'Might' Is All We Have........

In the past 9 days, I have congratulated 17 people on the birth of their new baby. 17 new babies that have entered this world in just over a week. The first few were easy, its an amazing thing to welcome a new baby in to the world and I genuinely am happy for each and every one of them. As the days went on... I began to dread opening the social networking sites for fear of seeing yet another 'New Baby' post.

It's funny, because sometimes they don't bother me at all, but gosh - when there are so many in such a short space of time, you kinda do start to feel that the universe is trying to play games with you, trying to see how far it can push you before you actually crack. 

I'm so conscious of writing a post like this because I know that most of those new mothers read this blog and I don't want to in any way take from their experience and joy.
I spoke to Gordon about this when he visited yesterday. It was in a different context and not at all relating to all of these new babies, but a different situation in which I had felt bad because I felt that one of my posts had perhaps taken part of an experience from someone else. He responded by telling me that it is in my nature to feel bad for others and while it is ok to feel bad for this other lady, I really shouldn't feel bad for writing about my true feelings. He told me that I need to realise that my feelings are just as important as the feelings of others and that it is important for me to write about what is true to me, even if it is not what others want to read. (He is oh so wise :-) )

Towards the end of last week, the new baby announcements were really starting to get to me, they were starting to bother me. Each one was a knife in my chest and as the days went by - those knives began to twist. So, what did I do? Well, I did what I always do... I tried to escape my own mind. I tried to keep myself so busy that I just would not be able to even think about it. Lulu, my beautiful bichon became the subject of my distraction, the sewing machine, my weapon of choice. I sat at that machine and I sewed and sewed and sewed. Let me put this into perspective... with the nature of the operation that I had and the location of the pain and soreness... sitting up is quite difficult for me... sitting hunched forward over a sewing machine is next to impossible. I had, earlier in that day, had a conversation with a friend about sewing and told her that I realistically could only manage 15-20 minutes of sewing at a time without really hurting myself.
After four and a half hours of sewing, Patrick arrives home from work to find me, a pathetic sight... hunched over the sewing machine with my foot on the pedal, tears running down my face and wincing in an attempt to ignore the absolute agony that my body was in. My body needed to stop, but my mind couldn't, because if it did... it would return to thoughts of all those beautiful new babies. It really was a case of mind over matter for me, and funnily enough - it was easier for me to ignore the physical pain in my body, than the mental and emotional pain that I was fighting so hard to escape from my mind and my heart. You can't escape it though, no matter how hard you try... because it will always materialise... one way or another.

That four and a half hour stint at my sewing machine resulted in me being in so much pain the following day that I was unable to get out of bed without help. My whole left side felt bruised and extremely painful, and this resulted in further frustration for me because I knew I had done it to myself. 
On the up side though... Lulu now has the biggest selection of doggy coats ever...!!!!!!!

This is a dangerous time for me right now. I am not in as much pain as I had been so am a lot more mobile and am finding myself wanting to do more. Unfortunately - this causes me to do more than I really should and I end up hurting myself. I know that this is setting my recovery back and I need to rest as much as I possibly can until everything settles down properly inside of me - but gosh, I just cannot do nothing. I need to be doing things all the time and even more so at the minute because I am constantly fighting to distract myself from the inevitable thoughts of all of those beautiful new babies. One of my closest friends from the UK made the very logical point to me that pushing myself to the point of hurting myself because somebody else is where I want to be... does not actually help me to get where I want to be... in fact, it hinders my recovery and therefore hinders my progress, which in turn hinders my ability to achieve my ultimate goal. (Gotta love all of these straight-talking friends that I have!) That's the kind of logic that I just cannot argue with, but instead really made me think about the physically destructive cycle that I seem to follow when I'm struggling to deal with what is going on in my head or how external factors are really affecting me.

