Monday 12 December 2011

IVF/PGD - process starts

We've finally had our first appointment at the IVF/PGD clinic to talk through the process. I guess they were checking us out as much as we were - suitable candidates to be parents??! I am not looking forward to starting IVF, as I hate needles and the thought of injecting myself with hormones. I was still hoping we'd get there eventually naturally, but so far it hasn't happened, and given what has happened to us, I guess there's not much alternative. They will send us the forms to get everything started, and then they'll start developing the Fluorescent In Situ Hybradisation (FISH) probes they will use to analyse any embryos we manage to get for the unbalanced translocation. This shouldn't take more than three months, and then we will be able to start the treatment.

Monday 5 December 2011

A week sailing

I did something a little bit brave, and signed myself up for a week-long sailing course - 5 nights on a sailing boat, staying in a different marina every night. Now this would be ideal in the middle of the British Summer but it was end November/beginning of December, and we actually had gale-force winds for the first three days! Plus it was very cold, and there's no heating on a wooden boat, so you're relying on plug-in heaters, which of course aren't on when you first wake up in the morning! Brrr.

From what I've been through, this week was good for two reasons: one, my days were spent thinking about how to survive the next wave/avoid being washed overboard/not getting whacked on the head by the boom, instead of torturing myself about dead babies and about others having seemly perfect pregnancies with perfectly healthy babies at the end (mainly the SIL). And second, I was so exhausted by the end of the day that i went to sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, even though I was in a minute, cramped space in the bow of the boat. These days I find it very hard to sleep as my head is swimming with unpleasant thoughts, or once I'm asleep, I wake between 3am-5am, again with these poisonous thoughts swimming around, and as a result I'm always very tired.

Anyway, here are some of my favourite photos from that week: