I've lost a lot of things as a result of my infertility, but one of the most painful was a friendship. And actually, I never thought I'd fully lost it, until I almost did.
Let me explain.
Until about a year and a half ago, I didn't have just one BFF, I had two. We all went to high school together and have known each other since we were teens. The BFFs have their own friendship with one another, but I've always been the Jerry that links them together. Meaning, it's not like we were ever a trio. More like linked duos.
My other BFF (I'm going to call her Gumbo) was one of my strongest sources of support during the early days of my diagnosis. We've been there for each other through most major life events...except when we weren't. Because as much as we love each other, we've ended up taking more than one extended break from our friendship. In some ways, we're too much alike. Too emotional, too sensitive. And we have a longstanding history of going through Big Things at the same time which ends up forcing us apart instead of closer together.
Around the time that I was gearing up for my first attempt at IVF, Gumbo was having serious conversations with her husband about future babies. As in, he wanted #3. As in, she did not. She was struggling to find a way to tell him this - that as much as she loved being pregnant, she wasn't ready to dive back into Diaperland again. In fact, she didn't think she'd ever be ready. She was happy with the two she already had.
I'm sure you can already see where this is going.
When my first attempted IVF got converted to and IUI, Mr. Hope couldn't be there for the first insemination (we did two back to back, to cover the spread). So Gumbo met me at the hospital. She made me laugh in the waiting room. She came back to the exam room and joked with Dr. God Complex who asked her if she wanted to get pregnant, too.
Afterward, we went to a diner where I ate turkey, as I think I'd read somewhere that turkey was good for fertility. I was calm, I was hopeful, I was certain that I'd just conceived my daughter.
As we left the diner, Gumbo mentioned something to me about having sore boobs, and how they kind of reminded her of how she felt when she was pregnant. Oh, and by the way, she told me, her period was late.
I winced. I don't know if she saw it, but I did.
I urged her to take a test. She didn't want to. I don't think she was ready to confirm what she already knew.
We took our first tests on the same day: 7DPO. Hers was positive.
Mine wasn't.
I had a feeling then that the IVF had failed. It wasn't rooted in anything other than my gut, and I was hoping beyond hope that I was wrong.
I started testing daily.
A day or two later, I got a superfaint positive. I even woke Mr. Hope up to show him. He didn't see it, but any woman who was trying to conceive totally would have.
Gumbo didn't see it when I sent her a picture. Even so, for one blissful day, I thought I was with child. That we both were. We'd be pregnant together. Our babies would play together. Wouldn't that make one hell of a story?
You already know how that story ends. The line didn't get darker. It faded almost immediately. Most likely, the superfaint positive was lingering traces of the trigger shot being picked up by a really sensitive test.
I fell the fuck apart.
It was so cosmically unfair that Gumbo, who didn't even WANT a baby, and who already had two of her own, could get pregnant without even trying, whereas I was throwing everything under the sun at my body and still couldn't conceive.
I told Gumbo I needed some time. That I couldn't help usher her through an unwanted pregnancy, when the only thing I wanted was one of my own.
She said she understood. Then she said she didn't. At one point, she told me she had another infertile friend who had been a tremendous source of support for her. That's great, I told her. I'm glad you have a more generous infertile in your life than I am capable of being right now.
There were some tense text messages exchanged over the next several weeks. Then, after about three months, I told her I wanted to make plans to see her. She was getting ready to take a trip, and plans kept shifting. By the time she was ready to talk dates, I was about to head into my next attempt at IVF. Also converted to IUI. Also a BFN.
I asked for an extension on the time out.
We talked around the time of her gender scan. I had convinced myself she was having a girl, because that was what I had wanted. When I found out she was going to have a boy, I felt relieved.
There were some text messages here and there, but we didn't talk again until there was a death in my family. She came to the funeral. She spoke at the funeral. I thought that maybe this could mark a new start for us. I was in a better place (sort of). And I missed her. I loved her. She is one of my oldest and dearest friends.
But nothing ever really happened. I'd text her and responses would come slowly. I'd message her through Facebook and hear nothing back. We had one phone call when a mutual friend was going through a major-league tragedy, but that was it.
And then I started this blog. And I sent her and a few other close friends, family members, and fellow infertiles the link.
Yesterday she wrote back and told me that she was happy that I seemed to be in a better place, but that she wouldn't be following my blog. That it was too hard to read because we were no longer friends. She had closure, she said, and wished me the best.
