Ouch

Hangovers and period pain do not make for a good mix.

Same shit, different month

15 DPO today. I have been checking my temps every morning for the past week or so. It was constant at 36.8+, it dropped to 36.58 this morning, signalling that the end is nigh for this cycle. Even though I held out little hope after ovulation that this would be our month, due to my knackered back and John's cold putting a bit of a brake on the baby making, there was still this "hmmmmm...maybe" glimmer at the back of my mind.

I blame the hcg injections myself. They are the instigators of fake symptoms which trick me every time. Two injections into the cycle and I am piddling like a puppy (well not all over the kitchen floor, but the same regularity), feeling a bit on the tired side, with mildly aching boobs. I try and ignore it all for the first week of the two week wait. Then on the second week, the "maybe" thoughts start creeping in. It only took us one go in the past..... But then by the end of the second week (around about now) the hcg has worked it's way out of my system, and the symptoms have disappeared, along with my optimism.

Sometimes I wonder are we mad to keep going at our age. I will be 40 at the end of May and John is three years older than me. In saying that, I think we are quite young in our appearance and in our ways for a couple our age. But my eggs don't know that I have young looking skin and that I like to shop in Oasis, they're still 40 year old eggs. And by the time our kids would be in their teens, we would be in our mid 50's. That's provided it happens for us soon.

The other thing that saddens me is that this has taken over three out of the first four years of our married life together. Early married life should be more fun than this. It shouldn't be about fertility drugs, mood swings, injections, timetable sex, disappointment, worry and anxiety. It just feels like we are on this non stop treadmill and we daren't press the stop button. It feels more and more difficult to keep going, but the consequences of stopping are just too hard to contemplate.

WTF?

A friend of mine has a fourteen month old baby. She is pregnant again, four months gone. She also is a smoker. She smoked all the way through her first pregnancy, but once the baby was born, she did not and does not smoke around her. Now that she's pregnant again, she has no intentions of giving up smoking. But she won't smoke around the baby once it's born, because that would be bad for him or her.

Is there some logic there that I am missing?

39 going on ninety

So this is what I get for getting enthusiastic about my gardening activities. As I said a couple of posts ago, I suffer with lower back pain every now and again. It started when I was a teenager, just before I left school, probably due to carrying an overloaded schoolbag on one shoulder.

Over the years it has come back to haunt me. I've seen all manner of doctor/quacks/ alternative medicine practitioners about it. GPs, an orthopedic consultant, a physiotherapist, some dodgy dude who called himself a "spinologist" (in my defence I was a crippled 19 year old at the time, and if Jack the Ripper had suggested chopping my head off at that point I'd probably have agreed to it if it took the pain away), a chiropractor who I think may have done me more harm than good, and told me that one of my legs was longer than the other; and several different osteopaths, one of whom told me that the one leg longer than the other theory was bullshit, and that my joints were out of alignment. One loud click later and hey presto, my legs were the same length again. I've also tried accupuncture for it, which seemed to give temporary relief.

Last year I had an MRI scan taken, and the results showed that I have wear and tear on one of my discs, on the lumbar sacchral joint. That means sweet FA to me, but all I know is that every now and then it flares up, and when it does I end up with excrutiating pain from my lower back down to my left foot. Anyway, a few week back, I went to lift a rather large planter pot in the garden, not realising that it was water logged. Straight away I could feel it. Ouch!!! It has got gradually worse over the weeks, to the point that operation Hump n' Hope was almost cancelled this month.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, last Monday morning, I woke up in agony. It was like all the muscles in my lower back had gone into spasm, and I could only walk, or should I say waddle, like a duck. I went into work for the morning, but left before lunchtime. I rang the osteopath and got a cancellation for 5pm that evening. I went to bed, fell asleep and woke up at 4.25pm. Yikes! Got up, dressed, made myself a sandwich since I had not eaten anything that day. Hobbled to the car, realised I was almost out of petrol. Went to the petrol station at the top of our road, petrol pumps out of order. Muttered expletives under my breadth whilst zooming out to the Limerick road, in as much as you can zoom in a 13 year old 1.1L Peugot 106 (our other car is a big shiney Audi, honest!). Then I met roadworks, complete with traffic lights which change every five minutes. The petrol light was flashing furiously at this stage. I prayed that I wouldn't run out of petrol in the middle of 60mph traffic on the N7. Made it to the petrol station (phew!), stuck €20 worth of fuel in the Puggernaut, and headed off in the direction of Killaloe.

