Category: Health
What to expect when you’re not expecting XXV: The end
I can remember the exact moment when Kim and I decided we were ready to have kids. We’d talked about it vaguely but we decided for real on a trip to Europe in 2014.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XXIV: Happiness is a high HCG
Last post was pretty grim huh? Apparently one of my sisters read it and rang my mum because she was concerned about my mental state.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XXIII: Purgatory
Someone messaged me and said they admired us for playing out the “horrors” of IVF so publicly so people could a) understand or b) if they were going through it themselves find some comfort that someone else out there knew how they felt.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XXII: Expecting?
Jesus, this is post number 22. That’s a lot of my dribble. Well mainly my dribble, some of it has been Kim’s pearls of wisdom. I’ve said this a lot but way back when we started writing we did it to help others.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XXI: One egg, two baskets
Boy it’s getting tense isn’t it? Saturday was transfer day, when the fertilised embryo we had was getting put back in to one of Kim’s uteri. We went in for our appointment. Kim had to drink 750ml of water immediately before-hand because apparently an enlarged bladder makes it easier for the doctor doing the transfer to see where to go on the scan.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XX: The stress and the excitement of it all
On Monday we went in for egg harvesting. Last time we did that we managed to get 5 eggs out which isn’t a great result but we were very happy because we’d been expecting 3 max. This time we tried not to have expectations because of the 5 they got out last time, precisely zero fertilised. Which sucked.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XIX: The mendacity of hope
As I write this it’s 5.30pm on a Sunday afternoon. It’s the day before we do egg collection. It’s been 26 days since we began this IVF round. It’s been the most hopeful round so far. But hope can always betray you, and when it does it hurts more than if you’d just been pessimistic the whole time.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XVIII: The Sharps Container
When you’ve made a commitment to writing out your story, and then that story ends up being way longer than you anticipated, you go searching for metaphors to represent what you’re going through because metaphors are one of the great pieces of human story telling.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XVII: it’s Fertility Week and I still don’t have a baby
A memory came up on my Facebook feed this morning. “Kim, we care about you and the memories that you make on Facebook. We thought that you’d like to look back on this post from 2 years ago”.
Read MoreWhat to expect when you’re not expecting XVI: Where have ya been Dave?
Two and a half months ago I had a shitty birthday when our most recent IVF round got called off. I wrote about that already. But the part I left out of the story was going to the vege market immediately after the IVF clinic.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XV: The Holiday
It seems I take about two days to mentally process things. After the shitter of all birthdays where we had been at the clinic on Sunday morning being told that Kim had the cyst on one ovary and that this fucked everything up and so we should can the round then and there, we got into the elevator and I actually burst out laughing.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XIV: Not such a happy birthday
Well that’s a bit shit. We had our first scan of this IVF round this morning. And now it’s our only scan of this round. The round has been called off. Happy birthday Dave!
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XIII: It’s my birthday tomorrow
Tomorrow is my 33rd birthday. It’s a bit of a nothing birthday. I like to measure birthdays in factors. The more factors in your birthday, the better the birthday. 33 doesn’t have many.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XII: Dicks are dicks
We’re back on. Today was day 0, Kim has begun taking a new pill that does some wizardry to try and get us a better outcome from this round of IVF.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting XI: Next please
When you think about IVF, you don’t tend to think about it in stages. IVF is the term we use when we talk about the process of getting a baby using science.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting X: The Great wall of Gyna
Back to hopeful again. Boy. We had our follow up appointment with the specialist to find out what the hell happened and why we had the unforgivingly named “total fertilisation failure”.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting IX: The Mental Load
There’s this amazing web comic floating around that talks about the mental load that women are often asked to bear when it comes to household chores.
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What to expect when you’re not expecting VIII: Having a break from Ms Ivy Eff’s wild ride
So I had it reported back to me that the last post was really sad. And I was sad. Just to get this out of the way early and prepare any readers still with us, things haven’t improved.
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