New Life

My goodness life has changed. It has been a LONG time since I wrote here. Not because I didn’t want to. Life just got very crazy and my focus shifted drastically during this time.

Health journey wise I lost 48kgs and travelled overseas and was living my very best life. Every kg I lost was hard worked for. There were many reasons I wanted to undertake this health journey. One of these was to give us the very best chance of having a child. We had 4 embryos frozen and the plan was to wait until we felt my body was in the best shape (and we had saved enough) and then go back in for IVF again.

Well….. long story short… we found out last October that I was pregnant… suprise!!!

Much joy, worry, excitement, fear, etc. ensued. What can I say after 8 years of infertility and then being pregnant in the middle of a pandemic I was a barrel of emotions hahaha.

Little Miss C came into the world in May and she is perfect. I couldn’t believe it. So many joyful tears you guys. We had some initial issues with feeding which is a story I will save for another day, but generally she has just been a joy. She surprises us everyday and I still can’t believe how lucky we are.

I have missed writing here and now as I continue on my life journey as a Mum, wife, health and knowledge seeker I really wanted to get back here.

Can’t wait to share and to catch up with you all!!!

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6 year anniversary of TTC is looming

So the IUI was a bust. Unfortunately as AF was 4 days late my hopes had grown super high. I didn’t POAS because I really wanted that hope to last for a little bit longer. I started bleeding the afternoon before my bloods were done. I let the nurse know and said I was confused because I was extremely regular and I it was very weird for me to be more than one day off. Only to be told that Pregnyl can make AF late. *SIGH* I really wish they would tell you this stuff when they give you the medications. So I thought I would share it with you all so you may avoid being caught unawares…

So far I have learned that Pregnyl and progesterone (anything) can/will delay AF. Obviously everyone’s body is different, we may not all react the same… yadda, yadda, yadda 🙂

As we come up to the 6 year anniversary of TTC in a couple of months I find myself questioning everything. Currently I have been TTC for 70 months, 70 failed cycles. That’s such a burden you guys. One of the most natural things my body should be doing and it won’t. I’ve never even had a BFP. I know people who have had 3 children in the time I have been trying to fall pregnant once!

Here are some of the things I am questioning:

Should I be looking at a different job which is less hours and stress so I can focus more on a health journey? Could I do a secondment at work or ask to go part time in my role for 6 months or longer? But all my pay goes towards an IVF fund which keeps us moving foward and I don’t really know if I could afford a pay cut.

I know in myself I could do amazingly well in this industry. I have been the library industry version of head hunted quite a few times and I am a hard worker who isn’t afraid of change or leaping outside the box. But any amount of success in this industry would not mean much to me if it meant foregoing the opportunity to be a Mum.

 

Recently I have asked myself a very important question…

Would I be willing to basically blow up my life if it meant we could have children?

The answer is yes.

 

Is this something I need to do? I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.

 

What could this look like?

• I have had doctors talk to me before about weight reduction surgery. I have never really considered it because it just didn’t feel right and I have met quite a few people for whom this wasn’t really a long term solution and they have had to have it redone down the track. During this cycle a nurse who has had it done at the FS office chatted to me about it. I asked her about the fact that we would not be able to do IVF during this time and she said we would still be able to make embryos and bank them, but that generally they will not allow us to transfer them for a year post surgery. I am very much in two minds about this, but will raise it with my FS on Thursday when we see her.
• Leave my job or ask for reduced hours to concentrate on a health journey. This is something I have thought about quite seriously. It makes me really sad because I really love a lot of the people I work with. I would really rather not leave, but I don’t know that my job could be done in less hours. Part of me feels that something drastic like this has to happen though. I have a very sedentary life in this job and there are not a lot of ways to fix that.
  If I get the surgery discussed above I will likely have to have quite some time off anyway so who knows.
• Completely retrain for another industry. This is something I have also thought about quite seriously. In particular I have thought about going back to uni and becoming a nutritionist that specialises in PCOS, IR and Diabetes. I have looked and have found it very hard to find specialists anywhere near me. I have also thought about going back to uni and becoming an specialist in the area of Autism. My nephew has Autism and I know a few other children who are on the spectrum too and there is a lot of talk by specialists of all the restrictions children on the spectrum will have. I would love to be a specialist who works closely with children with Autism to help them work through their own individual difficulties and overcome obstacles as well as develop techniques to help them navigate everyday life. Every single person is different, having Autism doesn’t change that, everyone is a snowflake and you need to treat them as such.
  Both of these options would include more work, stress and sedentary behaviour whilst I become qualified and established so I don’t know how realistic these choices are.

 

Has anyone out there blown up their life for this? Would love to hear your stories. Advise is also COMPLETELY welcome! I would love some!!!

