Horrible Itchy Disease

Woman in the last days of pregnancy is not a pretty sight.

I, for example, have just thrown up the sole thing I have eaten today-a fried egg sandwich-and after three hours sleep it's all I can do to move off the sofa in order to search the cupboards for stray crisps.  That is, if I can allow myself to eat anything at all, as I have also convinced myself that I have a terrible liver condition which is slowly poisoning the baby.

It all started last night.  I had been itchy, on and off, for quite a while, but last night's itching was on a whole new level.  My mother had kindly given up her bed and allowed me to sleep in her double while she suffered in the single bed which for reasons of storage has two mattresses and lives in "my" teenage bedroom, but it was all to no avail.  I tossed and turned, scratching away and peering at the internet on my phone in the darkness.  Unfortunately, Dr Internet's diagnosis was that I had something called obstetric cholestasis, and that my baby was going to die.  There was even an accompanying article from the Daily Mail about someone this had Really Happened To, to prove the point.  It took until 3.30am for me to finally get to sleep, only to awake at 6.30, just in time for me to confess my fears to Mother before she went to work.  Mother has now taken to addressing frequent stern grandmotherly rebukes to the baby within, urging him that it is "time to come out now and meet your grandmother."  I'm starting to think that's why he's staying in.  It was all I could do to point, sobbing, to the relevant section in What to Expect When You're Expecting and wail, "Mum, I have this.  And the baby is GOING TO DIE."

And what if the baby did die?  What would I do?  How would the news be shared on Facebook?  How would I go back to work and face all the puzzled teenagers wondering what I was doing there?  How would I put myself through it all again?  And some people actually have to do that.  It's too hideous to contemplate.

Anyway, I have spoken to the midwife this morning and they are going to do some tests today to establish if I do have This Horrible Itchy Disease.  Hopefully the results will be quick.  And at least the baby won't be premature.  Which is pretty much all I have to comfort myself with at this point, given that EVERYONE in my antenatal class (even the ones who weren't due until mid-August) has managed to miraculously pop out their babies already, leaving me as the bottom of the class loser who's a bit slow and holding everyone else up.  All I have to feel smug about is that hopefully, if my baby is born alive as planned, he will be so advanced that he'll probably walk straight out of the womb and off to university, and I'll never have to worry about getting the hang of breastfeeding, weaning or toilet training as he'll pretty much already be a fully formed adult.

I wish the Internet had never been invented.

So it turns out you can have such a thing as too much protein

Had an appointment with the midwife today.  This was the first appointment I have had where things did not go entirely according to plan.

I had, for a start, completely forgotten to do my urine sample, and had to try to squeeze it all out in the delightful conditions of the toilet in the GP's surgery, which has signs pinned up all around it advising people not to make a mess and informing the plebs that should they have an "accident" they should inform reception so that they can "help you clean it up."

I can only imagine the utter humiliation of having to have that conversation in the reception area with ten thousand people queueing up behind you and the assembled masses squeezed into the waiting room like sheep off to slaughter.

Also, is everybody in Wembley suffering from double incontinence?  Why does that sign even need to be up at all?  The last "accident" I had was on the way to gymnastics class in 1987 and even at the tender age I was then I managed not to wreck anything beyond my own leotard.

Anyway, I had the opposite problem as I only managed to squeeze out one tiny drop into the container, an embarrassingly poor effort on my part.  Even so, the midwife was still able to test this and confidently proclaim that it contained protein.

PROTEIN.  I'm not sure I even eat enough protein, let alone have such a surplus of it that it's coming out in my urine.  This can only be A BAD THING.  A very bad thing, according to my knowledgeable searches on the internets, as this could be the start of pre-eclampsia, and that's the thing that killed poor Lady Sybil in Downton Abbey.

OH MY GOD I AM GOING TO DIE LIKE LADY SYBIL!!!!!!!!!!

