Before I was worried by my fertility, I really had no idea just how much stuff was out there about the topic. I only really stumbled on the topic when I first started looking up pregnancy symptoms. The first time we tried to get pregnant I had the longest cycle of my life, grew enormous boobs, went off coffee, everything tasted of tin and generally I thought it might be happening. Several negative tests later and two weeks late I finally had a truly horrid period. We will never know what really happened but it sent me scurrying to Google to see what might be going on.
My internet adventures started with lurking around chat boards trying to understand early pregnancy symptoms and if I might eventually get two pink lines instead of one on my test stick. I learned a lot during this time, which frankly I would rather unlearn. Bizarrely I went from being someone who never really had PMT symptoms like sore boobs and fluid retention to being someone who actually felt quite pregnant for a few days each month, even though I clearly wasn't. It is quite likely that this started off all in my head, but believe me, it's real now. During this time, my much loved London Doctor postulated that I had an implantation problem. A theory which I have been kind of haunted by ever since. Reading my Basal Body Temperature Charts in the same way some people read runes, he declared this to be a distinct possibility. Needless to say the web-action stepped up to include some infertility sites and some medical publications and research papers.
My gynaecologist, once I had one, totally rejected this idea. But there again this is the same guy who refused to even think about treating my mild hypothyroidism. Bizarrely the colleague and endocrinologist he referred me to was adamant that we should treat it. They work about fifty feet apart...By now my internet researching expertise was a marketable skill and I was also trying to understand what the hell was going on with my thyroid as well as the rest of my bits. The Endocrinologist also agreed to run all the auto-immune and clotting tests I had been wanting to have done. They came back almost normal, bar a little speedy blood clotting and some ANA (Anti-Nuclear Antibody) action that could just be down to some recurring infection. So after a year of being poked and prodded it was my husbands turn.
Around this time I think I had the biggest row with him so far. Well at least since the baby odessy began. He didn't read anything, he didn't research anything, he didn't ask the right questions. He thought he was doing well coming to defend me from the gynaecologist who talked to his face with his hand up my fanny. I was not impressed by either of them and I let the one I was actually married to know about it. He read a lot and still sometimes surprises me by coming up with something I haven't extracted from Google. His tests had been 'pretty much normal' and you can see in one of my earlier posts that we finally managed to do some of the other tests he wanted to do in London, which were all fine. We also think we have managed to switch gynaecologist.
By early 2007 I was on thyroid medication and feeling a bit better, or at least not as bad. I still get knackered the next day after staying up past midnight and I still haven't shifted the weight I gained but I can't really tell what is normal any more. We decide that we are starting again with baby making and would count from me being well again. Around that time my internet attention shifted from the technicalities of infertility to the whole experience.
Stumbling across the blogs of Tertia, Julie and Julie gave my experience some shape and navigation. I didn't know these women, but they don't talk about sprinkling baby dust and use cutesy abbreviations for every detail that you can be euphemistic about. My particular pet peeve is talking about 'Baby Dancing' instead of talking about sex. I can only imagine the horrified expression on my husband's face if he had the least suspicion I talked about Baby Dancing to anyone. In these women's blogs there are no ticker tapes showing when babies, who are probably in primary school by now, were due to be born. They are sometimes raw and angry but they are always real and honest and I thank them so much for that. They make me feel like a normal human being, qualified to say what I think, whether I believe in faeries, God or the Easter Bunny or none of the above. I have even commented on their blogs occasionally, because I actually care and don't feel like a dork doing it. These women are the reason I blog today. It is my own little private corner where I don't have to modulate my response to anything. I can rant, rave, use obscenely long words, in short, it is my party.
The latest part of the puzzle fell into place this week when I finally got the results back from spitting in a tube once every three days ( AKA a Saliva Hormone Assay done by the good folks at Geneva Diagnostics in New Malden). I can't tell you the fun I had trying to persuade my local TNT office that actually it was perfectly safe and legal to courier my precious and now de-frosted samples. We were finally testing one of my London Doctor's reasonable hypotheses, that I might have a luteal phase defect. As it happens, it looks like I don't although I have a wee bit too much Estrogen in my system. Thanks to my superior internet research skills I know this is normal-ish for someone with a slow thyroid and I await the hard copy to see if it really warrants action. Much more impressively, an internet grown hunch of mine, was revealed to be correct. Since I first started researching my Thyroid problems I wondered whether the sheer stress of the last few years had finally buggered up my adrenal glands. My Endocrinologist had thought this might be a possibility also and ordered a cortisol blood test. Which came back normal-ish. With the saliva test you track cortisol through the whole day and mine is normal in the morning, it just gives up mid-morning and is pitifully low for the rest of the day. So now I need to tell my endocrinologist the results of this test in a polite and respectful way, that ensures she doesn't feel like I have been checking up on her. Although I have been suspecting this diagnosis for a while, the cortisol testing was just part of whole battery of saliva tests London Doctor ordered and was an oddly pleasant surprise
It feels good to have my hunch borne out, even if it took a while, but in fact most of my diagnoses have been spot on. I have often found myself ignoring them for fear of being some with 'Internet-itis' but from now on I am going to trust my gut feel. So it is back on the baby aspirin and on with the attempts to get my mother baggage out my system. Other than that I think as my adrenal glands get a bit better it is all going to be just fine.
Footnotes to this long scribe:
I don't have Addisons just yet. I have Adrenal Insufficiency rather than a complete pack up so we are going to try natural support, maybe DHEA and then steroids if we have to. I have a conversation scheduled with a colleague of London Doctor on Monday
Interestingly DHEA , the under production of which results from Adrenal Insufficiency is now being given to older IVF patients to improve the performance of their ovaries. It is so successful in some cases they aren't making it to IVF because they get pregnant.
Internet-itis is a condition whereby you develop conditions you have just read about on the internet and then convince yourself it is fatal. I have had it a couple of times and my friend M had it once or twice, we try to keep each other straight.
