IVF Journey: 13w5d pregnant

This is my IVF diary. My husband and I have been trying to have a baby for four years now, and have a diagnosis of 'unexplained infertility'. We have finally reached the top of the waiting list for IVF - a form of assisted conception. I'm blogging about what happens as it happens, as a kind of therapy for me and as an awareness raising exercise of what IVF is all about.

So I’m coming up to 14 weeks pregnant, and this is the point at which the pregnancy nausea is supposed to have gone or at least vastly reduced due to a dip in the levels of pregnancy hormones in my system now.

I gotta say I was just so tired of the whole thing. Really feeling crappy, sorry for myself, low.

But I had this feeling that I should have another go at giving up the nausea drugs, which last week I wasn’t able to do because when I stopped taking them I felt too sick to manage.

The husband helpfully pointed out that never in my life had I felt well when I woke up (true story) so he suggested I don’t take an afternoon dose rather than starting with giving up the morning one. So the plan was to take the pills as usual in the morning, then not take another one until I really felt I needed one. And see how long I could manage without.

I tried this yesterday. And I had a good day.

So I’m now maybe a day drug-free. It is going OK. I now feel a bit sick, but it is manageable. No worse than I felt on the drugs actually. More like at the levels of week 4 of pregnancy where it comes and goes and I can just about get on with stuff around it and even at times ignore it. I feel like eating little and often will probably do the job of managing it. Dare I say it a ginger biscuit might even make a difference. This is what pregnancy nausea is supposed to be like. This is what everyone else is talking about.

But without the anti nausea drugs…

I no longer feel gross inside, like I’ve recently had food poisoning.

I no longer feel restless, like a giant coiled spring that will explode if I don’t move about but with no energy to move about.

I’m much less physically tired.

My head is clear. My thoughts are bouncing about in my head. I can make connections, things are not fuzzy, I don’t feel stupid and confused.

So these must have been the side effects of the anti-nausea drugs.

Seeing the quick change, I can now see how sluggish I’ve been mentally and physically and what the sedative effect of the anti nausea drugs has been.

It has been worth feeling like this to not feel the debilitating severe nausea (that’s the trade off), but it has completely put my personal and work life on hold. I see that now. My mind is usually very sharp, and my life is simply not set up for being so fuzzy headed. If my head is not working I can’t enjoy books and TV shows that I usually like, my work is too challenging, I can’t keep up with my husband who is very clever. No wonder I’ve felt so low and frustrated. Everything I usually do has been a struggle and I’ve been stuck to find pleasure in anything within my usual sphere of enjoyment.

I’m just not having that anymore if I don’t have to, now that I see what it is like being closer to normal.

I’ll see how this goes, and certainly take the drugs less often from now on. I’ll stay off them if I can.

Because for now at least I feel like a different person. And that different person is me. I’ve not felt like me in three months.