 

 

Post surgery update

Hi everyone, sorry I didn’t put an update sooner. Surgery on the Saturday went really well and they were all lovely to me. I am pretty sure the anesthesiologist slipped me a pre shot without me even knowing about it because I was panicked (like I felt on the brink of a panic attack, but was trying to hide it), then I felt something cool in my arm and all of a sudden I couldn’t feel panic anymore. Everything was sweet. They took me into this big operating room and I thought the lights were huge and looked like flying saucers, this should have made me nervous, but didn’t. They asked me to get myself on the table and I did it, no sweat, no hesitation and that is the last thing I remember until I woke up in recovery… holy crap… I was roofied! 🙂

Everyone at the hospital was very lovely, it was probably the best first hospital experience one could have. I was REALLY in and out of it the first couple of days, I found it really hard to sleep in solid blocks and it was mostly and hour or two here then up for 2 hours then back to bed which was just completely frustrating. I couldn’t get comfortable at all. Drove hubby mental because he just wanted me to be resting. Everything seemed to be going well.

Come the Monday I wasn’t having any pain from the two wounds on the bottom of my stomache, but the one in my belly button was giving me grief. No matter what position I was in it hurt, it made me feel nauseated and just not great and I spent most of Monday in bed.

Come Tuesday I didn’t get out of bed until lunchtime, felt like crap and didn’t want to eat. I was back in bed by 2.30. Walked out to hubby just before 5 and said I feel really ill, he took one look at me (apparently I was a lovely shade of grey) and declared we were going to the doctors. My temperature was up to 37.6 which might not see that high for a normal person, but if you remember back to my temperature tracking my normal temp is in the low 36’s… I should also mention that I had taken panadeine forte just 1.5hours before which should have taken care of a temperature.

So it turned out that my belly button wound was infected… yay. As soon as they cleaned it out I felt a bit better (not as nauseated), it mean all of last week off work and some heavy meds, but I was feeling a lot better within 24 hours so that was good. I am back at work now and I am finding that I am super tired at night. Although today’s tiredness can be blamed on a reading hangover… damn book getting up to a really good part just as I was going to bed hahaha.

Anyways the diagnosis. I was really happy with my specialist a) he was super lovely when I saw him pre-operation b) he didn’t get to see me before I was discharged so I get a call at 7.30pm that night from him to talk to me about what they found, or more precisely what they didn’t find. There was no sign of any kind of endometriosis at all! I couldn’t believe it, going in both the doc and I were pretty sure they’d find some, but no, nothing. There were also no tube blockages, well he said it seemed like there was a slight one, but he didn’t think that was a true blockage. Honestly I will have to get more off him about that later… I was pretty drowsy at the time. They did the ovarian drilling and gave my womb a good clean out, but didn’t have to do anything else.

I was super excited about there being no endometriosis, it might sound awful to you guys, but I just felt like I had failed so many times at this making babies business over the past four years and I sort of felt like I had at least passed this test, but then I also feel a bit deflated because it means if the ovarian drilling doesn’t work then we are back to the drawing board.

Come on baby making 🙂

Surgery time

Disclaimer: there are over shares in the following

I know I haven’t been the most regular blogger of late. There has been a lot going on, Mr T has been in for two neck surgeries, we have had a lot on life wise and I have been preparing for the fact that I will be going in for laparoscopic surgery on the 12th of September.

Fast forward to now and I just got a call from the specialist… they want to do it this Saturday… eik! At first I went into what I like to call ‘deal with it’ mode; I spoke to my boss, we worked out the rosters and staff availability to make sure the swap was possible (especially because it also means that I will be off for 3 days next week). Luckily staff wise it turned out there are less people off next week than the one after. It also works out SO much better cycle wise, originally I was probably going to be going in for surgery whilst on my period and the doctor was like, ‘that’s fine, just wear a pad or something and I will remove it when I am ready for that area’ EWW!!! I think a lot of my anxiety was around that too, logically I know he is a doctor who has dealt with much icker stuff than that, but illogically it freaked me out a little hahaha.

So now that I have pretty much organised everything so it can be done this week I am sitting here going, “Shit! It is actually happening!” and am freaking out a bit. I have a fair amount of anxiety when it comes to hospitals and I have never been in for what I think of as proper surgery before… they removed my wisdom teeth, but that is very superficial surgery compared to what I will be having done this time.

What is he doing? Well I said to him if he was going in I wanted him to do everything he could at the one time because I didn’t want to deal with the anxiety and recovery time required from having to go under for another surgery. So we are doing four things this surgery:

• Search for and clean out of any endometriosis
• tubal flush (checking for any blockages)
• ovarian drilling
• and he’s going to karcher my womb … just kidding, but you get what I mean. I am referring to it as a ‘womb cleansing’

So hopefully all this will make a baby 🙂

Is it okay to eat the world?

It’s been a bad couple of days and it has been really hard to talk about it with anyone because I just am not even processing things at the moment. The only place I am functioning well at is work. I can shut off that emotion crap and get lost in my role. Currently the person I am at work is very different from the person I am at home. I am great at work, I am sparkle girl, I am organised and I get told that I have amazing initiative and they are so happy with me.

