Piglet: On First Name Terms with the NHS

Well yesterday's post (the Secret Weapon, by the way, was about to be revealed as a baby sling.  Regrettably it turned out not to be such a vote-winner later that evening, when Piglet bawled non-stop for ten minutes in it, and I took it off, thinking maybe it was too tight and crushing his little testicles) pretty much sums it up.  You start doing something productive; cooking, eating, drinking a cup of tea, writing this blog, sleeping...and immediately Piglet starts screaming and whatever necessary life task one happens to be engaged in is abandoned, never to be returned to, whilst all one's energy is taken up with trying to halt the bawling.

Last night it got so bad that my mother, who had sworn that she would be sleeping tonight and I would have to cope with Piglet's squealing alone, burst into the room and announced that his persistent crying was not normal and I should phone NHS Direct.  This then led to a 1am dash across Bristol to the only walk-in centre that was still open, in order to get him checked out by a nurse who pronounced him "colicky," which was exactly the diagnosis my mother had already made (I had gone for "acid reflux," but the nurse reassured me that this was not the case).  The good news (other than that Piglet was not, as my mother seemed to have feared, dying) was that when we finally returned, he actually went to sleep.  Hallelujah.

Give that this was the fourth time THIS WEEK that Piglet and I have accessed the services of the NHS in one form or another, I think we can now safely say that for probably the first time ever, I am definitely seeing a good return on all the tax I've paid.

Introducing the world's first Gu Chocolate Pot Baby

Well, the insemination process is complete.

And if I get pregnant, I will be writing to the Daily Mail and proclaiming it a "miracle baby."

I'm sure the Daily Mail has lots to say about people importing sperm from abroad off the internet and using it to self-impregnate.  Hell, they could even illustrate their disgust with a picture of me showing off my "bikini body" on holiday in their sidebar of shame if they wanted to.

Not that I'm going on holiday this year as cannot afford it after buying sperm off internet.

Anyway, the insemination was a bit of a disaster.

I say "a bit" because it was actually 50% a disaster.  I had ordered two straws of semen (I didn't see why you couldn't just order one, but I figured that as I was paying so much for the shipping anyway I may as well go the whole hog) and miraculously managed to get them both out of the nitrogen tank without causing injury to myself or, more importantly, the sperms.  Not that I could really be one hundred per cent sure of the latter as obviously they are microscopic.  And reader, it was EXACTLY how it looks on TV, you know when they get the semen out of the tank in the lab with a big ladle, and all the nitrogen-steam escapes.  AMAZE.  I felt like I was in a laboratory when in fact was in own bedroom.

Anyway, I then thawed all the little sperms out of their slumber and prepared the syringe.  Except that I didn't have a test tube handy (who has a TEST TUBE in their house?) to pour the sperm into, and the entire contents of the first straw ended up on the floor.  Disaster.

Fortunately, I managed to rescue the second straw by using an old "Gu" chocolate pot in lieu of a test tube, to empty the sperm into.  Forget "test tube babies," the "Gu Chocolate Pot Baby" will be a world first.  Maybe I could even get Gu to sponsor the baby's upbringing.  This is assuming that there will be a baby, however, and frankly that is looking unlikely since the content of one straw added up to no less than 0.5mls of semen.

I know they say it only takes one but that is ridiculous.  I have basically just done the turkey baster equivalent of have sex once with a man with a ludicrously low sperm count who hasn't even properly ejaculated.  No amount of lying on the bed with my lower body propped up on a cushion is going to rectify that.

Anyway, now all there is to do is send the nitrogen tank back to Denmark, forget about the whole sorry exercise and pray that all my egg sharing tests are clear so I can have IVF.  I imagine that will be a whole lot less stressful than this exercise has been.  I mean, IVF isn't stressful at all, right?

Sperm Shipment Arrived: Not at all Worthy of Comment. Just a regular day for everyone.

This just arrived at my door.

It was not at all embarrassing.  NOT AT ALL.

For a start, the two concierges downstairs didn't notice anything remotely amiss.  They were not engaging in any kind of conversation with the courier from UPS about "ooh look at this, ooh it needs to be kept cold apparently!" which I could not overhear down the intercom.  Then the courier did not even bat an eyelid whilst handing the package to me, let alone chortle heartily "HERE'S YOUR BODY PARTS!"

Then, while I signed the delivery note, he did not ask any questions at all which might have suggested that this particular delivery was in any way a little bit out of the ordinary and perhaps not your average book or DVD from Amazon, such as; "IS IT ACTUALLY HUMAN THEN?  WHAT IS IT?"