I'd gotten fired from our friendship without even knowing it.
And okay, yes. A year and a half is a long time to be on sabbatical from a friendship. But it wasn't like there had been no contact. Only, every attempt I'd made to reconnect - the Facebook messages, the random texts - she'd viewed them as me acting like nothing had happened, instead of me putting my toe back into the friendship water, so to speak.
I felt a little blindsided, to be honest. And I told her that. And I told her how I didn't want to sweep back into her life just because I was ready and expect her to be ready to. I was trying not to be an asshole, because I already felt like one for needing such an extended break to begin with.
We exchanged several emails yesterday and have plans to talk this week. I'm glad for that, because I do love Gumbo and I never once thought our friendship was over for good. I just thought she needed more time to get over the hurt she felt when I abandoned her in her time of need. She was right to feel hurt. If I'd been a better person I could've sucked it up. But I wasn't that person. I was me, and I was devastated, and I just couldn't do it. Not then.
Funny postscript to this story: Just after my first IVF with Dr. Smiles (my first actual IVF, as opposed to one that got converted to IUI), while I was still in my two-week wait (2ww), one of my closest work friends (aka Glam Colleague) found out she was pregnant. This, just weeks before her wedding.
The day she told me, I had a pretty good feeling my IVF had failed. I hadn't even started testing yet, but it was Gumbo all over again. (She and Gumbo are actually similar in a lot of ways, to be honest. She's like my work version of Gumbo.)
So now Gumbo's little boy is on the cusp of turning one, and Glam Colleague is about to pop out her little girl any day now. And my arms are empty.
Still.
But today I go see Dr. Smiles, and I get on "the list" for a donor embryo.
Maybe, just maybe, my arms won't be empty much longer.
Showing posts with label IUI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IUI. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Monday, September 22, 2014
backstory.
I've never been good at keeping secrets. This is partly due to the fact that I prefer to live my life as an open book. Or, at least, I used to. I even had a fairly raw, letting-it-all-hang-out-there blog for several years, in which I exposed even the ugliest parts of myself and my life.
And then I grew up.
And then I got an office job.
And then I had coworkers who read my blog.
I discontinued the blog. It was too weird with all of the daily F2F interaction. Later, I ended up deleting it altogether.
But I miss it. That whole community aspect. The spilling your guts to strangers who eventually become friends, but not the kind you see in your everyday life. Especially now, as I find myself myself navigating so many Big, Scary Things.
Such as: infertility.
Oh gawd, I can hear you thinking. Do we really need yet another blog about IF? Probably not. But right now I'm going to be completely selfish and say I don't care, because I need a place to talk about this shit, openly and honestly (albeit anonymously), before my fucking head explodes.
Like I said, I've never been good at keeping secrets.
This is what I'd put in my "siggy," if I was posting on one of the many IF-related message boards:
TTC since 2/2011
Me: 38 - DOR - one ovary, AMH <0.16, MTHFR
DH: 34 - low(ish) count & morphology (1%)
3 IUI cycles = BFN
:: changed REs ::
IVF #1 with ICSI = BFN
IVF #2 with ICSI = BFN
:: currently on a break from treatment ::
For those of you who may be new to the world of IF (which, FYI, is short for infertility), let me break this down for you in terms you may better understand:
Mr. Hope, as I will be referring to my dear husband (DH) from now on, and I decided to start trying to conceive (TTC) in January 2011. I think our first actual birth control-free cycle was in March, but I can't remember because I was still under the delusion that we could make a baby just by having unprotected intercourse.
In May of that year I had a wicked late period that turned out to be just that: a period that arrived two weeks late. I was worried, not only about the wonky cycle but also about some pain I had almost every time I ovulated. (I still had both of my ovaries then.) My gyno dismissed this pain as mittelschmerz. I also asked about whether or not I should be worried that I wasn't pregnant yet (oh, to be that naive again!). She gave me a nice pat on the head, recited some statistics about women in their 30s, and advised me to wait a minimum of six months before seeing a reproductive endocrinologist (RE).
