Failure stories

[BipBippadotta]

I'm far past the point where I'm interested in fertility success stories. Tales of lucky couples who triumphed over impossible biological odds to have their miracle baby make me want to self-immolate. Help me feel less alone in my utter irreversible barrenness by telling me about all the fertility treatments, supplements, folk remedies, voodoo, etc you've tried, that work for every other fucker on the Internet, but did bugger all for you.

I'll start!

Things that didn't work for us:
Grapefruit juice
Guaifeneisin
COQ10
Acupuncture
Vitamin E
Royal jelly
Wheatgrass
Pycnogenol
Low carbing
Inositol & melatonin
Cutting caffeine and alcohol
L-Arginine
Baby aspirin
Maca
B6
Starflower oil
Soy isoflavones
Clomid for DH (to increase sperm count)
Clomid for me
Clomid & injectables
High doses of antibiotics
Prednisone
IVF with ICSI

Banana I've been wondering how you were all day today. I'm glad you've got a good distraction, and I hope you're still feeling ok this evening. The cramps sound like a good omen. When is your next scan or checkup?

That video... especially the bit when she says 'And then I miscarried, and felt like a fraud'. That's (now) my biggest fear, that all of this will just vanish. But you're right, at the moment I'm pregnant, there's no point worrying about it.

Tiger how are you feeling? Is your bumholio any better or are you still singing Johnny Cash every time you go to the loo?

On an early train to London, stopping off for a blood test before heading to a two day course.

Hope your first day went well banana. Very jealous of the lovely nails. I haven't had a manicure or pedicure for a while, tend to avoid during treatment. Just another reason why IVF makes me feel drab!

robber that's exactly it. Try and exist in the exact moment. Today you are pregnant. Feels a bit like a yoga mantra. When are you in next?

I had to go back to consultancy type work bip, after working in the public sector, which was all broken photocopiers and office politics. You're not missing much I promise you!

The bumholio is much improved although still not 100%. Bloody progesterone! Starting to feel quite hot at night too, as well as wide awake from about 4am too.

Last night the pregnancy dreams began. I'm hoping I'm not plagued by them for a whole week like my first cycle. First one was quite nice, second one was more traumatic and didn't end well. It is bloody unsettling!

How is everyone?

Tiger how are you getting on? Good luck for Sunday.

Banana how is the new job going?

Bip are you almost at the 20w scan stage?

Robber how are you feeling, hope you’re getting on OK, I realise that life is just what happens between scans and life has a funny sense of humour that the time when the scanxiety is the worst, is the time you can’t bosh a sleeping pill or neck a bottle of wine to get through it.

tiger glad the bumholio is much improved, and hoping the dreams settle. Very unsettling indeed. Hoping they are due to bonkers hormones from something cooking nicely in there

Bip thinking of you and DH

AFM, nothing much to report. Due date came and went. TBH I felt strangely detached from it. I didn’t have a baby the day before, or the day after, so the day itself was fairly meaningless in many ways. New job is great and the perfect distraction. I may not be any good at the pregnancy thing, but I AM really good at my job. So in the spirit of this thread, it's nice not to feel a total failure for once.

Histology on the biopsy from the hysteroscopy showed there was indeed products of conception, so it was an early miscarriage. But Dr confirmed (and said the pictures and video show) that all pregnancy tissue was removed. He said he’s hopeful that starting from a much stronger base with a much healthier endometrium will mean we can get me menstruating, and that when we do a dummy FET I may actually respond to the oestrogen. We shall see.

Worked out that the last HRT pill is 4 days before my 35th birthday. It’s a tragic state of affairs when the best birthday present I could possibly get would be a proper period. Heavy period would be like Christmas and birthday rolled all into one!!

Hi all. Wishing you the birthday present of excruciatingly heavy bleeding banana!

Still here plodding along. Not enjoying being on the pill diet has gone to pot. Scan on Thursday to see if cyst has gone. I don't think it has TBH, reckon I can still tell it's there. Am somewhat of a cyst connasieur these days!

Good luck for Thurs, Bean. And wishing you a menstrual cascade for your birthday, Banana. Thinking of you on test day tomorrow, Tiger.

I'm all right, 20 w scan not for weeks yet. Have umpteen antenatal appts before then, though, which so far have all begun with some midwife or consultant or sonographer I've never seen before & will likely never see again asking 'is this your first baby?' Despite the fact that they've all got my notes right in front of them with a massive fuck-off SANDS sticker on the front that's meant to alert people to the fact I've had a baby who died. And hence, no, this is not my first baby. Never mind.

