40+ ttc: 2018 is full of bfp's!

[Orchid222]

Ladies, the old thread has finished, here's a new one.

Hello ladies, I'm at CD10 so it's showtime for me for the next two weeks. I usually ovulate around CD17, but in the last few months I've had a 24 day cycle and a 35 days one, so anything goes really .

Karigan, post ovulation fanny snot is a good sign! I'm waiting for my pre-ovulation one.

Adding to the positive stories, a very good friend gave birth at 45 and has the most gorgeous baby. It can and it does happen. Although for me, I just suspect I've always been infertile but never knew because I married late and started trying very late

AtrocityNeedles don't give up hope my sister had her first ( and prob last as the father has pissed off) at the age of 41 xx

Karigan- I can feel a bfp coming your way in the next few days!
Needles- why do you say you're infertile, didn't you say the other day you were pregnant a couple of years ago, didn't know it and drank like a fish?
Cleo-looks like our bodies do take their time to fully recover after a mc...but I'd still give it 1 cycle if I were you, if you were ovulating fine before the pregnancy you might find you're ovulating fine now, too.
As for my scan, I was 6+4 counting from my last period date but I knew I ovulated on cd20 so I think I was 5+5 on the day of the scan. The woman doing it said they can usually see things from 5 weeks but when I read some online stories women were saying it went either way for them, they either had a mc or the pregnancy developed later. What also worried me was that on the printout I got they put gestation of 4.3 but I know I was 5+5 counting from my ov date and adding 2 weeks to it.

It's so hard to tell Orchid, but I totally understand your worries. It's going to be a long 11 days, but hopefully all will be ok.

I think you are right about waiting a cycle to see what happens, I'm just not very patient! But I will wait. I just hope I hurry up and get that negative test soon (never thought I'd say that)

Orchid, I miscarried at 9 weeks. I drank like a fish a few days before finding out I was pg and when I found out (that I was pg), I freaked out and my friends told me it was very unlikely to have done the embryo harm at that stage. I doubt the miscarriage was caused by that one day of drinking but I guess I will never know. Am I making sense? Sorry if I was unclear.

Also now I feel I have to clarify that drinking like a fish amounts to two medium glasses of wine, for me

Critter - quick question about IVF. Do they freeze any eggs for future use? Just wondering, as time is ticking, quality & quantity will decline at each attempt

Cleo- when I got the costs from my local hospital they included a charge for freezing.

Thanks Orchid. I may look into that further then. I feel like I am clinging on to a cliff by one little finger at the moment. To have some eggs frozen would just extend that time a little bit

Hi Cleo, my clinic will freeze any spare embryos that get created, they don’t store your eggs though. If you want to use the frozen embryos in 5be future there’s an additional transfer charge of abou5 £1000 though.

Does anyone else get right or left sided pain after ovulation? Not when af is due.. but quite soon after ov..

So Critter, can you get a load of embryos made on first visit and you can use from the first batch for the next round at an extra 1000?

So is it cheaper to have more taken & created each time?

Atrocity - I doubt very much that two glasses of wine would’ve caused it. Hope you’re not feeling guilty about that.

Chat - yes! In the last year, I’ve been getting that! It starts after I ovulate for about a week. Like a full ache in the ovary area? Almost in the crease of the groin? It sometimes shoots down my leg too....

*dull not full.

@ cleo - you cant guarantee how many embryos will be created. The number of eggs they collect depends on how well you respond to the ovarian stimulation medication, and this largely depends on your AMH level. For example my AMH is 10.4 so they say there’s a decent chance they may get as many as 12 eggs from me - they will collect as many as they can. Many of the eggs will not be viable so will not fertilise, or if they do will not form healthy blastocysts, so from the 12 eggs on average the6 would expect to get maybe 3 usable embryos. You can choose to have 1 or 2 of those transferred (they strongly recommend against 3) which might leave 1or 2 usable embryos which they will freeze for one year. You can pay an annual fee to keep them frozen for longer than this, and if you ever want to have one transferred to use the embryo transfer charge is about £1000. Hope that makes sense!

@chatbash - I have never felt any kind of ovulation or ovary pain in my life until last month when I felt a large popping sensation accompanied by strong nausea on ovulation day. I also had masses of pg symptoms through my LP following this and got pretty excited but turns out that it was just an extra large follicle popping and putting out lots of progesterone 😔

@cleo I should add that it’s better to have the ivf cycles and only rely on the frozen embryos as a last resort as a % of them don’t survive the freezing process.

Thanks critter, that makes sense. I will be interested to hear your journey.
I never planned to go down that route, but now I may be swayed

CritterTamer and littlemimosa normally get the "oh your ovaries are getting ready"'aches and twinges and the post egg release.. I know you can't actually feel it moving down the tube but it does feel like it sometimes. Bit this cycle it does really hurt... 😞 hot water bottle later I think x

Yes, I do get ovulation pains, on alternating sides every month. If you are sensitive of hands (e.g. good at massage and stuff like that) you can palpate the ovarian areas and feel which one of them is the active one.

Mimosa, thank you. I honestly think it was a chromosomal abnormality because other than the infamous two glasses of wine I was the healthiest I had been in many years!

I'm at CD12 and waiting for the fanny snot. I've been really lax with the protein in the last few months so I worry that I'm having anovulatory cycles lately or just eggs of poor quality. That's what really bugs me about not getting pg - that I just don't know what the problem is. So I can't "fix" it.

Atrocity- agreed, 2 glasses of wine is nothing! I know someone who didnt know she was pregnant for a long time and was drinking until she found out and another who'd have a glass of wine at least once a week through the whole pregnancy. If it's meant to be it will be and there's not much we can do.
Have you had all the tests done to see if everything is fine? There might be something little that needs fixing and you'll be good to go.
Cleo how many cycles are you giving it before looking into IVF? I of course need to wait to see what happens with this pregnancy but if it's not viable then we'll give it a few cycles before going down that route.

We did some tests and the diagnosis was 'unexplained infertility'. We didn't go down the extensive testing route (e.g. NK cells) because an initial consultation at a fertility clinic placed our chances of success at between 3 and 5% and for that, I'm not putting myself through all that treatment. At the moment my current thinking is that stress might have something to do with it, but how does one get rid of stress other than moving to an idyllic island in the middle of nowhere?

That's what I got, unexplained secondary infertility. My husband said during the appt at the fertility clinic that he believed it was stress related and the consultant said his mum always tells him to send his patients away on holiday. While he said he obviously can't do that there is something to be said about stress. In my case it was very easy to pinpoint the source-it was my job so I made the drastic decision to quit and the moment I did that, I got a bfp. Sure this pregnancy might not be viable but it's a much better result than I had in the last year when I didn't even get a sniff of a bfp. So, if there is anything you can do to reduce your stress levels, I think it's definitely worth doing that and see what happens.

AtrocityNeedles swimming and yoga are good.. and not mega expensive.. yoga can be done with an iPad or a smart telly.. there is a lovely lady who does fertility yoga sessions on YouTube.. and in the comfort of your own home incase you aren't comfortable in a class.. ( I'm not) taking a month of tracking, temps, cm etc..can reduce stress
I know it feels scary as you don't know how many months you have left but if periods are regular menopause is a while away.. not necessarily a month off trying to conceive just regular dtd if your oh is up for that..
it's worth a shot.. xxx