That little blob of messy, cells is number 13 of 15 fertilised eggs that Repromed have had in the incubator since Friday morning.  This little chap(ess) was chosen because he/she is made up of so many cells that you can’t count them anymore.  They’re all merging together, just as they should be.  There are already three more of these little, tiny things frozen for the future .  This little guy/gal was picked from those four because, apparently, there is already a tiny hole in him/her, which is, so we’re told, good and a sign that he/she is already ready to start the next phase.

This, tiny, weeny little thing was introduced to us on an iPad, in the hand of a smiling embryologist.  It was then shown to us “live” under the microscope before being placed on the thin end of a very thin, device and dropped inside me.  The Dr gave me an ultrasound wand to hold over myself, pointed at the embryo’s new home, so that we could watch the entire thing.  We got to see the end of the bendy straw sneak in there and drop it in place.  We also got to see it, sat there, afterwards.  Strangely, it kind of glowed in there.  I’m not sure why, but there was a definite light patch where it was sitting against me.

They write the number they've taken on your hand so you can see when you wake up.

It was a bit touch and go as to whether we’d be allowed to transfer the embryo today.  The doctor was aiming to retrieve 10 eggs on Friday; he got 29.  That’s a sign that my ovaries were very stimulated.  I was a bit shocked when I saw that inky number on the palm of my hand, I knew that there were 27 follicles on the Monday of that week but I wasn’t expecting there to be that many reaching the point of producing and egg… instead I ended up with 2 more!

Having sorted through those eggs we were told that 19 were mature enough to be inseminated with.. we’ll call it man juice… (lol) Having injected 19, by Saturday lunchtime 15 of those had fertilised.  Then it was just a case of wait and see.  Today there are 3 in the freezer, one in me, one that has 14 cells, another with 11, another with 8 (all of which are being left over night to see if they get to the stage the one you see pictured above is at – if they do they’ll be put in the freezer too).  There’s one with only  a single cell, after 4 days… lazy …and cells like that will not be frozen and kept for the future.

We’ve been really lucky to collect so many eggs as it will reduce the chance of me having to go through the whole process for a while.  We can use up each one of the embryos that are frozen, should we need to, before I (or indeed Matt) need to hand over some more.

The reason that it was touch and go was because, as we were told by the doctor today, in the past if they have collected 29 eggs they just cancel the embryo transfer.  That’s because, in order to produce so many eggs at once (i’ve just given up over two years worth of eggs in one go) my ovaries have to become enormous.  As a result, I am really bloated and a bit sore.  At the weekend I was REALLY sore and walking at the pace of a snail.  I’m on hormone therapy now too and the side effects of that include bloating too! However, they changed my trigger injection to Lucrin (instead of Ovidril) and this seems to have made all the difference.  Lucrin’s hormone release is shorter, meaning that my body has had longer to recover and calm down. Under instruction from the doc i’ve also been drinking 2.5 ltrs of water everyday to flush out as much as I can. Of course, i’m still taking the more traditional oestrogen (Progynova) and progesterone (Cronin) but all the Follicle stimulating hormones have wandered off.

Because my bloods showed normal levels of hormones, i’m not dehydrated and my belly shrunk a little less than an inch in a day, the Dr let us go ahead.  There is still a risk that I will still end up with OHSS (Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome) but if I do begin to feel ill, this time it will be because the pregnancy hormones are kicking in… which also means … I’ll be pregnant!  As long as we’re vigilant we’ll be fine  I’m sure.

Every step of this process has been a risk.  The risk of OHSS has been there at every step of the way.  If the Dr was happy to offer us the opportunity then we decided were we happy to take it.  So now all we have to do is sit and wait.  The next hurdle for me is a pregnancy test.  If there’s no period (sorry boys) by the 8th of Feb I have to pop in for a blood test.  That’s how we confirm pregnancy here – something I know N8Girl would have appreciated when she found out she was pregnant

Keep praying, crossing fingers and sending us positive vibes.

