The LAST Jab!

21.12.14

So here goes....Last Jab time!

Last night was my last injection for the treatment and I had to wait all day for the nurse's call for her to tell me what time to administer the drug.

In my case I had to do it at 11.30pm so that I was ready for the egg collection tomorrow at 9.30am.Eeeeeekkkkkkkk!!!

With Ovitrelle it's pretty much the same as doing Gonal F. The injection comes in the form of a pen, so all you have to do is attach the needle. The only difference between this and the Gonal F is that with this you don't have to set the dose, you just inject and take the full amount of liquid that's in the pen.
Ovitrelle's job is to mature the eggs before collection and then to trigger ovulation at a certain time (which is why you have to take it at a certain time of day/night depending on when you are going in for collection)

Doing this injection was a bitter sweet moment.
Yes I sure am glad to see the back of injections, my stomach is sore and wounded but on the other hand it was kind of sad in a way.
I've come so far from that first night of injections when I didn't think I could get through this. I did it though and now I was at that point of realising that this is it......I've got through the part that I didn't think I could do and I was faced with the prospect that this could all have potentially been for nothing, on the other hand this could now be the start of something I've been wanting for a very long time.

http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/pregnancy/medicines/ovitrelle.html

So Glad My Misfortune Made Someone Happy!

20.10.14
Another day, ANOTHER SCAN!
Today's scan was the final one all of my follicles were at good sizes (of course there's no guarantee that there are eggs in there though) and the nurse was quite happy for me to be booked in for the retrieval.

During the follicle scans the nurses look on each side of the ovaries for these small black circles, these are the follicles, they then measure them using he ultrasound machine. 
The follicles need to be around 16mm to be mature enough for them to want to do collection. Some women's follicles do not mature and they have to try upping the doseage of the medication or if that still dosen't work they just do the retrieval and hope that there are some eggs that they can use.

I was very lucky through this process, everything seems to have gone very smoothly and my body appears to have responded well.

The nurse also looked at my womb lining with 3d ultrasound to check that the lining was thick enough (which it was) and here is when she realised that my womb is nothing but ordinary.
I'm used to the doctors commenting on it now but normally the nurses cannot see the defect on the ultrasound machine.

Well this time she picked up on it straight away and was quite excited that she could get a very clear 3d shot of it.
She was very excited and said that she couldn't wait to show the other nurses the image, I guess I was happy for her...I suppose from a nurse's point of view it's not every day that you get to see a true Biconuate Uterus on ultrasound but you can't help but think "cheers, I am having IVF and not knowing if a baby will survive in that bodge up of a uterus and here you are getting clappy happy over it". 
(to the right is my scan picture)
The Y in the scan is my womb which is why they say it's a heart shape, a normal womb would be a pear shape or upside down triangle.

IVF 2014

Baby In A Box!

So it's Official.....we are starting our first round of IVF imminently. 

The box containing all of the medication needed to create our 'Miracle' came yesterday.









Pretty scary stuff!
   

If you aren't nervous about your passion, You aren't passionate about it!

I've not posted on here since April.

Sometimes you just need some head space away from all of the craziness that infertility brings....this has most certainly been the case and we were also waiting for our referral to be sent off to Bourn Clinic.

We waited 10 weeks for the papers to be signed off by the specialist at the main hospital, it became so frustrating that I started to doubt if this was ever going to happen.
Luckily once Bourn finally received the documents they were much quicker to get things going.

We were sent an appointment for a seminar which we had to attend before we could have treatment.

On the day we got to Bourn at 2.30pm and was met by a friendly receptionist who showed us around the main building and left us in the canteen to get ourselves a drink.
When I say canteen, this is not like your school or work canteen.....this is a small room in a Victorian manor with carpet, posh sofa's and amazing views of the landscapes outside.
It took us 15 minutes to work out how to use the fancy coffee machines and I did nearly give up at one point but I knew that we had to familiarize ourselves with them one way or another as I would probably be spending quite a bit of time in this place over the coming months lol.

So we get our coffee's and sit down for 30 minutes in the posh canteen whilst watching all the other couples wrestle the drinks machine.
Afterwards we were ushered into the main room which was set out with a projector and rows of chairs which had all been taken barring the one's right at the front. "How typical is that?" I thought to myself.
So there me an Kenny are shuffling down this aisle past all of these other couples who are probably feeling just as scared, anxious and nervous as we are but all I could think was that we looked the the classroom boffins sitting bang at the front.
We take our seat and I instantly notice how unbelievably hot it is in the room. I have a banging headache anyway and now I am sat in a semi dark room, with no air-con, next to a projector machine that is blowing out hot air on the hottest day of the year so far. BRILLIANT!!!!

They hand out the paperwork and an information pack to each couple and we begin to flick through the hundreds of pages. You could cut the tension in the room with a knife.....I sat there wondering if they all felt like I did inside? A mess who just wished that this was a bad dream.
A woman at the front then introduced herself, she is one of the main doctors and for the next hour we were taken through a slideshow of information and a biology lesson in reproduction. At one point I kept feeling like I was going to black out...I kept going clammy and dizzy from the heat in the room, well maybe it was the heat or maybe it was a combo of that and extreme nerves?
If I didn't know about how the reproductive organs worked before hand I certainly do now.

Our first consultation is coming up and I am petrified, being told in fine detail what to expect is helpful in some ways but not in others....I feel like I'm already counting down the days until I have to stab myself in the stomach with needles.

I feel that so far I have been very open about my journey through all of this process as I feel that it could help someone else in the same position who is scared or dosen't know what to expect. I am just getting to the stage now though where I don't know if I should start keeping things more private?

TTcers around the world Map Update

I am currently updating the TTCERS AROUND THE WORLD map.

Please click the link below to access it

https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=z6Ssw1aNSerE.kg5R1VxNdzz8&authuser=0&hl=en

TTCers of IG around the world!

 

Recently I had a vision to create a map that gave a rough location of all the ladies who are on Instagram in the Trying To Conceive Community. The reason for this was so that others could look at the map and see if there was another TTCer local to them that they could connect with.

I put it up on IG to see what others thought and within minutes I had over 20 names with their city and so there it began!
The map now has around 160 ladies on it who are on fertility treatments or have been on it and are now pregnant or had a 'miracle' baby. It's amazing to see how many women in different places of the world are effected by infertility, on the map we have ladies in USA,Canada, UK, Australia, Germany and Puerto Rico.

 

Follow the link below to view the map:

https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=z6Ssw1aNSerE.kg5R1VxNdzz8&authuser=0&hl=en