Thursday, March 13, 2008

cancel that

So I shot up with a big old dose of Ovidrel last night so my not so impressive number of eggs should be ripening up like a couple of apricots in the sun.

Yes.

The shot itself was doable but weird. I mean, I wouldn't choose to stick a rather large gauge needle into my-ever-so-sexy-but-considering-the-needle-sticks-it's-borne-of-late-thank-god-it's there belly fat in order to inject a rather viscous fluid into my subcutaneous regions, but it wasn't that bad, you know? It itched a bit afterwards, and kind of left a big splodge of bloodless looking flesh around the injection site, but all in all, on a scale of one to ten, it was a meh.

I'm not sure if it was its hormonal effect taking place this morning though, or whether it;'s because I'm very, very tied today thank you eight am phone call on the ONLY day I get to sleep in, gah, or if it was my gut feeling making its voice truly heard, but I spent the morning feeling like I was holding back a whole mess sobbing in despair. I didn't break down into a weeping mass of goo though, because I'm just plain not good at responding to my feelings in a way that may suggest Weakness! Or Vulnerablity! Or, you know, Being Normal!

So I called the unit and the end result is that I've cancelled the cycle. Remember Tuesday when Eleanor advised me to continue with the IVF cycle? Yes, well, apparently Eleanor is a LIAR. Today's nurse, Jenni, I think, said some shit about "we'd normally recommend to cancel a cycle like yours, but when patient indicates they wish to continue bla bla BLA".

Seriously people, who the hell am I supposed to trust in that hinky joint? No one seems to be able to get the collective story right. One person says this, the other says something else entirely - and this Eleanor who I thought was so nice yesterday? In hindsight, really isn't. She's a boob staring drone, is what she is, and because I'd been told "Eleanor" was really nice and very compassionate, I saw something that didn't exist in the person I expected to see it in. "Eleanor", as it happens, was the doctor waving the coochie wand. I'd say it was my aching need to rely on someone other than myself during this fucking difficult time that led me to see compassion when all that existed was a brique, business like attitude in someone who really didn;t have it at all.

Anyway, the whole thing seemed so ridiculous, this forking out of exorbitant amounts of cash to chase a dream that, even with two healthy embryos, had the odds against it. Then only reason to go ahead would be for the drugs, man, but that's a helluva lot of money for a fifteen minute float on a cloud. Any fact finding from the retrieval - whether eggs exist and if so, how they responded to a swim in the petri dish with gaggle of enthusiastic sperm - would be ambiguous anyway as even the shittiest cycles can be explained away as being Just One Of Those Things, and as such, is not a diagnosis or a reliable indicator of how the next cycle(s) will proceed.

About the ridiculous: in a stimulated cycle, there's around a seventy percent chance of each follicle containing an egg. Of those eggs, around the same percentage will fertilise, and of those, around the same again will survive long enough to be transferred, and once transferred, have a less that ten percent chance of resulting in a live birth.

With those numbers, you can see that with only two follicles to work with, my odds would have been, well, as miniscule as the odds were of conceiving Daniel. Which, if you're a universe guided, flower child (which some might say I am), might suggest I should go ahead with it anyway because hello! history repeating itself, but even my inner hippy tells me I should cut and run. I've been so conflicted over Tuesday's decision to go ahead, and having actually and for real cancelled this whole shemozzle, I'm so not. I feel quite at peace with what happens next.

The two good sized follicles arent' going to waste though, and as I should be ovulating some time tomorrow, I'm going to effectively get drunk and get nailed by some total stranger in the morning. Or, if you like, be inseminated with donor sperm, hold the booze.

And in keeping with this unit's shenanigans, the nurse didn't suggest converting to an insemination after I cancelled the cycle. That was all my bright idea. She was all "...if you can access sperm..." (which amused me because she was essentially saying "if you can get laid"), and I was all "Uh, there's a whole wad of that shit in your fridge. It wants me and I don't even need to buy it a drink. ".

Chance of conception? Assuming two eggs spring forth, they're around five percent, which while it's half of the odds of an IVF cycle resulting in a pregnancy, is not as crazy as opting for the lesser odds if we were talking fifty percent versus twenty five.

While insemination is a less invasive procedure than IVF, for me, it's a whole lot more so because *squick alert* it's not like I'm not going to feel it when I stand up, you know?

Moving along and rapidly wiping that visual from all our minds....

If you're so inclined, please think of me and maybe even wish me some luck. It'd be much appreciated.




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