Mr. Hope had a medical issue that accelerated that appointment slightly; the elevator version is that he had next to no sperm because of testosterone supplementation. The RE did a monitoring cycle with me and declared me "fine." He pushed for us to use donor sperm but I said I'd rather wait for Mr. Hope's swimmers to return. We wouldn't have been able to do anything right then anyway, as my insurance had zero coverage for IF. Mr. Hope's had 100% unlimited coverage (this, I think, has been one of the biggest blessings of all), so we decided to add me back to his insurance during open enrollment and revisit the conversation after the new year.
In February of 2012 we went back to see the RE and discuss treatment. Mr. Hope had enough sperm for the RE to do intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), which is where they pick the best sperm from the sample and inject it into the retrieved eggs. (Here's a cool video about how ICSI works, in case you're wondering.) We were whisked from the doctor's office straight over to the IVF coordinator's office, where we were given a lot of paperwork and calendars and the like. Then she deposited us in the insurance coordinator's closet-sized office, where we were asked for a $500 enrollment fee not covered by insurance and a backup credit card in case insurance didn't come through.
It was about this time that I started to have a full-on panic attack because hey, I thought we were just going in for the results of Mr. Hope's latest sperm analysis. I wasn't ready for the actual babymaking part yet. My house was a mess. There were issues with Mr. Hope's job and a complication with mine. Etc. We decided that we'd wait until summer, using the time in between to eat healthier, exercise more, do some work on the house, and generally get our shiz together.
By June, we'd revamped our diet and I lost thirty pounds. I felt like I was in a good place to start a family. And then my "mittelschmerz" got worse. After a trip to the ER, we discovered that my left ovary had a ginormous dermoid cyst hanging onto it, and I lost it in the resulting surgery. The ovary that was left behind turned out to be very lazy. Plus the trauma of surgery sent my follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH, the stuff that tells you how hard your ovaries are working to recruit your eggs) up over 10, which is considered not great for attempting IVF. It rose cycle after increasingly shorter cycle, which prompted the RE to order an anti-mullerian hormone (AMH) test, which is a newer but fairly stable way of measuring ovarian reserve (how many eggs a woman has left). Mine came back at .16: undetectable.
Keep in mind that I'd spent the past year thinking that the only fertility issue we had was with Mr. Hope's sperm, which had since returned in decent numbers, albeit with poor morphology (i.e. the percentage of sperm shaped the right way for conception). But ICSI made the morphology thing a minor inconvenience, whereas my hormone levels indicated that whatever eggs I had left were likely rotten.
If you don't have eggs, you can't make a baby. Period.
My RE told me he could get me pregnant anyway, diminished ovarian reserve (DOR) be damned. Having a God complex makes a man promise many things he can't deliver. Mr. Hope and I wanted to believe him, so we marched forth into our first attempt at in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
The cycle started to go downhill almost immediately (issues with a lead follicle developing, instead of all of the follicles growing at the same rate) and I was converted to an intrauterine insemination (IUI). I went into the procedure convinced it would work.
It didn't.
I was devastated.
My next IUI was almost accidental. I wasn't on any stimulation medications (stims) but I had a good-looking follicle the RE didn't want to go to waste. So we did another IUI, which resulted in a second big fat negative (BFN).
Our next attempt at IVF happened in the summer. My medication protocol had been changed slightly but my response rate was basically the same.
As in: not good.
As in: another conversion to IUI.
As in: another BFN.
My RE turned into kind of a dick around this time, possibly because my body wasn't complying with his Almighty's treatment plan. Instead of altering said plan, he started to lay the foundation for breaking up with me. Suddenly we went from I CAN GET YOU PREGNANT to YOUR EGGS ARE CRAP AND I WON'T WASTE MY TIME ON YOU FOREVER.
So I left. I went to another RE. We prepared for a new protocol. During my pre-cycle, which is what I always call the cycle before I start stims, there was a death in the family. We postponed again.
Finally, in February 2014, a full year after my first failed IVF-cum-IUI, we went up to bat again. Things looked good for a while. And then they didn't. Only this new RE (we're going to call him Dr. Smiles, since he's got a thousand-watt one) didn't mind going to forward with just one follicle (follie). So we went to retrieval, and the egg fertilized, and we transferred back a meh quality 3-cell embryo (embie) on Day 2, which resulted in yet another BFN.
I went immediately into another cycle, as I'd read that sometimes this was a good thing for women with DOR. Not so in my case. The cycle looked like a bust early on. Somehow we made it to retrieval. This time the egg was immature. But wouldn't you know it, the Little Egg That Could pulled through in the co-culture (the stuff they grew it in), and it fertilized, and we transferred back a really lovely 4-cell embie on Day 2. When that one resulted in a BFN, Dr. Smiles called personally to say the whole thing had been textbook (you know, except for the only popping out one egg part) and there was nothing that we could've done differently.
