Round 8- Still Going Strong... ish

It is so hard not to whine about it. I'm two and a half weeks into the injections and they are starting to grow weary. (You know it is when the needles start to hurt when they didn't really bother me that much at first...) It feels like I've had a million blood tests and I've made too many treks across the city to collect my drugs every few days. Not to mention two scans already plus one more looming over the weekend.

C'mon stubbovaries! Pop those follicles!

The nice thing is that one of the doctors doing the scan the other day (and yes, it was a 'he' and yes I've become shameless) acknowledged how patient you gotta be when you do ovulation induction. It was just a simple statement but the fact that he acknowledged that there's a lot of waiting and teenytiny progress-watching was just good to hear.

Then he sent me home and told me to wait more.

Sigh.

Waiting is another intriguing theme of the infertility drama. You wait in general, big-picture, for God's plan to unfold, you wait for answers to mind-twisting and confused questions you have for Him, somedays... you just want to wait for heaven because the loss and pain are hard to bear.

Then you also wait for the more technical things like, for the days to pass until you can try a new cycle again, then you wait for all the drugs to kick in, and you wait for the dreadfully difficult phone call after the two-week-wait. Amongst other things.

Years,
months,
weeks,
days,
hours,
minutes,
seconds.

I've never been better at counting. But what number am I counting to?

I know I'm not the only one waiting. Some are waiting to meet the right man, some are waiting for a good job, others are waiting for healing... in the meantime, how do we still live the best we can?

8th Time

Hello! Having slight issues with my blogging career, can't seem to keep up with my intention to post regularly haha.

Anyway. We are trying again. How I got through the last seven months, I'm not sure. But here we are!

I did a count and this is our eighth time trying with assistance. If I do some quick math, and I like math, so please don't mind me, that's like an average of maybe 8 x 4 = 32 blood tests, and possibly like 8 x 2 = 16 ewwy scans. I mean at least that! Cos' often there's extra tests and things. Of course, it depends on your clinic and the amount of monitoring you get... random tangent I know, but that was just some interesting calculating for me. (And no, I never get used to the prick of the blood tests or the prod of the scans, but what to do!)

Needless to say, I'm scared. Terrified. I am finding this round a different kind of hard, probably because our loss in November was so shattering. I have hope but it is a disturbed kind of hope.

I'm trying to keep myself distracted and being busy does help. However, the two-week-wait will eventually come and I'm dreading that as that is the worst. (I'm thinking to maybe do something a bit different to get through it, like the Twelve Days of Christmas- so fourteen daily events? Or fourteen gifts for myself? Ideas?)

Overall I'm doing surprisingly well. (Thank you for praying for us if you have been.) Thank God for the husband who is doing the injecting for me. The last round was ten months ago and it took us a while to remember how it all works... I can't bring myself to do it- I know some of you do, big ups to you!

This morning, as I came home from my blood test (had to wake up early grrrr), I spotted this spider web outside our house...

Cool huh?

Things like this of God's creation help me to remember His greatness... which I forget very often.

TIME part 1- Waiting

With infertility, one of the things that changes is your perspective on time. For one, your perspective of time in terms of waiting. It is not simply waiting, it is also waiting for what possibly may never come or what may be continually disappointing (kinda like the buses in Auckland haha). Obviously it is not the healthiest thing to be simply obsessed with waiting for a child, but this is also the reality of desiring one and hoping to have kids, and depending on where you're at in your stage of infertility, our perspectives are going to differ.
(There's a poem about waiting- here.)

Anyway, what I was thinking about writing today was the whole idea of distractions and what to do with ourselves NOW so we are not simply focused on 'waiting' in itself.

Hold on. I want to emphasise that it is not my intention to say that we should be all about waiting to get pregnant and pop a baby out. I understand that at the moment I do have a 'goal' to be a mother, but I'm learning it is not for me to 'achieve' or decide. I do believe we can grow to have a bigger-picture perspective than that- and that God intends for more to life than that. All I'm saying is for those of us who are maybe still in the midst of treatment, in between cycles, waiting to see doctors or waiting to make concrete decisions on all these varied issues, I've been trying to figure out how to still live a meaningful and exciting life (haha), despite the 'waiting'.

I say this because practically, the way we look at our months and years are different for now. You know when you're on the infertility/fertility journey when you don't think of weeks and months in terms of normal calendar-type increments, instead you think like this:
- 10 days- roughly at least 10 days between ovulation and when you could be fertile
- 2 weeks- roughly 2 weeks from when you ovulate to when you can find out about pregnancy results
- 4-6-8 weeks- depending on what you're doing, could be 4-6 or 8 weeks for a cycle
- 3 months- if we do get pregnant, this is how long I need to 'set aside' and keep it on the down-low both for medical reasons and before we want to share about it publicly... etc.

and I could list a ton more of these which are more infertility-related like:
- how long till the fertility clinic office hours start?
- how long till the next chat with the nurse?
- how long till the next injection?
- how long it takes provera to work?
- how long it takes climophene to work?
- how long it takes till the next blood test?
- how long till the next appointment with the doctor?
- how long till the next dreaded scan?
- how long will we can start a new cycle?
- how long should we 'break' or rest from treatment?

I'm sure you could come up with some of your own too. Which then impacts the way we plan or schedule our lives- basically you kinda can't. So it becomes this sorta bizarre thing of waiting, but trying not to, but ending up having to anyway. Frustrating, anyone? sigh...