IVF, weeks 4-6

My egg collection is tomorrow morning at 9am.

How do I feel? There's a scene in the film Armageddon where one of the astronauts about to take off answers that same question. His verdict is: "98% excited, 2% scared. Or maybe it's more like 98% scared, 2% excited - it's hard to tell but that's what makes it so intense." That sums up my mindset this rainy, chilly evening.

I managed fine with the injections in the end. I got to be quite the dab hand with the old liquid siphoning by the finish. Inevitably on my last day I performed the maneouvre perfectly. Had my last morning injection been a gymnastic routine, I finished on the equivalent of a perfect en pointe dismount.

I managed to escape with only a little bit of thigh bruising and several sliced fingers, and the side effects haven't been as bad as I feared. I've suffered with migraines in the past so I was pretty well resigned to having one of those once the hormone cocktail kicked in, but I've avoided them so far. There was a thudding headache every day between day two and six, but a headache is very different to a migraine and I was able to cope.

The nerves I felt going for my first scan were about as jittery as anything I've experienced throughout this process. Because of my high FSH level I'd convinced myself there was a chance I might not respond at all. My big dread was the monitor revealing two stubbornly small and flaccid ovaries which had refused to produce so much as a pimple.

There was no need to worry. To be fair, the secret voice in my brain which is currently insisting that this whole thing might just work had told me I had nothing to worry about because I'd felt my ovaries kick in round about day five. It was the same feeling I had on Clomid - a sort of low ache, almost like you have wind, worse on the right side.

The head doctor at the clinic did my scan with her trademark - and actually increasingly appealing - no-nonsense style. The hell with KY jelly and easing it between my lips - the Renault was rammed, bammed and thank you mammed into me with very little in the way of opening pleasantries. Which suited me fine as I was burning to know what my pesky ovaries had been up to all that time. Despite the twinges I'd felt, it still seems weird that a little jab in your thigh flab every morning can make eggs grow there.

Immediately the doctor murmured "Oh, this is good," and I craned my neck to look at the screen. Even I could see them - oval, shadowy follicles clustered on my right ovary. She counted five, then twirled the Renault and located seven on the other side. Withdrawing the scanner with similar gusto to that with which she had introduced it, she proclaimed this to be excellent progress and sent me on my merry way with a view to presenting myself for a final scan on Saturday gone.

The jabs got a bit sorer after that, presumably because there wasn't much expanse of thigh flab left that hadn't already been skewered and injecting into a bruise isn't much fun. But I persisted and as I did the windy ovary pain got a bit worse each day, and my stomach started to bloat.

Saturday's scan went like a dream. I now have 14 follicles, seven on each side, all of which the doctor deemed to be the perfect size. I administered my hCG injection last night - it stung like a motherfucker, being cold out of the fridge, and the injection site on my beleaguered thigh flab is puffy and inflamed, but it is done and I now have no more needles to deal with. Hurrah and huzzah. I felt like cracking open the champers but since I've sworn off alcohol for the duration of this - might as well treat my body like a temple being the logic - I had to make do with water with lemon.

I've felt emotional but not as much as I feared. I imagined I'd be breaking down in tears at adverts, or howling in anguish on the train platform when I'd just missed one (both of which are exhibitions of myself I've been driven to previously by fertility woes).

But since the first scan revealed all was well, I've actually felt happier and more positive than I have for a while. It has to be said that this is down to some fairly wonderful caregiving by my legendary best friends, mind you. Friday night saw me not fretting and angsting over the next day's scan, but instead munching pizza, sipping peppermint tea and giggling in my PJs on their sofa. To be distracted, taken care of and amused during this nightmare has been wonderful.

So now. A short description of my physical state.

My stomach is distended like a malnourished orphan and I fancy that I can feel every one of those 14 follicles jostling for position on my ovaries.

I have unpainted toenails, as instructed by my egg collection admission form, which also forbids me from wearing makeup (unthinkable; surely a slick of mascara won't harm my eggs), deodorant (but cunningly, I have bought an odourless organic one - a girl doesn't want to be smelly), perfume or body lotion.

(It is worth pointing out that I have not had unpainted toenails for longer than it takes to remove one coat and apply another for at least 15 years. I always thought I had quite pretty feet but it turns out it was the varnish making them so. They are butt ugly naked. My nails are a sort of pallid yellow colour - as a result, one imagines, of nearly two decades of continuous varnish-wearing - and they look bigger, ganglier and sort of masculine. I hate them. My mother - from whom I inherited my obsession with toenail varnishing - was appalled.)

I now need to pack my bag - I'm instructed to bring a dressing gown, slippers (with which I can hide my unattractive feet, thank fuck), a toilet bag and a favourite CD with me. Then it's early to bed in the hope of some sleep. I'm not allowed to eat or drink after midnight, because of the sedative they'll give me. I'm to be there for 9am.