Well, OK, the midwife did have an alternative explanation for this.  She thought it might be a urine infection.  Not sure if anyone ever died from one of those, but it may mean I need to take antibiotics, which I will doubtless feel guilty about as will be contributing to the global epidemic of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that will one day wipe us out and take over the planet.  I can just imagine it now, me being rudely evicted from my flat by two tiny yet mighty blobs called Mr Bubonic Plague and Miss Small Pox, and them sitting down to enjoy a nice TV dinner on my cosy leather sofa in front of a BBC4 documentary about how these things called humans used to live on Planet Earth and they were really nasty and used to kill each other all the time in these things called Wars back in Ye Olden Days, and how Miss Small Pox herself nearly became extinct but luckily one of these humans had the foresight to keep her alive in captivity in a high security storage facility in America in case she might be needed for one of these Wars; and how Mr Bubonic Plague was briefly forced to eke out a miserable existence living in bins when those naughty humans proliferated.

Anyway, enough about diseases (although can I just say, not too long ago I read an article on the "Top Ten Worst Diseases Ever" and the worst one was something someone apparently had once in the Middle Ages where these insects burrowed inside his body and then multiplied until there were so many of them coming out of him that his servants had to maintain a constant routine of collecting them in buckets and emptying them into the sea until he finally died, eaten alive by insects.  IMAGINE IF THAT ONE CAME BACK).  The main point is I might have a urine infection, and this is kind of annoying.

Also, the baby is still back to back, and I'm not sure what to do about this as all the advice I have read says I should sit in a leaning forward position, but this is impossible as my bump is in the way.

Still, if last night's antenatal class is anything to go by, all this might be the least of my concerns as when the baby is born, apparently my life is not only going to not involve never being able to drink a cup of tea from start to finish ever again, but every day will be one long panic about whether or not I have or am about to accidentally kill the baby.  Yes, apparently the whole flat (or any building in which the baby spends any time) needs to be maintained at a constant temperature of eighteen degrees celsius, the baby cannot under any circumstances have a duvet, it must lie on its back at all times, you cannot fall asleep on the sofa anywhere near it and it's going to spend all day every day crying because you are a terrible parent who doesn't know how to breastfeed, bathe a baby without drowning or scalding it, swaddle it properly or change its nappy, and it wishes it had been born into some nice family with two parents and a car and a proper house instead of to wretched old you.

I cannot wait.

What if I don't love the baby?

Cannot believe it is now getting on for 2pm and, following an inadvisably large breakfast, I have done literally nothing.

Well, nothing except perusal of the internets, searching for such useful advice as "What if I don't love my baby?"

Well, what if I don't?  What if his constant wailing and not sleeping really pisses me off?  What if life as a single mother is miserable?  It probably will be a lot of the time.  I feel like I probably shouldn't be worrying too much about the future, as surely it's better to be mindful and live in the moment, but I can't escape the feeling that I am jumping off a ledge into the unknown, an unknown where there may well be storm clouds gathering and where I am no longer "glowing" with the joys of pregnancy and where people no longer compliment me for merely being able to walk around with relative ease ("You're doing really well-you're not having trouble walking or anything!" as if pregnancy was a debilitating condition-which I suppose, for some unfortunate women-it is).

Anyway, I suppose all I can do is take one step at a time, which at the moment means that everything seems unduly focused on the birth, which is all well and good, but surely the most important part is what happens after that, when I am lumbered with a tiny mewling creature who I have to try not to accidentally kill, and who is going to be around for THE REST OF MY LIFE.  Aargh!

Bring Me The WIne

God I could murder some wine.

What is a lovely two week break away from work without wine?  The most decadent treat I can now give myself is a decaf latte.  Literally cannot think about life stretching out into the future with no wine.

Still, things could be worse.  According to the Internets, I am lucky that I haven't already given birth to a preterm infant and am not now sat in a neonatal unit looking into an incubator wondering whether my child will survive.