At home, as of last night at about 6pm I completely withdrew and basically went mute for a few hours.

I am going to talk about something I haven’t on here before, in fact I have only ever mentioned it to one person on WordPress and that was in comments on her blog. I want to talk about my brother. My brother has a reliance on pot. It worries the hell out of me because over the past few years I have seen it get worse and I have seen him change, he has 2 children who are almost 4 and 3 and the problem has gotten worse since the second one was born (I need to be clear though on the fact that it is never around the children and he never uses it where they can see and he doesn’t keep it where they can get to it). Both babies were unplanned and my brother and his partner were quite young for the first one and had not been together long. Please don’t think I am saying that he doesn’t love his kids, he does, he adores them, but he cannot handle them for long periods of time because his patience is just not awesome. He does know this about himself and is careful.

Basically in general both he and his partner are not dealing with life and their two toddlers. She isn’t working at all, he has casual jobs and seems to get sick a lot which means no pay when he doesn’t go to work. They both seem very dissatisfied with their life and bitch about each other to members of my family.

So now you know the background. The basics anyways…

Which brings me to Clomid – it has had its side effects and at first I thought that my want to withdraw all the time was the side effect, but I am not sure whether it is the side effect or withdrawing is my reaction to the fact I am emotional and don’t want to snap at anybody. Either way I have been trying to deal with that and if I am honest I haven’t been too awesome at it.

So last night I get home from work to my parents and my brother, his partner and my two nephews are there. There was a weird vibe going on and my Dad said not to ask about it, after awhile they went home. I assumed they had had an argument or something. I asked my Dad infront of my Mum and he said it had been a weird day and long story short she is pregnant.

Queue me shutting down in 3…2…1… I just emotionally shut down. I couldn’t deal with it. So I made the right sounds of shock and disbelief and the murmurs of concern and then went about my normal routine of getting dinner ready. Hubby came out (he works from home) for a coffee break and tried to engage me in coversation, I tried to make the right sounds, but we have been together for 8 years so it wasn’t going to fool him. He stopped me from flurrying about the kitchen, made me look at him and asked what was wrong. I couldn’t say it for a second, then when I did I just whispered it, “X is pregnant”. He looked at me for a second and then burst out laughing, “you have to be kidding me?!” he chortled, “what idiots, are you serious? How stupid can they be?!”. Then for just a minute my carefully constructed facade of nonchalance cracked and I started to cry. He engulfed me in a hug until the sniffles subsided and I sent him back to work pretending I was okay.

But I’m not. I am not okay you guys. This is not okay.

Apart from the fact that there is all the emotional issues related to the fact that we have been trying for over 3 years (which really would be enough) I am beyond concerned for this baby. Unless they both completely change their current lifestyles this child is going to have a mediocre life at best and I am not dealing with that. My oldest nephew is a very smart child, but they do not spend time with him teaching him things. They don’t take the boys out for experiences, basically the only place they go is shopping, we live 30mins from the beach and neither of them have ever been. The 3 year old is beyond coddled and is still taken out in onesies all the time, he is referred to as Bubby and is completely emotionally clingy and dependant on his mother and barely talks (he might say 4-5 individual words – no sentences) – there is not a medical reason for this, it is purely because they have not spent time teaching him things. They have just magically expected him to develop this stuff on his own as he grows. Neither boy has any kind of schedule and will sometimes be up until all hours of the night.

But then stupidly even after saying everything I have above, when my Mum said she had talked to her about the fact she needs to really think sensibly and that she does have ‘choices’ and whatever she decides is her choice alone – I couldn’t process it. I couldn’t process the fact that someone would be lucky enough to fall pregnant, but be so irresponsible and lazy that they can’t make an effort to get their lives together so that they can have it. That they would choose the easy way out.

Oh god I have to stop. I can’t. I am getting to upset about it again.

So basically I went through the motions, I made dinner, I ate dinner, I hid in the back room and watched Netflix and ate a LOT of chocolate, I brushed my teeth and went to bed. This morning I got up, brushed my teeth, had a coffee, Hubby tried to talk to me about it and I changed the subject, I caught up with my WordPress reader and then went to work. Once at work, work me emerged and got business done. But now, now I am home again and at home the problem is real and I don’t know how to deal with it yet. I want to eat everything, can I eat the world? On top of everything else I have weird achy feelings in my lower abdomen, they are really weird and I haven’t felt anything like it before. It is almost like when you get bloating before AF, but it is only in my lower abdomen. Is this some weird pre-AF Clomid side effect too? Or is hiding my emotions just wrecking havoc on my body?

I am really hoping the dam doesn’t break at some really weird time. Can you imagine me finding a handbag I adore and just bursting into sobs hugging it? My next blog may be from a padded room hahaha.

If any of you have some advice for me I would completely love to hear it. I am wide open to any kind of advice at the moment 🙂 Thank you for reading my rant and I am sorry if it upset anybody.