Next cycle is MAY!!!!!

 I had a 5 minute $100 consultation with my RE yesterday. I checked the time before i went in 4.25pm and then when i left, 4.30pm..i found it frustrating as i had waited 35 minutes..and all that time he was with one couple..then it gets to me and im in and out in 5 mins again ( the 2 other times we met with him for the first cycle they were just as fast!!)..grrr. I assume he was just trying to catch up..however, i did get my questions answered..so i guess i can't really complain..lol.

I felt bad for another couple who came in to the waiting area while i was waiting. The IVF consultant is in the gynocolgy dept at that hospital (not my own hospital) and a heavily pregnant lady came staggering in and saw them. They obviously knew each other saying hello etc..then preggo says to them "Oh congratulations when are you due?"..to which they shake their heads..preggo looked completely dumfounded as to why they were sitting in the gyno area. She eventually sat down and got called in before i got to go in myself. I wanted to say something to the couple..but I didn't know what to say, so i said nothing..I always worried about meeting preggo friends when i was getting my ultrasounds, but thankfully i never have.

  Anywho, the RE approved of all my supplements. He didn't say that they would make a difference, but they won't hurt and to go ahead and take them. He wants us to get more eggs next cycle and wants to get some frozen embryos..so we are on the same page there.
So Im having a long down regulation cycle next time. and doubling the dose of gonal f and having 225 in the morning and again at night..sounds do-able..so im on the next clinic in my town..and its the first week of MAY!!!!!!!! OMG..thats ages off..and he said with the long down reg i will likley be on the pill next period..but that should be here Monday..so I wouldn't think id be on the pill almost 3 months surely??? I have to ring the nurse next week to find out when i start..but on the upside..that gives me a lot more time to get rid of some weight..im going to start using weight watchers..i won't rejoin, i'll just use the old books i already have from last time!  I hate the fact we have to wait so long, but i like that I can get my weight down and hopefully have better sucess!!

losing weight is so hard

Why does it have to be so difficult..I eat well..yes occasionally i do eat potato chips or candy, but its not an every day thing, i don't go wild. I don't exercise much, but who does?? I do walk to work a lot ..yes true its only 8 minutes....but i do it..i even go super speedy and do it in 5 minutes sometimes..i speed walk around town for 20-30 minutes a couple of times per week..when i say speed walk, i don't mean that funny walk they do at the olympics, just fast walking. I also jump on the Wii fit and do dvds sporadically..i feel that it should be enough..and it does seem to be enough to maintain my weight..but it never seems to shift, not even when i up the exercise and deprive myself of things i want to eat such as cheese and bread.
A friend at work has successfully lost weight doing the Du.kan diet..thats one where you eat only protein for a week, then alternate only protein with protein + certain vegetables..it sounds easy..but im sure its not..i want to try it..but i don't feel like i have the will power to do it right now..and im not sure i should be trying to lose weight in such a severe way when trying to become pregnant. Im not enormously overweight, though the Wii fit tells me i am just under the obese category with a BMI of 29. I can still buy clothes at every day stores in the average range. But i would like to trim down a bit. I guess i am just going to have to become more diciplined with myself and make myself move more..grab out the weights, stick on the dvd's and eat no junk food at all...does cheese qualify as junk food??LOL

Wow..God is out there!!

I was just sitting in my living room thinking. My thoughts turned to babies as they tend to do and i asked "will I ever have a baby?' not expecting any sort of reply..but suddenly my mouth turned into a smile, i felt a calm peace spread over me and i heard  "yes you will"
wowsers..was that God? Did I get an actual answer from the big man himself??? Or was it my optimistic self being optimistic..I think it was God..my optimistic self doesn't tend to make me smile or feel peaceful like that..gosh that was so amazing..just had to share!!

Fitball class

well i did it..i got up early and got to my first 9.15am fitball class with step into life....it was outdoors!!
 I set my alarm for 8.30am and went to bed the night before at just a little after midnight, so early for me (night owl, usually up til 1.30am at least!) However, DH decided that was the night for watching a dvd in bed (we rarely ever do that)..he did turn the sound down, but him being deaf in one ear means that his low sound and my low sound are totally different!! I nearly got to sleep a couple of times, but always something loud would happen to wake me up. It finally finished at 1.45am and do you think i could sleep then?? nooooo, of course not. I must have dropped off somewhere around 2.30am..and then..i was awake again at 7am..arghhh..i got up at 7.30 as trying any longer was futile. The cats were sure surprised to see me at that time of day when i let them outside..ok, let one out and forced the other one out..lol She wishes she was an indoor cat.