Or maybe I've just been googling "27 weeks pregnant" too many times and looking at the pictures that come up.

Also, on the Internets, everyone seems to be having some sort of drama.  Even on Fertility Friends (don't ask) everyone is complaining about having to go to hospital every five minutes because of bleeding, or being in excruciating pain with unpleasant conditions with names like "sympathetic pubis dysfunction," or something like that.  From what I can work out, this condition, the name of which I have almost certainly got wrong, is basically another name for "loads of pain around the pelvic area."  I feel as though it is some sort of miracle that so far (touch wood) I have not suffered with any of these terrible afflictions.  Still, there is plenty of time for all of this and worse to happen over the next thirteen weeks.

Speaking of which, the baby isn't moving much right at this minute.  Cue thoughts of imminent disaster.

Also, having children seems like quite hard work, even when one's children are pretty much the most charming and well behaved specimens that one could meet.  I cannot imagine the difficulty of having to cope with a badly behaved or disabled child, for example.  There will be no more frivolous buying of shoes, that's for sure.  No more impromptu trips to American Apparel.  No more dates with anyone ever (OK maybe that's not such a bad thing.  Am thoroughly sick of dating and all associated activities.  Such as trawling internet dating sites and talking about disastrous dates with friends.  Obviously not sick of the actual shagging.  Except when with reprobates, which usually is, so maybe sick of that as well.  Thank God I got it all out of my system during my wild youth).

Anyway, enough of this morose worrying.  Going to lie down and see if I can feel the baby moving.  I have discovered that this is an activity which always cheers me up, mainly as it reminds me that there is actually someone in there.  Bizarrely, I am never alone.  WEIRD.

'Twas the night before the scan and all through the house.....I am stressing out, googling like a hyperactive louse

First scan tomorrow and I am feeling completely calm and zen-like about this.

In other words I have spent the entire day sat in my flat googling the following search terms:
Period pains 12 weeks pregnant (need to know if this is normal)
12 weeks 6 days pregnant stomach flat (and is this normal?)
Chances of missed miscarriage at 12 week scan (it always pays to be prepared for the worst)
Chances of missed miscarriage after 12 weeks
Lower back pain in early pregnancy (surely this is a sign that things have gone awry?)
How do I know if my foetus is still alive

Strangely, none of this googling seems to be able to give me a definite answer to any of these pressing questions, and thus I have come to the conclusion that the internet should never have been invented, as it clearly serves no purpose beyond wasting one's precious time which could have been better spent doing something important, like dancing around the room making myself feel sick or modelling different outfits around the house to see how non-existent my baby bump looks in each one.

Also, in my frantic googling, I have managed to read many scientific articles about the purpose of the nuchal scan, so now when I go to the hospital, not only will the myriad of different fears include the possibility that the baby is dead or never existed at all and is in fact a figment of my clearly over-active imagination, but that the baby has one of the many different "trisomies" or other horrific disabilities the scan is designed to reveal.  What if, for example, I see the little thing on the screen, only to discover that it has a patch of fluid behind its neck, or lacks a nasal bone?  Both strong indicators of Down's syndrome, apparently, and as I am so old surely my risk is greatly increased?  Why oh why did I not have children in my teens?  WHY?  Why didn't I just settle down with the first reasonable person who was interested and start popping them out?  Now I am doomed!

OK so when I look at some of the people I was interested in in my teens as they are now the thought of settling down with someone who was destined to become, twenty years later, an obese chav with an oddly shaped head and eyes that don't appear to line up properly with each other might make that seem like the great juvenile folly that it would have been, but you get my point.  And anyway, it's hardly as if my babyfather is the catch of the century given that I have technically never met him and he may well be awful.

Oh God what if Babyfather IS an obese chav?  I mean, it's not like I would know.   OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE???!!!

I can't think about this whole situation anymore.  My brain is about to explode.  Need to be mindful.  Mindfulness, mindfulness.  Concentrate on the moment.  Ooh I think Countryfile's on now.  Going to watch that and not think about any of this awfulness.

