IUI - Take #3

Early October 2009 - one month until my 39th birthday and I was fully aware that my personal time frame was closing in fast. If I want to complete my baby making days by my 40th birthday, time was running out. In my fantasy world, I had hoped to get pregnant in Vegas in January and have had the baby by now and it was frustrating, 10 months later, to still be trying. As the words of the song go, you can't always get what you want...

Our cycle this month was pretty straight forward, much the same as last month. The drugs produced two good follicles, in fact, better ones than last month (again, whatever that really means??) and I was inseminated under anaesthetic once again. The difference this time was that I went straight home and straight to bed for two days. Sounds silly but I tried not to stand up unless I had to ie toilet and shower to make sure that the sperm stayed, for want of a better phrase, "up there".

We had moved into our new house by this stage and were getting ready to take a family holiday up the coast in a couple of weeks time. All things going well, I would get a positive result the week before we left and have an enjoyable time away with my family, contemplating the excitement of a new baby. Either that or the disappointment of a negative result which would be accompanied by lots of margaritas and indulgences that I would otherwise not allow my pregnant self.

I was at a party the night before we left, and I was up to day 32 this time. SURELY this was it..SURELY the menstruation monster could not be that cruel to me this month as well and string me along an extra couple of days more than last time. I drank water at the party, stayed away from the cheeses and went to bed hopeful. Alas, it wasn't meant to be. As I got up in the morning to get into my bathing suit ready for the beach, it came on like a flood. I was more devastated and somewhat angry this time. How could this be happening? I have been able to fall pregnant twice before and these last two times, you couldn't get the sperm any closer to the bloody eggs and they still didn't won't to come to the party! In the cryptic analogy I used for my Facebook status, I wrote "well, the boys are on the dance floor, now get up and ask the girls to dance, dammit!". Well these damn boys just don't wanna dance!

I rang the clinic and gave them the news and they must have told Dr M how disappointed I was as she called me to have a chat. Also in the back of my mind was that due to our holiday, I would have to give this month a miss because the crucial times I needed to come in for blood tests would fall on days we were away so that was just one less month to try. Dr M explained to me that it was probably a good idea to have a month off anyway and I had to agree as it is mentally exhausting to accept what you personally deem as your own failures AGAIN. She told me to wait for the next period and that given the dates, I would be able to get one more cycle of IUI in before Christmas but failing that cycle, in the new year we would have to consider our next game plan ie IVF.

As it had never occurred to me that we would have to go down that road, this was another mental challenge for me. There are so many more factors to consider with IVF, including costs, invasive egg retrievals, what to do with unused embryos etc and I really didn't want to obsess about things that hadn't yet happened. I had a lot of time to think on the road trip there and back and decided on the good old French option - cest la vie - what will be, will be. We had a lovely holiday and returned home to our new farm and for the first time, we got to enjoy our new surrounds with the kids and figured we will worry about the next cycle when the time comes.