Go number 13!

Strange facts…

• On Friday we were laughing when we realised we had chosen parking space 13 as we headed to the operating theatre.
• Yesterday my mum sent me a silly email asking how the little ones were.  We made a joke that number 13 needed burping…
• Embryo 13 was chosen.

Spooky!

Related articles

• The not at all unpleasant blossoming of new life. Woo. (n8girl.com)
• Go for Launch! (rockinmochin.com)
• Eggs Benedict? (rockinmochin.com)
• And a happy new year! (n8girl.com)
• On Babies… (rockinmochin.com)

What a lovely face I could pull at 22. Why'd I choose this one?!

Matt and I have been together for nearly 12 years and married for 3 and half. We’ve travelled the world, bought and sold houses, studied for a degree each, helped each other develop our career pathways and started new businesses together.  We’ve emigrated to the other side of the world so that we can experience life in another hemisphere.  We’ve achieved a lot together but there’s been one thing evading us – children.

One of my favourite students (I know I don’ t have favourites yadah yadah) told me, 3 years ago, that I’d better hurry up if I didn’t want to attend parents evening with a Zimmer frame – that actually made me laugh.  (Teenagers are amusing little creatures – they think 26 is middle age.) I’ve had adults I’ve worked with tell me how much they enjoy still playing tennis with their kids because they had them whilst they were younger – hint hint – and I’m bored with the assumption that people make when you meet them that because we’re in our 30s and married we must have young children.

It’s not that we don’t want them.   In fact, I remember one argument when we were 24 and unmarried where Matt suggested we have a baby before we were married – babies are something we’ve been discussing for a very long time.  We’ve always known that we wanted a family of our own and although our adventures have delayed us a little, we’ve actually been trying to create baby woowaa for nearly two years.  To some, that might not seem very long but every ‘big fat negative’ is actually pretty hard to take –  it gets harder to take with ever month.

About a year ago, we did some ‘investigations’ and were referred to a fertility clinic.  It turns out that, for us, there is actually a biological reason why we haven’t given conceived a baby Woowaa.   Our chance of conceiving naturally is pretty low.  We were told by a GP with sympathetic eyes that, if weren’t in any rush, we could just keep trying and see what happens, he told me to read the content on the Repromed site.  It was “NO” number 20 that helped us make our decision. 20 months might not be long to some, but for us it was long enough.

Yes, biscuits are a very important part of the injection process.

We’ve been in the expert care of Dr Angela McClean of Repromed, Adelaide for the last 12 months or so.  We’ve both been poked, prodded, scanned and tested.   It was through this process that we discovered that Matt has a unsually low white blood cell count which prompted a whole line of enquiry that was quite scary but thankfully fruitless.  We’re both proven fit, healthy and ready to be parents. We’ve made the decision to start IVF treatment.  In fact, the reason I’m writing this now, having stayed very quiet about it for all this time, is because I started the injections last night.

I’m writing about this now so that I can share the journey.  This blog has always been about sharing.  Its read by lots of people looking for information about how to emigrate from the UK to Australia.  Now, as our life moves towards a different kind of journey, maybe we can share some thoughts that will support others who are experiencing the same thing.  I wasn’t ready to share these private events before.  Maybe I am now.

Related Articles:

What Happens During IVF?

What’s it like in a fertility clinic?

After spending time in Derby and Brum with the Woodwards we embarked on the massive mission of catching up with as many people as we possibly could… whilst continuing to munch through Matt’s food wish list.

The rolling English countryside!

