Why I Never Found The Magic Fix For Secondary Infertility

And how all the things I tried were a waste of time and money.

A lovely lady who I know via the world of Instagram shared a post a while ago that blew my tiny mind. Simply labelled, What if we reconceptualised fertility friendly food and called it … food. Crazy right? Not sure what the Fertility Wellness Industry would have to say about this. I think they’d be spluttering into their Acai Super bowls. This statement got me thinking (I know, steady.) About all the things I tried during the years that I handed over to fertility treatment (think image of folding up womb and handing over to security) I spent a lot of time trying to find the magic fix, holy grail food or super supplement that would help get me pregnant. I tried many things that promised they would work and quite simply, nothing bloody did.

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End Of The Road For Fertility Treatment

In my desperation to have another baby, we have traipsed from consultant to consultant, plodding along the fertility conveyor belt. Despite having had a straight forward and easy pregnancy with my daughter it has seemed that my body simply doesn’t want that to happen again, thank you very much. Shutters down, closed for business. My last post back in October 2019 on this topic, talked positively of seeing a new consultant, but admitted that I was finding treatment hard with the drug side-effects (I was about eight months in at this point) And in amongst all this, I knew in the back of my mind that should we not be successful that I wanted to do a final round of IVF. I was adamant that this was our plan. In my head, another go at IVF meant we’d magically be given twins. I know. idiot. However COVID hit and forced us to take a break from it all and dare I say that this actually turned out to be an incredibly positive thing.

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Taking A Break

There’s been a distinct lack of posts on here this past year (anyone noticed?!) with only six written to date. I’ve been feeling a bit indifferent and detached from writing, as much as I enjoy it, and I’ve felt less and less need to write on here. It filled a space for me before, I had lots of free time before Olivia started school, it gave me something to do while she was at nursery, napping during the day or if I just wanted to ignore her (!) It gave me some purpose and a chance to use my brain (tiny Homer Simpson brain that is). And also, with our fertility problems, it helped writing everything down, I found writing very cathartic. But now I work two days a week my time is taken up with lots of other things and the few times I’ve sat down to write, nothing has come. And also, if I’m completely honest, I’m a bit bloody bored of writing about my fertility nonsense. Quite frankly, I’ve had enough of it.

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My Thoughts On The Ovusense Fertility Monitor

During the last four years, something I’ve never been 100% certain of is whether or not I’m actually ovulating. We started trying for a second baby in 2015 and I duly bought and used ovulation sticks, given that they worked like a dream when we conceived our daughter. However second time round I found them to be increasingly unreliable. I seemed to get conflicting information from them, either nothing each month or several peak days. This meant I’d start using them really early to try and catch the right day, which ultimately meant spending loads of money. I stopped using them after a year and aside from a scan with a private consultant in 2016 which showed I had ovulated at the time, bar this confirmation I had no idea what was going on in there every month (hellooooo, anything?!) Because of this and because I simply wasn’t getting pregnant, I felt I could do with some help in this department. So towards the end of last year I found myself looking at devices I could buy, that would help me pinpoint ovulation.

Ovusense

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More Heartache Than It’s Worth? Why IVF Wasn’t The Quick Fix I Thought It Would Be

For some reason, when things weren’t working as easily as we had hoped in trying for a second baby, I always had it in my head that we would try IVF. But I’ve no idea why this thought was in there? Why did I think this? Perhaps because I know a lot of people who have had it and it’s worked, perhaps because I follow lots of people on Social Media who have been through it. Maybe that’s why it was already implanted in my mind. Definitely one reason I’m sure I was considering it, was because of my age – there is something akin to doom when you are a woman nudging 40 in the fertility world, think flashing klaxons going off, warning of your ovaries about to shut down. Ultimately, however, if I am honest, deep down I thought that IVF was the answer to our problems. I thought it was going to be the easy route to getting what we wanted.

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