Got down to the park and met the other ladies..i remember there was a Lyn, Robyn, Jacki and Rachel..i don't remember the other 2....i think all but Rachel were well older than myself. In a way thats good because it means they aren't all competitive or snobby. In another way it might mean i don't get to work out as hard..its fine for now when im just starting..I guess i will just wait and see! It was windy this morning, so we had to hold the fitballs the entire time otherwise theyd be blowing away. I really enjoyed it..the only downside for me is the hideously early start (yes..9.15am is hideously early)..can i happily continue getting up early..i suppose i can only try it for a while and see how it goes. I need to be in better shape before our next IVF attempt and i just don't exercise much on my own..so classes are better for me.

I also had a doctor appointment today to discuss my latest cholesterol result..it was unchanged, though triglicerides had gone up. She wants to put me on statin drugs which i really don't want to do. I asked her if it will interfere with the IVF drugs or being pregnant and she looked it up. The statins are a class C drug and you can only use class A while pregnant (or that could be the other way around...) so i can't take them yet (yay!) am going to double the dose of fish oil and try extra hard to get it down naturally. She also wants me to check with RE about the supplements im taking, especially the coQ10. I see him in 10 days.

Twins and adoption

I love how the B symbol on the blogs looks like a baby carriage. Its probably just me.LOL anywho I digress.
 Last night I dreamt I had twins. A boy and a girl. That would be so super awesome if it came true. If we have a singleton child I feel it will be lonely as there are no young children in either of our families. DH is the youngest of 5 brothers. The next brother up from him has the youngest kids on their side and they are 9 and 12. the next 2 cousins are 15 and 18 then the other 4 cousins are over 23. So noone to play with there. Im the youngest in my family with 2 brothers. Only one is married, but his wife is 49 this year, so i guess theyre not having kids. So thats it, no kids at all..and i think we will only have one pregnancy once the IVF works. I really can't see us trying again once we get our baby. Mostly the costs involved, but also the worry of an abnormal baby.

Id always thought if we didn't get pregnant we could just adopt. Turns out thats not easy in Australia. The govt is so good at helping single teenage parents that they keep their babies these days. Don't get me wrong, im happy they have the support and stay with their families, but it does mean theres very few to adopt. Even the families who can't look after their children and get them taken away very rarely give up their parental rights in my country. I read a statistic that each year there are less than 50 children adopted in Australia. The average time to adopt a child here is 7 years. if you want an infant it can be over 10 years!! Even the overseas adoptions are difficult with a lot of redtape and huge costs. the average wait for overseas adoption is 3 years and the average cost is over $20,000.

DH and I were discussing our plans the other night. I mentioned adoption and he said he really doesn't want to raise someone elses child. If we can't have our own, he'd rather be childless. I guess being childless wouldn't be soo bad. Its what we are used to afterall. I guess in a few years people will stop asking us when are we having kids.  Still..Im holding onto hope that we will get lucky with our next IVF and get our miracle babies..um..baby...babies...whichever!!

Operation Good Egg

I found all the supplements I wanted..yay. After i got them i started to worry about all the combinations and potential side effects..so am going to go slow with them.Looking online it seems that none have side effects, but every now and then you find a site that says differently..so I took one tablet of each yesterday morning and found my throat was a bit clogged up..so today i skipped them all..still clogged..so perhaps its not them afterall..Its difficult to know what dose I should have. I'm thinking to just stick with one pill for now.
so each morning i will be having
1x Elevit prenatal
2x Fish Oil
2x Royal Jelly
1x Maca
1x Spirulina
1x Coq10
  seems like a lot, but if it helps me get super eggs I don't care!! Plus most of them help with cholesterol which I have in abundence..it is slowly coming down..started at 7.9, last check was 7.3 and i just had another test and find out the results of that next week. I really don't want to take statin drugs..so i hope its still coming down!
Lastly today, if you are the praying sort, please say a prayer for the people in South Queensland and Northern New South Wales as they battle though the worst floods they've ever had. The floods cover an area as big as Victoria, (bigger that France and Germany together..in other words its a lot of water)

wooo first post- the story up to now.