Saturday morning we got up and drive over to Hereford. Hereford, is where I was born and where most of my family lives.   We drove straight to my Nan and Granddad’s house and caught up with them for an hour or two.  We walked in whilst they were in the middle of decorating their living room so Matt made himself useful by taking down the blinds! They both seemed really well which is relief as Nan has had quite a few health issues this year.  The only resident of the house hold who seemed a little subdued was mad dog “Whiskey” who amusingly seems to have put on so much weight he didn’t manage to greet us in the passageway as he usually does… he can’t fit through the pet door anymore.  He also seemed far less inclined to bounce about and spin on the spot.  Other than that I’d say everyone, including Jason the cat were all good!

Uncle Nigel was also there being chief wall paper person so it was great to see him too before we headed off to catch up with other relatives.

One significant thing I had to do was visit the grave of my late Nan and Granddad.   A week after we left England my Nan passed away and I didn’t have the chance to attend her funeral and say farewell.  So, rather than grabbing chips from the college chippy and having a cup of tea with her we had to head to the cemetery to say hello.  It was very strange and sad but it was good to take some flowers to cheer up her resting place.  In fact, we ended up picking up sandwiches and eating them on the park bench a few meters away from where she rests; I reckon she’d have liked that, us having lunch with her.

After visiting Nan’s grave we headed over to my cousin’s house.  She had a little baby girl whilst we were away and we’d never met her.  It was lovely to catch up with her and her brood.  They really are awesome kids, she should be very proud of them.  We arrived at a point where he oldest son had to apologise to her because he’d managed to hit her with his toy dinosaur… His response was that “big t-rex did it” and when she replied that big T-rex better apologise then he put on a monster voice and said “sorry mummy” .  Very cute!

It was also really cute to see the traditional Lloyd style sibling personalities in evidence.  Oldest one…  noisy, confident and independent.  Youngest one… shy, clinging to mum and quiet.  Tee hee!  Even Matt said I can see you there and Kelly there!   lol  It was really cool to catch up with them all.

Now.. this is BALTI!!! YOM!

On the same day we’d booked ourselves into our favourite Brummy curry house, the  Shylhet Spice Cuisine, in Kings Heath.  I can’t tell you how amazing it was to eat a proper curry with a proper Naan! Lol  I’ve really missed an actual Balti.  Our local curry house tries hard to make them but they’re just not the same as an authentic Brummy Curry!  YOM!

The curry gang! Thanks for coming you guys! :0)

What was even more lovely was that nearly 20 people came to eat with us.  Some of them driving from North Wales just to spend a couple of hours with us!  We are really lucky to have such fabulous friends.  There was a lot of love in that room !

We graciously gave ourselves Sunday off from our mad dash and, after a very important breakfast at Beckett’s Farm (sausages)  spent most of the day at Mum’s setting up their NAS drive (NERD ALERT!) Matt, of course, made sure that he had the opportunity to drink more English Ales in the evening; I was so tired of going out that I stayed in… Unfortunately, I didn’t know that Matt had taken a house key with him and so ended up staying up until the wee hours so I could let him in…. you might have seen the Facebook status! Lol

We bounced back into the swing of things on Monday, heading to my favourite place in the whole of the UK… Stratford upon Avon. I just had to go and see the new theatre and have a yummy cream tea by the river! I know it’s a clichéd British thing but I really do love a cup of tea and a scone with proper clotted cream!  YOM!

We were joined by friends of ours so we were given another opportunity to catch up with people we hadn’t seen for a while! All good

By Tuesday lunchtime we were on the train to London so that we could spend some time with my bestieN8 and her husband – I need to invent a little name for him    It’s always awesome to catch up with her and we’d planned in a little spa day to ensure that the gossip wasn’t interrupted by smelly boys.  That meant that we left Matt to his own devices.  He ended up catching up with a friend in the pub at lunchtime… and didn’t finish drinking until late that night…  I force-fed him about 2 liters of water that night… there was no way I wanted to travel back to Adelaide with a really hung over husband!  NO no NO! I think it worked too!

On the Plane home.. Matt didn't know what I was up to

And that was that.  A plane out of Singapore down to Adelaide and we arrived home Saturday morning! A whirl wind tour of Britishness and now it’s all back to normal…. Sunshine, 20 degrees, coffee at the beach….

