Talk to me if you've decided to stop trying

[BipBippadotta]

Hello. I think I have to stop trying to have a baby or I will ruin the rest of my life. Can someone give me some advice or a handhold or something about how to do this?

I am currently waiting to miscarry for the 3rd time in under a year - this after the full-term stillbirth of my daughter 18 months ago due to a ruptured umbilical cord. I'm 39.

My life has ground to a halt. I don't want to keep tearing myself apart trying to have a baby, particularly as it becomes exponentially less and less likely to work out with every month that passes.

I do not want to use donor eggs / sperm. I don't want to adopt (obligatory explanation here: I don't think after so many traumatic losses my DH and I are robust enough to take on a child who's already had a very tough start in life, possibly with obligations to maintain contact with their family of origin. Nor could I bear trying to adopt internationally, waiting interminably, etc. I think any of these things, at the moment, could destroy our sanity and/or our marriage, and those are the only two things I have left at the moment).

Since my daughter's death I have been so focused on having another baby that I don't know how to turn things back around. I have grieved for my daughter - I have grieved like you wouldn't believe - but there has simply not been the time to sit back and come to terms with it all like everyone says you should do before trying again. Given my age, I had to try again immediately or give up the possibility of children forever - and that's a fucking hard thing to do when you've just buried your only child.

I don't know how to keep going. I can't take any pleasure in anything. I can't face seeing my friends, as I don't have anything to say for myself anymore that anyone wants to hear. The only thing that has been giving me any sort of forward momentum is trying to have a baby - and I have to make myself understand that it is not going to work.

How do you know when to stop? And when you know, how do you stop? Do I have to hit rock bottom, and have a complete nervous breakdown, before I know for certain I can't do this anymore? Is there a way to stop trying before you go mad? How do I claw my way back to something that feels like life?

No worries, Danny - we were going to do pgs with our IVF cycle but the fertilisation rate was so low (2 of 11 eggs) we didn't get enough embryos to test. Would have to go through several more cycles banking embryos in order to get a decent batch for testing. There are still a couple of avenues we could try, but we've pretty much drawn a line in the sand and said no more medical intervention.

bip it sounds like you have explored and tried SO many different routes. I truly hope that helps you feel you have done pretty much everything you could possibly do, I know that was really important to me when we were going through it, to feel I had tried many different options so I could look back and say we gave it our best shot...I really wish you all the very best xx

Do I really have to force myself to try to be interested in life drawing, or take up rock climbing, or do conversational French class just to take the edge off the loneliness and fill my hours and feel like I'm doing something constructive?

No, otherwise I'd need to hand in my badge now but over-50s aerobics is clearly the new rock 'n' roll, ha ha ha. I always think of being childless as one of those old 80s tampon adverts - yes, you can rollerskate about in your white hotpants if you want, but most people don't, actually.

How are you feeling now, btw? I have been thinking of you over the past week. Did you see the thread in AIBU today, btw, by a woman who is pondering trying for children or not? It's here and there are some interesting views and perspectives. I know the circumstances are different but it might help.

And again on your stats. You really have been through the mill so do take care.

Heh, I like the 80s tampon advert analogy. Foolishly mentioned it to my DH though and he's now fixated on the prospect of my rollerskating around in white hotpants.

We've just had a few days away for our 10th wedding anniversary. Most of it was lovely. But we discovered the foolishness of not using contraception as I ended up having another chemical pregnancy this month. There was not even a flicker of happiness about the positive test, just a sense of doom and self-reproach for letting it happen. Fortunately it was all over in a few days, but it did cast a shadow over our anniversary celebrations (DH didn't want me to drink after we got the positive test, I laughed at him for trying to treat this as a 'pregnancy' like other people might have, where you have a baby at the end rather than another miserable thwarted embryo... raised voices and tears in posh restaurant, etc etc. Turns out I was right of course, but I did behave quite badly).

Thanks for the link to the thread - didn't make it past the first page sadly as in my current mood Mumsnet is giving me more than the usual dose of rage (one more 'have you considered fostering?' comment and I will tear my eyes out so I never have to see the internet again). I seem to have lost my ability to filter out the usual thoughtless shite and zero in on the good stuff.

