So I haven't updated our little blog of ours for a while, I have been SO busy marking exam papers and moving house that thankfully, infertility had not been the main thing I think about.
I know that I sound like the most depressive and obsessed woman, and some of you will be reading and thinking "God just stop thinking about it! you're going on and on and it won't help you" etc...
Well no it won't, but thats the harder thing to get people to realise, infertility is something that you HAVE to deal with every single day, not because we like to sit and mope and wallow in self pity, but because it's a medical disease which requires you do something every single day. Just so you get a better idea of what a 'month' in the life of an infertile couple is like, here's our monthly routine..
Cycle Day One - You realise that you've failed to get pregnant for another month. With every month that passes statistically the chances of ever conceiving a child drop. So you have to go through the grieving process and come to terms with another failed month. Just when you thought things were bad enough, you have to deal with the physical pain which is just another reminder of what you haven't got growing inside of you.
Cycle days 2-6 - You've grieved, you've cried, you've been mad at the world, then you have to start taking another months worth of fertility medication (In my case Clomid). Every morning, wake up and pop one of these tiny little white pills that are supposed to be a baby in a tablet, and hope for the best. Then spend the rest of the day dealing with the side effects which are just a constant reminder that you're infertile, and the drugs are making you ill.
Cycle days 6-18 - You can only get pregnancy when you ovulate. Fact. Average woman ovulates anywhere from 12-18 days into her cycle. An egg lives for about 24hours, sperm lives on average for up to 3 days. In order to get pregnant you have to make sure you have sperm in place, ready to meet the egg when it finally pops. No good having sex AFTER you ovulate, or too early, it won't work. In order to find out when you're ovulating you do ovulation predictor kits (OPKs). Just to make it a little bit harder, fertility medications can change dramatically the day in which you ovulate, so you have to test every day from cycle day 6 to 18, in the hope that somewhere along the line it turns positive. A positive ovulation tests tells you you are going to ovulate in the next 12-24hours, so have sex NOW!
For those of you wondering, you don't just get a "yay" or "nay" on OPKs, you have to play mini scientist to decipher the results.
Not that easy is it??
Cycle Day 10-20 - Ok you've taken the drugs, you've taken the ovulation tests, but obviously you need to make sure that (sorry parents and family) you're having sex in you're fertile 'window'. You might have thought you were following this so far, but now I'm going to throw a spanner in the works. Although an ovulation test tells you when you are going to release an egg, you are fertile for about 5 days leading up to a positive OPK. But, how do you know when these 5 days are, before you've even got a positive?? See the problem. So you pretty much have to make sure you're having sex, whether you like it or not, every other day throughout the whole month, just to be on the safe side. (Just on a side note, infertility takes all of the fun out of sex!)
It doesn't matter how tired you are, how poorly you are, if you have friends and family staying over, how early you have to get up etc...you have to have sex. Final line is, if you don't, you've wasted another month, and that month could have been the month. (see cycle day one)
Cycle day 18-28/35 - A womans 'average' cycle is 28-35 days long, its normal and healthy to fluctuate between the two. After you've tired yourself out forcing your poor partner to have sex a ridiculous number of times, got the positive ovulation test, you would think that you can have a few weeks of rest. WRONG. Then you are in, what us infertile woman like to call 'The dreaded two week wait'. It takes 14 days from an egg being released, to a period starting. This is called a luteal phase. In some cases it can be longer, but often not shorter, as that in itself can lead to infertility.
Anyway I digress, the two week wait is the 14 whole days you have after ovulation of obsessing over 'am i pregnant or not'. A woman will never be more in tune with her body than when she is trying to have a baby. Every cramp, every pinch, every case of indigestion, every headache, case of wind or sore boob is a possible pregnancy symptom. Not only do you have two weeks of this, you also have to now be careful of what you eat, no drinking, no heavy exercise, no junk food, no caffeine...just incase a miracle has happened and you have been successful in joining a sperm with an egg.
Then some months we're really lucky, and our cycles decide to be a little bit longer. So 14 after you ovulate you are waiting for your period to arrive, and it doesn't! Something magical has happened, you're excited, you can't sleep, you wake your husband up at 4am to tell him it hasn't happened, you plan hospital appointments and names and are elated that finally you're not broken anymore and you're going to be a Mum. The you do a test, negative. Confusion sets in, how can it be negative, my period isn't here and I'm always regular? You google. Maybe the fertilised egg implanted late? It takes about 2 days to get enough HCG in your system to show up on a test. Yes that must be it, it didn't implant until late so I can't tell. I'll test again tomorrow. So 15 days after you ovulate, still no period, still excited, still elated, test again, negative. Still holding onto that one desperate hope that its just too early. This carries on for 3 more days, and then it's 18 days after you ovulated, still no period and no positive test. Then on the 19th day, your period decides to arrive, 4 days late. You are now devastated, heart broken and feel like a failure. Then we're straight back to cycle day one.
Cycle day 1-35 - Lets not forget that while all of this is going on, every single morning you have to wake up and take your temperature before you do ANYTHING. Basal body temperature is a good indication of whats going on in you body. It drops before ovulation, rises after, and if your pregnant continues to rise, if not starts dropping again. So as soon as you wake up, before anything else is done that day, you must take your temperature using a basal body thermometer and record it on a chart, once you start moving your temperature fluctuates, so you don't get a true reading. Then you get one of these
And being the trained infertile mertyl I am, I can tell you from that chart exactly when I ovulated, when I had a bad nights sleep, when I ate too much and when I failed to become a mother.
So there you have it, yes I sound like a broken record, and I know there are people in this world that are much worse of than me, I am extremely thankful for my brilliant family, my wonderful family in law, my fantastic husband and my marvellous friends (I was running out of adjectives then) if we never become parents I will still have them, but infertility is never ending, you can't get away from it, and seen as this is an infertility blog, I will sound like a moany old cow. But I don't want you to pity us, or feel sorry for us, but as this is a disease which we are fighting, which is vastly ignored and treated as a taboo subject, I just want people to understand.
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