So, our travels are over.  We’ve hopped to Europe and back in a week and enjoyed catching up with family and friends.  This was a our first time out of Australia since we arrived here 18 months ago. So, it was really our first opportunity to see how we felt leaving it.  I know we didn’t go all the way to the UK this time (that will happen in August though) but we did have the opportunity to see our friends and family as well as see how we felt about coming back… and leaving them.

It’s a very strange feeling.  First of all, Matt told me that he felt strangly sad leaving Adelaide in the first place.  He had to remind himself that this wasn’t a repeat trip of our “ping pong” back to the UK in ’07, that we were coming back.  I, on the other hand, was so busy thinking about the stuff I needed to get done when I got back that I wasn’t under any illusion that we wouldn’t be returning!

Spain did feel different this time though.  Obviously, having grown up in the UK, Spain was a regular holiday destination.  It always felt strange and different.  It’s dusty, dry, has terracotta roofed houses, beaches with cafes and a different atmosphere to the U.K.  Weirdly, when you go there from another, dusty, dry place with beaches and terracotta roofed houses it feels strangely familiar.  Even the plants were like the ones we have here in Adelaide.  The feeling of familiarity with the place I now call home.. from a location on the other side of the world was not something I was expecting.  It was nice though.  It also meant that leaving Spain, our holiday destination, didn’t seem as much of a wrench as it did when we were living in the UK.  I’ve left the Spanish beaches and cafes for the one’s down the road.

It’s a nice feeling knowing that you want to come back.  It’s even nicer knowing that the life you have now chosen to lead everyday is a little like the one that your friends and family back home see as a holiday.  I’m not being unrealistic, obviously I have to go to work in between but at the end of the day, the beach is at the end of the road, the sun is usually shinning and I can relax here

Of course, hanging out with your friends for the first time in 18 months is wonderful.  To be honest, I was worried about where I might fit in after all that time.. it appears I fit exactly where I used to! (yay!) which is a relief!  I did have a secret cry on the beach during the wedding because I knew that now that lovely day was over, I had to be on my way… away from my best mate again.  I soon slapped myself out of that though.  I’ll see her in 5 weeks!

Let’s see how I cope with it after August!

Here’s some more piccies of the event!

We’re sailing along in a lovely house boat called the Black Shiraz. It’s warm and sunny and Mu and Dad are having a whale of atime! Mum’s been driving!!! lol Here’ are a selection of pics! I’ll add to them over the week. Internet is sketchy!

You can still leave messages on the voicethread (a post down) or on here and I’ll follow him around today (paparazzi styleee) and add pictures to the slide show below!

and here’s a message from Nini and Dunk all the way from Thailand… (2pm) It made him smile Yay! Good to see you both looking so well

Below is something called a “voicethread” it allows you to leave messages about something for others to read. I use it in teaching to get pupils to discuss… stuff. Now.. .I thought we could use it to say happy Birthday to an old man. The advantage of using sound and webcams being that he won’t have to find his binoculars to read the messages

All you have to do is:

1. Go to voicethread.com and create an account. ( or use User: selena clarke at gmail dot com (but as an actual email address if you catch my drift!)  Pass: party1980 amd skip to point 2!)
2. Come back here and click on the comment button at the bottom of the “voice thread”
4.Choose your weapon! How do you want to comment? Select your option
3. Put in your user name and password ( or the one i mentioned in point 1)

5. Record your message

So far… well done Ciaran! This may be too much and I might be being silly.. But I thought it was worth a try as we’re so far away! lol if all else fails there’s always Faceache or leave a comment here