I think I need to withdraw really, get as far away as I can from anything to do with babies and parenthood and families - - including anything that is focused on not having a family (local branch of 'gateway women' meets in the same pram-infested pub where my NCT group went for 'baby & bump' coffee mornings). I just want to curl up by myself in a dark cave somewhere until some other point of reference for anything begins to emerge.

It's like I've had a migraine for 18 months. And I've been spending all my time reading about migraines on the internet. Philosophical tracts on the meaning of migraines, neuropsychiatric accounts of the causes of migraines, support groups for chronic migraine sufferers - - and while some of it has been hugely helpful it's also brought me into contact with the inevitable hordes of opinionated internet people who believe migraines are caused by gluten or dairy or carbs or 'negativity', or that your migraines wouldn't bother if you if you were a Buddhist and not so 'attached' to your pain, that you should give in to the migraine, that you should fight the migraine, that if you were a remotely decent person you would shut the fuck up about your stupid boring migraine and celebrate the uncomplicated happiness of your pain-free friends, because that's what friends are for, and it's not their fault you've got a migraine, is it.

And then - as though the endless migraine itself isn't bad enough, and the claustrophobic boredom that migraines are all I can think or read about - every month I deliberately slam my own head in a door, ensuring the pain only ever gets worse. First step is to stop slamming my head in doors. Second step is to accept that if there were a cure for migraines, it would be on the first page of Google. If it's not there, I am not going to find it on the internet. I'm on my own with it, really, as we all are with all our 'baggage', at the end of the day.

Another uplifting post from me! Oh well. Sun's out - hopefully I'll perk up a bit!

Thanks everyone for checking in and enduring my waffling. Sesame hope you're doing all right out there.

You write beautifully, OP.

Oh another chemical Bip that's actually nightmare stuff I'm so sorry to hear that. It's so frustrating it marred your anniversary too.

I looked into the Gateway thing too last week, probably from your previous mention. I felt I needed to connect with others (bit of a loner) but I'm not sure if the line got blurred between the nice thought of 'connect with other childless women' to connect with 'sad friendless people' in my mind but I've been put off. That's so sad the meeting was held in the same place as your nct group. Gahh horrid, sorry. Doesn't sound appealing at all.

it's like I've had a migraine for 18 months and I've been spending all my time reading about migraines on the Internet
Read this on my phone at work and it stopped me in my tracks, I just kept re-reading it as it blew my mind so much. I can't even articulate how much I get this and how sad it makes me about my own situation and how much it sums up what an effect this shit has had on my life for so long.

I'm on my phone so hard to scroll back to comment on other great posts. Love the 80's tampon commercial analogy too.

Love to all going through this shit. It really it the most soul destroying thing. When I want to connect with others it's not a Gateway photography meet up in Edinburgh I want, it's all the people on this thread (and others on mumsnet!) that I want. You all get it. . Off for a sob.

Yes - I often wish the lovely people on my barren threads lived nearby and we could all go for a knees-up. I'm a bit of a loner too, Wooty & totally get what you mean about feeling isolated but also having a morbid fear of the random meetup. If all you have in common is not having children, it's not much to start with, conversation-wise. I imagine it being a bit like speed dating. Or an inversion of antenatal groups - and I found antenatal groups to be a special circle of social hell, long before anything went wrong with my pregnancy.

It is so good to find people here who get it - and who can offer a variety of perspectives from a general position of empathy and understanding and - crucially - humour. Bit of a shame it's all on such a mum-and-baby-and-family-centric website though. On particularly bad days that really rubs my nose in it - the most comprehensive general chat repository on the internet is so relentlessly mum-branded that I have to stare at that fucking due date calculator / baby name finder toolbar even as I scroll through a thread about the EU, or 'what's the creepiest date you've ever been on?'

On another thread someone made a good suggestion that I should bookmark helpful threads so that I skip the Mumsnet front page & the pram adverts & am not tempted to whip myself into a misanthropic frenzy with the new baby AIBUs constantly in the 'trending' list ('my so-called "best friend" came to meet my newborn ds today and all she brought was a onesie from John Lewis! And the card didn't say 'baby boy', it just said 'new baby' so clearly she hadn't put ANY thought into it. I now see that she was never really my friend. Feel so deceived. AIBU to put dog shit through her letterbox?').