Cruel and Unusual Symptoms of Pregnancy

I'm back!  Already!  After just one day!

Obviously this means that one of my hundreds of New Year's Resolutions is to write more often.

The other main one is to clean the flat but I still haven't done that. I'm using morning sickness as an excuse, especially since I threw up three times this morning and was feeling too ropey even to go to Topshop, so ended staying in all day, apart from one ill-fated trip to Asda, which turned out to be closed.

Along with the sickness, this morning I noticed a new and alarming Disgusting Pregnancy Symptom.

I have developed weird brown spots on my nipples.

AAAAAARRRRGHHHH!!!!!

Obviously this required instant googling to check that it wasn't breast cancer.  Kylie wasn't much older than me when she had breast cancer was she?  How old was she?  God I should know this, as a proud owner of the Kylie Annual 1988.

Also, whatever happened to annuals?  Do the youngsters still get them for Christmas every year?  Is there, in fact, such a thing as the One Direction Annual 2014, for example?  I'm going back on the Google to check.

There is, look!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Direction-Official-Annual-Annuals/dp/0007521006

My faith in humanity is restored.

Oh God now I have "One Direction Annual 2014" stored in the saved searches on my computer.  Does this make me a suspected peodophile?  The spelling of that last word there might be wrong, but I am not checking that on the Google.  Definitely not.

Anyway, it's 7.30pm now so I might go to bed soon.  There's nothing on TV to keep me awake, as with it being New Year's Day and all, all the TV presenters and other people involved in putting programmes on the television have got the day off, so all they are showing is films.  Old films I've seen a million times, like the Karate Kid and Big, but not, it would seem, Brilliant Old Films that one would welcome watching again for the millionth time, like Grease 2 or Dirty Dancing.  The other day I thought I had stumbed across Short Circuit but it turned out to be a disappointing modern lookalike called Wall E.  When the baby is born, I will make sure it watches all the old classics.  Especially Grease 2.  Everyone needs a good strong feminist message like "I ain't nobody's trophy."

Anyway, now I am totally off the point.  I was supposed to be talking about the brown patches on my areolas.

What, nobody wants to hear about that?  Well, I'll be off then.

Knicker Watch Officially Starts Here

Today is a momentous day.  One that will go down in the history books.  Or at least the annals of my life.

I hope.

Yes, today is the day I got a faint line on a cheap pregnancy test from Wilkinson's.  And a day before Official Test Date at that.

I celebrated in hedonistic style, dancing (walking.  Didn't want to dislodge the blastocyst) around the room for a good hour, mostly to I Need a Hero by Bonnie Tyler and a selection of the songs from Grease 2.  Then off to Pret for a celebratory breakfast of superfood salad and peppermint tea (I do hope peppermint tea is safe for blastocysts).

I am a bit scared, of course.  Correction:  I am TERRIFIED.  Have to keep resisting the urge to stand on balcony with a megaphone bellowing the news to the whole of London whilst displaying the urine-soaked pregnancy test triumphantly as though it were the FA Cup as, after all, it may be (lowers voice to a whisper in case Blastocyst hears and starts getting ideas) a chemical pregnancy.

I am also a bit worried about this whole "positive thinking/visualisation" thing.  I mean, if you can make your womb lining grow by visualising it as a big fluffy duvet, as my acupuncturist suggested that you could, does this mean that you can also make your embryo die by imagining your period starting and ruining the whole thing?  If this is the case then Little Blastocyst is in big trouble, because I am visualising blood every time I go within a mile of a toilet, and since one is never more than one mile from a toilet unless travelling through remote desert lands on the back of a camel, this is quite clearly all the time.

And with that, I am off to the toilet.  Just checking, of course.

Ten Things I Have Learned About IVF

1.) I am thinking of looking for a role in the circus as the Astonishing Human Pin Cushion.  