I got upset when I was talking to Gordon yesterday. I did something that I said I wouldn't do. I started to look at the big picture, I began to describe the process that I was facing and all of the steps that I will have to go through. Up until that point, I had promised myself that I was going to take this one step at a time and only focus on the current step and the next step at any one time. Yesterday we went through it step by step and I was hit by the realisation that the best case scenario that I can hope for is what most people would describe as a living nightmare. I began to look back at what I have been through to date on this journey, and even though that was a rougher journey than most people could ever imagine... it was actually simple, it was all so easy and straight-forward compared to the path that lies ahead of us.

I don't know where I am going to find the strength to go through all of what I have to go through. I am not even going to lay it out in detail in this post, but I most likely will in the near future. All I know is that I have to find the strength from somewhere, because I cannot look back in ten years and know that there was one more chance (however minute) and I didn't take it. I think the 'what ifs' would kill me. 

It also only struck me yesterday that I had actually lost one of my tubes. I mean... I knew it had been removed... but the realisation that it was actually gone was quite stark. I know its for the best and will hopefully improve our chances whenever we do decide to go to the Czech Republic for treatment, but it is very much a feeling of being incomplete - or perhaps 'more incomplete'. I don't think any woman who has lost a baby (never mind 10) can ever truly feel 'complete', because there is always a part of her that is missing.... but unlike the pain of the tube removal which will hopefully subside in the foreseeable future.... the pain of losing your baby never will... you don't get used to it... it doesn't get easier... you just get better at hiding it and sometimes (like now) you find yourself so surrounded by what you so badly want, by what you should have, by what you have given your life to achieve but just can't... that you find yourself struggling to breathe... breathing hurts... everything hurts... and when you see picture after picture of ecstatic new mothers and proud new fathers with their beautiful new baby... a little part of your heart breaks further and you truly wonder if it will ever be your turn... but worse than that... you start to realise that it might never be your turn and you don't know how you will cope with that.

I think about the times that I lay in hospital, recovering from surgery after surgery or violently sick after Chemotherapy, with my family pleading with me to just stop this because it is going to kill me and all I can think is that it will be worth it when I finally hold my own baby. I've pictured it so many times... in the delivery suite... handing our baby to Patrick and knowing that finally, finally we are complete and knowing that every thing we had been through just served to make us love this little person even more.... and once we've had some time together, just the three of us.... we will call our families... and I will call Gordon and tell him and I'll want him to come in and hold this precious little being because I know in my heart that he/she would never have been here if it wasn't for Gordon... and Patrick will take a picture... the very first picture that will go on this blog... it will simply be a picture of my baby's hand curled around my finger and that picture alone will say more than every word in this entire blog has said... and everyone will just 'know'. We will probably have names picked but will change our minds as soon as we see him/her. I think we will share a lot of moments of silence just holding hands and looking at our beautiful baby... because there just will not be any words worthy of that moment... and then we will be..... we will just 'be'.

This is the picture that I need to keep in my head. I'm suddenly having flashbacks of my Undergrad Psychology Class as we studied Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - I am being reminded to 'Begin with the end in mind'  (not to mention surprised that I've remembered that after all of these years...!!!) I know that I need to do everything that I possibly can to make that picture a reality. Even though I know there will be countless times when I am so afraid that something is going to go wrong and I know that at some point we will be sitting across the table from one of the Dr.s in the Clinic in the Czech Republic... about to be told whether or not any of our embryos are genetically viable... and while we need to be prepared for the fact that the answer may well be 'No'..... it also might be 'Yes'.

I know 'might' is not an awful lot to be hanging my hopes on..... but for the foreseeable future.... 'might' is all we have.

It Should Have Been Me........

I've had a few setbacks in the past week, lots of issues with my chest and yet another abdominal infection has left me in a lot of pain, feeling like I'm back at square one and still unable to sleep at night. As I lay awake last night, watching each hour pass by until it was time for Patrick to get up for work and eventually I dozed off at I guess what must have been around 9am. 

At around 11:30am, I am awakened from my slumber by the sound of my phone beeping, thinking it was just a text message, I was prepared to ignore it and just respond later, but it was kinda niggling at me for some reason, so I picked up my phone to see that I had received an email from Gordon entitled 'New Blog', but there was no content to the email, not even an invitation to check for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors (I'm not a pedant, honestly...!!!).

