, life, and sex etc, but I often feel the need to appear detached and mentally very strong with her. Which is really weird because she is the one person who never seems to judge me for my behaviour or opinions.  Filip and I are close, but we mostly chat on the MSN, and I find it hard to open up when you are typing. Some conversations are meant to be had in person I think.

MajDazzles was over last weekend, and we had a long conversation. Talking with him makes me feel better in a strange backhanded kind of way – he seems to think I have this perfect life, and reminds me that there are wonderful things about my life, as well as this constant misery. I dont know why, but I have always been closer to my male friends and I am really missing Edouardo at the moment, he is exactly the person who has helped me deal with major upheavals in the past – usually by taking me out and getting blind drunk. Maybe that is all I need right now to stop feeling like this.

More and more, I really feel like I am out of sync with Mr K., he doesn’t seem to understand where I am at. And when I try to talk to him about it, he reacts by being angry, he seems to think I am blaming him for this situation. Which is just not true. I have been trying to let him know that I can’t keep doing this without his support. Back in Janurary, he told me (the day before an egg collection surgery) that he didn’t want us to do IVF anymore. He wants more children, but can’t hack the IVF thing any longer. So for the last six months, I have effectively been trying to do this on my own, and I’ve been aware that he’s not really supportive of it. I feel keenly that he hasn’t really shared in the disappointments with me, and he has distanced himself from the procedures and surgeries etc, and in doing so, he has effectively distanced himself from me.

I dont think he understands what is driving me to keep on trying, and I know he wants me to give up. I was managing okay even though I knew he wasn’t really with me, right up until I had this miscarriage. Now I feel like he doesn’t share my sense of loss, and is almost looking at me as though this situation is self inflicted in someway. We have been talking about it.  A lot. But I just dont feel like I am being understood. This thing isn’t just one dimensional, I feel like I am facing so many different emotions. Lots of which don’t even make any sense, even to me.

I feel an intense strangling sort disappointment at losing the baby.
I feel saddened that my friends can’t talk to me about this.
I feel so very lonely, like no one else really cares.
I feel disillusioned that my husband doesn’t get it.
I feel like jumping in my car and driving as far away from my life as I can.
I feel hopelessness for the future, I don’t know if I can continue like this.
I feel like writing myself off and throwing away my responsibilites.
I feel like hacking all my hair off and changing everything.
I feel a wistful longing for the carefree single life.
I feel like being infertile makes me a failure as a woman.
I feel unattractive, useless and unwanted.

04/02/00 TSI (-)ve
18/04/00 IUI (-)ve
09/05/00 IUI (-)ve
16/05/00 IUI (-)ve
04/06/00 IUI (-)ve
13/07/00 Laparoscopy
21/08/00 TVEPU – Egg Collection 15 eggs (14 fertilized)
23/08/00 Embryo Transfer 2 embryos (-)ve
08/09/00 FET 2 embryos (-)ve
01/11/00 FET 2 embryos (+)ve
25/06/01 LSCD – Live birth – Male 36.5 wks
04/10/02 FET 2 embryos (-)ve
04/11/02 FET 2 embryos (-)ve
09/12/02 FET 2 embryos (-)ve
13/01/03 FET 2 embryos (-)ve
06/03/03 TVEPU – Egg Collection 14 eggs (14 fertilized)
10/03/03 Embryo Transfer 1 blastocyst   (-)ve
02/05/03 FET 2 embryos (-)ve
12/12/03 Laparoscopy
12/01/04 FET 2 embryos (-)ve
03/03/04 FET 2 embryos (-)ve
28/01/05 TVEPU – Egg Collection 17 (8 fertilized)
31/01/05 Embryo Transfer 2 embryos (-)ve02/03/05 FET 2 embryos (-)ve
11/04/05 TVEPU – Egg Collection 20 (9 fertilized – ICSI)
16/04/05 Embryo Transfer 3 blastocysts (+)ve
31/05/05 Dilation and currettage for Missed Abortion

This is a list of the some of the procedures I have undergone in what has become an epic saga to try and have a family. These are the ones I can remember at any rate. The latest entry on this list is what has me trying to escape my own brain. I feel like I can’t live with my own thoughts anymore. I have been through enough for ten people, and wish I could have some sort of mental breakdown. But I dont know how to do that. I know other people who seem to fall apart at the drop of a hat, you know the type, boyfriend dumps them or they have some fight with their friends, and it is the end of the world. I have discovered I am just not like that. Recently I wish I could just crawl into bed and cause as much trouble as humanly possible, but I think it takes a certain type of extremly selfish individual to allow themselves to do that to the people around them. Anyway, I just can’t. I get up each day and put on the face people expect.

I can’t put into words the overwhelming disappointment that I feel from this miscarriage. It took so much heartache and tears to get pregnant in the first place, that I literally feel like my chest has been ripped open, and my head is going to explode. When I was trying to get pregnant initially, it wasn’t this hard, I guess I didn’t fully comprehend what I was trying to achieve. But now I have my son, Angel, in my life, and I know just how precious children really are – it has made continuing on IVF so much more difficult. Every negative feels like a huge weight crushing down on me, and I am fully cognisant of the little person/s that will never be. First time round I was just trying to get pregnant, now I am trying to have a little baby, and when it doesn’t work, it feels so much worse than failing to get pregnant.

But this last month I have discovered there is something worse than not being able to get pregnant. Getting pregnant and then losing the baby is devastating. We were all so excited to be pregnant, and my doctors all seem so sure that it would happen eventually that it didn’t occur to me that something would go wrong. So when I went for my scan to see how many of the embryos had developed, I was kinda hoping for news of twins or (god forbid) triplets. The last thing I expected was to be told that the embryo had failed to develop and that it was all over, and I was back to square one.

I have long wondered if I am being punished for being a terrible person whether that be now or in a past life or something. Somehow, I thought having to go through all this must be karma for something I’ve done. Maybe I am inherently not a very good person who doesn’t deserve to have a family. Or maybe I’m just not meant to breed due to some Darwinian imperative or something. Either way, it’s slowly killing me inside.

Today is one week and one day since the worst day of my life. I can’t do this.

.