The aftermath of IVF Round 4

JAN 2011

1 Jan - 20 Jan

TISSUES - HAVE GONE THROUGH A TON OF THESE

FINDING IT HARD TO GET OUT OF BED & FACE THE WORLD

The past few days have been quite hard. My emotions are up & down, but for the most part I am pretty low.  H & I are able to talk about everything that has happened in the past few days and share how we are feeling etc...

I keep going between anger & sadness. I am angry that this happened to us. Angry that I let myself feel so positive this time that things would work out. Angry that Dr J is away for a few weeks and I can't go see her NOW and ask her all the questions I have about this and about what to do in the future. I want & need to talk about all these things now. Angry that the one time I wanted to see the counsellor at my clinic they too are away and then when they gave me the number for the back up counsellor, I called and got their machine stating they too are away. I feel angry & abandoned by the professionals when I really need them most.

When I am not angry I am incredibly sad and prone to lots of tears. I was so happy that we had made it and we were going to get our much wanted baby, besides that I was thrilled at the thought of no more IVF. Happy that I did not have to lay awake at night and worry about things like would we ever have a child? Would we end up having to use donor eggs/sperm or have to adopt. Now all my fears are back and worse than ever. H is devastated, especially with the way things happened. Going from celebrating such good news to only get such bad news the next day. Besides H, I have got support from the ladies on the IVF forum I became a part of, unfortunately most of them have gone through this & know exactly what I am feeling but of course everyone handles things in different ways. It's a help of sorts but I really don't have any friends close by who can come round & just be with me & help me cope. They all live from over an hour away with families & commitments of their own & some are on the other side of the world & one in particular is great with emails & even skype which has been a comfort.

As for my mother, we have always had what you might call a rocky relationship. Things in the past 18 months have been better but I had to accept years ago she is not the type of Mother most daughters have & will never be. She is someone who should never have had a child as she just does not have that mothering instinct. If I was to phone her in tears she would have no idea what to do. When I told her about what had happened her first response instead of "that's awful', "I'm so sorry what can I do," 'how are you both coping?" was to say "that's no good, but its better it happen now then have a baby with something wrong with it like being retarded or deformed".

We want a child so of course we will continue with IVF but for now I have lost all faith in it and I am scared of doing another cycle. Of course what scares me the most is going through this all over again. As for the way I am feeling I really have to take this day by day at the moment. I never ever imagined that the path to starting a family would be filled with so much stress, frustration and so many tears.

I have found the past few weeks very difficult to cope with. I don't want to get out of bed & face the world - I just don't have the strength. I sleep a lot & that's easy as I'm so exhausted from the floods of tears that can just arrive at a minutes notice with no warning. I try to do things to distract myself & keep myself busy. Sometimes they work but other times they don't. I suffered severe depression many years ago and this is almost what that felt like & I was getting scared I was going to have it come back.

I do have a good therapist I still see & started seeing regularly again when we started IVF as the hormones etc... can & do interfere with your brain chemicals, that's one of the reasons so many women get post partum depression for no reason. I finally got an emergency appointment to get n & see Dr K and tell her what had happened in the past few weeks & how I wasn't coping & she reassured me that what I was experiencing was normal. A combination of the hormones & brain chemicals and also the grieving process. Dr K did not think my depression was coming back. I was advised to keep going like I had been with doing things to try to keep myself busy & eventually things would get easier in a few weeks. If they didn't then might have some cause for concern.

Dr K was right & eventually day by day it did get easier to cope but I still felt alot of sadness. Unfortunately when they discuss IVF with you they go over all the medical & clinical details but no one explains the emotional side of it & what to expect. I know what I have experienced since last June, I was not expecting at all.