things don’t always go to plan…

After two failed attempts we investigated the IVF route in more detail but in the meantime we thought to try for a third attempt at home while we were waiting. IVF is NOT cheap, but it obviously has far greater success than an at-home insemination. I was also unsure about how things would continue to go given my polycystic ovaries so we decided to take the plunge.

For reasons I’ve mentioned before, we opted for a Danish clinic. To summarise, our main reasons were:

1) Cheaper (I mean much, much cheaper, probably 1/3 of the price)

2) could choose our donor, including an anonymous donor if we wanted

3) no waiting list

4) quite fancied a trip to Copenhagen!

 

I sent off a query and had a telephone conversation with one of the doctors in the clinic to establish my reasons for wanting to pursue this route, my age, history, results of blood tests etc. The conversation was detailed and I was re-assured that the clinic was indeed professional and used to doing this with non Danish nationals. There are two protocols to choose from with IVF, the long protocol where you are given medication to completely stop your cycle and then further medication to dictate when you ovulate, when your cycles starts etc. This is a lot more invasive and interfering with your body, as well as taking a lot longer for the whole process. The other option that we decided on was a ‘short protocol’ which piggy backs your existing cycle, taking medication to stop ovulating and then pinpointing the exact time you want to ovulate so as to harvest the eggs at the appropriate time, particularly as I was going to have to travel to Denmark to do it.

After our telephone conversation the doctor emailed a prescription for the necessary meds which I then took to my doctor over here to get them to write a local script for me. This is where our first good bit of luck in the process came about. IVF medication is NOT cheap – in the region of £1,000 for a cycle. ON TOP OF the cost of the procedure which in the UK can vary from £6k – £9k. (The clinic we were going to did a package deal where you could have one go for £2k or three for just over £4k, but we didn’t need to decide just yet.)

While we were starting the IVF process we ordered one final batch of swimmers for a last try at home. We ordered them, after waiting a few days they finally arrived as I waited, and waited, and waited for the right time to inseminate using my charting. The time never came and as the deadline for using the swimmers came and went with them still in the tank we realised that my body was not going to co operate this month, and that we’d just wasted £800 and two vials of swimmers for absolutely nothing. It was gutting to have to put those guys in the bin, the most expensive 1ml of liquid gold I’ve ever bought, and the biggest waste of money on any purchase I’d ever made.

We tried to push the money out of our minds and focus on the IVF, thankful that we’d managed to sell a property we’d owned which made us enough money to pay for the process and make the loss of £800 a bit easier to cope with.

I went to my doctor over here to get the prescription for the IVF drugs which had come through, waiting for my cycle to start with anticipation. I dropped it off at the pharmacy where of course they told me only a couple of pharmacies on the island stocked what I needed and of course they weren’t one of them. They had to ring around and finally found where I was supposed to go, but it had to be ordered in and would be a few days, so I’m glad I prepared early!

Three days later I went to pick up the scripts, expecting quite a hefty bill for the three medications. I waited, biting my lip and wincing in advance when the receptionist had a look at the label.

“That’ll be £9.60 all up.” I wasn’t going to argue with that, and escaped as quickly as possible in case they realised they’d made a mistake, and realising we’d just accounted for the money we’d lost, deciding there are swings and roundabouts in this process and that a baby is worth much more than that anyway.

Getting home I checked the meds and timetable for when I’d have to take them, discovering unfortunately they were all injections with needles. Word of advice, if you are squeamish about needles IVF may not be for you!

I needed to have a ultrasound and start taking the first medication (effectively a follicle growth hormone) just after the start of a new cycle, as the aim was to get a decent number of follicles to grow to a big enough size to be able to harvest and fertilise, keeping in mind usually with a natural cycle you have one or two maximum. If you can start with 10 or so follicles to fertilise rather than one, you have a much better chance of getting pregnant!

My cycle started and I had my baseline ultrasound, starting to take the meds on the second day, planning another three ultrasounds in the next week to monitor the size and number of follicles that were growing. The risk with the medication I was taking (Gonal F) is that it’s possible to grow too many follicles to too great a size, particularly if you suffer from PCOS as I do, hence the regular monitoring.

A second ultrasound showed around fifteen follicles growing nicely – 15!!! that was great news, imagine if they could try to fertilise 15 follicles! I bounced out of the ultrasound, starting to think about booking our last minute trip to Denmark in less than two weeks now we were able to pinpoint the days of the cycle we needed to be there. Because of the weirdness with my previous cycle, the dates had moved back a bit but I was lucky enough not to have to teach during the week I needed off, and A and I went about excitedly booking for what we hoped was our ‘baby making holiday’, praying I might come back pregnant.