About half a mile up the road after taking the turn off for Killaloe, I met a tractor. Lovely. Farmer Ryan dutifully pulled into his yard and got the fuck out of my way, leaving me stuck in the middle of about twenty cows blocking a seriously narrow road. At this stage my inner farmer's daughter came out. I blasted them out of it with the car horn, shouting "move you stupid fucking animals", whilst they happily grazed at the hedgerows and sprayed the bonnet of my car with cow shit. Oh the joys of rural living. No wonder I left city life behind me. I pushed my way through, to find a Killaloe Yummy Mummy the other side of the traffic sitting there gingerly in her 4x4, looking terrified to move. Obviously not the product of an agricultural upbringing like yours truly. For the love of God woman, you have bull bars, use the fucking things!

I made it to the osteopath 10 minutes late. It was a new osteopath, so he wasn't familiar with my history, and couldn't find any record of me on his database. So after I gave him the same run down as I gave the GPs, orthopedic consultant, spinologist, chiropractor, three previous osteopaths and my accupunturist, I realised that he was probably looking under the wrong name. I have an unusual surname beginning with a G, which sounds very like a far more common surname, which begins with a D. Sure enough he was looking under Jane D******* and not Jane G*******. Anyway, up on the examination bed/table I crawled and the torture began. Does this hurt? FUCK!!!!! (You can take that as a yes by the way). This went on for almost an hour, but by the end of it he had worked a good bit of the muscle spasm out. I was told to go home and put ice on it to bring down the inflamation. A packet of frozen peas would do the job nicely. So I parted with €65 and went on my merry way to my local purveyor of frozen legumes.

I spent most of the day in bed yesterday bored out of my head playing Sudoku on my DS Lite, trying to work myself up to the frozen pea treatment. So I'm back at my desk today, feeling a lot better and walking much more like a 39 year old than a ninety year old woman, or a duck. I'll just have to cancel that bungy jump I had planned for the weekend. Damn! Anyone for dominoes?

Signs of life

Some pics I took in our garden yesterday.....

Snow drop

First daffs of the year

A very early tulip

There's something really lovely about seeing the first signs of life in the garden after a long dreary winter. It gives me hope for the new year.

Am I turning into a middle aged old fart when I'm getting excited about my garden?

2ww - take 3

Well it was a case of effort in the face of adversity this month. John got struck down by a dose of the man flu, and my lower back pain flared up again for the first time in a while. I've suffered with back pain on and off since I was eighteen years old, so twenty one years. When it strikes it is nothing short of debilitating. So I don't know how we managed it, but we did make a couple of attempts at project Hump and Hope (copyright Xbox). If we're successful this month it will be as Miranda said of the conception of her son on Sex and the City, "the special Olympics of conception".

I found out the other day that my next door neighbours had recently become proud parents of a beautiful baby girl. So I did the neighbourly thing and popped in with a gift for the little one and a quick chat. As my neighbour said, they have seen a lot of life changes in the past year. They got married last Spring, and now they are parents. My untold story felt like the elephant in the room. We have lived next door to each other for three years now, we were already married when we moved in, so where are the babies? I don't know them well enough to tell them about our "journey" and they thankfully have the tact not to ask, but I left the house feeling they must be wondering what's the story on our side of the fence.

So I'm once more onto the pregnyl injection week of my cycle. We've been doing these injections four times a month now since last March, so we've nearly completed a year of them. At the start it was very daunting fiddling around with needles and syringes in our own house, but luckily one of my best friends is a nurse so she helped us out for the first two times. Now it seems easy, if a little bit tiresome that I'm still injecting myself with hcg hormones derived from the urine of pregnant women. Nice thought, huh?

So another two week wait begins, due to end on March 1st. Watch this space.

The perfect valentine card

For a long term clomid user to give to her other half. I found this card in my local bookshop last night.

On the outside, a picture of a cartoon crab, with the word "Valentine", on the inside the message "Thank you for loving me even when I'm crabby".

Love it!

Conversations with the clueless

Some conversations I have been party to in the past year or more.

