This is going to be an emotional post and possibly incoherent, so be warned. I am high on adrenaline and anxiety. Last night, I couldn't sleep after waking in the middle of the night. I dreamt that all four of our blastocysts tested normal, but wait, only one came from me and the others all came from different donors. In fact, these donors were random patients at the clinics whose eggs were stolen during their IVF rounds and mixed together to create the pool that we received.
In my dream, I didn't know whether to feel horrified, angry or amused. That's when I woke up. Oh, and the first two were girls and the latter two were boy embryos, in case I forget.
I know, Freudian. And completely sub-conscious, I should add.
Nothing has ever gone as planned, which I guess is the story of my life when it comes to IVF. It can be miraculous and it can be horrible. And so far, our story has been pretty miserable.
Why do we have slow-growing embryos? Is there something then wrong with the sperm, even though we always achieve close to 100% fertilization (you can imagine why I never thought it was a sperm issue before)? Will we ever have a child that is biologically linked to us? Have I been doing all these rounds of medication and targeting the wrong conditions?
It is enough to be the stuff of bad nightmares.
How does one deal with recurrent IVF failure? I don't see this written about a lot. And it should be, because it is something that will break your heart. There are only so many times you can try IVF and only so many rounds of emotional heartbreak one can take. How do you feel, when you are the "worst off" in the room?
I had to ask myself this recently, again and again. I've been trying to work on the support group and website. I really have. But support hasn't come easy during this time. It's hard to support, when you feel like your own process is on veritable life support, when you feel like, or are, the constant infertile in the room.
Case in point, one of my closest friends started IVF barely two plus weeks ago. This was someone with whom I've known since we were 18, someone who camped out at our tiny starter apartment and whom I travelled to France with after she broke up with her long-term cheating boyfriend, when our other girlfriends were already too married and pregnant to help her forget about her fears and loneliness. Someone whom I then bunked out with when the husband and I had our first big married fight.
I walked her through her first year of marriage, telling her getting pregnant would happen, you weren't sub-fertile till after a year of trying. That year came and went, her husband refused a sperm test. When he did, as expected, he had a very low 1% morphology.
Get thee to IVF! Two rounds of natural IUIs later, I pointed her to the public hospital doctors, toward funding requirements, toward the right nurses, and how to give yourself shots, while she was shocked by the cost of natural IUIs (I didn't have the heart to say that I had paid easily 3 times that for medicated IUIs) and complained about having to take trigger shots.
Then, while I was doing my last round, she did the same, with vaguely similar follicle growth on half the amount of stim meds. That's where the similarities ended, since she has a normal ovarian reserve and FSH level. She actually retrieved far fewer eggs and far fewer of those fertilized, 6 embryos as opposed to our 8. But guess what, on Day 3, all those embryos were 8 celled of good quality. On our day 3, we would get perhaps 1 8 celled.
While this happened, I kept our results from her, not wanting to freak her out as to what could go wrong. That our own had dwindled to not a single blastocyst by Day 5 and a meagre few late Day 6 blastocysts. (As a policy, I refrain from talking about my own process to my friends going through IVF at the same time).
But the questions kept coming: "my husband berated me because he doesn't want to transfer two", "what should I do to increase my chances after transfer", "do you want to go to acupuncture on Saturday, because my mum is driving me there". A fresh transfer. I ask you. I've done innumerable rounds of IVF and I have never got a fresh transfer.
Suddenly, I was feeling very uncomfortable in my support role. I didn't want to do it anymore. I did not want to go to acupuncture, I just didn't want to take a ride from her and her mum.
I was sad — not just because her mum was driving her to acupuncture and mine has never bothered, nor knows where the place even is, remotely, but because I was still reeling from the recent results and implications and feeling lost and confused all over again. Because I was scared that soon, I'd be the only one still googling causes and symptoms and donor options and trying not to be emotional that I didn't know where to go or what to do!
Supporting her was something I wanted to do, but at the same time, it was hurting. Because she still had 6 embryos, all at 8 cells. Because the difference between our results and even a half-decent IVF report is so stark, it would only make you feel sad to be reminded about it, and there wasn't any positive spin I could put on that. Because it made me angry. Not at her, but at how it was.
After all, if we failed in transfer, what next? The US? To what purpose? Just to throw more money out of pocket at the process, to get a bit further and be told it's negative?
I was being realistic that after 8 medicated rounds, we were swiftly running out of options, and while I never wanted her to fail and suffer more, I was also not prepared for how painful it would be, to see her succeed just after two unmedicated IUIs. I was not prepared for the gaggle of mothers and then me, to grow ever more uneven, within our group of friends.
