Triggers

It surprised me how many infertility triggers are out there. I expected the “obvious” ones – pregnancy announcements on Facebook, baby pictures, holidays, anniversaries – to be triggers, and despite being prepared for them they are still a source of sadness, a reminder of what is missing from my life. I didn’t anticipate the less obvious triggers. The things that seem completely innocuous but cause me to bite my lip and fight back tears. Things that you wouldn’t think are triggering. Things that are only triggering to me.

Last night I started watching Captain America: The Winter Solider since I’m going to see the new Captain America movie today. I wasn’t sure if I had seen it before, but as I watched it I realized that I had. It took me awhile but I realized my husband and I went to see if the night before our wedding. We went with my brother-in-law, a cousin of my husband, and my sister and her fiancé. My sister and I didn’t have a great relationship at that time. I wasn’t sure if we’d ever have a great relationship, but we were fine then. We are essentially estranged now. I had to stop watching the movie because I didn’t need the reminder of the horrible, hurtful and selfish things she said to me when I tried to open up to her about my infertility testing.

People don’t always know what to say to someone struggling with infertility. Many times they say the wrong things - you’ll have a baby on God’s time (why doesn’t God want me to have a baby now?), you can always adopt (because everyone has an extra $20,000-$60,000 lying around), you can take my kids (thanks, glad to know you’d give up your kids), have you tried x, y,z thing (my doctor has me on strong fertility drugs, but sure, just trying the position you suggested will definitely fix my infertility), just relax and it will happen (yup, I am definitely preventing myself from getting pregnant because I’m too stressed out) - and inadvertently hurt you. When your friend tells you that they are struggling with infertility, just listen. Say you are sorry for what they are going through and that your are there for them if they need to talk, or need a hug, or need to drink all the wine and rage at the universe, or just need to smash things. Even if you’ve never struggled to conceive, show empathy and be there for them.

Being infertile on Mother’s Day

Back when we started trying 16 cycles ago, I thought I’d get pregnant right away. My family is full of women that got pregnant easily so I had no reason to believe that I would be any different. Mother’s Day would have had me 12 weeks and I had already planned how to tell my parents. The baby would have been my parents first grandchild so I was going to send them a combined Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gift of mugs saying “World’s Best Grandma” and “World’s Best Grandpa” with an ultrasound picture. I didn’t get pregnant cycle 1, but there was always Father’s Day because I would for sure get pregnant cycle 2. I stopped planning announcements on cycle 8 when my OBGYN diagnosed me with infertility. Even then it never crossed my mind that I still wouldn’t even be pregnant the next time Mother’s Day rolled around.

I think the mothers in my life are amazing. They deserve a day to recognize how amazing they are. But getting through the past few weeks has been incredibly difficult. Everywhere I turn there are advertisements for Mother’s Day. “Show Mom some love by shopping our 30% off sale”, “Last minute Mother’s Day gifts”, “Buy a special gift for your Mom”, “Put Mom at the top of your list”. Social media is full of Mother’s Day things, including this new post going around my friends list: “Motherhood dare! (I accepted) I was nominated to post a picture that makes me happy/proud to be a mom... (only one picture) I'm going to tag some ladies whom I think are fabulous mothers (I know way too many to tag you all - sorry), and can rise up to the challenge of posting a pic of their own. If I've tagged you as one of the awesome moms, copy the text and paste it to your wall with a picture, and tag more moms! HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY (soon) to each of you xoxoxo "I LOVE BEING A MOM and I love all of YOU”

Every single one is a small stab to my heart reminding me that I’m not a mother. Despite doing everything I possibly can to become a mom, I am not. 15 failed cycles, including 2 failed intrauterine inseminations, 3 different doctors, 8 doctor visits, countless blood tests, an HSG, a transvaginal ultrasound, an abdominal ultrasound, 3 monitoring ultrasounds, $1200 on fertility treatments, $600 on medications, a semen analysis, ovulation prediction tests, pregnancy tests, fertility charting app, basel body temperature thermometer, 3 books on charting your cycles and increasing the chances on conception, many research articles on fertility and infertility treatments,  almost 2 years of prenatal vitamins with DHA, extra B vitamins, extra vitamin C, extra vitamin D, baby aspirin, Coenzyme Q, vitamins for my husband, Preseed lubricant – all I see is a stark white pregnancy test. I don’t get to see my husband kiss and talk to my belly. I don’t get to hold his hand and look at wonder at an ultrasound showing us our baby. I don’t get to feel my baby grow inside me, feel my baby kick. I don’t get to hold my baby with my husband, look into their eyes and think “we made you”.

While you are celebrating tomorrow, while you are posting things like the above on Facebook, and even while you are struggling with a difficult pregnancy, a challenging toddler or a mouthy teenager, take a minute – just one – to think about your friends and family that want so desperately to be mothers too. The ones with no living children. The ones struggling, doing everything they can to conceive. They may not have shared their story with you, but with 1 in 6 Canadian couples struggling with infertility and 1 in 4 that have miscarried, they are the woman in front of you at the grocery check out, and the one sitting next to you on the bus, the coworker in the office down the hall, your neighbour, your cousin, your friend. They are struggling to get through tomorrow and they are wishing and hoping and praying with every they have that next year, next year will be the year that they are a mother too.