2.) Everyone is telling me what to eat: Drink milk, eat eggs, don't eat cheese, eat tofu, don't eat tofu, sugar is bad for the eggs.  It's enough to drive anyone to a life of cupcakes and wine.

3.) The sole reason that most people who have IVF are married is so that there is someone to remind you that you are actually mental when you are hopping around the bedroom terrified that you have overdosed on Menopur and are going to drop dead right there and shouldn't you be phoning an ambulance right now, or at least NHS Direct?

4.) The best thing about work is having other people there to tell you that you are actually mental when you brandish a syringe at them, yelling, "Do you think I took the right dose?  I took THIS MUCH!"

5.) The most important question facing the world right now is this: If Menopur is made of "the urine of menopausal women," then who is donating their wee to science for this to happen?  Are people in lab coats secretly raiding the cisterns of the over 50s?

6.) I am seriously thinking about starting a business selling my mother's urine to make IVF drugs.  I could be the Walter White of fertility medicine.  

7.) The best thing about downregulation is the lack of bloating.  If this is the shape of what's to come in my menopausal years, then I will be still wearing crop tops in my sixties.  This is BRILLIANT.

8.) After getting off lightly with no depression or mood swings throughout downregulation, things have  taken a sudden turn for the worst during the stims phase.  Today I almost cried at the News.  While they were talking about a teachers' strike.  During which I got A DAY OFF WORK.

9.) I have started believing in acupuncture to promote fertility.  And visualisation.  And foods that look like soggy grass.  And the power of wearing orange.  

10.) Drinking coffee and eating Nutella have started to seem like the sort of terrible vices that can only be cured by attending a 60 day detox programme at a rehab centre in Arizona and wearing a sensor that immediately administers an electric shock when going within one hundred yards of Costa Coffee.

Why can't it just all be easy, like in the Bible?

AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHH

I am sat on my bed with a copy of The Baby-Making Bible next to me.  It all seems a lot more complicated than it is in the real Bible, where men just have to "know" their wives, and "go into" them.  Although I suppose that Abraham and Sarah had difficulty conceiving, and had no success until they reached the grand old age of ninety-nine, which beats even the most outlandish Wikipedia stories about OAPs conceiving back in the 1740s.

And there are several stories about women (including the unfortunate Sarah) having to put up with their husbands going off with comely young concubines to continue the family name.

And the Virgin Mary's cousin Elizabeth struggled a bit.

And the Virgin Mary herself conceived in a somewhat unlikely manner, being a virgin and all that.

OK the Bible is probably the greatest book ever written about infertility.

But it doesn't tell you an awful lot about how to conceive, except that it is something that only The Lord  can make happen, which isn't very useful.

Or you could just go and get your widowed father roaring drunk in a cave, and "lie with him" (THIS HAPPENS KIDS.  IN THE BIBLE).

Anyway, The Baby-Making Bible isn't so much fun (not that I am suggesting that *see above* is fun).  It's just about how people should have acupuncture, and not drink too much water and stuff.  Yes, not drink too much water.  It actually goes against all known medical advice.  I have continued to drink water, and I have also been augmenting it with a daily shot of "Royal Jelly," which is quite literally the food of Queens.

Queen Bees, that is.  Yes, I eat the same stuff that Queen Bees eat.  And I am like, a million times their size.  This is astonishing.  Anyway, Queen Bees lay LOADS of eggs, enough to populate an entire hive; therefore it stands to reason that eating their food means that I too will lay LOADS of eggs.

And this is very important as I am going to be having IVF.

YYYYYEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!