It's alarming how nobody ever actually looks at your maternity notes. They insist you bring them with you to every appointment, but nobody wants to see them, they just give you more & more sheaves of frustratingly un-hole-punched papers to put in them, which always fall out and get lost because, oddly enough, I don't carry a fucking hole punch with me at all times. But it doesn't matter - lose them, burn them, make them into origami, nobody cares. The sonographer doesn't care about my blood pressure, the midwife doesn't care about my levels of amniotic fluid, nobody knows where my blood & urine results will be sent (the GP nurse took those, so it's apparently nowt to do with the maternity team & therefore not their job to care whether I've got pernicious anaemia or syphilis). Everyone pays attention to the task they're assigned for your 10-minute appointment, but there seems to be nobody whose job it is to take clinical responsibility for the whole picture, except me, with my un-hole-punched pack of papers, and Dr Google. This is apparently called 'being an active partner in your care'.

It's the 2nd anniversary of my daughter's birth & death on Tuesday, so I've got that shaky feeling of imminent threat. There's also, of course, sadness, and guilt at being pregnant when I go to her grave on her birthday.

We unwisely tried to introduce our most skittish cat to the garden today & she immediately slunk underneath the decking and hid there until dark. We are both in such a paranoid frame of mind at this time of year that we became convinced that she'd come out at night and be killed by a fox / get stuck in a drain / drown in a water butt / etc. We couldn't stand the thought of losing another family member, so we did what seemed sensible & flushed her out from under the decking with a garden hose. Furious wet cat came shooting out, snarling. Now she hates our guts and has gone back to hiding in the chest of drawers, probably forever. And will probably shit all over my jumpers. Ah well.

bip, that is possibly the most accurate (and saddest) description of NHS care I've ever come across. You should send it to the hospital Chief Executive. There is so much talk of 'joined up care' in the NHS, and yet it fails so spectacularly and so often. I work in health and these days the focus of management is saving money and little else, sadly. Everything else is suffering.

Sounds like a tough few days . Your strength is outstanding and you certainly shouldn't feel guilty. I'm sure the cat will forgive you too. They don't come running back as quickly as dogs but they can still be bribed back to affection!!

that shaky feeling of imminent threat. I'm there right now. I tested, it was positive. The line doesn't look convincing, my back aches menacingly and I'm spotting. My last IVF cycle ending in bleeding at this point and my first was a chemical with strong positives, even on a digital, that then petered out over the course of a week. I strongly suspect this will go the same way. My official OTD is 14 days after transfer, so this coming Friday. We'll see where we are then.

Tiger holy shit, I've got everything crossed for you that this sticks. Fucking stressful times. Hang in there.

Bip that account of maternity care is soul destroying to read. And completely unacceptable too. I'd complain to the director of midwives.

Tiger cautious congratulations from here.

That sounds horrendous Bip, I have heard of other stories where Sands stickers are ignored, I don't understand how people can be so insensitive. I feel some guilt TTC after losing my son, so I can empathise with the guilt that you feel but your daughter will know that she's still loved and remembered on her birthday. The world keeps turning. Hugs for Tuesday.

Tiger cautious congratulations from me too, hope it's a sticky one.

Bean hopefully your cyst-dar is faulty and the scan on Thursday finds its gone.

Bip - such true words and sadly shouldn't be like that ESP with sands sticker on your notes.

I understand the guilt though different circumstance to you - my husband died 5.5yrs ago. I met someone after and as you know finally preg after 10yrs ttc with dh and df who I then met. I do still feel guilty that I'm happy with df

But we all deserve happiness and can understand your emotions on tue xxx

Ps cat will forgive you - I was always told to butter their paws when moving and cats rem the lovely taste and feeling and return to that place i.e. New home

Tiger sending lots of sticky dust

Banana hoping that dummy run /era goes well and some info is found from it

Bip for Tuesday, I'll be thinking of you. I love the NHS but the lack of joined up knowledge and thinking is often breathtaking. Whereas for most people it is just time-consuming or irritating or even entertaining, in your case it is really unfair and upsetting.

Also, most cats are professionals at looking fucked off for the smallest grievance, it keeps owners on their toes!

Tiger a cautious congratulations from me, I hope those lines keep appearing. Will you test again or will you hold out til Friday? I don't think the backache is necessarily a sign of your period.

Banana fantastic news that your job is going well. Is this a contract or a permanent job? Like the others, I've got everything crossed for a niagara of flow when you stop taking the HRT. Is the pain from your back under control now you're back on meds? I'm ok thanks, got another growth scan on Friday. Fortunately I have a mountain of deadlines between now and then, which I'm sure will distract me.

Bean and Blue how are you both?