I open the Aculife website on my phone to find a post from a very excited Gordon about his experience yesterday. Yesterday some pretty significant ground was broken. Yesterday two worlds collided and became one. Yesterday saw the welcoming of Complimentary Medicine into the world of Western Medicine. Yesterday was the day when a Practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine was welcomed into and permitted to work alongside the finest Doctors in the field of fertility and reproductive medicine. That's pretty amazing.

You see, up til now it has been a battleground where although acupuncture has been used to compliment fertility treatment for many years, It has been seen by most IVF Clinic Directors as a waste of time, as some Mickey-Mouse, complete waste of money attempt at giving yourself some sense of false hope. I've even been directly discouraged from having acupuncture as a compliment to my fertility journey by an IVF Clinic Director, despite its positive effects being unquestionably proven. 

My experience has primarily been that acupuncture is somewhat of a taboo subject inside the walls of IVF Clinics and is met with a head-tilted, nodding sympathetically gesture of feigned empathy to the tune of 'Ah sure, you'll try anything when you want something so badly'.

This has meant that the morning of Transfer, the day that you need to be at your most relaxed, becomes the day when you have to perform a feat of logistically epic proportions on top of undergoing the whole Transfer process. Your timing must be precise... especially if, like me... you have to travel the morning of the transfer. 

My experiences have been as follows... So, Transfer is at 12, but I need to call the Clinic at 10:30 to see if the embryos survived the thawing process, but in order to transfer at 12, I need to be at the Clinic by 11:30 at the latest and I need to leave at least 30 minutes of travel time between the Acupuncture Clinic and the Fertility Clinic to allow for traffic and trying to find parking and any other delays that may arise, so that means I need to leave the Acupuncture Clinic by 11, so I need to arrive at the Acupuncture Clinic for Pre-Transfer acupuncture at 10:15, which means that I need to leave home at 9am. Leaving home at 9am is not a problem, but having the constant worries of 'I'm going to be late......... I'm going to miss my appointment......... Oh God, why is there so much traffic???........ It's just raining, why has the whole world decided to drive at 5 miles an hour???... Why is there never anywhere to park?...' Along with the worries of ' I wonder if my embryos have even survived......... I've come all this way and I could be told that I have no embryos to transfer........   Only 20 more minutes til I can call the Clinic to find out.... seriously, is this clock going backwards...???' And once you have completed the Transfer, you then have to take some time to recover, before returning to the Acupuncture Clinic for Post-Transfer treatment...!!!

All of that stress and worry on top of what is a hugely stressful procedure anyway. 

Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could arrive at the Fertility Clinic on the morning of Transfer, go to your prep room (which doubles as your own private recovery room), have your Acupuncturist there to treat you immediately before and after the Transfer and then go home and relax? What a different process that would be and that is what took place yesterday at SIMS. The burden of that extra stress was taken from the patient and distributed between the Fertility Doctors and the Acupuncturist. They had to figure out the logistics and the timing and it was up to them to make sure it all went as smoothly as possible.

And from what I understand, it was something quite amazing. You can read Gordon's blog post here. 

What an amazing development and one he should be very, very proud of. He has created a synergy, he has built a bridge over sometimes hostile/sometimes toxic waters and that is an amazing step, a huge achievement........... So why have I been sitting here in a pathetic state of misery, crying inconsolably since reading it?

It should have been me... and that is not just me saying generally 'it should be me, when is it going to be my turn?'........ it actually should have been me.

