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The Aftermath

By 5th February 2015April 14th, 2022No Comments

February 2015.

I’m struggling. I’m shocked and grieving (is that the right word?) and heart-wrenchingly disappointed.

I feel betrayed by my own body. Again. As if it wasn’t enough that my body is all end of the line fertility wise, now it’s ignoring the very strong drugs we went through great pains to inject every night. It released the eggs I’d spent two weeks growing, two weeks of painful injections and hope and tender bellies…

My doctor was all ‘oh dear’ and ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I’ve never seen this in my entire professional career.’ None of that makes me feel better. I’m the one off, the 0.05% (her number, not mine). I’m that person that ovulates six days early on Orgalutran.

I knew it, too. Right when she did. I’ve done enough ultrasounds now to know how it goes. When she swung around to look at my left ovary and none of the black blobs popped up I knew it was wrong. Two days before there had been many of them, big black blobs crowded around each other, vying for attention. What I saw instead were little sad triangles. Collapsed follicles. Tiny corpus luteums.

I cried. I cried and cried and cried.

Despair. Disappointment. Waste of time, money, energy and pain. Waste of hope, and futures and everything. A waste of everything.

I wasn’t prepared to fail here. Zee was of the opinion that we shouldn’t talk to people… I did, because that’s how I deal… I build little people supports by sharing, like it’s no big thing to share. I wasn’t scared of sharing because I thought nothing would go wrong. We weren’t implanting the eggs, just freezing them.

No one would be asking or waiting for news because it was all going to go to plan. I wasn’t going to get pregnant so no one would be waiting to hear if it worked or not. I wasn’t prepared to fail here.

There were lots of other places to fail, I knew. Like that come egg extraction, a few of my follicles might not have eggs, so we’d get a few less. That perhaps some of the eggs might not fertilise. That of the ones that did, only 40% would reach blastocyst stage. And of those, perhaps only some would be healthy and viable.

But we didn’t even make it to egg extraction. We failed before the finish line was even in sight. I wasn’t prepared to fail here.

Needless to say… I stopped talking to my people. I don’t want to talk about how this round failed. Hear their sorrys and oh dears.

We’re going to try again, because fuck you body. I want my fairytale family, society has sold me a dream, society told me that this is my future and I want it. We still have the means and so we will try again. We will try again with what small ovarian reserve I have left, and we will take all the drugs and we will try again and again as long as we can afford to. We will try until there is nothing left to try. That is how I feel about this right now.

Still, I have to wait for my body to catch up, so I have some time to adjust. To grieve and to feel.

I was on a healthy eating diet, the four hour body one (no carbs, no sugar, no dairy) that was doing wonders for my body, energy levels, and sleep patterns and everything. My skin was awesome too. It was easy to do, too. Especially when I was going it for my little embryos…

I was kind of ashamed at being on the diet though, friends of mine were already making asides about skinny-ness and eating habits, in a way that only friends can do, pointed with a nice glossy coat of well meaning concern. It was easy to push that aside, though. If I didn’t want to talk about IVF I talked about energy levels through out the day and it helping me sleep. My body was in awesome, healthy shape, my doctor was happy, I was happy having something small to take care of, that I could actively do.

Now I think fuck the diet. I’ve eaten a handful of snickers bars. And peanut butter cups. And FRUIT. I’ve missed fruit. And fries. I’m going out to find fries later today, I will eat them all and it will be glorious.

I’ve got a few weeks to be kind to myself. To give myself chocolate and space and time before we start round two and I’m going to take it. We’re going to France for what I thought was going to be a celebratory eggs-in-the-freezer holiday. Still, I’ll take it as a take-your-mind-off-it one instead. We’ll see.

I have some time to be kind to myself, and right now there is nothing else I need to do.

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