Over lunch, talking amoung a group of people who don't know anything about my situation. Conversation got around to a couple, who after many years of marriage, had two children in close succession. One woman, who has a young family herself, pipes up "Yes, it's funny that, some people wait years and years to have kids and then they have one after the other!". Yes, it's a funny one alright, not so funny for the couple who are more than like not waiting by choice, but who are trying and trying for years in vain, before finally having their family by the assisted conception route. Not that I threw in this tuppence worth into the conversation.

Talking to a colleague, who I would consider a close enough friend. She knows about all my losses. I was taking the following day off for my first appointment with the fertility clinic we are attending. Told her this. She looks at me like I am a moron, and says very slowly "you do know fertility treatment is for people who can't conceive in the first place, don't you?". Oh shit, I never thought of that, I did no research whatsoever and just picked a random name out of the phone book. Better get on to them and cancel the appointment, because my friend, who has never tried to conceive, never mind had any children, but thinks she knows everything there is to know about fertility, pregnancy and childbirth because her sisters have kids, told me to. Thanks for putting me right on that one.

Same friend, in the later side of her mid thirties, always saying she would love to have children, but in absolutely no hurry to have them all the same. Again may I reiterate that she knows that at this stage we had been trying approx two and a half years, had suffered 4 pregnancy losses and that I was dosing myself to the gills with fertility drugs which were giving me severe depression and mood swings. Says to me one day "If I ever have kids, I hope I'll be able to pop them out like my sister. She's really lucky, not a bit of morning sickness. Flew through all her pregnancies. I hope I'll be like her. It must be horrible to cope with morning sickness". Well love, if you're thinking of starting trying to conceive in your late 30's, morning sickness most likely will be the least of your worries.

Head, meet wall.

All aboard the lurve train...

So it's CD11, and we're gearing up for this month's burst of timetable lurvin', aka the week we have to ride. Oh to be 25 and energetic again. Last month we laid back and thought of Ireland on cd 16, 18, 19 and 20. CD20 was one of those "will we go again?" "all right then, might as well" ones. Offer it up for the Holy Souls. Where is the passion? Where is the romance?

Last month I ovulated on CD18. On CD18 this month, we are planning on going here for a rosamantic dinner, one of my favourite restaurants. All very conducive to seduction, one would think? Slight fly in the ointment though. As it's many miles away from our house and a ten minute drive from John's parents, we've arranged to stay with the in-laws that night, so that we'll be taxi distance from our bed and can enjoy a few glasses (ok, bottles) of wine. But how does one avoid the uber chatty mother in law who wants to engage in conversation until all hours when we get home? Sorry Missus, we've got to go and make a grandchild for you?

This reminds me of a baby making attempt last summer, when we were visiting my parents for the weekend. My uncle was also staying, as he was recouperating from an illness at the time and he was sleeping in the main guest room with the double bed. So we were sleeping in the upstairs twin bedroom, my teenage bedroom, directly over the living room. I had to drop elephant sized hints to John that it was bedtime, while he and my Dad were thoroughly absorbed in some kind of home computer conundrum that John always fixes every time we visit my parents. So off we toddled to bed, trying to do the deed in a very very single bed, which was very mobile and noisey, directly over my parents' living room. Cringe! As it happened, our attempts were in vain. It would have made for a good story to mortify any resulting offspring with in years to come.

So this time next week it will be out with the peesticks, preseed, mucodyne and sexy undies and away with the comfy pyjamas, woolly bedsocks and hotwater bottle. Here we go again...

Cottage Cheese anyone?

Did I mention in my last couple of posts that John and I were put on extremely strong antibiotics for three weeks? The idea was just in case I might have some kind of low grade bacterial infection of the endometrium. So we had to take two weeks of flagyl and three weeks of klacid, to run concurrently. The flagyl was particularly nasty. We both noticed that if you didn't eat before taking it, you end of with a dose of the shakes. I also had an extremely nasty bitter taste in my mouth, pretty much all the time. So I was really glad when I had taken my last flagyl dose last Friday morning.

However, worse was yet to come. By Sunday morning I noticed evidence of a nasty yeast infection in my undies (aka thrush, hence the photo, gettit?). YUCK!! So now as well as swallowing the following every day - two klacid, two pyrodoxene (vit b6), two fertility plus supplements (the smelliest most vile supplements known to womankind), four probiotic tablets, one calcium supplement, one fish oil supplement and one Vit D supplement - I now have the added joy of canesten pessaries and cream.

Can a woman's life get any better?