On my second visit to SIMS Clinic, during my first full consultation with Dr. Walsh when we were discussing our next cycle (this was before we got the genetic results), I asked Dr. Walsh about acupuncture before and after Transfer and he responded that he would highly recommend it and knowing my connections with Gordon and Aculife Clinic, he suggested that I ask Gordon to recommend an Acupuncturist in Dublin that I can attend before and after Transfer. So... me being me, knowing that Gordon is already in discussions with Dr. Walsh over trying to create some sort of 'synergy' between the two Clinics, and also being of the long-standing impression that if you don't ask - you don't get.... explained to Dr. Walsh the importance of having your own Acupuncturist by your side, not just any Acupuncturist, but the Acupuncturist who has been on this journey with you, the Acupuncturist that you know, trust and respect, but also... the Acupuncturist that knows you, and knows what will work best for you. (Seriously, if I'm not gona let 'just anybody' cut my hair, I'm certainly not going to want 'just anybody' influencing the outcome of the most important procedure of my life...!!!). Aided by Patrick's smirking statement 'if its not gona be Gordon, its not gona happen'.

 - Dr. Walsh agreed to it and thanked me for opening his eyes to the connection between the patient and her Acupuncturist. He told me to have Mr. Mullins contact him about it and they would put arrangements in place for Gordon to be present in SIMS immediately before and after my next transfer. He explained to me that it is not something that is usually allowed, but as they are in talks about it anyway and because of my long-time connection with Gordon and Aculife Clinic, it would actually be a good opportunity to trial and assess how it would actually work in practice.

Reading Gordon's blog post, I wanted to be so happy for him and I so appreciated that he had notified me directly of this blog post - I think it would have hit me a lot harder if I had just casually come across it. I couldn't help but have this be a huge reminder of just how much things have changed for me, Of where I am versus where I thought I would be. Yet again a reminder that I am being left behind and the world is moving ahead regardless. I felt like he was handing me the most amazing ice-cream with one hand, but chopping my arm off with the other. A fantastic step for fertility treatment, but one that is becoming further and further from my reach.

A follow-up email from Gordon told me that he was conscious of how it would make me feel and that even yesterday, as he entered SIMS Clinic to break this new ground, he was very aware that 

'This was supposed to be Anne-Marie'

I am honoured that I even crossed his mind yesterday, and to that extent I guess I do feel that perhaps I was part of the process in some tiny way and I know I will be very proud of that... once the initial blow has passed. 

It really shows the strength of Gordon's dedication and determination that he traveled from Cork to Dublin to carry out Pre and Post Transfer Acupuncture for one patient. He is a true advocate for this and his understanding of what a fertility patient actually goes though is second to none.

Now... I wonder how he feels about travelling to the Czech Republic for Pre and Post Transfer Acupuncture........ ;-)

Pregnant Arachnids... Or Something Like That...

I am so up and down at the minute, it's actually ridiculous. One minute I'm fine and I'm laughing and joking... the next I'm in tears. I don't know - maybe its just hormones, they're gona be all over the place right now.

I have this feeling of anxiousness, like I have a million things to do and no time to do them - which is crazy coz all I have right now is time, so much time. I pretty much have 24 hours a day coz I'm not really able to get much sleep. I think a lot of it is because I am used to working 12-14 hours a day and being kept busy for all of that time. Gosh, I can work 14 hour days and still feel like there aren't enough hours in the day...!!!... Now... now I have time, its all I have... and all I want to do is get back to work... can't stand up straight... but want to go back to work...!!! 

I don't do very well when I'm not being challenged or stimulated or kept busy and gosh, I've tried to keep busy. I love to sew but I'm not able to sit up at my sewing machine so I thought I'd keep myself busy by knitting. I've knit so many scarves in the past 2 weeks, but I'm kinda getting bored with that now. 

