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

Also did the bum on the cushion. Brazil nuts, no caffeine (no tea, no choclate), no deoderant. No perfume. Only oily fish. No red meat. Everything organic. Some stone a frien gave me in my bra. I forgot about those till I read this thread. It's kind of funny, puts me in a good mood that other people try stupid stuff as well

I did have a go with the egg white again this month.

Banana I got Femara through Serum - Clomid gives me lots of follies but thins my lining too much, so they thought it would be worth trying Femara instead. It's made me cry continually for several weeks, and ovulation felt like a small bomb exploding in my pelvis. Good times.

Not tried fertility hypnotherapy, as unfortunately hynobirthing is forever associated with such unspeakable horror it makes me feel sick and cold to hear anyone speaking in hushed meditational tones. When you've had some daft bint whispering in your ear for 8 months that you are entitled to have a calm, spiritual birth ('it's your birthright!'), and will have a pain-free natural labour if only you visualise it well enough and with enough positivity... and then when the day arrives you end up labouring for 20 hours after learning your baby is dead, begging for a c-section which eventually your consultant grudgingly gives you, without anaesthetic and your terrified husband has to help them hold you down while you scream as they cut you open... the faintest suggestion of plinky plonky hypno music gives me panic attacks. So I'm basically traumatised by all non-pharmaceutical relaxation techniques. Xanax works a treat though. Not recommended in pregnancy - but then there's no real danger of that for me!

God, that came out bitter.

Oh fucking hell bip, I'd say Xanax was indicated on your cornflakes after what you've been through

So sorry that you've been through such hellish ovulation and Femara was such a disappointment (wondered if it was from abroad as so few UK Drs will prescribe it off label. Was about to write off licence but prescription gin might be pushing things a tad)

I (sort of) feel your pain as my three bastard follicles (which I can't even use as we agreed not to TTC naturally because if anything did implant into such a shit lining we'd be back in the high risk zone for another miscarriage) were not far off 3cm on Sunday. And are now more than ready to pop. Thankfully he's seeing me this evening after clinic hours to do the Neupogen wash so I can trigger tonight, and just release these frigging eggs. That are just going to complete waste. Well that was £500 on Gonal-F and £300 on Cetrotide well spent.

Any new spunk and egg white combinations this month? Other than frittata or meringue? Perhaps a light mousse?

Saw this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36940756

The fact my first thought was 'investigate elective appendectomy and tonsillectomy' pretty much says it all

Hmmm maybe the lady with her seventh surprise pregnancy has had lots of things removed as a child? I have everything intact. Dammit, should have had more childhood illnesses. Who is even doing a study like that? It's not USEFUL to know you might be more fertile with no appendix. Can they not put the time into getting healthy unexplained infertile women pregnant. Argh.

My autocorrect changed infertile to inferior just then.

Hmph.

Sorry about the hypno ref bip. For the record though, you are allowed to sound bitter every time you talk about your daughter's birth and doctors performing major surgery without pain relief. AIBU is full of people feeling bitter about only being invited to the second part of a wedding or having to pay more than their fair share of the restaurant bill. Multiple years of infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, physical trauma and mental scars come with the right to be bitter and to receive lashings of empathy and drugs.

Fuck me, Bip, a CS without anaesthetic? Words fail me. Why did they do that to you?

We are trying PGS next cycle. I asked the doc how often all the embryos are defective. I expected him to tell me that it happened less than 30 per cent of the time. But no! It happens in the majority of cases. Oh goodie!

Tonsils and appendix still very much intact here. God damnit.

Potatoes thanks for validating my bitterness. It's a pretty bitter-making process all in all, and you do get so many people who haven't been through it judging you for not being all sunny of disposition all the time.

Banana Xanax on cornflakes sounds like the breakfast of champions!

Spartacus they did it because the anaesthetist wouldn't believe me that my epidural wasn't working (they very often don't, generally because the epidural catheter has been badly positioned - there's a lot of research into this). At the op I asked for a spinal block or general anaesthetic and they said there 'wasn't time' - which was rich, given that they'd made me wait 20 hours because there wasn't a baby's life to save and therefore it wasn't urgent. So they performed the whole thing while I was screaming - occasionally sticking a gas mask on me that would knock me out for about a minute so I would stop thrashing, and then bringing me back around again. The next day as I lay there in the bereavement suite a whole team of doctors turned up to tell me that the anaesthetic failure was my fault - the epidural was definitely working, I just thought it wasn't because I was 'too anxious' and it made me delusional. They even went back and made a retrospective comment in my maternity notes insisting that the epidural was working, contrary to the observations of midwives over the previous 20 hours, and my own stated experience. We should have made a PALS complaint, really. But when you're presented with a united front of doctors telling you in no uncertain terms that they will back each other up and discredit you as a delusional hysteric if you complain, there really seems little point. And I was in such shock for months afterwards, I didn't have the strength for a fight. It has made me really quite angry about the mind-over-matter ideology in woo circles - it sometimes seems just a dressed-up version of 'damnit, woman, you're hysterical!', where there is nothing in fertility or childbearing that can't be blamed on the mother's mental state.