 

 

 

 

 

The long wait

As I’ve mentioned before, the two weeks after trying for a baby before taking a pregnancy test are about the longest two weeks I’ve ever experienced, even worse than waiting for exam results.

I didn’t really expect our second try to be successful because I’d been so sick with a cold when we tried. Despite the evidence that says this shouldn’t affect getting pregnant, I couldn’t help but imagine my body shutting itself down for all but the most important bodily functions. Still, I endured the two weeks anyway, trying to keep positive in case it was successful. It was more difficult this time as I wasn’t able to chart my temperature or other symptoms since all I felt was sick with a cold.

In the meantime to prepare for the worst, we started looking at IVF clinics as this was the route we were going down should the ‘at home’ method not work. I was already seeing the specialist on the island who was giving me blood tests to determine if I was actually ovulating, a necessity since it’s possible I have polycystic ovaries which can affect your attempts to get pregnant. The test results all indicated I was ovulating which is a positive sign and mean that in theory I can get pregnant, if we get the timing right. In the meantime we continued to search across Europe for IVF clinics, comparing prices and trying to determine through reviews which ones we thought were most likely to be pro lesbian and suitable for us.

It felt good to be doing something pro-active, and although the clinic have an affiliation with a UK clinic, it proved to be extremely expensive, we had no choice in the donor we wanted, and there was likely to be a significant waiting list. Not content with having to go with that option, we managed to narrow our choices down to a clinic in Spain or one of three clinics in Denmark, should the impending pregnancy test be unsuccessful.

The day of the pregnancy test came around and I was still sick. We’d bought a couple of digital monitors to test on first thing in the morning and I dutifully POAS (pissed on a stick), taking it up to Abs, both of us settling in nervously to wait. The seconds ticked by with nothing happening while the stick was ‘thinking’ and analysing the results. We held our breaths, huddled together under the covers until letting out a deep breath as the ‘not pregnant’ flashed up again.

“Thought so.” I said, disappointment evident, despite our realistic expectations.
“IVF?” Abs said.
“Let’s go for it.” And there it was – our best chance now for getting pregnant was going to lie with us going on an adventure to Denmark and hoping they had more success than we’d had in our home attempts. All we needed to do was find thousands of pounds, hope my cycle would regulate itself, and be able to organise at least a week off work in the middle of teaching season! Oh well, we never thought this road would be easy…

Try No. 2

We hadn’t really expected our first attempt at a baby to work so it was onto the second go. If I think too much about it I have to admit to being a bit jealous of those who don’t have to worry about the timing of when to order swimmers, pay the cost of them or pay an extra £200 for postage, but as this was the only option open to us we couldn’t think about it too much about paying £800 for one month. I continued monitoring my cycle as I had been for months; planning the days we thought we would need the goods and mentally preparing. The real difficulty is that over here there are no deliveries on Saturday or Sundays which is pretty limiting as a woman’s cycle goes on, no matter what day of the year it is! The first month we tried I had the problem of a weekend insemination and had to order the swimmers to get there a couple of days before, but this time it looked like it was going to be during the week. We presume couriers will take a day or two to arrive from Denmark, but of course there is always the exception. Of course this month proved to be the exception – some things are never easy!

It’s a queer thing, plotting the journey of your swimmers (or if you think about it, the start of your potential baby) across the world. You receive the tracking number and log in to see ‘departed’, ‘arrived’, ‘clearing customs’. Another thing I’ve wished during this TTC (trying to conceive) journey is that I was more consistent with my cycles as the thought of wasting £800 on a missed ovulation fills me with the heeby jeebies. Still, I could only go on the information I had and as we patiently waited for the little guys to make their way across Denmark, through the UK and onto Guernsey, we started to dream and talk about what having a baby would actually be like. Will this process ever work? Is it just a wasted exercise in spending stupid amounts of money when my body has no intention of reproducing? We’ve always said ‘when we have kids’, or ‘our kids won’t be allowed to do that’, but we’ve never thought about the fact that this might actually become reality.

Over the past year or so I’ve seen numerous women desperate to have a baby, to the extent that it’s all they talk about. I don’t want to be one of those women, I want to be one of those cool, calm and collected women that takes it all in their stride. Still, we’ll see if it’s a year and nothing has happened! Enough digressing, back to the swimmers. After ordering in enough time they arrived in the UK alright but then hit an obstacle in the form of SNOW!!!!! Now I love snow as much as the next person but NOT WHEN I’M WAITING FOR AN IMPORTANT DELIVERY! Our whole island comes to a standstill at even a sniff of snow. Schools and businesses shut down, cars are abandoned by the side of the road, planes and boats in and out of the island are cancelled and no mail gets in or out.

