Hello Yorkshire - it's amazing how long you can spend in limbo. And I sometimes think that secondary infertility makes it a different sort of difficult to give up trying, because you keep thinking 'but it DID work before!' I know what you mean about it not being a clean break. I still have ovulation sticks, but used my last internet cheapie hpts last month, so will at least not have the soul-killing couple of days of squinting at negative tests this month, and that does feel like a massive release.
One happy discovery I've made recently is that some of my old fertility supplements are brilliant for preventing hangovers. Take some milk thistle, starflower oil, and NAC before a night out and you'll be right as rain the next morning - no headache, no hangover anxiety, no quivery stomach, nothing. I feel slight regret when I think how much better the past 5 years would have been had I spent them drinking heavily with no remorse rather than joylessly swallowing wheatgrass shots and hating myself. Hey ho, I guess I've got the rest of my life to make up for lost time, and given that nobody will need me to live very long anyway there's nothing to stop me going at it like Lemmy from Motorhead.
Wooty don't worry at all about being a 'die-hard' telling me to give it another go - it absolutely makes sense to look into everything. And to be fair Serum probably weren't quite as apocalyptic in their prognosis as I heard them to be. They did say that chromosome abnormalities can also be caused by high dna fragmentation in sperm (we haven't had DH tested for this - didn't seem much point as there's not much you can do about it), and that antioxidants + antibiotics for 40 days might help a bit, but equally might not. Mainly they thought the fact that it took 2 years to conceive dd back when I was a sprightly under-35-year-old didn't bode well for the state of my eggs now. I'm glad I contacted them at any rate, so please don't feel shit.
I think the bottom line is we've had such a bad run of luck and so much trauma that I can't see how even a 'successful' pregnancy wouldn't just end up producing a child with 7 heads. Every month I persist in trying, it feels like I'm tempting fate to smite us with a catastrophic disaster that would destroy everything in our lives that is still good. It's just so exhausting that this level of fear coexists with such an overwhelming desire to hold my own living child, and to have that chaos and surprise you describe of having another little person in my life.
I feel for you in the position you're in at the moment - it's such a hard decision to try with DE when you've still got that hope that it just might work with your own eggs. It's so hard to come to the level of acceptance that takes, particularly when your self esteem has become entangled with all the fertility stuff so it feels like an admission of failure. That's how it feels for me anyway.
Sometimes I see threads in the general parts of Mumsnet, outside the barren ghetto, by posters who are in awful situations, i.e. both parents have profoundly disabling chronic health conditions that make them super-morbidly obese and incapacitated by depression so that they struggle to look after their 3 children under the age of 5, etc. And I've become so fucking self-absorbed that one of the first things I think is, how is it that despite having so many things seriously wrong with both of your bodies, you've had no trouble at all having babies? What is it that is so fundamentally broken about DH and me that even though we are ostensibly fit & healthy we can't manage what comes easily to people who can barely get out of bed for pain and fatigue and mental illness? (And how do these people have the energy to have enough sex to have so many children?) The only thing I can conclude from this sort of thing is that there can be a staggering amount wrong with your body without it compromising your fertility. So all the advice they give infertile women about the importance of regular exercise and stress-reducing meditation and no alcohol or caffeine and a perfect balanced diet is bollocks - it's just an opportunistic attempt to push a general public health agenda to the segment of the population most desperate for advice and most likely to listen. It doesn't have any particular effect on fertility at all, just keeps you marginally healthier and full of self-loathing for the 10 miserable years before you finally give up trying. Ooh so bitter.
Can't believe the cheek of that RSPCA man, Wooty! I tried to volunteer with a bird rescue centre the other day after my adventure with the pigeon - but it was clear it would just be a world of pain I didn't need right now. The lady at the charity said I'd be rung up once or twice a day to go and rescue injured birds from fences and people's lofts. It would be just my luck to end up unwittingly summoned to the house of one of the awful couples from my antenatal classes. I can see it now, me climbing down out of their chimney like some Victorian urchin, covered in pigeon shit and holding a screaming bleeding flapping pigeon while they sit smugly on their sofa playing with their adorable toddler and feeding their newborn twins & ask me curtly please not to get soot on their rubber playmat. Sadly I think the pigeons will have to wait until I'm retired.
Oh please do ask your dishy doc about your orgasms - I can see it now: 'Doctor, doctor, I'm having terrible trouble with my orgasms... please can you help me?' 'I'd be happy to. Why don't you lie back on the examining table and I'll see what I can do...' 