Mind Games.

I’m only 2dpiui and already the mind and body games have started.

The excess hormones are making my body do odd things. Apart from the bloating, which has thankfully subsided – I only look 12 weeks pregnant now – my boobs are huge (ok, they were before, but now my cup definitely spilleth over), with rather painful nipp.les, I am still as vague as anything, and I need big sleeps every night. I also have the nose of a bloodhound.

Stupid hormones. And so unfair. Because I know that the odds are not with me, but with all these “symptoms” it’s really easy to get excited and hopeful.

I have become an obsessive googler of male infertility. Stupidly, I have spent two years thinking I was the one with the problem, and when we got my partner’s diagnosis, I was eyeballs up in wedding preparations and end of year deadlines, not to mention Christmas and honeymoon, so it’s only this week I have managed to truly procrastinate at work and get in some decent time with Dr Google.

Did you know that even men with azoospermia – someone whose ejacul.ate contains no sperm – can still father children if a few are found in the testicular tissue? Today I was reading about a man who fathered twins after surgery managed to find 40 sperm. 40! I was upset with our 3.5 million.

Whilst our numbers are good – 55million where over 40 mil is considered normal, the problems are with motility (30% when 50% or more are normal) and morphology (2% normal when 15% or more is normal). We also have antisperm antibodies. However, our DNA fragmentation index was 7.36% when 0-15% is considered normal.

So if we don’t get there with iui, we may have a good chance with icsi. My partner just likes to take one thing, one treatment at time, but I need to be one step ahead and know what is going to happen if we are unsuccessful at each stage. I just like to plan!

Servicing the mare.

Can I just start out by saying how shiteous I feel.

This morning I felt like I had a couple of kiwifruit swinging around in my abdomen. Now it feels like a couple of grapefruit. I can’t do up my jeans, going from sitting to standing is not nice, and I don’t walk, I waddle. I look 16 weeks pregnant, and I’m acting like it too.

These drugs are doing some serious stuff to my mind. I completely forgot where I parked my car this morning. When I did locate it, I drove around the block for no reason at all.

Then I buggered up a fact on a news story, and didn’t realise until a smug little prick that I used to work with called up to set the facts straight (nevermind that two other colleagues, with a lot more knowledge of the subject, proofed the article before it went live and failed to pick it up), followed by a nonsensical conversation with my partner during which I couldn’t actually form a coherent sentence.

So I’m sitting here, trying to get comfortable, while my abdomen continues to distend. If this is 100iu of FSH, I can’t imagine how painful stimming for IVF must be (and lets hope I don’t have to find out).

So the insemination went well, I guess. Once they had separated the good from the bad, and washed the sperm, we had 3.5million to use. It sounds like a lot, but it’s not. The minimum for IUI is about 2 million, so hopefully the “high fertility potential” sperm that we know are in there, will do their job.

It wasn’t a particularly nice procedure and I didn’t expect it to hurt as much as it did. It was by no means near the pain of a HSG, but it was pretty uncomfortable. I think I must be a wuss. Oh, and I have a long vagina! The first speculum was too short, so my midwife had to pull out the big equipment (she said it was because I was tall).

It went a little something like this.

I lay down on the bed, which was elevated so that my pelvis was tilted about 35 degrees toward the ceiling. She put the speculum in, and then a long, fine catheter with a diametre of about 2mm. Then she fiddled around trying to get it as close to the entrance to the fallopian tube as possible (this was the part that hurt the most) before squirting the good stuff up.

Then I had to stay with my arse in the air for half an hour reading outdated trash-mags (Ricki-Lee “I have found love at last” from 2007) while waiting for sperm to hopefully meet egg.

Went straight to work after. Felt like I was going to chuck a couple of times, and did some low stress editing for the rest of the day.

R. my favourite midwife (there are four at the clinic at the hospital) said that I had responded really well to the drugs and that it looked good. My Oestrogen level was good, follices almost too good, great lining blah blah. But I’m more concerned about the sperm. Of the 3.5mil, there has to be a winner.

I really want to be one of those bitches that is lucky first go on IUI.

Oh and please accept my apologies for the quality of this post. It’s not me, it’s the drugs.