moving on to IVF

 To be honest, I feel so jealous of my 14 year old pregnant neighbour. Today is her baby shower and she looks so pretty in her pregnant dress. I wonder what it would be like to feel pregnant and have a baby growing in me and here this little girl gets to experience it. Oh, I know she is too young to handle this and I feel sad for what this pregnancy will do to her life. And I feel the injustice of it that it would have been so much better for her and for me if I had been the pregnant one. I feel truly flawed and defective as a woman to not be able to do this basic thing. I look in the mirror and I see wrinkles and gray hair and I feel old. And sad.

 This is not the life I had planned either.

 Somehow I really believed it would have happened by now. 39 and no baby. Great job. Great husband. Great home. Financially we are struggling a bit  but only because we are trying to get a business off the ground and I know that will get easier. But I try to adjust my identity to that of a woman who never has children, who remains childless and I find that I can’t. As much as I try to accept God’s will and believe that He must know what is best and do what is best for us all, I can’t see my husband and I as a couple without children.

 I want them so badly. I have so much love to give. I dont have any children in my life – I am not close to my nephews who are both teens. And I drifted away from each of my friends as they had their babies. They moved into some elite new social group that childless me cannot penetrate. Most women my age have teenaged children. And here I am begging to just have one little teeny tiny baby.

We are moving onto IVF in April or May. It will be our one and only shot because the cost is so prohibitive. And we have agreed that after that IVF we will be done trying to conceive regardless of the outcome. It saddens me to give this up but I spent my entire 30′s focussed on this. It has consumed my life. My dear husband says that we need to focus on something else and I agree but for the life of me I cant imagine what else there is in life besides having a family.

My mind and my heart still believe that this is going to happen and this is the year that we are going to finally become pregnant and by next year we will have our baby. And I hold fast to that belief. And try to trust in Jesus.

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Uterine lining, implantation issues and hormonal injections

Apart from poor endometrial receptivity which I wrote about in a previous article apparently there are other factors which can affect the quality of the lining.

As most women trying to conceive a baby know, estrogen and progesterone are critical factors in uterine lining and implantation. Adequate estrogen is required early in the cycle to ensure that the lining grows to the right thickness and quality. This is because estrogen triggers endometrial cells in the lining of the uterine to divide and prolierate. Progesterone stops this proliferation (after ovulation) and helps the lining to become a stable place for the egg to implant.

During Assisted Reproduction Techniques (ART), like IVF, and sometimes even IUI women are often put on estrogen and/or progesterone at different times during their cycle. It turns out that the doses and method of administration of these drugs can make a huge difference to the quality of the lining.

Vaginal administration promotes an uterine lining that has a more normal structure, and is thus more conducive to successful implantation than intramuscular administration. So be sure to ask your doc about this and if possible request the vaginal administration.

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