It's Amazing what can happen in a year...

I’m three days late ( not in regards to my menstrual cycle , because I’m back to the irregularities again), and I’ll save that for another post .

What I mean is I’m three days late to post an impromptu soppy but well warranted social media birthday message to our 1 year old .... yes one year old!

Like' I may sound like every other mum/parent but seriously where did the time go? I remember my birth like it was yesterday so how did I get here? :

That’s the purpose of this ‘special edition post’ - in three parts I will be talking about my second IVF cycle, my pregnancy and lastly the birth of our miracle rainbow baby.

I’m just taking everything in and having a moment . I feel like I didn’t get the memo ; I didn’t realise how emotional one would feel once your little one reaches their first milestone.

I felt like it wasn’t worth the baby blues, the feelings of regret - yes women who have dealt with infertility get that too. The guilt of not taking enough photos or videos , as well as every milestone picture hit me like a tonne of bricks.

OK, maybe not a tonne of bricks but I trust you get the message. As I take you through the journey to have Seb you will realise that again there were many hiccups along the way:

IVF 2

So to recap, in December I wrote a post about the outcome of my first fresh IVF cycle. Of course the reason why I’m still blogging is because it wasn’t so much the happy ending we wanted and this resulted in a miscarriage.

Following that I was frustrated , and confused as to what will happen next. It was more annoying to hear from my consultant that my body needed a break, and so whilst I just wanted to have another embryo transfer there and then, they said I would need to have three natural menstrual cycles to get my body back to ‘normal’ before I can do another round of IVF (although my body doesn’t know what normal is).

The ‘catch22’ is, when you have a miscarriage it upsets the flow of your cycles and so many women report that their periods are out of sync for a few months. On the other hand, women are also said to be extremely fertile. Of course I wanted the latter. In my previous posts I’ve always spoken about wanting to be that miracle success story where the day I was to start some sort of fertility treatment I found out I conceived naturally.

So fast forward, months went by and ‘surprise surprise’, by March 2017 I still had not yet had a cycle.

I googled everything I possibly could that would help start my cycles-, parsley tea, raspberry leaf , not to mention many other unheard of supplements since I started this dreaded journey.

Once again it didn’t do anything but made me hate my body more. Nothing seemed to be working, and on one hand I was thinking ‘God where are you ?’ but on the other hand I felt there must have been a deeper reason to the further delay. That being said I was going stir crazy and just wanted things to move forward so I finally took matters into my own hands and begged the lead consultant to start me on a drug called ‘Provera’ that would hopefully kick start ‘Aunt Flo’ (AF).

By the way in the TTC (Trying to Conceive) Online community we have various acronyms and a woman’s period is referred to as AF. Well even after taking the medication, AF like the diva she is took her good time and finally arrived in April.

Of course I called the clinic straight away and informed them that I was finally ready to start my second IVF Cycle.

In some respects this cycle wasn’t as intense as the first, as I had already made some well-formed quality embryos from my fresh cycle.

All I needed to do this time round was prepare my body for the transfer – this Involved many weeks of putting my body into menopause to supress my natural hormones, and then taking stimulating drugs in the form of daily injections. Every stage of this process went smoothly as the textbook would write, and my body was responding extremely well .

So just to give you an explanation- for frozen embryo transfers, you are basically thawing the embryo(s), and placing them back into your womb.

So you need a thick juicy (PAUSE) lining that will accept the embryos and help them to attach and grow into a nice healthy bouncing baby. Sounds like a science lesson but IVF truly is a very unique science in its own way.

my lining at this point was halfway to being at it's optimum thickness

So fast forward to transfer day ; after various sessions of acupuncture, healthy eating that would hopefully thicken my lining, trying to remain stress free , and prayer; It was finally transfer day . Before this happened I had to discuss how many embryos I would place back- we collectively decided that we would replace two because the high miscarriage risk and increasing the chances of at least one making it to the finish line, but on balance I also had to be prepared for a very possible multiple pregnancy as they were both high graded embryos.

So we went ahead and needless to say it was so smooth and painless compared to the last time. The transfer was administered by my consultant and one of my favourite nurses, a day after our third wedding anniversary, so to me I was convinced all the stars were aligned LOL . At the end they showed me where they had placed both embryos, and at that point I was technically ‘PUPO’- another TTC community acronym which stood for ‘Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise’.

Just after the transfer

What that meant is that I had another two weeks of symptom spotting, stressing, and an unreal amount of self-control to not test for a pregnancy until my official test day at the clinic.

In my next post I will talk about what happened when I found out about the pregnancy, and how it started off.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions drop me a line.