Welcome back! If you read the last installment of our IVF adventure, you will know that the next stage of our journey is stims...
(Did you miss the last installment? Quick, go back and can read it here.)
You’re probably thinking, what the heck are stims? Stims is short for ovarian stimulation. Usually, a woman will produce one egg every month when they ovulate. Sometimes two but it’s not common. Stims essentially tells your ovaries to go into overdrive and produce loads of eggs at once. You are required to do injections yourself, at home, every day, twice a day for 2 weeks. I remember making such a huge song and dance about these injections, but the needles are so tiny you barely feel them! I felt so silly after I did the first one and was like.... urrrm.. that’s it?
Over the coming 2 weeks, we had to go to our clinic in London 3 times per week for scans and blood tests. We found this part especially grueling as neither of us could get time off work and didn’t want to use all of our holidays on appointments. SO, as a workaround, we had to book our scans for 9 am each time, leaving the house before 6 am to get to London for 9 am, have a 15-minute scan, quickly get blood done and then jump back in the car and dash back to Banbury to be back at work for 11 am, to then work back the time we had both missed. Doing this 3 times per week, whilst on massive doses of hormones took its toll. Especially on me. One day I cried in the car listening to Eminem and later, Busted... I know... what?? The lyrics made me so emotional that I literally sobbed. I also cried in the toilet at work multiple times but I cannot remember why.
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About 10 days into stims, we went for a scan and the doctor looked concerned. He said he could see about 20 good-sized follicles (that’s a lot!) and lots of other smaller ones. He sent me for blood tests and told me not to take any more injections until they called me later that day. I was worried. There is a very serious risk of IVF drugs, called OHSS (ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome). We were warned it was a risk, especially as I have PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) but like most things, we kinda assumed those things happened to OTHER people. Surely it wouldn’t happen to us??
OHSS is basically when your body reacts too strongly to the medication and it makes wayyyyyy too many follicles and becomes out of control. It can be life-threatening.
I went home that day and googled OHSS to death and realized I had some of the early signs. Excessive thirst, stabbing pains in my abdomen, bloating, headaches, etc. The clinic had told me at my scan that my ovaries were no longer the usual size (about the size of a walnut) but were now each the size of a large lemon! No wonder I looked like I had eaten 4 Sunday dinners!
When the call finally came, they told me not to do any more injections as my hormone levels were dangerously high. The doctor later told me that had I continued the medication, there was a distinct possibility I’d have ended up in intensive care. Scary stuff! So I stopped all drugs and did something called ‘IVF coasting’ till the end of the 14 days. With this comes a risk that the more mature follicles might be of no use by the time the eggs are collected.. my incessant googling told me so. I quickly resigned this whole cycle to failure and convinced myself our dream was over. (Of course, it all seemed the more dramatic because I was pumped full of hormones).
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After doing our trigger injection, which told my many follicles to ripen, we ventured back to the clinic for the egg collection. You get sedated for this part, so I don’t remember anything. I was a bit sore after and slept most of the drive home, but otherwise was fine. They collected 20 eggs!!! As you know, we did egg sharing, so we donated 10 of the 20 to another couple, and the remaining 10 were ours. I suddenly felt a pang of worry at this part... We had just given away 10 of our OWN chances to get pregnant. What if when they divided the eggs, they got the good ones and ours didn’t fertilize? A million scenarios run around in your head, inflated by the medication and painkillers and sedation. Not just that, but the eggs were now outside my body... it was now in the hands of the embryologists, strangers, to fertilize them and keep them safe till the fertilized embryo could be put back into my womb 5 days later. I felt suddenly powerless.
Over the coming 4 days, we received calls each day from the laboratory to tell us how our eggs were doing. By day 2, there were only 3 fertilized embryos still standing, a good, an average quality, and excellent quality. But all I could think about was the 7 that hadn’t made it. Wondering, why? What I had done wrong? Were my eggs bad? Despite the reassurances from the clinic, I couldn’t stop worrying and I was on tenterhooks by the phone each day, waiting for their call. What if the next day, none had made it?
On the 5th day, the day of embryo transfer, only one embryo was left. Our little average graded embryo that we named ‘Eggie’. The petri dish that the embryos are stored in, is considered a hostile environment, so the longer they can survive there, the better chance the embryo will have of implanting in your womb. Getting to day 5 is a huge achievement! At this stage, the embryo is called a blastocyst. Here is a picture of our little ‘Eggie’ who was smaller than the size of a pin head!
IVF journey
After the transfer, we had to go home and wait a torturous 2 weeks to see if had worked or not. Have you heard of ‘the two week wait’? It’s awful. I swear I read half of the internet to find out how to aid implantation.. I ate brazil nuts and pineapple core till my lips burned, just so I could assure myself that I had done everything in my power to make this work.
In the last few days of our two week wait, we flew to Cuba for a holiday. We figured, if the cycle didn’t work, we had time alone together to grieve before we had to face people, and if it did work, we would have our last holiday together, just the two of us.
At the airport, as we queued for security etc, I felt something wet in my underwear.. I couldn’t leave the queue to go check, I had to wait to get through to departures. I was convinced my period had arrived and it was all over. But when I finally got to the loo, it wasn’t blood I found, but something else... I didn’t know what it was! (I now know it was called implantation bleeding and is very common – just something nobody talks about).
The whole flight to Cuba I was worried sick, was my period coming? What did it mean? Finally arriving in Cuba late at night, we got to our room and went to bed, exhausted. I woke early and couldn’t stand the waiting anymore. I should have waited 3 more days but I had to know... so I fished one of the many pregnancy tests out of my suitcase and peed on that stick.... within seconds, a first.... then a second line appeared!!! Something I never thought I would see.
After so many years, month after month of negative tests, I didn’t trust my eyes! I woke up my partner and showed him... he didn’t believe it either! So we got our digital test from the suitcase and, low and behold, within a minute, the word ‘pregnant’ appeared on the tiny screen. Our lives changed forever in that one moment. All of the fear, the tears, the heartache and burning lips from eating so much damn pineapple, had all been worth it. My stomach was a pincushion and the 12 hourly progesterone suppositories gave me horrible wind.... but it was worth it all a million times over, for how we felt in that moment. I simply cannot describe it in words.
Here is the final video diary entry from our journey:
Now, our little Eggie is known as Esmé and is 8 years old. She now has 2 younger siblings. One IVF, and one a complete surprise; conceived naturally quite by accident.
Now that our family is complete, our IVF days seem a distant memory. We have been incredibly blessed to have 3 miracle children. 2 miracles of science, and one miracle that we never knew we were capable of making on our own. Life is busy and it’s manic and it’s a blissful kind of chaos. In our kitchen, we have a photo frame with a picture of each of our 2 older children as embryos, with the caption ‘God is Master and Creator of the universe... but sometimes he works with an embryologist.’
Last photo session at Alma’s Home studio of Hayley’s fun bunch! And yes it was amazing Christmas session!
Christmas Family photo session in Dorset