Good luck with your PGS... I suppose at least that way you can spare yourself a potential miscarriage. But it so often feels like a choice between getting bad news now or later.

Banana I hope your follicles go off without too much discomfort. Horrible that you're not even allowed to try to use them.

bip silly question but how are you at the dentist? If I recall you said you had hypermobility syndrome too? I don't personally have this issue, but as resistance to local anaesthetic can be one of the delightful problems associated with EDS / JHS, wondered if this might have exacerbated the absolute horror show you had to endure at the hands of the arsehole anaesthetist (ie there's even more reason why you were telling them it wasn't fucking working)

Echoing potatoes that you have every bloody right to be bitter as hell. Certainly anyone who offers any platitudes like 'think positively', 'it'll happen', 'you'll get there' or offers a unicorn story about their friend of a friend who got drunk and relaxed while on the waiting list for IVF having adopted a child, deserves a swift punch in the gob. Flamethrowers at the ready

Yesterday's delight: British Gas boiler service man telling me how lucky I was not to have kids. I gave him the death stare and icily said 'not really'.

This evening's magical infertility entertainment : off to get Neupogen squirted into my uterus to see if it has any magical effect on my lining (if so, we can add it into the protocol next time). Consultant agreed to do it after I sent some medical papers to him, he's never done it before but agreed it looked compelling and was definitely worth a try. He's not charging me for the procedure either - just have to pay for the drug they've bought in from the pharmacy - which is handy. Learning experience for both of us!

Banana that was my first thought too - can I get my appendix removed? Sadly tonsils and appendix are in place.

It's interesting what you say about hyper mobility and anaesthetics. I am resistant to local anesthetic (cue them frantically injecting me with morphine when I tried to do egg collection under local), and to the best of my knowledge don't have hyper mobility, but my mother does.

Hope the squirting works for you.

Banana dental anaesthetic works fine on me, and have had local anaesthetic for stitches before and that's worked. So it seemed more likely that it was the siting of the epidural that had gone wrong. But I do have a friend who is resistant to local anaesthetic - and she goes to a dentist who will put her under. What bliss, to wake up with perfect teeth and no memory of the awful drill noise.

Your consultant sounds great! Seriously though, you should be on his payroll with the research you're doing for him! Good luck with the rinse-out. And glad you were icy with the British Gas man. What a fucking twat.

bip best bit about infertility is the wooze juice.

Before my hysteroscopy the anaesthetist told me he was about to shoot me up with the class A's. Bring it on, I said

So one uterine wash down, mega scanxiety now kicked in as to whether we will see any effect when I go back for a scan (& possibly the procedure repeated) tomorrow

Quite funny. When I go in for a date with dildocam, to avoid getting tangled up I now don't usually bother unfolding the sheet, and just plonk it on top of me in a vague nod to modesty.

Well apparently when he's going rooting around there with an anglepoise lamp aimed up my vagina, seems he wanted a bit of privacy, so he unfolded the sheet and draped it over me

10/10 on the speculum technique. Sort of twisted it around somehow. Felt less like being cranked open like a shoehorn. He swapped over to a different one to get a different view of the cervix. I'm not sure if the second one had a sea view....

Bip, your experience was fucking terrible and I just wanted to say I'm so sorry. You could still get PALS involved. I'm sure the midwives would remember you, things like that are rare and I'm sure would stick in their memories. But if it would just do more harm to you to revisit it then that's totally understandable.

So the hypnotherapist told me about two miracle babies for women she'd worked with.

Hate miracle baby stories. Went right off her.

Drugs and luck. That is all.

Ugh, Potatoes I'm sorry. The only woo therapist I've ever met who didn't tirelessly wheel out the miracle stories was my infertile acupuncturist. I guess she got how shitty it is to be constantly regaled with tales of other people's success - however good it might be for business. I had some doozies though - mostly people who shook their heads sadly and said they and their almighty magic woo could have spared me my stillbirth / miscarriages / failed IVF attempt if only I'd come to them first. That used to make me breathe fire.

Thanks for your kind thoughts, Tabby

How'd the scan go, Banana?

This thread has made me chuckle -and there's not much that's funny about infertility.

Ditto lots of the above...
Sex every day, sex every second day, sex only when persona kit says red, sex when temp says I'm ovulating, bum raised on pillow, legs in air,

Acupuncture, losing weight, exercise, Chinese herbs, coenzymeq10, vitamins a to flipping z.
5 rounds of IUI - 3 with Clomid, 2 with injections.

5 IVFs with varying shit responses to drugs for unknown reasons

I eventually came to terms with it as best I could having had lots of counselling because I really did feel I was going to have a breakdown with the sheer sadness of it all.

