Tag: Fertility

Uncertainty!

On By wannabemummy82In Fertility for single womenLeave a comment

Sorry it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written. Things have been a little up in the air! Since I last wrote I went to the clinic and signed all the legal paperwork that is needed to ensure that I am the sole responsible parent for my future child as well as information release forms and agreements for sperm storage. It was a lot of forms and signing but it is done! So that is it, all the formal stuff out the way! Things are really moving forward… except I have been told by the nurse that they want me to re-do my progesterone blood test and my thyroid function before moving forward. I knew about the thyroid but not about the progesterone.

This is where is gets tricky. I do not have a regular cycle, and I am definitely not your 28 day cycle kind of person. So a 21 day progesterone test does not apply to me. So instead I need to have mine 7 days after I ovulate which means I need to track my ovulation. Ok, so in theory that is fine, except you have to book a blood test at my GP about a month in advance. Fortunately my clinic will do the blood test, it just means more money… worth it though!

So I went home from the appointment, ready to track my cycle and get the blood test asap. And then… hospital again! Yep, another trip to A&E in excruciating pain. This time I got an urgent appointment for the next morning. Scan done and nothing found. I was told I needed to go back to my GP to be referred to another department (not quite sure why my GP has to do it!).

My decision now is that now that I have a house to move to (oh yes, I have a house!) and as much as I want to move forward, my sensible option is to try and find out what is going on before I do anything. I feel at the moment like I take one step forward and two steps back.

Of course this probably all seems pretty trivial considering what is going on in the world right now. But everything is relative. And in my world this is still such a major thing. My brain swings from worrying about Covid-19 to worrying about how old I will be when I have my baby… or if it even happens. I hear other people talking about the issues raised with having children and all the uncertainty around working and how lucky I am because I don’t have that problem. I WANT THAT PROBLEM! I want to be coming home, thinking about whether I need to take my child to work, or if my child’s nursery/school will be open for me because I’m a key worker. I do not see myself as lucky. My heart breaks more every day that my health issues and this world health crisis goes on.

My clinic has emailed to say they will still be going ahead as normal but please don’t come in if you are at risk or showing symptoms. Right now I am technically neither but I have other issues in the way.

There is so much uncertainty for everyone right now. I work in a school and at the moment I am still going in. But for how long, I do not know. No one does. Will I need to go in everyday or will I need to work from home? Will my move go ahead in 2 weeks or will something happen to change that? Because really, should I be staying with my Mum who immunocompromised? How long will this health scare go on for? When will people stop panic buying? Surely you have everything you need by now!

What I do know is that there will be an end to this Covid-19 crisis and life will eventually go back to normal… but what is normal for me now? And will it be normal as a mummy or normal as a wannabemummy?

Grieving

On By wannabemummy82In Fertility for single womenLeave a comment

For most women, hitting that time of the month is just an inconvenience that doesn’t really mean much. Don’t get me wrong, we all know what we have them for but you don’t really think about what it means. I’m talking about the fact that with every period, that is one more potential child slipping away.

When a girl is born she will have approximately 2 million eggs in her ovaries… great right? Wrong, around 11 thousand eggs die every month leading up to puberty so by the time you reach your teenage years you have around 300-400 thousand eggs. Still not too shabby… EXCEPT, approximately a thousand eggs die each month. And when you run out, well you run out. Not all women are the same some women have fewer eggs but we don’t have little counters on our pelvis telling us how many we have left.

The average age of the menopause is 51, around 5% of women will experience menopause between 40 and 45 and 1% before 40. Not a lot, except that is still 1 in 100 women. Suddenly doesn’t sound quite so great.

My point is, that whole ticking biological clock is a real thing. And with every period you are essentially losing a child. This might sound dramatic but for some of us it just feels real. So with every period, we grieve. We grieve the loss of a child we will never have. And you ruminate, you spend a good amount of time during that period getting upset and stressing over what is happening to those tiny little eggs inside your body.

It’s hard to understand this unless you have been here. And although I thought I was alone I have recently found out I am not. This is a genuine grief that women feel but we don’t talk about it. The average age for women to have their first baby is 28, well, I’m 9 years beyond that… that is approximately 108,000 eggs. Approximately 108 periods. That’s a lot of babies I have missed out on.

And this is why I am on this journey. My clock is ticking, my eggs are dying, their quality is degrading and my uterus isn’t getting any younger either. So I am here, having bloods taken, spending my spare time looking through sperm bank catalogues and imagining what my future child would look like… if this works. Please, please let this work!

Nerves

On By wannabemummy82In UncategorizedLeave a comment

This week I had my first lot of blood tests. Nothing majorly stressful… or so I thought! I woke up on Thursday feeling, well, not quite right. Then I remembered I was having my blood test. I have no problems with having bloods done, after all I used to take blood from people all the time! But I had this weird feeling of, “what if I fail these tests?” I know you can’t fail a blood test but these are checking my fertility… what if I have a fertility problem that I never knew about, what if I’ve left it too late and my age is going to make this a problem.

Nerves have set in! Not nerves about WHAT I am doing but nerves about whether my body CAN do it! I’m taking all the advice, I’m taking conception vitamins, I’m taking myo inositol, I’m starting Slimming World this week, I’ve even massively cut down on my caffeine intake (probably the hardest one!)… but will it all be enough?

I went for my blood test, it took 20 minutes… I’m not easy to bleed! Great, all sorted. Until a few hours later, sat in traffic on the way home from work, when I suddenly thought, “did she take the right bloods?” I kept telling myself I was paranoid! But I had to phone the surgery to check… and it turns out I was justified! She had taken the LH and FSH not the progesterone! Now I’m panicking! But it’s all sorted and they won’t need me to come in again… apparently!

Nothing like a bit of added stress!!!