Sometimes, he said, these things just happen.
After that, Mr. Hope and I went to meet with Dr. Smiles to discuss next steps. This is often referred to as the WTF appointment (which means exactly what you think it means). That's when he told us that we should start to seriously consider going the donor egg or donor embryo route. It wasn't the first time Mr. Hope and I had been given that speech, but it was the first time we talked about those options in any kind of depth.
Then we took a long break due to work travel and vacations and, if I'm being totally honest, some road construction that would've made the hour-long drives to the clinic even more of a bitch than they already are.
And that brings us mostly up to date. I say "mostly" because how we got to this precise place - which is us deciding to give IVF with our own embryos one more go but simultaneously starting the donor embryo process should this last-chance cycle fail to produce a viable pregnancy and ultimate baby - well, that's another story for another day.
And then I grew up.
And then I got an office job.
And then I had coworkers who read my blog.
I discontinued the blog. It was too weird with all of the daily F2F interaction. Later, I ended up deleting it altogether.
But I miss it. That whole community aspect. The spilling your guts to strangers who eventually become friends, but not the kind you see in your everyday life. Especially now, as I find myself myself navigating so many Big, Scary Things.
Such as: infertility.
Oh gawd, I can hear you thinking. Do we really need yet another blog about IF? Probably not. But right now I'm going to be completely selfish and say I don't care, because I need a place to talk about this shit, openly and honestly (albeit anonymously), before my fucking head explodes.
Like I said, I've never been good at keeping secrets.
This is what I'd put in my "siggy," if I was posting on one of the many IF-related message boards:
TTC since 2/2011
Me: 38 - DOR - one ovary, AMH <0.16, MTHFR
DH: 34 - low(ish) count & morphology (1%)
3 IUI cycles = BFN
:: changed REs ::
IVF #1 with ICSI = BFN
IVF #2 with ICSI = BFN
:: currently on a break from treatment ::
For those of you who may be new to the world of IF (which, FYI, is short for infertility), let me break this down for you in terms you may better understand:
Mr. Hope, as I will be referring to my dear husband (DH) from now on, and I decided to start trying to conceive (TTC) in January 2011. I think our first actual birth control-free cycle was in March, but I can't remember because I was still under the delusion that we could make a baby just by having unprotected intercourse.
In May of that year I had a wicked late period that turned out to be just that: a period that arrived two weeks late. I was worried, not only about the wonky cycle but also about some pain I had almost every time I ovulated. (I still had both of my ovaries then.) My gyno dismissed this pain as mittelschmerz. I also asked about whether or not I should be worried that I wasn't pregnant yet (oh, to be that naive again!). She gave me a nice pat on the head, recited some statistics about women in their 30s, and advised me to wait a minimum of six months before seeing a reproductive endocrinologist (RE).
Mr. Hope had a medical issue that accelerated that appointment slightly; the elevator version is that he had next to no sperm because of testosterone supplementation. The RE did a monitoring cycle with me and declared me "fine." He pushed for us to use donor sperm but I said I'd rather wait for Mr. Hope's swimmers to return. We wouldn't have been able to do anything right then anyway, as my insurance had zero coverage for IF. Mr. Hope's had 100% unlimited coverage (this, I think, has been one of the biggest blessings of all), so we decided to add me back to his insurance during open enrollment and revisit the conversation after the new year.
In February of 2012 we went back to see the RE and discuss treatment. Mr. Hope had enough sperm for the RE to do intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), which is where they pick the best sperm from the sample and inject it into the retrieved eggs. (Here's a cool video about how ICSI works, in case you're wondering.) We were whisked from the doctor's office straight over to the IVF coordinator's office, where we were given a lot of paperwork and calendars and the like. Then she deposited us in the insurance coordinator's closet-sized office, where we were asked for a $500 enrollment fee not covered by insurance and a backup credit card in case insurance didn't come through.
It was about this time that I started to have a full-on panic attack because hey, I thought we were just going in for the results of Mr. Hope's latest sperm analysis. I wasn't ready for the actual babymaking part yet. My house was a mess. There were issues with Mr. Hope's job and a complication with mine. Etc. We decided that we'd wait until summer, using the time in between to eat healthier, exercise more, do some work on the house, and generally get our shiz together.