Now I knew I probably needed the swimmers on Wednesday at the very latest and Monday came, and with it lots and lots of snow. I tried not to stress as I still had a little time and the swimmers were still in the UK, but I was feeling a little anxious. Tuesday came around with me slightly more panicked as more snow had fallen, and as predicted, the island had come to a complete standstill. I wondered if there was any way I could stop the inexorable ticking of time and the impending ovulation, knowing it was pointless and that at this stage only a miracle would bring the little guys to us in time to inseminate.

The dreaded news came: ‘A RARE red alert blizzard warning has been issued for Guernsey tomorrow.’ YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING!!!!
I rang the courier company and had a chat to them, and they said they were doing what they could to get deliveries over by boat, but that of course it depended on the weather. The boat has much more chance of arriving in snow than a plane but this wasn’t very comforting at the time. By this stage there were unheard of six foot snow drifts in parts of the islands, which stopped anything getting to and from those areas. Thankfully I lived in a parish (like a suburb) where the weather wasn’t quite as bad, and I offered to pick up the swimmers if they happened to arrive.

Wednesday morning dawned and with it more snow and even worse, I’d come down with a nasty cold. By this stage I was thoroughly sick of the sight of snow and just wanted the whole ordeal to be over, and me to somehow be miraculously pregnant. All I could think of was ‘yes, I can try next month but I will have wasted over £800’. I spoke to the courier company a couple of times during the day and finally in the afternoon they rang me with the unexpected news ‘your package has arrived’. WOOOOO HOOOOO! Somehow the little guys had made it, making their way across Europe and the UK and onto our little island, despite the snowy obstacles faced with the weather. I carefully made my way up to the airport to pick them up, thankfully managing to keep a straight face when picking up ‘the package’, even though we all knew what was in there. I strapped the 14kg tank into the seatbelt and carefully made my way home again, ready for our second effort.

My body had co-operated and we knew Wed night and Thursday were my best chance of getting pregnant. We only opted for two vials this time, and again I’d calculated the best time for insemination. I was worried about being sick because my temperature was all over the place which made it a bit harder to determine timing. I googled getting pregnant while sick and found out it’s not supposed to make any difference. I had images of my body shutting down on all foreign objects (which sperm definitely is!) but apparently no, this has no effect.

Evening came and Abs returned from work and it was time for THE ATTEMPT. Now we thought for some reason it would be a good idea to video preparing the mixture, taking it out of the tank and letting it warm to room temperature. Let me just warn all you women out there, this is never a good idea. In theory it was good, but the reality was quite a different story. Imagine a 14kg tank over half a metre in height that houses a measly 1ml of liquid. This amount is significantly smaller than a teaspoon, which in itself isn’t a problem but it is when these vials are sitting at the bottom of a nitrogen filled vessel nestled within the tank. In order to get to the vial you need to open the lid of the tank, pull up the metal vessel inside to reveal the vials but being careful to leave them still in the nitrogen. You then had to somehow pull one vial out of this skinny vessel that is narrower and longer than your hand, whilst keeping everything else open. I was happily recording when Abs ran into trouble. She managed to open everything, but was then unable to pull up the vessel and pull out the vial without some tongs. Added to this she forgot to put on the safety goggles and she had nitrogen flowing out of the tank towards her face and you can imagine she was getting a bit stressed! She yelled at me to help her so off I ran to get some barbeque tongs. I handed them over and started videoing again, only to be yelled at to help rather than just filming. After a few yells I got the picture and put the video camera down, accidentally forgetting to turn it off (honest). The next two minutes of footage consists of Abs swearing and cursing colourfully at me, the tank and the vials, and me defending myself to no avail (you ain’t seen her mad!). Now this is hardly a recipe for a romantic insemination, and by the time she’d managed to get the vial out, took a deep breath and said ‘let’s go’, I have to admit to not really being in the mood to lie there for an hour and try to look happy. Added to this I felt awful from the chest infection developing, worried I’d cough so much I’d cough everything out after it had been put in. Either that or it’d come out my nose.
Still, I knew I needed to do the deed as we’d gone to so much effort. Abs managed to inseminate with little fuss after the palaver of the extraction, and I just lay back for an hour with my legs and bum in the air, fending off the regular inquisitive noses of the dogs, wondering what I was doing lying down within licking reach.

Next morning we inseminated with little fuss, the option of videoing shelved for the foreseeable future. I now just had to hope that my cold didn’t stop anything happening, and that our timing was perfect. I idly thought that if it did work we’d have a baby by the end of the year but was not very optimistic this time, given my ill health.

Still, ‘gotta be in it to win it’ and here we were against the odds, in the ‘two week wait’ once again.

Cobo in snow

Our tank!

The ‘Two week wait’

Trying for a baby is all about waiting. You have to wait for your cycle to start, you wait for the fertile ‘window’ that’s best to try, and then you have the two week wait (‘TWW’) to see if you’re pregnant.

