Weekend holes

Wow. Feeling strong and good at the moment. Am on the pill as the first stage of treatment and it is making me feel a bit wobbly and emotional at times but am aware about this so it is ok.

Things are, I think, a lot better with H. We had a huge fight at the weekend because he wants to go to Houston for two weeks for work. I did not have a problem with this but he thought I did and to cut a long story short we both exploded in misconceptions about each other and it was all horrible for a while.

But we did manage to scream a few things out into the open as a result. I have been very hurt by lots of the rage he has screamed at me over the past few months and now I have told him. He also has been able to reassure me I am not alone in this IVF journey and he will be there if I need him to be. We are going to buy the drugs together tonight. For some reason I have been delaying and putting off buying them so far by myself. This has made me feel strong and good and supported again.

I can't imagine anything more testing to a relationship than infertility. It hits us at the core of everything. His infertility made him feel less like a man. He called himself a Jaffa - seedless fruit. I suppose mine has also made me feel me less like a real woman, or without the role and sense of purpose of a real woman which I long for. Nothing else seemed to matter to me for much of the past 2 years or so except the pursuit of fertility treatments. I suppose that made him feel that he didn't matter.

Most importantly, the lack of child leaves this gaping hole in our daily lives and makes us feel less of a family. Weekends can be very hard. It is as if we don't really know what to do with our time. It is no accident that we always argue at weekend time then things are lovely during the week.

Switch to positive?

An old friend is also going through IVF at the moment and has been having a hard time coming to terms with it. She said she had been feeling overwhelmingly negative and hopeless about it all.

She dislikes the idea of the drugs - she doesn't normally even do Neurofen. Plus she has been feeling it won't work, and if it does she will miscarry, and if even this doesn't happen the baby will be born with Downs.

She told all this to the nurse who suggested she had nothing to lose by switching these thoughts around to positive ones.

My friend said wasn't that just setting herself up for a fall?

The nurse said if there was a fall it would hurt no matter what and she would have to deal with it if it happened. She had nothing to lose by being positive in the meantime.

Thyroid and AMH despair

I just had an appointment with a thyroid specialist, referred to by our fertility specialist. He doesn't think I have a thyroid problem. This is a good thing, but has made me sad.

I was so bouyant going up to London to see him. So hopeful. I even wore my sunny yellow cardigan and bought a colourful new bag. I was on the road to IVF again. It was exciting.

Those horrible months when it looked like H was going to pull away from it all were over. He had come around, at least for this cycle. It seemed he had just been afraid. It was all on again.

But now it is me who is afraid. Going through those papers again, explaining to the new guy our story, I remembered how bleak it is.

My AMH should be higher than 5, yet it is consistently 0.7. This is extraordinarily low and means I have hardly any eggs, or good eggs, am not sure which. I also have high FSH which means the same thing.

It is not something anyone has an explanation for. Or knows how to treat.

How I long for twisted fallopian tubes. Or cysts. Or anything clear cut and graspable. I especially long for us to be back to when they thought all that was wrong with us was H's low sperm count.

But what I have seems unfixable, a mystery. The NHS won't touch us. Not even the local private clinic held out much hope. We are going to the last chance saloon in London, the specialists in hopeless causes.

I went to this doctor because one of the tests I did with one of the people I have seen showed I have some high thyroid anti-bodies. This can sometimes have repercussions for fertility and mean the embryo doesn't 'stick' to the lining of the womb. This is easy to treat.

I suppose I had hoped he was going to say: "That's what it is," and there would have been an easy treatment. I even read something which said IVF chances increased to 50% with this treatment.

But my high antibodies are the ones which don't matter. The specialist said there is nothing wrong with me in that way at all.

Even if there had been, he said, it would have been a whole new issue, not connected to the AMH/FSH. It would not explain it, or suddenly make it treatable, but be an added thing which is wrong. We can obviously do without that, so it is good that my anti-bodies are the wrong ones.

Yet suddenly I feel like H, that this is all futile. Just when I persuaded him otherwise. I can't tell him. And nobody else will understand.

Confessions of a Tempee

In my current confusion I have found myself temping almost full time.

I haven't completely squashed ideas of freelancing or redirecting into another career but I have to take one step at a time and do what is right for the moment.

Obviously the money ain't great, and there are moments when I find myself stuffing envelopes and wondering how this came about. But on the whole I am loving it. Loving the freedom. Loving the 9-5. Loving the walking home unburdened at the end of the day, watching office politics from a distance.

Most of all I am loving dipping into lives I didn't know existed. Finding the world ripe with eccentricity. My current 'boss' in the marketing department of a snack food re-saler is Alan Partridge. Not a bad man, but definitely existing via a reality all of his own.

On my first day he self-importantly took me into a meeting room to tell me all about the company. He then got into a battle with his loud, rumbling stomach, which kept on interrupting his speech. Rather than smile at the situation, or even ignore it - he got angry. At every rumble he gave a dirty look downwards, shifting furiously in his chair. There was even some clearing of the throat to communicate his displeasure, as daggers flew from his eyes. I tried to smile reassuringly, but to no avail.

In the end he stabbed his hand into a box in the corner (presumably stock supposed to be sent somewhere) and pulled out a chocolate bar which he proceeded to eat.

Later in the day I heard him on the phone to someone responsible for a cigarette advert. "We need to move this line to the bottom somewhere," he said. "The one that says smoking can seriously damage blah blah blah. It is a bit negative, don't you think?"

Kindness of a Stranger

The last few months have been resplendent with tears. I still do not understand it all but it seems we are moving forward now with a few scars.

There have been many days of walking and crying alone. Turning up to friends doorsteps in that state stopped being helpful. It was a state of mind I needed to deal with on my own. Save seeing friends for when I wanted to have fun or chats or be in life again. I can maybe talk about some of the tears in retrospect but I don't want to be seen as the forever crying friend, or be the forever crying friend.

There was one stranger who entered my solo space, though, who I will never forget.

After a yoga class, on the way to see a friend for coffee, I walked down by the sea. Something about the wild waves, twinkling sun and families having picnics made this wave of anguish overcome me from nowhere. I was crippled up, and found myself hunched up on a doorstep not knowing how to stop it, how to move on.

She came up and said "breathe this!". She held out a small silver perfume bottle. "Breathe deeply," she said, "have a squirt of this."

Puzzled, I nodded. She squirted, I breathed. I cried. It was all repeated. I may or may not have smiled thank-you. She said, "Go down on the beach and throw stones into the water. Really throw them. Really hard."

I staggered down. Felt a bit of a fool. But threw those stones. And felt calmer.

I don't know if she saw me.

I had a nice, normal chat with my friend.