Really sorry so many of us are stuck in this holding pattern. Soul destroying indeed. On a good day I can feel that the sadness / longing / loss does add depth to life. It's just working out what to do with it.

Wooty just read back through the thread a bit and worked out you're in the middle of an IVF cycle now. Wishing you all the luck in the world.

bip very sorry about the chemical, that’s totally shit! I usually use the web version of mn on my phone, so tend to go straight to my most recent mn pages, which means firstly I check out threads I’m on (berries) and then threads I’m watching (the infertility threads I lurk on). And sometimes I go straight into style and beauty. I then probably wouldn’t see any baby stuff until I clicked on active.

I had my wtf appointment at my fc today. I did use the opportunity to talk a bit about at what stage I give up. Have said that I still want to go ahead with cycle no. 3 and they agreed to change the protocol for me so that I can try something new. So the plan is to get started on my next af in a little over a week.

wooty I’m not going to turn up to a gateway women event myself either anytime soon. I should probably go out and make friends, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go to something like this. I’d much prefer to stay under the duvet amongst similar minded virtual friends, thank you. That also reminds me of a counsellor I had, right at the beginning of deciding to go for fertility treatment (I was borderline depression at the time) who told me that I shouldn’t worry about being lonely, because once I had a baby there would all sorts of ways of going out to make new friends…

Bip, just to agree that you do write beautifully. I'm almost tempted to screenshot your words and send them to DH/my in laws/friends and acquaintances with their well meaning but ridiculous advice, work colleagues who all seem to be baby bombing me recently, the list of people is endless. No one gets it, there's no escape, and it's a lonely, relentlessly heartbreaking place to be.

Holy fuck, Sesame, what an astonishingly crap thing for your counsellor to have come out with. People simply can't understand, can they, that IVF does not guarantee a baby. Reminds me of my most recent therapist who was great about a lot of things but kept trying to insist that what was happening to me was 'normal' & I was just a hypochondriac. Some of her clangers included sharing with me her proud discovery that 30% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, so I really shouldn't be alarmed that 80% of mine had ended that way. She wondered if my miscarriages were really miscarriages or whether I was just testing too early ( is 9 weeks too early?). She also smilingly assured me that stillbirth was not uncommon at all - why, as recently as 3 generations ago, infant mortality was so high that most families would have had a stillbirth. Mary Shelley lost lots of babies? Very sad - only one of her 7 children survived to adulthood. Or was that Beethoven's wife? Anyway. Very common in those days. Knowing I had a fairly average obstetric history by 19th century standards was not much of a comfort.

Also had my wtf meeting with clinic yesterday & was told if we want to try again we need to do it now and be prepared for more miscarriages. Got the hard sell about donor eggs. Poor fertilisation rate was definitely not a sperm issue as that would have caused total fertilisation failure. It's definitely an egg quality issue & it's only getting worse. I could take supplements if it made me feel better to be doing something, but all the DHEA and ubiquinol in the world can't fix age-related deterioration of genetic material. Nothing I didn't know, really. But I was glad he didn't give me false hope.

I almost wanted him to put it all in writing & sign it so I could send copies to all the people who insist I'm being defeatist because Cherie Blair / Julia Roberts etc etc etc had babies well into their 40s, so it's definitely not too late. It's like being told we can all expect to live to 90 because the Queen's managed it.

Having a slightly ragey day today. I am angry with myself because my dr was so nice in declaring my eggs scrambled that I somehow perversely ended up thinking, maybe one more little round of IVF. Maybe I've got just one final egg in there that's not completely fucked. How will I know if I don't try? And this is how it all gets going again.

I am just so sad and angry that we came so close to being parents. I just can't really cope with the idea that this is it, it's over. This is how it ends. A horrible traumatic death and then a dribbling of terrible miscarriages and then nothing, ever again.