I logged into the Aculife website a few minutes ago. I check it every few days to see if there have been any updates. Gordon is doing this new video blogging thing which is kinda cool. On the bottom left of the webpage, there is a testimonial section... I see it every time I log in, at least 2-3 times a week and I've never had a reaction to it, it has never bothered me, but when I logged in a few minutes ago a testimonial popped up that read "Thank you for everything, and also for keeping me so calm during my pregnancy. We are so so HAPPY" and I was hit with his overwhelming feeling of 'This is never going to happen for me!' and 'Seriously, what if it never does happen?' I began to feel panicky, looked for a way out (its a webpage... just close the screen, right?), Nope... the next thing that I see is a post from December 23rd announcing that the Clinic was finishing up for Christmas on that date, but not before they were announcing 5 new pregnancies...!!!  
I was reminded of an experience I had 8 or 9 weeks ago, Patrick and I went to Amsterdam for 5 days. Bearing in mind that I am terrified of spiders - We spent our last day there at the Artis Zoo, an amazing zoo. I'm not entirely sure why, but I agreed to go into the Insectarium. Ok, I knew that there would probably be a spider or two in there, but I figured once I knew where they were I could avoid them and all would be ok. So we go inside, and I am being very very cautious and all of a sudden I hear Patrick gasp and say 'Oh God' I look up and I am face to face with this huge tarantula (he probably wasn't huge, but he seemed humongous to me!)... and I start to panic. Patrick said the blood just drained from my face. I have to get out of there, but it seems that everywhere I now look... there are more and more spiders and I can't find the way out. I'm sure it was very very funny to watch, but it was my worst nightmare come true. I know I wasn't in any danger at any point, the spiders were all behind glass cases. We eventually found the way out and I had to sit down for a bit. I was so mad with Patrick, I know it was probably misplaced anger but I felt that if I had just come across the spiders by myself, I probably would have been ok and it was probably the shock of reacting to his reaction and realising that I was face to face with the tarantula, that made it such a terrible experience for me, and then the panickiness because they are all around me and it's that feeling of being trapped or having no escape and I guess infertility is a bit like that. There is no escape, the whole world is like the insectarium and pregnant women are like the tarantulas. They are EVERYWHERE! And some days it is ok to be around that and surrounded by women who are pregnant... the days that I am prepared for it, the days that I spot to 'glass cases' and know that they are there... and then there are the days when I'm not prepared for it and I realise, usually when it is too late, that I am face to face with a pregnant woman.. and not only that... I am surrounded by them... they are everywhere and it's hard to get out of a situation like that.

It's funny coz I have quite a few friends who are pregnant right now and I can see them reading this and thinking 'Has she just called me a tarantula...???' I'm honestly not looking to insult or offend anybody, I'm making somewhat of an analogy... one that makes perfect sense to me at 6am in my completely sleep deprived state.

Maybe I'm my own worst enemy though... maybe I shouldn't go into the Insectarium when I know I suffer from a ridiculous fear of spiders.... and maybe, just maybe I shouldn't log on to the website of the most amazing Clinic that makes miracles happen and helps people to have children... when I know I'm not quite ready to hear that 5 more women have moved ahead of me on the ability-to-have-their-own-children spectrum. Gordon lives to help people get pregnant and have their own children... of course he is going to announce on his website when his patients finally get those two pink lines. I often ask him why can't it just be easy? and his answer is always that it isn't easy for anyone who attends his Clinic. Everybody has a story, a past, a journey, everybody who Gordon works with has maybe failed to become pregnant after years of trying, or perhaps has a history of recurrent miscarriage or ectopic pregnancies, or perhaps has been through cycle after cycle of failed IVF cycles... of course he is going to announce when these women become pregnant, these are true miracles and I know if it was me, I'd be shouting it from the rooftops.

It's funny though... I know all of this, I know how amazing it is and I know that feeling only too well... the feeling when you finally see those two pink lines and your whole world changes in that split second... I know this, I know how those women feel... but I can't help feeling that I'm somehow being left behind... and I know that there is nothing that Gordon could do that he hasn't done for me, he has gone over and above the duty of 'acupuncturist' many many times... so why do I feel like I want to scream at him, that I want to tell him that it is my turn now, it has to be, I've been here the longest and I don't want to wait anymore. When do I get the two pink lines?, when do I get to hear my baby's heartbeat?, when do I get to crave pickles and marshmallows?, when do I get to go through 17 hours of labour?, when do I get to hold my baby in my arms??? So many questions, so many unanswered questions... 

Perhaps I should substitute 'When do I' for 'Will I' and maybe those are the questions I should be asking...