Sometimes you meet somebody by chance and you click. When I lived in London, which now feels like a lifetime ago, I met a girl from Germany. She was a friend of a friend of my flatmate and came over during the Christmas holidays. Although we had never met before, we talked and talked and sipped Baileys to keep us warm in that cold Brixton flat. She had such good energy! We exchanged email addresses, but did not really keep in contact other than the occasional short email to inform one another of big events such as me getting married, her getting married and when we moved to Dubai. Then we lost touch for some years until she sent me a really sweet email commenting on our blog and telling me that she and her husband had been through ICSI too. With success, since they now have a daughter and subsequently conceived their son naturally! One of the things she said in her email was "It's a really hard way. It's a big test for your relationship. You can't think of other things". Which is so true. All of it.
The strange thing about IVF is the preconception phase; it's broken up into quite a few steps which you normally don't really think about. As you enter the process, you are aware that something can go wrong at each step. So when we started with the injections of Decapeptyl (the drug that controls hormonal stimulation) last Thursday , we knew that it was the first step of many on a difficult and emotional journey. Yesterday, two injections later, we were back at the hospital. They check several things on the third day of the cycle to see if you have sufficient follicles of appropriate quality. To increase the chances of success for IVF, hormone injections are given that that stimulate the ovaries to develop multiple ovums (or is it ova? ;-)). During a normal cycle, only one of these small follicles grows and releases the egg after ovulation and if not fertilized, sheds it during menstruation.
It turned out that I did not have enough small follicles; there was a small(ish) cyst (on my other ovary this time) and the lining of my uterus was a bit too thick *. The fact that I did not have many follicles ready to develop (I had four to five visible ones where they aim for eight to ten for IVF) was probably an after-effect of the operation. And the cyst? They come and go. Hopefully nothing to worry about.
Disappointing? Yes, terribly, as it is going to be at least another month before we can start making our little Flonny. But on the upside it gives us another month to prepare ourselves. Mentally and physically. We are continuing our well-balanced diet and we are trying to reduce stress as much as possible. Anything to create the best possible environment for when conception actually happens! We are now going to concentrate on other things for a bit, like the house.
For the ones of you that don't speak Portuguese and could not read the comment from my friend Daniel, he suggested to have one door handle in each colour for the kitchen. Nice idea! But we have settled on red. To match the other (currently non-existent) red details in our new house. We are now thinking about all the other things that we still have to think about before we plan to move at the beginning of September!
* Techie explination of the possible reason for the thicker lining:
It probably had to do with the corpus luteum cyst that was removed during the laparoscopy now a month ago. The corpus luteum is the collapsed follicle which has produced an egg in any particular cycle. It produces progesterone and is essential for building and maintaining a lining of the uterus into which the fertilised egg can implant and continue to grow. Apparently it is quite a rare condition for the corpus luteum to continue to live beyond the normal 12-16 days after ovulation and to develop into a blood filled cyst like I had. This causes body temperature to remain higher than normal due to progesterone still being emitted from the corpus luteum. If the progesterone levels do not drop (this normally only happens when you are pregnant), the uterine lining is not shed during menstruation hence remaining thicker in the early stages of the next cycle.
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