Back to square one

I successfully defended my PhD recently. I have been working on the revisions from hell for over a week now. Although all of my examiners signed off on my thesis with minor revisions, one of the examiners appears to hate one of my chapters and I have no revised it 4 times. I now not only have the record for fastest PhD completion in my lab, longest PhD thesis in my lab, I now hold the record for most revisions to a thesis. I have literally rewritten the chapter once a day every day for the past 4 days.

A few days after my thesis defence I had an exciting day. I was offered an amazing post-doc position – my dream position – and had IUI #2 in the afternoon. I had 2 eggs for the IUI, 50 million sperm, and my doctor finally found a combination of meds that prevented my luteal phase bleeding. I was filled with so much hope that maybe the treatment would finally work. I’d finally get my baby. But I was also filled with worry – what if it did work and being pregnant screwed up my new job. I couldn’t celebrate my new job because I was so worried about what would happen if I got pregnant. Another thing that infertility has taken from me.

There is only one infertility clinic in the place we will be moving for my new job. As much as I’m worried about being pregnant impacting my job, I’m even more worried about moving and having to wait months – I have friends that have 15 MONTH waits - to see a new doctor. I’ve been waiting over a year for a baby. I’ve already waited 3 months to see an RE after my referral, 1.5 months for an appointment with an OBGYN to get an RE referral. I’m done waiting.

IUI #2 didn’t work. We decided to go forward with IUI #3 and will work out something so that it doesn’t impact my job. I’ll use the same meds protocol this cycle. We have an IVF consult with our RE just over a week. Luckily, I was able to get a quick appointment because she had a cancellation – she was booking into June. I’m hoping we will have the time to do an IVF cycle before we leave. I’m not sure if we’ll go all the way to embryo transfer at this time or if we will do a frozen transfer in a few months. IVF is our last step. It was a step I was hoping I’d never reach. It shouldn’t be this hard. 

Treatment Cycle 1 – Clomid + IUI + Progesterone

I had to take ovulation tests all last week to pinpoint when I'm ovulating so the RE could do the insemination when the egg was actually there. Since they need me to call by 2 to schedule the IUI for the following day that meant that I needed to test at work, which ended up being more complicated than I anticipated. I have no problem working in the lab for 4-5 hours with no break, but as soon as I had to avoid using the bathroom for 3 hours, all I had to do was go. I use Wondfo ovulation tests and normally use the cup/dipping method to test. I didn’t think I could discretely do this at work and had heard that the foil packet the tests come in can be used as a cup, so I gave that a try. It went okay the first few days but by the end of the week I was wearing bulky sweaters so I could hide a disposable cup. It all turned out to be a waste because I didn’t get a positive until Saturday. Since our local clinic is closed on weekend, that meant we had to go into the city.

My husband normally works weekends, but was actually off that Sunday, which worked out great. He did have plans with friends but ended up cancelling those because I refused to take transit home by myself after the IUI. The IUI process takes about 2.5 hours, but most of that is waiting between the boy part and the girl part of the procedure. They wash and concentrate the sperm for the IUI, which takes about 2 hours.

Luckily, they highly encourage the man to "collect his specimen" at the office so we didn't have to make a crazy sperm-drive like we did for the semen analysis. There was a lot of paper work to sign and things to initial to make sure the correct sperm got back to me at the end. I mentioned to my husband that there was less of a chance of a mistake because the clinic was empty when we were there. They offered to let me go with my husband to collect the sample but I passed on that.

There is an amazing taco place about a block from the RE office, so we went there for lunch while we waited. The tacos were SO GOOD. 

The nurse didn't give my husband the option if he wanted to come with me for the IUI. She just assumed that since he was there he wanted to come in. She went over the IUI with me and all the technical talk seemed to make him a little uncomfortable. There were 49.8 million sperm after washing and we were told that was a really good number because a pre-wash total of 45 million is considered normal. The IUI actually doesn't take that long. The nurse put in a speculum and then placed a catheter through the cervix into the uterus to deposit the sperm. Once everything was positioned she asked my husband if he wanted to push down on the plunger to release the sperm. He nope'd right out of that. It felt like a pap smear with cramping. I had pretty bad cramping that nigh plus a lot of bleeding. The bleeding stopped and the cramping was mild the following day. I was started on twice daily progesterone suppositories starting 2 days following the IUI, to continue until my blood pregnancy test or I got my period.

This past Tuesday my period arrived, so the first IUI cycle was a failure. The clomid and progesterone lessened my bleeding, but it didn’t stop it. I started my next cycle of clomid yesterday and will be repeating this whole process starting next week.

Wednesday marked 1 year since we started trying for a baby.

Dear DH

 I know you don’t want to be undergoing fertility treatments. I don’t want to be undergoing them either, but with my broken uterus and your funny looking sperm, we may not be able to have a baby any other way. Every day I wish that we could just do things the “old-fashioned” way instead of all these drugs and doctor appointments.

I know tomorrow is your day off. It is my day off too. I know you don’t want to spend part of the day driving into the city for my intrauterine insemination, and neither do I, but I have an LH surge and it’s time. I know you have plans with your friends tomorrow and don’t want to change them, but bodies are unpredictable and tomorrow gives us the best chance of success this cycle. This is our 14^th cycle trying for a baby and I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of cycle after failed cycle. I’m tired of the doctors appointments and the testing.

I know you don’t want to go to the RE tomorrow. I don’t want to either, but it will all be worth it when we have our child to hold.

Love.