I have been accepted as an egg sharer.  This means that I do not have any of the following:
HIV
Syphilis
Gonorrhea
Chlamydia
Any of the ten million varieties of Hepatitis
Cystic fibrosis
Dodgy chromosomes

I have so few diseases, I am even CMV negative, and eighty per cent of the population have that, whatever it is.  The only significance of that fact is that it limits the choice of sperm, as one can-in bizarre twist of weirdness as clearly in Real Life, when choosing a partner on Match.com, or in the dim light of a ropey club with sticky carpets at 2am, one always questions the likelihood of one's prospective partner having a very common virus that almost everyone has anyway-only choose sperm from a CMV negative donor if one is CMV negative.  This inevitably limits the choice of available sperm.

In fact, it limits it so severely that when one narrows the selection down to only "UK-compliant, ID-disclosure" donors, one ends up with a choice of barely sixteen men.

Sixteen.  IN THE WORLD.

OK "in the world" is a slight exaggeration, when what is actually meant here is "in a sperm bank in America."

You can imagine my delight when I saw their photos (yes, photos.  AMAZING) and discovered one who was "fit."

I was so happy that I ran home from work early just so that I could call America before my beloved Chosen One sold out, only to find that it was "Labor Day" (please note inverted commas.  I know this is not the correct spelling of "labour."  I am merely being authentically American.  Also, no pun intended) and the sperm bank was closed.  Horror.  This meant that I had to make the Fateful Call the following day, from work, from my mobile, whilst praying that no one walked in while I was on the phone.

To my relief and delight, the donor-who I had, in my head, started calling "The One"-was still in stock, and I purchased him-or rather a vial of him-immediately.  Totes amaze, as they would say in Essex.

However, all was not rosy for long, as I then decided to have a little look at him on the website again, just so that I could admire my great judgement in choosing him.  Then I saw the other nine photos.  AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH.  He is not as fit as I thought!  This is a tragedy.  I am going to have an ugly baby with a grade point average of 3.2.  And I don't even know what a grade point average is!  And he is doing a degree in something which sounds dangerously like "mickey mouse studies of things that aren't really things."  At a college which isn't Harvard or Yale!  And none of his siblings went to university!  And he places baseball!  BASEBALL for God's sake.  It's like ROUNDERS!  And he was a ten pound baby!  Not as in cost ten pounds (I wish.  No comment on the cost of all this), as in weighs ten pounds!  OH MY GOD I AM GOING TO HAVE A HUGE BABY WHO'S GOING TO BE EVEN BIGGER AS WILL POP OUT WEARING BASEBALL CAP.

Pass me the smelling salts.

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.

The Curse of the Missing Email

Aargh.

Haven't been able to sort out the sperm donor admin (yes, there is "admin") as you need to print off the donor information and sign it and send it back to the clinic.

God this is complicated.

So as I don't have a printer I opted to send the email order to my work email account so I could pillage the facilities in secret and print out my order form.

The only problem was, the email DISAPPEARED.

As in, literally vanished.  INTO THE ETHER.

Presumably it is still floating around somewhere in Cyberspace.  Wherever it is, it is certainly not in my work emails, despite my two (TWO!) attempts to send it.

My fear was palpable.  What if I had sent it to the wrong person?  It could have literally gone ANYWHERE.  One hardly needs to spell out what a disaster this might have been.  I even asked one of the IT technicians if he had any idea what could have happened, which would have raised supicions in itself as the minute he offered to try and find it for me, I backed away, waving my hands as if surrendering to some imaginary army and shouting "No!  No!  It's OK!  It doesn't matter!" whilst walking backwards at top speed.

As an alternative to email, I have been forced to use a USB stick.  Now all I need to remember is to delete the offending item from said USB stick before I use that very same instrument in assembly to deliver the end of term powerpoint.  Imagine the horror if I accidentally flashed up an order form for a load of sperm.

On second thoughts, don't.  Is too hideous to contemplate.  I am going to continue trying to track down that missing email.

Hair dye: hated by right wing American conservatives everywhere.

So I decided to do something productive today.