Despite what people tell you about the TWW, it is awful. It’s like an exam you’ve taken that you really want to know the results of and have to wait, or waiting for Father Christmas to come when you’re little. From the people I’ve spoken to, the worst thing is that your mind plays tricks on you. People are a lot more aware of their bodies these days, and often a lot more in control of their attempts to get pregnant, particularly if you need to go down the insemination route. Rather than a vague ‘I haven’t got my period yet and it’s due about now’, people are counting down the days until they’re due and testing for pregnancy earlier and earlier.

How do pregnancy tests work, and why do you have to wait two weeks?

The first test women usually do is to wee on a stick (‘POAS’), using either a cheaper test that shows two lines, or a digital, slightly more expensive test that says ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant’. The tests all work the same – they try to identify whether there is a protein in your urine called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) which is present when you’re pregnant. The levels of protein increase rapidly which is why you need to wait a period of time before testing, otherwise there is the risk of a ‘false negative’, whereby the test says you’re not pregnant, even though you are. Some women test daily for weeks but in my head that would make me even more stressed!

Many times after a woman has received a positive urine test they’ll go to their doctor for a blood test for confirmation. This blood test might check for HcG, much as a urine test, which can detect pregnancy fairly early on.

The second type of blood test measures your ‘beta’ which is the exact amount of hCG in your blood. Often you need two of these types of blood tests because your levels rise quickly in the early stages of pregnancy, and it’s the increase that is the important factor. They’re also able to identify problems in a pregnancy where it’s not viable, because of a rapid increase in beta before a levelling off.

Back to the TWW. I had heard women talk about this and thought they were exaggerating how frustrating it is but NO! It’s a completely helpless time where you overanalyse everything you’re feeling. There is so much information out in cyberspace about what you should eat and do during the TWW to increase your chances of a ‘sticky’ (ie successful) pregnancy. You should eat part of the core of a pineapple every day for five days, you should avoid vigorous exercise… None of these things are proven to work, and of course there have been plenty of children born with no assistance whatsoever over the years. One thing I dare you to avoid though, is to google ‘early pregnancy symptoms’. That’s right. You have a sore throat for a day and you want to know if it’s related. Your scalp is itchy – do I just need to wash my hair, or is that a sign? You have cramping in your belly. Can that be a symptom? IT DRIVES YOU CRAZY!!!! Of course being me I didn’t feel any different at all. I still went to the gym, although I did slightly lower intensity than normal, I still avoided alcohol (gave it up whilst trying) and I, as always, avoided caffeine (I don’t drink tea or coffee anyway) while I waited for those 14 days to count down before I could test.

The most stressful thing during my TWW was sending the tank back. Guernsey has a strange policy for shipping ‘dangerous’ goods, which I’m still to get my head around. A full tank of nitrogen and swimmers was able to get here with no delays (thankfully) but sending a completely empty tank back is a whole other story. All was organised with DHL to send back through the sperm bank so I (naively) thought it would be easy. Nope – I rang the number on the form. ‘We don’t pick up from Guernsey’. OK, so how do I do it? They couldn’t help me and didn’t know who could, and I wasn’t sure which company had delivered the goods. After ringing around a few companies I finally found one that would act as an agent for DHL. The problem was they considered the empty tank ‘hazardous goods’, and needed customs permission to ship them out of the island. Never mind they got IN OK, and that everything had been declared. The guy told me he’d look into it and ring me back asap which was a relief since I had to get the tank back within about three days or be charged extra.

Three days later I rang after hearing nothing. ‘Still waiting to hear’ was the response. I then followed up every couple of days until nearly two weeks later they finally told me they had permission to ship the goods. The oddest thing of all is that because it’s ‘hazardous goods’ they couldn’t ship it on the normal boat that took them mail. No, because it was dangerous it had to go on the PASSENGER FERRY! How is that less dangerous, I wondered, before deciding it was best not to question these things even though an empty tank is hardly likely to cause any damage, apart from falling on someone’s foot.

After a slightly awkward conversation I managed to drop off the tank, trying to ignore the fact the guy had known exactly what its contents had been. There is no privacy anymore! I had been in contact with the sperm bank who were very understanding about the delay, even though they’d never had this problem anywhere they’d shipped across the world, to over 100 countries. Typical Guernsey.

By this time it was time to do the pregnancy test, and Abby and I crowded together in bed one morning after I POAS, holding it close to our noses as the minutes ticked by waiting to see if our first attempt had worked. Those seconds had to have been the longest of my life until finally the words flashed up ‘not pregnant’. A feeling of sadness and disappointment washed over me as I took a deep breath, knowing the chances had been slim anyway and that at least we knew what to do next month to try again, hopefully with a better result.