I now have a beautiful daughter adopted from Russia and I thank god none of that shit worked because we wouldn't have her. And ps, I had a surprise pregnancy at 43 (that ended in MC) 2 years after adopting dd.

And I nearly forgot, I did a Novena one year too.

It's just fucking shit, isn't it?

mine I’m so sorry for all the torrent of shite you went through having treatment, but am so happy that you have a beautiful daughter. A friend who’s adopted said her parents always told her how EXTRA wanted and loved she was (and is), because she was specially chosen to become part of the family.

Bip and Potatoes I really think there should be some kind of barrens directory of non-fertile woo practitioners.

It’s like the boards of baby photos you get in waiting rooms - DH gets apoplectic with rage about them. I know they’re meant to be reassuring examples of ‘look how many people we’ve helped, you’re in the right place’ - but DH thinks it’s absolutely disgusting they’re there. When you’re the couple who’s had a failed cycle or miscarriage, they’re just there taunting you and underlining your barreness, as if to say ‘here’s what you could have won’.

Bip scan went better than expected thanks - no miraculous 2 day transformation, but it had definitely done something and my consultant was pleased with the improvement in the appearance of my lining. So we’ll deffo do it next cycle (whenever that may be)

Just now on period watch - if I get a bleed in 2 weeks then we can start stimming me.

That's absolute best case. The far more likely option is that I don’t have a proper period (part of my issue is my lining not shedding properly) and we’ll be looking at another hysteroscopy, probably early September.

Then 1-2 months of a copper coil + oestrogen pills / patches. Then maybe cycling in Nov/Dec. Or not, if we still can't get me to bleed.

Oh the irony. When TTC you’re supposed to be willing your period NOT to come. I’m nothing if not contrary, as I’m absolutely desperate for one.

Bananafish, in my clinic they used to have all those photos on the wall too. At the start of our journey, I thought they were lovely, that's where it was all going to end for us too. But with each failure, they taunted us from the walls. It was like 'Even here, where the barren women come, you're the most barren of all, ha ha,'

My clinic were then moving to bigger premises - to accommodate all us barren women - and I asked them not to hang the photos on the walls of the new place and explained why. They very kindly listened.

Pps, the very lovely secretary of my infertility Dr had a very lovely name. At the start of our journey, when I thought if I just kept at it, I'd be one of the lucky ones, I decided that if I had a girl, I'd call her by that lovely lady's name. Years later, we got our beautiful girl who also had a beautiful name. When she started talking, she wasn't able to say her name properly and called herself a shortened version of it which is.... you've guessed it, the lovely secretary's name. this is the name we use for her all the time now. Isn't that a bit woo???

Great reading all your stories as I'm lying here recovering from
My laparoscopy which I went private for as nhs are generally shit. Although my consultant was horrified over the lack of testing I had had which he says I was entitled to on nhs even though I had one DC but my GP is crap, so ended up paying for that privately. So currently in pain eating bee pollen and propolis (trying not to think about the fact it's basically bee phlem/vomit waiting for expensive blood test results that will probably tell me I've missed the boat (bloody DH insisting we waited for 2nd cos loads of famous people had babies in their 40s -bastard)

Ah Ilove. You have reminded me of my favourite NHS conversation, when I was denied investigations after an ectopic pregnancy because "those are for infertile women and you have just had an ectopic pregnancy so are clearly fertile".
Hope you are recovering well.

Spartacus the comments tge nhs come out with at times would be funny if they weren't quite so offensive!

Owls, for some reason it had never occurred to me that I'd been scarfing bee vomit all these years. Swallowing the bodily fluids of insects, injecting myself with the urine of menopausal nuns... it sounds like the sort of thing only junkies in the deepest stages of withdrawal might resort to. Hope you're recovering well.

Banana fingers crossed for your bleed!

Mine really glad you wound up with your lovely daughter after all your trials and tribulations. And good on you for getting the clinic not to put up all the baby pics!

Update here. Looks like Femara wasn't a total wash out as I've had positive pregnancy tests today and yesterday at 8 and 9 dpo. What really strikes me this time is our absolute lack of any emotion apart from a faint sense of inconvenience. We're moving in a few weeks, and I keep thinking, fuck, somehow in amidst all the putting cats in catteries and packing and unpacking and changing my address with all the utilities companies I'm going to have to fit in another ERPC. I don't have that kind of time to spare right now. Let's hope this one just fizzles out on its own.

This would be my 6th pregnancy (7th if you count a very short-lived chemical back in April). It's weird to realise that actually my preferred option at the end of every month is just to get my period and be sad and angry for a few days and start again; the positive tests have only ever brought protracted fear and misery.

Bip can completely understand how you're feeling, and I too adopt the 'a pessimist is never disappointed' maxim (bullshit, heartbreak is heartbreak, no matter how much you tell yourself you expected if). BUT. We will all be cautiously optimistic and very hopeful on your behalf. Everything crossable crossed for you xx

Thanks, Banana. And I am willing your period to arrive so you can crack on and get those embryos back in action.