Comparing myself to someone who succeeds in their first IVF round, or someone who has perfectly normal eggs, is a stupid thing to do because it will make you feel hopeless or inadequate when the reality is, you have different conditions. I'm sure this story will make a lot of you feel like I am overreacting or inventing a cause that isn't really there.
But this week was also one of reacting to how bad bad might be for us, and it was not the best time to be supporting someone going through her own feelings and questions.
There were two takeaways for me. The first is that support is a difficult function. For everyone. But maybe especially, given our position, for us. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, but there are times when we have to take a step away to rationalize, to detach and to work through our own feelings.
You can't give when your emotional reserve is empty, and sometimes, the only thing you should focus on is your own journey, not other people. But supporting makes it very hard not to focus on what you need to do, and not other people, or how things are.
I had a mean thought that if I had not introduced her to the public clinic, they would be safely a year away from ever being there or starting treatment, giving us a full opportunity to clear out our own issues before trying to help with theirs. Indeed, they probably would have waited around a few more months out of sheer procrastination, and another few months between public and private hospitals and another few months languishing in the public hospital queue.
When I think about it, I was torn between not wanting her to suffer more and wanting everyone to suffer the indignity and frustration of a few long years with medical intervention, so that I wouldn't feel so alone and they wouldn't be so insensitive or ungrateful. So I wouldn't have to watch them succeed so fast, so quickly and so painlessly.
The realization I had from being capable of thinking of this is that the inequality in this friendship had actually been building for a while and pre-dated this IVF comparison.
This was someone I invited over to meals, loaned clothes to when she bloated too much to wear her own to weddings, walked and jogged with when she wanted to shed some weight.
Conversely, I had hardly ever been in her home, and I had to admit to myself that when I really thought about it (I'm not a calculative person, I really hate to count), she had been leaning on me for a fair while. I'm tired of being everyone's lowest common denominator. Did I think about reciprocity in those terms, and what did I ever get back from it?
So the last text was, she has OHSS. A full ten days after transfer. And I knew. I knew the beta would be positive, I knew it would be high, I knew it would be twins.
I knew all this because, generally, my journey is where everything I want doesn't happen. And everything else does. I knew it was the pregnancy hormones kicking in, and sure enough, it was. And she tells me, "you were right about that."
Of course I was, I'm right and I'm so bitter. How can you not be bitter about recurrent IVF failure? I'm right about everyone's cycle. I'm right about everything except my own cycle, is never right. It feels like you're on infertility island and just watching all the ships sail away, leaving you on-shore because it's Not Your Turn.
Then I got into the office and found that my colleague, just a cubicle over, is having twins. And on the phone and found that another friend, who started her cycle at the same time, also got her positive beta. Both in the same hospital, the one we were kicked out of years ago now. Same day, twins at work, and two friends in a row.
People say that what doesn't break you, will make you stronger. But honestly, I think that's just the kind of bull that people say when you don't have a choice. You get to the point where you start to suspect you're depressed because you feel so sorry for yourself and you feel that's all other people are feeling (pity) about you, too. When you think there must be lower limits to how shit you can feel, recurrent IVF failure will basically, easily, prove you wrong.
Because, that's how IVF is supposed to go, isn't it? You get all good embryos, they stick them in on day three, you get twins. Spend zero out of pocket, at a public hospital. Easy Peasy. I've had Four friends do this. Four! Just amongst the girls I know. In fact, they are all the twins I know.
And I ask myself, why does it have to be so hard. Why do I have to be so old and older, why does it always have to be me here, with complications and compromises, still researching our options and feeling like the biggest fool. Am I doing something to jinx myself? Am I the jinx? Why doesn't it work? That's the crux of why IVF failure is crushing. And the cost of IVF failure, which has just been building, and building for us, is crushing too.
Then, you're just left wondering, why do even infertile people succeed so easily? And how, really, do you deal with being here years, when even infertile friends speed through successful IVF within a year? Why do the reminders never get less unfair, just more personal and more relentless as time goes by? What do you do, with all this love for something you've never known and something you keep getting told you're not going to get, as it slowly starts to eat away at your mind and soul?
And I'll be fine, I know. I'll be lonelier, but I just need to get it out of my system because these are friends I see every week, the sadness and the frustration, well, it will be inescapable. I think that's why people move on or stop doing IVF, it's not the meds or the logistics, it's that there's a limit to how long you can keep failing because of what it does to you.
It's just heartbreaking. I'm so empty right now, and so sad sometimes just watching my husband be tired of it all too. And when he says he wish it were easier. That is sometimes the hardest thing.