Thanks, Danish sperm bank, for adding that lovely sticker with the words "TISSUES AND CELLS" and that tantalising little footnote about the case containing "human tissue."

I had images of the police turning up on my doorstep, demanding to know why I was importing human body parts and was I in fact a cannibal/mass murderer/both, so in order to avoid this, I ended up blurting out what it was.

"I don't want to say!" I protested, before realising that this made the whole enterprise sound even more dodgy.  "OK it's sperm!"  then added "from a sperm bank" just to clarify in case he thought I had got it through some dodgy means rather than through a recognised commercial enterprise that presumably conforms to international laws.  "For insemination" I then added, in case he wondered what I could possibly be doing with a load of human sperm and did I in fact have a laboratory set up in my flat, where I was running my own secret government cloning laboratory, manufacturing cloned soldiers for some future war when I am going to be a Blofeld-style Bond villain with ambitions to be Queen of the World.

"Oh right," said the courier with interest.  "So do guys come round and do that here then?"

Horrible images flashed through my mind of what that might entail.  Although to be fair, surely this was no worse than inviting round Absolute Bastard to do the deed au natrel, so to speak.

"Er, something like that."

Something which is never going to be done again.  It either works, or it's the IVF.  I am SO not going through this again.

  

Treatment Over. Complete with Simulated Walk of Shame for Authenticity

So the IUI is over, and I am going crazy all over these internets.

The current fear is that the IUI was done too soon, given that it took place less than 24 hours after I had taken the so-called "trigger" shot (I confess I had absolutely no idea how this would work, and lay awake most of the night praying that I wouldn't ovulate too soon and miss the sperm).

And after all that I now find that the "trigger" doesn't trigger bugger all until 36 hours later, by which point the sperm would all have been dead as a doornail (is that the phrase?  Well, as dead as a very dead thing anyway, like, I don't know, a 5000 year old Egyptian mummy or something).

I even had a dream that all the sperm were dead.  So there, it must be true.

Perhaps I have in fact killed the sperm by visualising them dead.  I have a powerful mind you know.  Today I was thinking about Alexandra Burke (God knows why) and an Alexandra Burke song popped up on my ipod.  Now if I can trigger Alexandra Burke to sing in my ears merely by thinking about her, surely I could also be responsible for killing sperm by thinking about them dead.

The actual events surrounding the insemination are somewhat hazy.  Mostly because I was drugged up and don't remember any of it, therefore in the extremely unlikely event of my becoming pregnant, the baby will appear like some sort of miracle virgin conception that I will probably give birth to unexpectedly in a toilet (sadly, another one of my crazy dreams involved me giving birth to twins far too early in the pregnancy, i.e. early enough for them both to still be red and bloody and look like foetuses.  The dream ended badly, with one of my beloved twins dying in my arms, and me then running around desperately trying to stop the other one from dying too.  If that's not a grim premonition then I don't know what is).

Anyway, I went for a scan on Friday afternoon-the first since I'd started on the ol' meds.  Of course all my fears had been realised and I had overstimulated, although frustratingly not by much (frustrating because had I had one less follicle, I wouldn't have had to pay over the odds to get one sucked out).  I had four follicles.  Now that I've read all manner of details about other people's IUIs on the interwebs and all of them seem to know in great detail the precise sizes of their follicles (or "follies" as those in the know, such as myself, call them).  However, I was so worried about how many there were that I paid absolutely no attention whatsover to the size of mine, and now realise that I should have asked.  I'm sure one of them was 22mm, and another one maybe 17mm, both of which sound pretty standard from what I've read.

Anyway, I was offered the stark choice of either abandoning the cycle, which would have been less unpalatable had I had an unsuspecting man available to drag back to my place to try "au natrel" (which I didn't.  Men are so unreliable) and hope for the best (i.e. some babies but preferably not quads.  That would be embarrassing) or paying an extra few quid (450 to be precise) to get one "or two" aspirated.

TWO!  What was the point in taking all those poxy injections if all the eggs were just going to be sucked out?

I chose the latter.  Unfortunately this meant a total cost of £500, the additional fifty coming from the train ticket to Devon that I had purchased with the objective of attending a friend's wedding there the following day.  I also had to come back the following morning for the follicle reduction and the IUI to be performed together.

I went home and had a mournful last glass of wine, hoping that it wouldn't damage the quality of my precious eggs.

The following morning I set off for the clinic early, looking uncannily like someone doing the walk of shame, as I was completely overdressed as I was getting on a train to attend said wedding straight afterwards, but afflicted with a severe lack of make up or hair products as both were in my suitcase having been driven to Devon by a friend the night before in the expectation that I would be joining said suitcase later.

