SURGERY DATE!!!

Liar liar pants on fire! No surgery date...made you read though :) 

Still plodding on. AF arrived 5 days early with some sort of fiery vengenace, on the plus side it means my fertile week this month will be holiday week. Hurrah! Even though I'm not doing OPKs are anything like that, holidays means guaranteed sex so there is no pressure. 

I had my counselling session yesterday and have been 'prescribed' a book as homework before my next appointment, I was thinking my holiday reading would be something easy and light hearted, but instead I will be getting stuck into my new copy of 'Conquering Infertility'. I'm sure I'll get some dodgy looks on the beach with that one!! 

I told the counsellor yesterday that nothing frustrates me more than when people don't acknowledge the possibly of there never being a 'happy ending' to our journey. Like "Oh you WILL get there eventually" or "When you have a family you'll forget all about this" (Ha, yeah right!) and she raised her eyebrows and said it was very unusual for her to actually have a patient acknowledge that not everyone does get a happy ending, and most of her time is spent discussing the need for an alternative plan with couples, and she believe it very healthy for me to have this frame of mind. Wasn't what I was expecting!

I'm in an OK mood today, 13 days until Tunisia which means I can start seeing the weather forecast for our first day !!

Remember me?

Its been a very long time since I updated, at least in Steph terms anyway. Partly because I have had nothing to say.

Things have been...erm...bad. I'm not feeling to great with everything at the moment so I've not been in much of a mood for chitter chatter on here.

I'm still in limbo, no surgery date for my cholecystectomy, no communication of how long I have left to wait. I can't, realistically, see the fertility specialist until after surgery (as there is nothing to discuss before..) so we still don't know if we have funding, lost funding etc... work is, frankly, shit. I leave this place most days just thankful I've gotten through without throwing sharp objects at people. I think describing my current state of existence as floating between two islands is fairly apt.

My mood and depression has meant I can't stand to be around or converse with many people who aren't Martin. He gets it, he's the only one who gets it, so it makes sense to stay grounded to him, right?

On the other hand we will be jetting off for 7 days here...

...in exactly 20 days. To say I'm mildly excited would be an understatement. At the minute my excitement for Tunisia is sort of managing to sugar coat everything else. I'm slightly worried about the immediate holiday blues that are sure to follow. I'm already dreading coming home and we haven't even gone yet! 

Our 2nd wedding anniversary is on October 26th and we've booked to go to Dublin for the weekend, so thats another thing to look forward to. :)

After than we have to just wait until 2014, and hope that we can get back on track with TTC. I had a month of using OPKs but I just can't do it. I knew I was ovulating this week and I intentionally avoided sex for the 5 days leading up to, and the 5 days following, realistically after 3.5years getting pregnant naturally is a one in a million, I'm not going to put myself through the trauma of AF arriving for one in a million, I had 2.5 years of that shit!!

I'm hoping that my next update comes sooner and is titled something like "SURGERY DATE!!!". Fingers crossed!

 

It comes around so quick.

September 4th. 2 years since our miscarriage.

I can't believe it's 2 years later and here we are.

Yesterday I read a piece on my new favourite blog (The Infertility Therapist), whereby she tries to describe infertility and what it's like.

She said that having infertility, as a disease, is like falling down a lift/elevator shaft, but at a painfully slow pace. It's all very dark and you can't see where you're going, nor how far you've come. You know that eventually you will reach the bottom, but while you're falling you have no idea how long it will be before you get there. Weeks, months, years or never. You may meet other people who are also in the lift shaft, but all moving at different speeds. Some will reach the bottom quickly, some will move slower than you, but it doesn't matter because while you're free failing in the dark, you simply do not possess the ability to see the end. More importantly, when you do reach the end, it's just as important to remember that there are still people in free fall and without knowing what speed they're travelling, you can't offer and insight into their fall.

I felt that was a very fitting description.

Blog recommendation

While trying to find the phone number for the counsellor at our clinic, google presented me with a link to some blog called "The Infertility Therapist".

I've only read a few posts so far, but felt so strongly about it I needed to write here immediately and recommend it to my friends. The background is this lady struggled with infertility, and also happens to be an infertility counsellor. She now has 3 children (I know one was through FET) and she blogs from both points of view. An infertile woman yet to have children, an infertile woman who is now pregnant, and an infertile parent (oxymoron, but I think thats a good description)

This particular post was very fitting for me at the moment, and discusses 'fertility envy' and the break down of relationships between friends and family when fertile and infertile come together.

http://theinfertilitytherapist.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/fertility-envy-infertility-and.html

Worth a read. I shall be spending the afternoon reading through this and maybe learning a thing or two.

I know I'm going through a tough time at the moment, but the following post reduced me to tears in my office

http://theinfertilitytherapist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/top-tips-for-surviving-infertility_23.html

p.s to all my friends, I apologies profusely for my lack of contact and general shit-ness at responding to texts or PMs. I wish I had an excuse, I'm just sorting myself out and normal service will, hopefully, resume shortly. x

Flounder

When I was tiny my favourite Disney film was The Little Mermaid. My uncle took me to see it when I was 2 years old (yep, I'm a young'un) and I slept all the way through it.

Flounder was one of my favourite characters, so it seem quite fitting now that flounder is the best possible way to describe how I'm doing. How I'm coping? I'm not.

I've written moany posts before, I've written posts when I'm pissed off before. This is different. I'm bit pissed off, I'm not just moany, I'm floundering. I don't see the point in life. I'm stuck. I have a disease which needs to he treated and a medical team that won't perform surgery, and another disease that means I may never have children that can't be treated. How can anyone EVER be ok with that?! I just want one child. Just one. I will never want for more. I just want to experience pregnancy once. The kicking, the scans, the excitement. Just once. I don't need any more than that.

If I can't do that, what's the point in me existinrg, honestly? I'm floundering. I've never, ever, felt so low in my entire life.