My new coping strategy 2009

Yes, I am rising up from the ashes of the second failed IVF cycle. I am feeling more positive today and more proactive about helping myself through this process. I've got a brand new 5 point strategy to help me with my TTC journey. So here they are, in no particular order: (warning - it's very long winded :-)

1. Ask more questions

I will be talking to my fertility specialist tomorrow and we are going to request a face-to-face appointment to talk through things at length. Both LH and I have a huge list of questions we want to run through. For me, this ranges from discussing the E2 levels on the first (very high) and second cycles (too low??), talking about getting to the bottom of the possible endometriosis issue, and discussing what our chances look like now that she has seen how I respond to treatment.

Top of my list is also a discussion about immunological testing. We caught up with a friend on our holiday who has 6 month old twins courtesy of IVF treatment. She has significant health issues, one of which is lupus, which is quite a serious autoimmune disease. She said that at her private clinic in London, they did a full immunoscreen before any cycle was done and discovered she had natural killer cells (these are very efficient little white blood cells whose role is to combat disease in the body - got to love the immune system!). Anyway, further reading tells me that they have the capacity to destroy the embryo once it gets into the uterus. She had immunoglobulin and heparin treatment to deal with the problem. Steriods can also be used to dampen it down.

Now, I have no reason to think that I have an immune problem but that doesn't mean there is something going on in my uterus that we don't know about. I have always had eczema, which is an autoimmune disease, so who knows? It is also apparently possible to do an endometrial biopsy to see if the NK cells are out of control.

And one factor I can't get out of my head - in all the months of TTC, I have never once had a positive pregancy test. That means I have no evidence that implantation has ever occurred. That makes me wonder about immunology and my uterus and I want to cross it off the list before we go any further.

Thank god for online TTC forums. The wonderful women out there who share their thoughts provide so much information that we might otherwise never know about. One particularly useful aussie forum talked about immunological testing and even which clinic and doctor I can go and see about it.

We will be discussing this with Dr D and we also plan to be up front about getting a second opinion. This is just too important to us to feel uncomfortable about going elsewhere.

2. Cut myself some slack

I now know that organising to go to a friend's beach house and spending time meeting new people and being very sociable in the last 4 days of the TWW was a bad idea. What was I thinking? I really need to cosset myself and just do the social things I can cope with, and cancel the rest in that stage of the cycle.

I have always been the kind of person that feels very bad about cancelling social engagements and being an 'unreliable' friend. It always annoys me when people do this to me. Well, from now on, if I am at a difficult stage of my cycle, I will give myself permission to make my excuses and not go out if I feel like it. Can you believe that I seriously thought about going on a girls night out on the day of egg collection because it had been pre-arranged and I felt bad about letting them down? That's not being a martyr, its just plain stupid! Luckily I did pull out and I'm glad I did because I felt terrible!

3. Remind myself how lucky I am

I've spent the best part of the last 5 days feeling utterly sorry for myself. Some of the negativity has been bitterness directed at all those 'lucky' people who just got pregnant with no hassles and who now have all their lovely children.

This line of thinking is so pointless and self destructive, I've just got to stop it in its tracks. The way I am now going to do this is to think about my close single friends - I have at least 3, who are also 41, who haven't met the love of their life yet and have a much more greatly diminished chance to have children than I do. At least I have lovely husband, who is prepared to go through this TTC agony with me and to try as hard as we can to have children before it's too late. And that's something to be thankful for.

4. Be more healthy

This one could actually read 'Give up alcohol'. I am already quite healthy, by my own estimations. My BMI is dead on 23, right in the middle of the 'normal' range and always has been, I get regular exercise (running and swimming x3 a wk before IVF and now walking at least x4 a week), I cook good healthy food at home with lots of vegetables and fruit, and I rarely drink soft drink or eat chocolates and biscuits. So, it will be more of the same, more of the time.

I've cut down my alcohol consumption loads since TTC, and don't drink at all in the TWW's. But I still think it's too much - I am probably averaging about 1 drink a day. I find it hard to stop at just one drink.

Lovely husband has been torturing himself with the thought that he drank too much alcohol before fertilisation in the last cycle and that caused the high abnormal fertilisation rate. Well, I probably had more than I should have as well, it being the christmas drinking season. I never had more than two glasses of wine but probably on more occassions that I should have.

As LH says, 'I don't want to look back and think that the reason we failed IVF was because I drank too much'. He's got a point - I don't want that on my conscience either. And as they say in the medical world, its an easily modifiable risk factor. So, we are both teetotallers for the time being. Who knows if it will help but it certainly can't do any harm. Its going to be hard to deal with the comments and pressure socially but I plan on saying I'm doing it for medical reasons, and hope that stops any further probing.

5. Stay busy

Having spent the last 5 days thinking about nothing apart from TCC and turning every detail over and over in my head, I'm just exhausted by it. I just can't seem to shut my brain off and think about anything else. Tomorrow we both go back to work and that will be a good thing. First time I've looked forward to going back to work after a holiday!!

I also need to sink my teeth into something absorbing to stop me doing the endless googling and fretting. I need to start learning shorthand for my job and it is by all accounts really hard to learn, especially if you are an oldie like me. It should be just the ticket for me to totally focus on learning something new that is really hard.

So, there they are. The 5 points that I hope will help to keep me sane and drag me out of this miserable quagmire. Lovely husband is still sad but he seems to be improving each day. He has agreed to go and see the councellor, which is a very positive move. I think he will be much better when he is back at work and really full-on busy.