I do spend a lot of time on facebook… It’s a great way for me to keep up to date with the goings on of my friends and family. I chat to my cousins, Aunts, Uncles, Pals.. all sorts. Mostly about nonsense but nonsense is the normal stuff that we sometimes take for granted This morning when I logged on I noticed that one of my most awesome of uncles has been offended by a status message his teenage daughter left about wanting to get out of this S**t hole. Now… When we were 16 we all wanted to get out of this S**t hole. We didn’t mean that we hated the people we lived with or the house we grew up in. What we meant was -”I’m a teenager – I’m working out who I am and I feel like I’d like to get out and see a bit more.” I guess the difference is. Even when I was 16 comments like that were private. I might have spoken like that to my friends (no mum… I’m sorry… i didn’t even bother to spell the word out loud… i just said it.. I was a rebel you see) or mentioned my adverse feelings towards Redditch in Mirc or ICQ. I NEVER would have mentioned it, in quite that manner infront of my parents… Mostly because I’d be in BIG trouble. We don’t swear in the Clarke household until an extreme situation happens and then (if you’re mum) you’d have to spell the word rather than say it – Which is really funny.

What really got me thinking though was this comment… “Here Here sign of the times..” I started imagining what it would have been like if I’d have had YOUtube, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress etc when I was a kid. OH MY GOD! SHAK FM would have been a Youtube channel sending it’s messages across the world. We’d have had to have hid the fact that we were only miming with Dad’s old battered guitar in the garage and N8girl and I would definitely been YOUTUBE singing sensations. In fact we’d have won “Britain’s Got Talent” by the time we were 14 and be filthy stinking rich! I mean I was always being followed with a video camera the size of a small house and was THE Biggest show off known to humanity so just imagine what horrors could have awaited!

However, when you think even further down the generations and consider what might have happened if our parents had had access to the same web 2.0 and file sharing services then it gets really scary. Uncle M would definitely have created himself a Youtube channel for his band and a My Space page to post his gis. My dad? The gadget king? Well goodness only knows what chaos he could have created with the power of the modern inter webs.

Mum? Well I imagine she would have her own Spotify DJ account in which she would showcase her own “edits” of the songs she steals from Youtube – They’re much better than the originals you know…

So… What if we allowed our folks just a taste of the stardom they could have achieved if they were generation y?

and here’s the band they were all singing about…

Sorry folks…

We can’t be that mean to the grownups and not embarrass ourselves can we??

I’ll upload something now….

I’m waiting for the train so thought I’d try this new wordpress app. It’s flipping hot outside again! I decided to meet matt for lunch after a pretty unproductive morning.

It was lovely. We sat by the river and had some nice cool drinks and sandwiches . Yom ! Train’s here!!

Us in Selly Oak / Weoley Castle 2000

2010 - Red Poles

The picture on the left was taken in the year 2000 when Matt and I started seeing each other. I can’t believe that this picture on the right was taken in 2010 (10 years later!) Time has flown and when you think back ten years an awful lot has happened.  Nice things of course There’s no way that in the year 2000 whilst sat in Weoley Castle in my ground floor bedroom I’d have thought that in 2010 I’d be living in Australia.  No way at all!

But, we are and so we can go to lovely places  We decided to go to Red Poles for lunch today.  It’s in one of my favourite locations.  Right in the middle of all those yummy vineyards My memories of the place had not done it justice.  It’s so beautiful and calm; perfect for a Sunday afternoon.

YOM! I NEED one of those tea cosies!!! AWESOME

There are moments in your life when you feel a bit overwhelmed by loveliness. Red Poles does that to me.  We were sat under the veranda which is draped in a beautiful grape vine and fairy lights, looking out across a vineyard, lawns and a pool full of long grass (no water i don’t think!).  There’s someone playing guitar and singing lovely, soothing soft live music about 100 yards behind you and food and drink is brought to you on request.  The food is amazing.  Fresh, tasty, homecooked.  YOM!  Being the Brit I am I even managed to finish my luncheon with  a cream tea   Perfection.

ooohh… and I nipped to Foggos to get some of last years Cincaut Rose   Double YOM!!