Really pleased (/sad) that some of my rants are resonating with those of you in similar positions. It is so lonely. Was reading back through the thread and smiling desolately at all the ways we trick ourselves into not giving up while giving the appearance of acceptance (e.g. selling the baby furniture, thinking 'now it's really got to happen!') it's just so hard to let it go.

bip Fucking hell at that verbal diarrhoea therapist of yours, that stuff is completely shocking! To be fair to my counsellor, at that point I was 38 and planning to become a single mother by choice, and completely oblivious to the fertility problems that I had. And she was an ex mid-wife, which probably provides the most skewed view of these things possible. I was still 'young' and naïve and thought the biggest decision I needed to make at that point was to go for treatment in the first place, and to figure out how I would raise a baby on my own and deal with my family etc. I never really considered that 3 years on I wouldn’t end up with a baby. Even the first fc I walked into, suggested that my chance of success with ivf could be as much as 50%. In that same appointment, the doc took me on a proper tour of all the potential risks of treatment, including triplets! It was only after the amh test and the first crap cycle that the odds just kept plummeting.

I don’t really buy that stuff you get from a fc about egg quality. They always blame it on the women and her fucking aged eggs, never themselves and the stupid protocols that pump your ovaries full of shocking levels of drugs. I had a total fertilization failure on my second cycle, and my fc sold me some crap that it was all in my eggs and the chances of ever getting pregnant by fertility treatment or even naturally were less than 1%. But after that I switched fc and under a new protocol plus ICSI I did better than before although by that time I’d already lost a year and had even less eggs to work with. In any case, by what you’re telling us your eggs are fertilizing all the bloody time naturally, it’s what happens after that it all goes awry… (Which might however still be a crap aged eggs issue… )

bip I'm really shocked by your therapist. Surely day one lesson one of being a therapist is listen to people's problems and help them find solutions/find peace, but don't offer advice.

I'm not sure there's more I can add to this thread but it continues to be a great counterbalance to the usual "miracles do happen" crap that drives me crazy so I'm lurking and saying hi occasionally.

to everyone facing difficult decisions

Yes the Gateway thing confuses me - is everyone on there childless/childfree? It doesn't seem like it. There seems to be a wide range of male/female, young and old (perhaps too young to have decided on/discovered a life without children...?). It annoys me it markets itself as somewhere to meet up with other childfree people but in fact it seems to be a social club for everyone

Ooh sorry. mammoth post

Potatoes meant to say, hope you're feeling better? Read your horrific account on another thread and couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe you'd been bleeding for so long and were left to get on with it either. Totally shocking. I hope you are all fixed up now and looking after yourself

Hah - yes, it's awful, I also read about the woman born without a reproductive tract and actually felt jealous! - 'how nice it must be to know where you stand from the outset.' 'I'll bet she didn't need to badger her GP for months to get that looked into.' I have become completely warped and perverse.

I also do a lot of sighing these days. I really annoy myself with it. I do this weird thing where I puff air out of my lips like a slowly deflating balloon. I think it's a variation on the breathing they tried to make us do in my hypnobirthing class - 'loosen up your lips and it will encourage our cervix to soften!' The fuck it will.

Re: the midwife's comment 'most women wouldn't even know they were pregnant by this stage' - apart from being a nasty, pointless thing to say (what, so it wouldn't be a miscarriage if I'd never known I was pregnant? Like if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? I'll thank you not to use my miscarriage as a Zen thought experiment, you uppity dickwad) - can it possibly even be true? If you have regular periods, by 8 weeks you're a month late. Are there really many people who wouldn't notice that at all? It's all just such dismissive bullshit.

Also with you on total lack of motivation. My house is a revolting pig sty. Was thinking I should make a bit of an effort with my appearance & managed to drag myself for a haircut the other day and on an impulse got this semi-permanent pink rinse, thinking it might be a bit of a fun, springlike pick-me-up. I now look like a tragic old biddy with try-hard emo hair.

Oh Emo Bip I did LOL at your 'try hard' pink Emo rinse, I couldn't help myself. I hate going to the hairdresser with a passion and usually leave feeling like it's the end of the world. Hopefully today you are over the shock of the newness and the pinkness and realise that in fact you actually look quite ravishing

If not, well what is life without the joys of the hair disaster .