In fact, I am contractually obliged; i.e. by my new year's resolutions, that Contract of Doom I have of course made with myself yet again this year, despite the fact that the previous twenty years' (TWENTY YEARS!!!!!!  HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?) vague promises to "be more positive" have so far yielded nothing but an ever-deepening well of cynicism to do at least one productive, life-enriching thing each day.  There are some exceptions to this.  Work, for example, doesn't count.  Not even if you do it at home.  Nor does loading and unloading the dishwasher, although other varieties of housework obviously do, since they need to be performed less frequently-at least in the den of filth that passes as my home-and have a less immediately obvious expediency.  For example the dishwasher needs to be emptied in order for me to re-use the dishes that are housed within, whereas I can still sleep in my bed even if the sheets haven't been changed for six months.

Anyway, as well as going to work and unloading and reloading the dishwasher, I decided to dye my hair.

This was mostly an excuse not to go to the gym.

The gym also counts as a "productive thing" but I am as yet udecided about whether it could also be classed as "life-enriching," unlike dyeing one's hair, which is of course a sublime experience.

At least my grey hairs will be covered.

I hope.  That was the aim anyway.  I shall be much affronted if I spend the next half an hour on my knees on the cold, hard bathroom floor rinsing rancid brown liquid from my hair, colouring the entire bathroom walls in the process and more importantly, missing the whole of Miranda, only to find that I am left with the same four hundred or so stubborn wiry bright white hairs sticking out of my head at odd angles.

My hair can stick out at odd angles all it likes, as long as it isn't grey.

Righty ho, just returned from lengthy sojourn crouched over bathtub.  Ten minutes left of Miranda.  Not bad going.  No crippling neck pain either.  I am liking this Garnier stuff.  It remains to be seen if the Evil Greys have been banished forever.  Well, they always say "forever" on these hair dye things, don't they?  Or at least they imply it with their "permanent" moniker.  Nothing is permanent.  All life is impermenent.  And in Hair Dye Parlance, "permanent" just about covers two months.

Still, I am hoping that those two months will buy me some brown-haired time well into the first trimester of my phantom pregnancy with my would-be baby that is due to start in about four days' time.  It may help you to know that I am conveniently calculating pregnancy the same way a staunch American conservative would, not from conception or even the maturation of the egg, but from the beginning of the development of the dominant follicle.  In other words, day one of my period.  Yes this is too much information, but believe me you are going to hear a lot worse over the next few months I guarantee it.  Or at least I virtually guarantee it.  Leaving a bit for margin of error-e.g. what if the test results I'm waiting on before I can go ahead with treatment show that I have some hideous disease, like one of the many brands of hepatitis, or worse, and this turns into an "oh no I have a horrible disease" blog.  That would be truly awful.

Anyway, I digress.  Life is too short to be worrying about whether I have any of the many brands of hepatitis.  I have hair to dye.

And The Internet isn't sure if that's safe in pregnancy.

In fact, such is my state of absolute paranoia that I have even pondered among my many musings on the state of my egg cells, whether hair dye might not only *possibly* be unsafe during those tortuous days of the first trimester, when virtually nothing appears to be certified safe and one may as well be wrapped in organic cotton wool and placed in a warm oxygen chamber for three months with a drip feed of folic acid, but even in the stages the precede it.  The stages that I desperately hope I am currently in, e.g. those precious few months pre-conception when my body is a temple to the god of the maturing egg.

What if hair dye is the cause of all chromosonal abnormalities in human egg cells?  What if declining egg quality in older women is directly proportional to number of grey hairs and consequently amount of dye used trying to disguise them?  WHAT IF GARNIER NUTRISSE IS A FANCY FRENCH NAME FOR CONTRACEPTIVE????  Any of these things could be true!

I bet the US political and religious right have something to say about this.  Probably something like "Evil Beautifier of the Female Head Belies Deadly Secret" along with some pictures of aborted foetuses.

This is all too much to bear.  I'm off to eat Nutella out of the jar to make myself feel better.

OH NO NUTS AREN'T ALLOWED EITHER.  God preserve us.