By June, we'd revamped our diet and I lost thirty pounds. I felt like I was in a good place to start a family. And then my "mittelschmerz" got worse. After a trip to the ER, we discovered that my left ovary had a ginormous dermoid cyst hanging onto it, and I lost it in the resulting surgery. The ovary that was left behind turned out to be very lazy. Plus the trauma of surgery sent my follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH, the stuff that tells you how hard your ovaries are working to recruit your eggs) up over 10, which is considered not great for attempting IVF. It rose cycle after increasingly shorter cycle, which prompted the RE to order an anti-mullerian hormone (AMH) test, which is a newer but fairly stable way of measuring ovarian reserve (how many eggs a woman has left). Mine came back at .16: undetectable.
Keep in mind that I'd spent the past year thinking that the only fertility issue we had was with Mr. Hope's sperm, which had since returned in decent numbers, albeit with poor morphology (i.e. the percentage of sperm shaped the right way for conception). But ICSI made the morphology thing a minor inconvenience, whereas my hormone levels indicated that whatever eggs I had left were likely rotten.
If you don't have eggs, you can't make a baby. Period.
My RE told me he could get me pregnant anyway, diminished ovarian reserve (DOR) be damned. Having a God complex makes a man promise many things he can't deliver. Mr. Hope and I wanted to believe him, so we marched forth into our first attempt at in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
The cycle started to go downhill almost immediately (issues with a lead follicle developing, instead of all of the follicles growing at the same rate) and I was converted to an intrauterine insemination (IUI). I went into the procedure convinced it would work.
It didn't.
I was devastated.
My next IUI was almost accidental. I wasn't on any stimulation medications (stims) but I had a good-looking follicle the RE didn't want to go to waste. So we did another IUI, which resulted in a second big fat negative (BFN).
Our next attempt at IVF happened in the summer. My medication protocol had been changed slightly but my response rate was basically the same.
As in: not good.
As in: another conversion to IUI.
As in: another BFN.
My RE turned into kind of a dick around this time, possibly because my body wasn't complying with his Almighty's treatment plan. Instead of altering said plan, he started to lay the foundation for breaking up with me. Suddenly we went from I CAN GET YOU PREGNANT to YOUR EGGS ARE CRAP AND I WON'T WASTE MY TIME ON YOU FOREVER.
So I left. I went to another RE. We prepared for a new protocol. During my pre-cycle, which is what I always call the cycle before I start stims, there was a death in the family. We postponed again.
Finally, in February 2014, a full year after my first failed IVF-cum-IUI, we went up to bat again. Things looked good for a while. And then they didn't. Only this new RE (we're going to call him Dr. Smiles, since he's got a thousand-watt one) didn't mind going to forward with just one follicle (follie). So we went to retrieval, and the egg fertilized, and we transferred back a meh quality 3-cell embryo (embie) on Day 2, which resulted in yet another BFN.
I went immediately into another cycle, as I'd read that sometimes this was a good thing for women with DOR. Not so in my case. The cycle looked like a bust early on. Somehow we made it to retrieval. This time the egg was immature. But wouldn't you know it, the Little Egg That Could pulled through in the co-culture (the stuff they grew it in), and it fertilized, and we transferred back a really lovely 4-cell embie on Day 2. When that one resulted in a BFN, Dr. Smiles called personally to say the whole thing had been textbook (you know, except for the only popping out one egg part) and there was nothing that we could've done differently.
Sometimes, he said, these things just happen.
After that, Mr. Hope and I went to meet with Dr. Smiles to discuss next steps. This is often referred to as the WTF appointment (which means exactly what you think it means). That's when he told us that we should start to seriously consider going the donor egg or donor embryo route. It wasn't the first time Mr. Hope and I had been given that speech, but it was the first time we talked about those options in any kind of depth.
Then we took a long break due to work travel and vacations and, if I'm being totally honest, some road construction that would've made the hour-long drives to the clinic even more of a bitch than they already are.
And that brings us mostly up to date. I say "mostly" because how we got to this precise place - which is us deciding to give IVF with our own embryos one more go but simultaneously starting the donor embryo process should this last-chance cycle fail to produce a viable pregnancy and ultimate baby - well, that's another story for another day.
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