And you made an grumpy person laugh so thanks!

bip I've been lurking on this thread (and the whole infertility section) on and off for a while, but I just had to say that I'm so sorry for your loss, your pain and the shit unfairness of life. You write beautifully, and the migraine analogy really touched me. I have emailed it to myself and will be forwarding it to my husband and friends.

to everyone going through this shit.

Hello Cooper - I have seen you around these boards. Thanks so much for your lovely words, and I'm sorry to hear you've got the endless migraine as well. It is so tremendously shit and painful.

Several sets of overbearing parents have recently moved to my neighbourhood. The braying, entitled type whose children have names so overwrought it makes you want to call social services and report them for child cruelty. Their children are all about the age my daughter would have been, and for a moment the other day I thought, 'Christ, if things had gone according to plan I'd be spending my life trapped in soft play centres with this bunch of douchebags.' I felt enormously guilty for the rest of the day and kept reassuring myself in my mind that this didn't mean I wouldn't give anything to have my daughter back. Ugh.

Wooty still chucking at 'somebody SHAG ME!'

Ack, help, I need talking down. Can feel myself being sucked towards the IVF vortex again. I knew this would happen. I think as my hormones right themselves after each botched pregnancy I forget how shit it all is and remember again how much I want a baby.

Have just spent much of the day researching human growth hormone, as that can apparently improve live birth rates among the elderly infertile with geriatric eggs . I doubt my clinic would support its use, so have been trawling illegal online pharmacies with a view to buying my own on the sly and injecting myself with some completely random substance from the internet. Please someone come and slap some sense into me.

Bip step away from the online pharmacies!!

I say this as someone who does exactly the same thing with my extensive 'I've read some Internet' medical training

Adding in growth hormone for egg quality to my next stims cycle is on my list of questions in my notebook of doom, with which I plan to interrogate my lovely consultant

CRGH seem to use it quite routinely but otherwise it doesn't seem to have taken off here

I promise to report back with his thoughts if you promise to step away from the dodgy pharmacies

(I say this as someone who bought viagra cream for uterine lining from a pharmacist in Malaysia that Serum clinic in Athens had commissioned to make a vaginal viagra formulation, whose details were in the immunes faq on Fertility Friends. Which is as maybe but I still bought goo filled tampon style applicators off some bloke off the Internet, with no idea what's in them. So do as I say not do as I do obvs)

Bip you are not allowed to make yourself feel guilty for a flippant thought. You had no control over what happened to your daughter and if you magically did have any control you'd be putting yourself through all manner of insufferable social situations just to have her with you. It's totally ok to have these 'rescue' thoughts. It gives your emotional brain a little respite but it means nothing.

On the IVF front, I don't think it's a crazy idea to try again. You produce a lot of eggs for your age (I'm older than you so I can say 'your age' without it being insulting ok ) and this obviously increases your chances. I think you got 11 eggs last time but just 2 fertilised? I think your consultant came back to you and said that this was due to a problem with the eggs as if it were sperm it would be an all or nothing thing?

This is such rubbish. With my dh's plc zeta issue there are some sperm with normal levels, some sperm lacking the protein and some without. All sperm have normal function to penetrate the egg, it's just when they're in there you have to hope that it's one with normal plc zeta levels or the egg won't activate. This problem causes 'no fertilisation' or 'LOW fertilisation' as confirmed by our consultant carrying out the research. I'm not saying your dh has the same issue as mine but there's so much the consultants don't know as research is ongoing. It really annoys me when they blanket blame the eggs, it's such a cop out. . Oof I'm crabby today >

Have you thought about doing IVF abroad? It's so much easier than I thought it would be and so much cheaper. The only clinic I've found so far that do the AOA is Serum in Greece (and one in Munich who didn't email back so I gave up with them). It's 4000 euros for 2 tries plus drug cost.

I did ask them the question about human growth hormone (I'd read it increased success of embryos making it to blastocyst) but it was a very definite 'no' and some mention of side effects I think. I did do some googling too at the time to see if I could buy it online... I don't even like taking paracetamol. It's crazy what I'm prepared to take in the hopes of having a baby. On this I stopped short.

