This is my plan for next few weeks and I spent a good part of the weekend organizing things, particularly in the study.
My plan is to empty out the study closet, and towards that end I did a bunch of elelectronic recycling on Sat. This is stuff that has been laying around for years - left over parts of my old desktop computer.
I also have an old work laptop that needs to be shipped and I don't have a box big enough for it and its docking station etc so it has been languishing on the study floor for over a year. I hope to have that shipped off by end of the month.
The one big job I tackled on Sunday was sorting through my boxes of left-over fertility medications. I actually had empty vials and boxes of Repro.nex and Gonal.F from my October 2011 cycle. I took all that stuff out, blacked out my name and Rx number from the labels and threw them all in recycle, including what seemed to be countless empty vials of Repronex.
It was scary looking at the heaps of medications I put in my body. There was also some sadness involved since that was my final OE cycle that yielded two embies, but ended in a chemical. I remember that roller coaster cycle so well, each day wondering/praying my follies would grow. I was on the highest dosage of meds for 15 days which is much longer than normal, given I was responding slowly.
I still have some expired meds that I have put in a bag along with numerous sharps containers and will take it to my local pharmacy for disposal.
The next item I need to tackle are my medical records for my TTC cycles. It is in different folders and I need to organize it into one folder.
Hopefully by spacing these activities over several weeks I can get organized and also catch up on things that have been pending for months.
In other news, I saw this article today that I wanted to share:
http://todayhealth.today.com/_news/2012/12/10/15825174-fertility-drop-off-surprises-women-over-40?lite
I think it hits home for me in several areas.
While I certainly knew that fertility declines with age and at 39 yrs when I started TTC I knew it would be challenge and likely take longer, I did not expect it to not happen at all for me without ART.
What did take me by surprise, as I became familar with the world of IF, was that the IVF success rates for over 40 years decreased to about 5% or so. Plus to be honest, I totally bought into all the celebrities getting pregnant in their 40's which made it seem very doable.
And given I did not have ovulation or other issues, I really felt that it would work.
Looking back the very first month we tried and hit ovulation, I was late by 4 days which has never happened. I was so confident we had nailed it! I took several HPTs and all were stark white, but I read that some women do not get a line until days after, so I was still positive, until AF showed up.
Boy, did I lose my innocence fast!
I must be a masochist, but I always feel compelled to read the comments on IF articles. And I'm always depressed by what I read. It's easy to say that women are "stupid" or "naive" to wait until their late 30s/early 40s to have children, but I don't think they have any idea of how much things have changed in our society. It's often not a choice to wait that long. I hate playing the blame game, but I think a lot of what we're seeing has to do with how men have changed. I hear time and time again from women about how hard it is to find someone reliable and steady who is willing to commit and start a family. I went through it, too. I dated a lot of what I would call "child-men" who, even in their 30s, weren't interested in taking on the responsibility of a wife and family. It wasn't my choice to wait until I was 38 to get married, and I get really ticked off when I see people placing all the blame on delayed motherhood on the woman.
ReplyDeleteAnd don't even get me started on the 40-something celebrity pregnancies!
(Sorry for getting a little ranty there.)
Totally agree with you.
DeleteGood luck with organizing. :-)
ReplyDeleteI've been a realist through this process but kept hope. I know that with my age factor alone it was a long shot but to add in the endometriosis..well, I'll be stopping all fertility treatments, which for me are natural cycles with possibility of progesterone or trigger shot, in April.
ReplyDeleteUgg...those articles are so depressing. I've thought so many times, if I only knew then what I know now...I, too, was very naive about the whole TTC journey. Never in a million years did I expect to have to go through what we have to get where we are. Good luck with your organizing - you're further ahead than me!
ReplyDeleteMy infertility surprised me. I fully expected to get pregnant fast. Ha. I guess I'm an odd ball thought, because had I realized fertility declined so much with age I would have started earlier.
ReplyDelete