The Saga of Becoming Fruitful

Posts Tagged ‘infertility’

National Infertility Awareness Week

Oct 19-25, 2008 is the National Infertility Awareness Week. Most, if not all, people who visit this blog are struggling or have struggled through infertility, and thus we are the best spokespeople for infertility and raising awareness to it.

Some of us are pretty open about the process we are going through in our quest for a baby - we talk and write about it to friends and family and we let them know of our blogs so that they can visit it on their own conveniences.

Some of us are going through this journey to baby secretly, with a lot of friends and relatives not aware of what we have to go through.

Some of us are somewhat in the middle. I think I fall under this category. I answer to queries about us having children but most of the time though, I do not volunteer information about our “saga of becoming fruitful”.

I have an answer to people who really want to know what is going on and who I trust to hold those answers confidentially. I also try to weigh how much I share since not everyone is interested in the whole nine yards.

I have a different answer to people who I am not comfortable with - those who think they know it all on how to make babies, those whose personalities treat stuff lightly or those who just want to know but cannot hold their tongues (use the information to share to others who have no business of knowing).

I (We) have spent a lot of time culling information about our diagnosis, treatments and of our fellow infertiles’ experiences. Maybe even too much information, TMI in infertili-tese. We can probably teach lessons on this now.

My simple mind tells me that there are 4 types of people we are interacting with in our everyday infertile lives:
1. Tactful people who know about infertility - We like them because they “understand”.
2. Tactful people who do not know about infertility - Potentially, these are the people who are open to be educated more about infertility and become our friends, allies and advocates.
3. Tactless people who know about infertility - These ones I would avoid because they do not have a compassionate heart for our sufferings (that they already know of).
4. Tactless people who do not know about infertility - They may still have hope

So there really is an opportunity and value in having an Infertility Awareness Week (Why not a month?) and making people more aware about infertility…

So what am I going to do in connection with National Infertility Awareness Week? Well, I just wrote a piece in my personal blog about it in the hopes that friends and family become more aware of this thing called infertility.

How about you? How are you going to make the people in your circle of influence more aware of infertility?

Consultation re IVF - REFRAMING (Part 1)

We had our consult with DrH and she was very accomodating. She answered all our questions - I didn’t necessarily like all her responses, but it is good that she didn’t sugar coat it. She said that she would have discussed most of the topics anyway but appreciated the questions I sent in because it gave her an idea where we were coming from.

She said that she wished there were more couples who were more concerned on what would be done to their embryo.  She just gave me some more additional things to dig more on too…

Anyway, I wrote all that I could remember from our consult … yes I forgot the recorder… and writing it down resulted into a very long post, so I am broke it into 3 parts.

OUR INFERTILITY FACTORS
The factors we are facing are Advanced maternal age, PCOS/Anovulation and Low sperm morphology:
- PCOS/Anovulation can be “tricked” by controlled ovarian hyperstimulation (COH).
- Low sperm morphology effect would be minimized with IVF.
- So, the only factor that we cannot do anything about is the advanced maternal age - that determines the egg quality. (I got the usual talk about “women are born with all the eggs for their whole lifetime. As the woman ages, the quality of the eggs “deteriorate”.” In essence, my eggs are old… my raw materials have deteriorated.

Re my 3.5 FSH - DrH said that what it means is that for a 40-year old woman, that was good. However, it still does not compare to a 25-year old woman’s eggs who tests as 3.5 FSH. My eggs are still 15 years older!

WHAT OUR IVF WOULD LOOK LIKE
Since I am a good responder to the gonadotropin, DrH expects to be able to harvest a lot of eggs if I undergo COH in preparation for IVF.  However, she said that fertilization and viability of embryos from eggs of someone my age may not be very good, so just fertilizing a few eggs will not make sense and that the procedure will not be worth it. She also recommends to transfer back 3-4 embryos since the implantation of embryos for someone of my age may not be very good as well. (So that means the “fate” of embryos that are not transferred is a real key question.)

As for typical reasons for IVF cancellation, DrH mentioned 3:
- low stimulation
- overstimulation (typically for younger women)
- ovulated early (or early LH surge)

What to expect with Lupron?
- Before starting, ultrasound to make sure there are no cysts
- Start Lupron. Attend IVF Orientation
- Expect period
- Baseline ultrasound

DrH said that the Follistim dosage she would use for IVF would be at the same level as our 1st Follistim stimulation (that was cancelled) which showed I was a good responder. So instead of the $3K medicine cost estimate, she thinks I would only be using $1.5K worth of meds.

Progesterone is going to be intramuscular (IM) injection…on the butt? on the thigh???. (I was hoping it was just suppository even if it was a bit messier.) Uuuggghhh…

Now, Where to Begin this Blog?

As of today, I am in the middle of my first injectable cycle with my new doctor. (This is actually by third injectable cycle, all in all, considering the 2 cycles with my previous doctor.) So, I am unsure where and how to begin this infertility blog.

I’m thinking about first backtracking as early as the first infertility diagnosis procedures with my new doctor so that this blog makes chronological sense. That means, I will be posting recent history first before current events. I wonder though if and when I will ever get current? (Why didn’t I start blogging about our infertility journey earlier??? Good question I ask myself a couple of times already.)

I’m thinking also of just starting with current events right now and then just intersperse the recent history as I have time to do that in retrospect. It will feel like a bad movie with a lot of flashbacks… but it will be easier for me.

Decisions, decisions…

Aha!!! I thought of something that will have the best of both worlds - starting current while having recent history still posted chronologically.
- I will be starting with current events (using current date as the publishing/posting date).
- I will post recent history, as I am able to write (using previous dates as the publishing/posting date)

As for my pre-new doctor saga, I will just create a separate page in this infertility blog in addition to this Home page (tabs on the top) to capture it. I will be revising them as I feel inspired.

BTW, I know I will have to eventually quit calling her my “new” doctor. For now though, let’s call her that - my new doctor.

Being Fruitful

I was thinking about what the blog title of my infertility journey was going to be instead of what I’ve thought through earlier. A verse in the bible entered my mind - something about God telling Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply”.

I opened www.biblegateway.com and used “multiply” as the search word. The search results showed verses starting with Genesis 9 which was already about Noah. I thought, hmmm, all this time did I mistakenly attribute this phrase as being spoken to Adam and Eve?

So I did another search and used “be fruitful” as the search phrase. And lo and behold, God indeed spoke this to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1!

I meant the blog title to reflect God’s direction to be physiologically fruitful (have children) as in the context of Genesis 1:8 and Genesis 9:1. However as I was thinking more about it, I realized that being fruitful is more than just trying to conceive, getting pregnant and bearing children.

Even in the midst of the infertility journey, surely there is fruitfulness for a woman. So although, the emphasis of this blog is on being fruitful - the baby kind - I would be writing about fruitfulness of a different kind from time to time.

Ancient and Trying

Originally, I wanted to call this blog “ancient and trying” but after bouncing off the idea with my husband, he cringed a bit. Not sure if it was the idea that his wife (moi!) was already 40 and no longer the “young” woman she married… or maybe he thought that “ancient and trying” is not a very graceful blog title. Whatever…

So we brainstormed a bit and got to “40 and trying” which sounded good at that time. It would capture my current situation. . However, now that I’m ready to start the blog, I realized that it was not necessarily representative of what I’d like to write about.

So here I am with this new blog - “The Saga of Becoming Fruitful” - our journey through infertility.

I would be very delighted if you leave me a comment so I’ll know what you thinking, too!

Thanks for visiting!