In my news, my IVF in January broke my cervix . I can't orgasm without a horrible sharp pain which kind of ruins the whole thing. In more delusional moments I hope that maybe they just cranked it open a wee bit so now more sperm will get through . Hey presto, problem fixed. What a twit I am.

Thanks for bringing me back from the brink, Banana & Wooty! I managed to refrain from buying dodgy Chinese hamster DNA off some bodybuilding website thanks to your kind intervention. Instead I stayed up until 2am spending a large portion of my IVF budget buying clothes and beauty products on the internet. I'd become determined to put as much distance between myself and the smug yummy mummies of my neighbourhood as possible, and in my mind this required an enormous style overhaul and a very expensive handbag.

Had an evil evening yesterday - went to a neighbourhood drinks thing which had been really good fun last year. Waited until it was dark & safely past children's bedtime so it would only be the pre-children adults and the safely post- (/non-)fertile. Wandered over, only to discover to my horror that the local hipster families were having such fun they'd all decided to let little Brutus and Caligula stay up late as a treat. It was like a shoddy compromise between a soft play centre and a pub - no toys, but you had to step over screaming toddlers on microscooters to get to the bar. Ran into a woman I know who was pregnant the same time as me. Her little boy (3 weeks younger than my dd would have been) was running all over the place, dressed like a tiny steampunk. We turned around and left immediately, my vision went spotty, and then I had a full-on hyperventilating panic attack in the street.

I was racking my brain the other day trying to think of places I could possibly go to be 100% safe from babies and toddlers. Literally the only place I could think of was Paddy Power. Perhaps betting shops across the land are full of traumatised infertile women breathing into paper bags.

Wooty oh God, I am so furious & frustrated for you about your painful orgasms post-IVF. Is there nothing this process doesn't eventually ruin for us? Body, sanity, social life, sex life...? What will it come for next? Our jobs? Our pets?? It's like it systematically drains the pleasure out of every possible experience. Jesus. What can have caused that to happen? Have you said anything to the clinic about it? Or would they just do that thing that clinics do & refer you back to the NHS who can be relied upon to laugh at you and send you away. Ugh, so bitter today.

Thanks for the info about AOA, that's really interesting - I'd forgotten you'd taken part in research on this and they'd actually tested your DH's sperm. Argh, my consultant is an ill-informed knob. Though I think, perversely, part of the reason I've liked working with him so far is precisely because he's an ill-informed knob & a bit lazy & quite happy to tell me there's no hope. I'm so ambivalent - half of me wants every avenue explored before it's too late, the other half just wants to be told to give up. But Serum in Athens sounds good - and I used to live in Greece many years ago so it would be nice to go back.

Bip I'd deffo take a flamethrower to that place again. Might learn Tarquin and Jocasta's parents to keep their precious darlings at home. Fucksake

Just to echo wooty about Serum. So, so, so many women on the low AMH FF threads I'm on, have had success at Serum when getting to the end of the road with UK clinics. I know you're not a low AMH-er but it's more the point about women in their early 40s being told they'll never get pregnant with their own eggs and DE is the only viable option etc etc. By all accounts Penny @ Serum is quite the miracle worker - and incredibly lovely. There's loads of info about cycling with Serum on FF - and as there's so many UK women going over, there's pretty much always a FF-er there to meet up with if you're travelling solo (many women get their DH to freeze a sample, if it's tricky for both to travel). She's also very very hot on improving sperm quality and not attributing everything to egg quality. Which is somewhat unusual in IVF world!

Also wooty FUCKSAKE on the cervix. As if this whole process wasn't shite enough

I had a second D&C on Weds to bring the neverending miscarriage to a close (7 weeks post ERPC and I'm still not un pregnant-ed), this time with a camera up in my grill, and my consultant said he'd dilated my cervix a bit extra because in women who've not had children apparently it can snap shut a bit too much for tissue to pass easily out. Apparently it's fine for swimmers to get in, but not for bits of leftover dead baby to get out of (although as he's given me a thorough clean and polish there shouldn't be anything left at all that needs to vacate the premises)

Closed cervix shouldn't be an issue. Painful cervix definitely not right, you poor thing!