I arrived and was shown into a hospital ward-type room along with two other women who were both having egg collections for IVF.  There was a surgical gown on the bed-type thing which I assumed I was supposed to put on, but no one had actually explained to me whether I should, and the other women looked like they knew what they were doing, so I didn't want to look like a total idiot by putting it on wrong, and had to poke my head round the curtain and ask the nurse.  Embarrassment number one.

Embarrassment number two occurred when one of the other women came out of her egg collection clearly drugged up to the eyeballs and slurring her words whilst gleefully telling the nurse that she had "dreamed" she would have four eggs collected (a bit like I dreamed I had dead sperm and dead twins.  I sense a theme here and it's not a good one).  I decided that I would not be drugged up and embarrassing and when I came out of my follicle reduction and IUI (I reminded them I was having this done by asking lots of questions about how many follicles they were planning to remove, etc, just in case they got confused, thought I was having egg collection too and removed all my eggs.  HORROR) and therefore when I came out of theatre (why do they call it that?) I demanded several times that the nurse reassure me that I did not sound "drugged up," then declared that I loved the drugs and wanted them all the time, especially when travelling on long haul flights.  DOUBLE HORROR.

Anyway, after a bit of lying about drinking cups of tea and wondering where all the sperm were (there didn't look like there were many in the test tube, although I was assured that there were over 9 million) I was finally free to go and hot-footed it to Paddington to jump on a train where astonishingly, I made it to the wedding on time, albeit sans make up.

The rest of the day was spent trying to avoid doing too much dancing (I had been advised to avoid the gym) or drinking (I had been advised not to do that either).  I'm sure I didn't ovulate until later that evening, which I reckon could scupper my chances as surely if I didn't ovulate until, say, midnight, that would have been more than twelve hours after IUI and by then surely all the sperm would have been dead, given that the interwebs say they only live for about six hours once they've been frozen, thawed and washed (a traumatic process for a sperm, one imagines).

Anyway, I am trying not to overthink this (have just spent the last two hours desperately searching for answers on the interwebs) as hopefully the clinic know what they are doing (fleecing me, mostly).

Anyway, I am armed with a pregnancy test and I am determined to use it.  Hopefully not until my period is late (PERIOD PLEASE BE LATE.  TEST PLEASE BE POSITIVE, OR I HAVE WASTED A WHOLE CREDIT CARD THAT I COULD HAVE SPENT ON SHOES!!!!)

Only time will tell.

In the words of the great Eminem, I'm Back I'm on the Rack and Ovulating

Loving the drama.

It is expensive though.

Went for a scan at the clinic today-first one since I started taking the medication a week ago.  It turns out that I have indeed over-responded, and the drugs have miraculously resulted in four follicles (weird, to think that something I just stuck in my stomach each night has led to such fecundity).  So naturally, if they were to go ahead and inseminate, there is the chance that I would end up with quads.

Not quite the ideal scenario.

So they won't go ahead, and I was give the bittersweet choice of cancelling the whole thing, or having some of the follicles aspirated.  The latter is obviously the more expensive, but having come this far I didn't fancy having to start all over again, so aspiration it is.

What is more weird is that the medication has speeded up one's regular bodily rhythms somewhat and despite my having thought I had another week to languish around waiting for my follicles to grow, it now appears that they are quite literally ready to pop, and hence I need to be inseminated tomorrow.

This rapidly put paid to my previous plan of hopping on a train down to Devon tonight for a wedding tomorrow.  O the drama.  And, since one of my friends had driven off to Devon with my suitcase (this was planned, she didn't just steal it) I am now stuck in London sans toothbrush, retainers (AARRGGH.  WHAT IF MY TEETH SUDDENLY SPRING BACK INTO THEIR PRE-BRACE-LIKE STATE I.E. CROOKED AND HIDEOUS??) and make up.  Not to mention the outfit I had been planning to wear to the wedding.

So to cut a long story short, I shall be arriving at the clinic tomorrow in full wedding regalia, ready to be aspirated with the IVF people having egg collection (this will involve being sedated, like, in a SURGICAL GOWN and everything-at least I hope there will be a gown involved.  Don't fancy wearing my nice dress in theatre.  To the theatre, maybe, but not on the operating table) and then jumping off the table post-insemination and onto a train to Devon to attend said wedding.

Good luck to me.  The baby (should I be fortunate enough to be blessed with such) is totes being named after the happy couple (well, one of them.  Probably not both, unless I spawn some weird hermaphrodite).

Good luck to me again.  One can never wish oneself enough good luck.