Blondes I don't think I'd realised that your DH had passed away, that must have been awful. As much as he drives me bonkers, I can't imagine life without my DH.

Radio 4/politicians today talking about NHS maternity fuck ups which cause dead/permanently disabled babies - and basically alternatives to spending half a billion a year on litigation and compensation. They want a more "honest system". Having read Bips various accounts of nhs care, including the most recent, good fucking luck to them. They should consult with people who've been on the receiving end of shambolic, frankly negligent care, rather than politicians and public sector gravy trainers having public talking shops.

Bip all the hugs for tomorrow.

Blondes I'm so sorry to hear about your dh. I'm sure he would be nothing but thrilled to know you are happy.

Afm I'm bleeding after 13 days of the pill. WTAF? that's 3 periods in 3.5 weeks.

icy not sure what you heard on R4 today but there was a parliamentary debate on stillbirth last week, led by Patricia Gibson MP whose IVF baby Kenneth died due to a catalogue of preventable errors. The investigation took 2 years, and she found that some people never get an investigation, answers, apologies or improvements, so the same things happen again and again. I saw her speaking on C4 news last week and it was v emotional, I could relate to so much of what she said. Some MPs may be jumping on the bandwagon but it comes from a genuine place. Whether anything changes is a different matter...

Blondes I'm sorry to hear about your DH. Amazing to find happiness now though.

Bean does your consultant have an explanation?

AFM I'm managing to do my jabs half asleep! Four days into down regging at the moment, I have an endometrial scratch on Friday and a suppression scan next week on 27th. This cycle has been going super quickly because I was on CD13 when I went in for my initial consultation and they made things happen quickly (not NHS obv) so I could start drugs on CD21.

Thanks for all your anniversary thoughts.

I think until something awful happens to you you can find a sort of Blitz spirit that makes you proud of your resilience in the face of NHS chaos - I remember feeling smug about how patient & uncomplaining we all were at Whipps Cross when there weren't enough chairs in the waiting room, and enormously pregnant women were sprawled on the floor or leaning against walls while waiting 3-5 hours for delayed appts, or when they only had one functioning blood pressure cuff in the entire unit, or when they lost a friend's blood results and because it was too late to re-do them they made her sign a legal document saying she had decided retroactively to refuse the tests and waived her right to the results (so they couldn't be sued if something went wrong or remained undiagnosed). We all rolled our eyes and felt quietly proud of ourselves for not being the type to make a fuss. I My friend and her baby were OK, as it happens. But they could easily not have been. I know so many people now whose babies have died because of failures to diagnose easily treatable conditions, or cock-ups in prescribing, or failures in triage. We trust this system with our lives & it's only when something important goes wrong due to systemic problems that you realise none of this is funny or acceptable - it's only luck that more people aren't seriously harmed.

I worked in mental health for an NHS hospital a few years back. We were openly encouraged to find ways of discharging people from waiting lists or 'triaging' them elsewhere before they'd been seen, to bring down recorded waiting times and keep us from being decommissioned. I interviewed for an NHS job later on where they asked me frankly whether I could be creative with 'treatment outcome measurements' to improve service stats. There was no sense that my interviewers thought this could be considered unethical, it was just the way things were. Having had that view into the NHS makes it pretty disheartening to be a patient; I am under no illusion that the patient's best interests are an organisational priority, however much individual practitioners may care. There are amazing doctors and nurses and midwives, but they are operating under such pressure & institutional paranoia & are made to bear the brunt of such chronic understaffing and lack of equipment that they can't possibly do their jobs as thoroughly as they were trained to.

Anyhow, rant over. I've just got to accept that, as with most things, the outcome of this is mainly down to luck.

Blondes I also hadn't realised that you had lost your husband. I am so sorry to hear that. And I am glad for you and your partner that you are happy and on your way to having a family. It is very hard to honour such a huge loss and also keep moving with your life. It brings a lot of mixed feelings.

Blue I am sorry for the loss of your son as well. It is such a minefield ttc again while trying to process what you've lost.

Banana fingers crossed for your lining & glad the job's going well!

Tiger hoping you're doing OK, and hello to everyone else out there (Zippy & Pea & others currently waiting for treatment / trying to work out next steps).

Blue it was Jeremy Hunt on Today talking about overhauling the compensation system for maternity fuck ups and basically cut the cost of litigation. People would apply to an independent panel who would review what happened and then make a ruling re compensation. If the patient isn't happy they can still go to court. The scheme will be voluntary. Apparently the "lessons learned" will then be circulated across the NHS.