well ive been reading over lots of different blogs and decided i may as well start my own to have a record of this tediously long journey. My name is Kez and i am 39. DH and I have been trying to create our first bundle of joy for about 5 years. I went off the pill around 28 as i didn't like the idea of putting chemicals in my body and we used other birth control methods. We started not preventing, not trying when i was about 33. As i approached 35 we decided to start trying.I read up on everything I could find about making babies. Turns out that a lot of the early tries were missing my ovulation..whoops. Everything you read says you ovulate 14 days before your period.I have a regular 28/29 day cycle so according to this info i would O on day 14..but once i stated to take my temperature every morning, i found I O'd between day 11 and day 13 most cycles. So after we started timing it it still seemed to take forever. I decided to start investigations after a year and a half. This brings us to Nov 08. I tried a doctor that specializes in fertility. I had the initial consultation and he ordered some hormone tests..before i got the results we finally got our BFP!

However a couple of days later I started spotting. The specialist doc is only in my town one day a month, so i went to the GP who said it sounds like a miscarriage and there was nothing that could be done. He ordered a blood test and told me to go home and rest and to come back in a couple of days. I went back and the blood test showed my Beta was 50 and progesterone was low (I can't recall the number any more, but it was single figures) The doctor said he would expect the beta to be a lot higher and that i would likley miscarry. He wanted me to have an ultrasound to make sure it wasn't ectopic. I was also leaving for a trip to UK to visit DH's family for christmas in 2 weeks..so timing was terrible. I couldn't get the ultrasound until 2 days before we left. It showed that the baby was gone. which was good because if it was lingering i would have had to have a D&C which would mean i couldn't go on our trip. It was a sad time, but i couldn't be overly heartbroken. I had prayed to God to let me be pregnant even if i couldn't keep it. Just to know that I could get pregnant. So I had that answer!

After we got back, I went back to the fertility specialist who told me my progesterone levels were extremly low. I told him about the miscarriage and he said the low progesterone could easily have been the reason and was a bit surprised the GP had not prescribed progesterone in the slim hope it might have saved the baby. He prescribed a cream to help future hopeful pregnancies. But it was very expensive and difficult to get. I don't know why he made it so difficult, but it was a special order only from a certain chemist. so after 5 months of using it, i gave up and decided if i got pregnant again id just get some from the GP.

Then in May 2010 after almost 2 years of no luck I decided to start investigations again into why its not happening. Went to a different GP who ordered tests. Everything looked fine hormone-wise. So she reffered me to a gyno. The gyno did a few other tests and got DH's sperm analysis ordered. All showed fine, though DH's motility was low. She put him on menevit. She decided due to my age she would proceed to a laparoscopy and hysteroscopy under anasthetic immediately. So the results of that were that both fallopian tubes were blocked. She failed to flush them open. So we were referred to IVF as our only hope. I did ask how they were blocked, she thought it could be scarring from a PID that i never knew i had. She said perhaps they weren't quite closed back in 08 when an egg made it through..and she said its always possible that they could clear themselves as she didn't know what the blockage was!

So we had our first antagonist IVF in Dec 10. It wasn't so bad. most of the injections i didn't feel..a few hurt, but not much. Out of 16 injections we only had 2 bruises. We got 7 eggs, 4 fertilized. One 5 day blast transferred, no frozens. On the day we were due for our beta, the clinic was closed for chrismas. So i did a pee stick and got a faint faint line. i tried again in the evening, still really faint. DH couldn't see it at all. I tried again the next morning..barely there. Id been using this batch of sticks long enough to know they don't do evaps. so i left it a couple of days, tried again..stark white..again, stark white. so my guess is that the little bean did implant, but couldn't hold on. By the time we got the beta almost 2 weeks later there was no trace of anything.

So today i made my appointment to see the RE. I can't get to see him til Jan 27th..so any thought of trying again for Feb go out the window. I thought march, but its more likely to be April. It gives me 4 months to get these eggs into the best shape possible. Im already taking royal jelly and want to get Coq10 and spirulina as ive read they are great for improving egg quality. I also aim to lose weight and get back down to size 14. My original aim was to drop 10kgs, but i think i will go by size instead.
Interestingly i just got a wrong number call and it was a lady who i used to workout with.  I guess she has my number on her phone still..She recognised my voice and we had a chat..well she now runs fitness classes, so im going to go along next monday..chance that she rang? nahh..i think its a gentle nudge from our Lord who knows how lazy I am!

Ok..im done for my first blog post..i think this is going to be fun!!