Calculating hope....

So, I am still, waiting, waiting, waiting though I did hear from the Thailand clinic that they are putting their prices up in September *sigh* isn’t that just and IVF story for you – prices going up. As it happens, the prices went up just as JourneyMan and I did our first IVF cycle, though from general comments, these price rises are not as rare as one would hope, it seems that the prices seem to go up fairly regularly in the IVF world – I wish my salary went up as much!! Anyway, enough bitching about money. Not really that much happening in the world of IF for me at the moment – still working on the passports and writing list after list of things that I will need to organise but as Journey Man says “what’s different about me writing lists?” – cheeky, that is what he is!!

So, back to IVF ghosts past. Interestingly enough, I feel very much now that I am in the same position that I was in after the first cycle, AF has gone AWOL and I was in the waiting, waiting, waiting mode. Do you think that at some point you get used to waiting? I definitely haven’t gotten used to it. Anyway, the first cycle was cancelled in November and Christmas came up really quick. I remember going to this Road to Bethlehem thing that they have at a school not far from here. It has become a bit of a tradition with our family and part of our Christmas tradition. I am not religious but I enjoy this because it is really fun and it brings the family together, I love Christmas. I remember thinking to myself that Christmas, ‘next year I will be pregnant or bringing a baby along with me’. I was absolutely certain that it would be so. I looked at the pregnant ladies and mum’s with their children happily thinking that it would be me that next year.

The next year came (last year) and I didn’t really want to go that much. Journey Man didn’t come this year, I can’t remember why and I was not in the spirit of Christmas at all. Normally I have my tree up in the first week of December and love all of the Christmas shows on TV and all of the family traditions that we have. Last year, I was a whole different person. We had had 4 failed cycles, we weren’t going away after Christmas like we normally do, I felt like I had failed in my life. My mum dragged me along to the Road to Bethlehem and mostly I wanted to cry. When I saw a pregnant woman, I averted my eyes. I tried not to see the mother’s happy faces looking at the children’s delight at the play. This time, I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t go (this year) if I wasn’t pregnant or have a baby. Time is running out, days, weeks and months are slipping away to achieve my dream this year.

I am a woman that counts a lot. I like numbers and pretty much am counting things or calculating in my head at all times – yes, I know I am sad. When I am running on the treadmill, I count down the minutes, I calculate how far I have fun and how much further I will go, as I say – I am totally the female (and human) version of The Count. Each year I have found myself calculating – if I get pregnant by March, I will have a baby that year and then March rolls around and I calculate when the baby would be due if I was pregnant in April, May, June etc. I look at success percentages religiously; I calculate the change in percentages that reducing my BMI would make. I calculate when the next cycle is due, and at the moment, I am obsessed with counting when we most likely will be going to Thailand – though I am completely flummoxed at the moment with AF gone AWOL. I calculate when I would be able to tell everyone about the pregnancy. I count down the days until I see the haematologist. I try to calculate the chances of me getting a blood clot when taking the birth control pill and oestrogen (1 in 8 apparently and that goes down with a flight I believe) and then try to calculate how much this would be reduced if I take blood thinners.

Okay, so now I realise why I am a bit tired a lot of the time! I hope, I hope, I hope that soon I will be calculating how many weeks I have until the baby is born, how many weeks we will wait before telling everyone, how much money we will need to babify the house. Mostly, I just hope (and count) and hope (and count).

Thanks for reading my friends – I hope that I haven’t bored the hell out of you with this very strange post!!

Cheers,

Journey Girl