Not convinced. It's an efficiency drive, so the panel will be trying to pitch the sums at just enough to deter complainants from going to court, and won't necessarily be an accurate reflection of either the sums needed for ongoing care, or enough of a punitive amount of compensation.

Hunt also said U.K. needs to drive down rate of stillbirths - but if the whole attitude is "blitz spirit muddling through, one person one role" then there's no chance.

Sadly, the NHS like so many other sections of the public sector (I'm looking at you Network Rail!) is just lowest common demononinator. People go in all positive and wanting to do good things and a good job, but get ground down by the reality. So you have people who don't bother reading files, lose test results, don't really care. If you're 1% rich you can opt out entirely, for the rest of us we just have to put up and either shut up or be shut up. It's so depressing.

Thanks for sharing that icy, sounds like a load of hot air and not what last week was supposed to be about.

Reflecting on bip's post. At my recent appointment with consultant to discuss post mortem results, we also discovered a miscommunication at my 16wk appointment where I should have been told to be checked out every 4 weeks but went away thinking that my next appointment was with GP at 24wks and midwife at 28wks. So I didn't see anyone at 20wks (other than sonographer for anomaly scan) and lost my son at 21wks. It wouldn't have made a difference as neither GP or MW would have had any reason to check my cervix and even if they did, they are unlikely to have seen anything wrong (as my cervix dilated so quickly in a few hours at 21+3), but I'm left feeling that I 'missed' an appointment at a critical time.

It is very hard to honour such a huge loss and also keep moving with your life. It brings a lot of mixed feelings

So very true. You don't get over a death of a loved one but you learn to cope and totally understand the emotions you have over being preg and the loss of your baby 💐💐💐💐

Guilt that happy - you are not replacing. You are carrying on building a new life and pathway to your hopes and dreams

We were together 19yrs and suffered from depression and sadly took his own life at home by hanging - I found him. Massive shock - my whole world collapsed and all hopes dreams and plans for the future destroyed

The woolly hugs people on mn made me a lovely blanket. Full of warmth and hugs

But

Time goes on and I have met a wonderful caring supportive man who has 3 kids in late 20's yet was happy to ttc with me

Been together 4.5yrs and engaged but no date as yet as we decided paying for ivf was more important then getting married

And the rest you know. Bubs is almost 17w

Almost half way xx

Oh lord, Blondes what an incredibly traumatic loss. I'm so sorry. I just can't imagine what that must have been like for you. I am so so pleased that you've managed to find happiness. It must have been a very hard road.

Blue I had a similar experience of the follow-up meeting with the hospital after my daughter died; not that anything could necessarily have turned out differently, but a feeling that things hadn't been communicated & fallen through the cracks at lots of different points. First they told me, with no hint of an apology, that they'd lost the placenta & umbilical cord they were meant to send for testing - 'but that doesn't really matter, chances are we wouldn't have learned anything from that anyway'. Then looking through my maternity notes afterwards (which I had to request separately, and which are how I finally learned that the official cause of death was a ruptured umbilical cord - at the follow-up meeting the consultant just said 'we don't know why it happened' - so clearly she hadn't bothered reading my notes) I discovered that there had been very little growth between scans at 36 and 38 weeks. I'd been sent for extra scans and nobody ever told me why - no mention of why in the notes either. At both of those scans the sonographers told me everything was absolutely normal, baby was a bit on the small side but nothing to worry about. So she could have been struggling for weeks and nobody picked it up. Equally maybe everything really was fine until labour started and the cord broke. We'll never know. But nobody from the hospital gave a convincing impression of giving a shit.

Oh Blondes what a terrible thing to go through. I'm so happy things seem to be working out for you.

Blue and Bip that must be incredibly hard to deal with. Bip we'll all be thinking of you tomorrow. Blue I'm glad the DR is going ok so far, I always used to feel better when something was happening.

Bean fucking hell, that sounds awful. What does your consultant say?

Tiger got everything crossed for you.

Wave to everyone else.

A loss is a loss. Yes I didn't expect dh to ever kill his self or die - or least not till we were old/80's/90's

Yes I met df and I see it that I was lucky enough to find love not once but twice with two special men 💓

I couldn't imagine being a mum and my child dying - that's wrong - parents should never have to bury their child

The child usually as an adult will bury its parents iyswim

💐💐💐 to you bip thinking of you tomorrow

She hasn't said. Just that she's not worried and to let her know if heavier. It's not really got beyond spotting and is darker today so who knows. Naively hoping maybe it's the cyst disappearing. Guess I'll find out on Thursday.

Good luck for Thursday, Bean, and glad it's stayed at spotting. Hoping it was the cyst going out with a flourish.

Bean. Good your consultant isn't worried. Good luck for thur