I'm told I may not remember the procedure - I bloody hope I don't - but I'll do my best, tomorrow or as soon as I feel well enough, to describe what I do recall here.

I very badly wish all this was over. But while I'm anxious, I know this is just another hurdle I need to get over in my quest to get what I want more than anything in the world.

Wish me luck.

IVF, weeks 1-3

So. I started Synarel nasal spray on Sunday November 8, after a training appointment during which we were taken through the whole process in blow-by-blow detail. I've taken it every day, twice a day, since then.

I thought I'd have blogged more during the first weeks of IVF but it's surprised me how tired I've been and how little I've had to say.

I think one reason I haven't written anything is that there's not an awful lot you can say about taking a nasal spray. The bad things are, in no particular order:

1) remembering to take it at 9am and 9pm every day. This is inconvenient because I leave for work at 8 so most days I need to take it in the office toilet. There are days when I've been busy, distracted or just forgotten and then been stricken with panic at 11ish and forced to hare along the corridor to do my sniffling.

Taking the evening dose isn't much better. So far I have inhaled it during a ghost hunt at a castle in a rainstorm, sitting in the cinema during a film, at a salsa class, and round the side of a theatre ahead of meeting a moderately famous comedian.

2) sometimes when you snort in the wrong way, it goes into your sinuses and stings like when you were a kid at swimming class and inhaled chlorinated water. It also tastes bitter and unpleasant when it trickles down your throat, a bit like chewing aspirin without water.

3) the side effects haven't been too bad for me, limited chiefly to the odd hot flush in bed at night, several medium-strength headaches and one fainting episode (but that was when I was poorly anyway with a virus, and I'd just stepped out of a hot bath). One odd thing is that I seem to have low-level heartburn all the time in that when I eat or drink I feel a slight burning sensation in my throat and chest. But, like I said, no side effect so bad that I can't cope with it.

The good things are - well, there aren't any, unless you count the fact that I've responded to it. I had a scan on Tuesday which revealed two very subdued, deflated ovaries - and so they bloody should be, for what they're putting me through - and an empty womb with minimal lining. Everything as it should be after nearly three weeks on the spray. I now need to keep taking it up until the egg collection at which point I can replace this daily activity with the delightful alternative of ramming a pessary up myself.

So I was given the go-ahead to start the injections. I had a training appointment with my favourite nurse after my scan. To say it went badly would be to do injustice to the word 'bad'. I am completely ham-fisted and clumsy at the best of times. Dealing with tiny, fiddly-as-fuck vials and needles while under a reasonable amount of strain and immediately following a vaginal probe did not improve my dexterity.

For my first trick, I shattered the tiny glass vial which contained the dilutant solution. WHY do these need to be so small? I get that there's not a huge volume of liquid and we are living in an age when minimal packaging is considered environmentally sound, but for fuck's sake, I'm not a member of the Sylvanian Family.

And another thing. Why do they have to be glass? It's not like they can be recycled - they get thrown in a sharps box and incinerated as clinical waste, so make them plastic and easier to handle! I cut my hand in four places trying to snap one open in front of my initially amused and then anxious nurse. I left the clinic with four elastoplasts on one hand and another on my arm where I'd had my blood test. I looked like I'd made an extremely bungled suicide attempt.

I'm on four amps of Menopur because of my higher than average FSH levels, so having eventually opened a dilutant vial and sucked its contents into a syringe, I had to be shown how to pierce and dissolve four separate (glass) vials of powder. Each time, you have to squirt the contents of the syringe into the vial, dissolve the powder, and suck everything back up again. Fiddly doesn't begin to cover it.

After that you detach the big fuckoff needle and reattach a smaller injecting needle before easing the plunger up to 1ml, getting rid of the air and then doing the jab. For this you need six hands because you have to pinch your skin, insert the needle, depress the plunger and withdraw it all at virtually the same time. All I can say is thank fuck it's women who do the injections during IVF, as we all know men can't multitask.

At the clinic, I injected myself with a bit of saline solution to prove I could do it, then my first real jab was yesterday morning. I had set everything out the night before, like a cook before a big dinner party, and barely slept because I was so nervous about being able to manage without the nurse. But it went surprisingly smoothly - which, as I discovered this morning, was beginner's luck. It reminded me of the first time I parallel-parked my car after my driving test: it went in first time and I sat stupefied by how this could possibly have occurred. The next time, it took 40 minutes and involved tears, howls and a prang on the bumper.

Perhaps this morning's disaster was because I hadn't slept a wink, having spent the entire night convinced a demon was hiding in the wardrobe after watching Paranormal Activity at the flicks. I knew things weren't going to go well when I immediately sliced my forefinger opening the glass vial. I bleed a lot even from small cuts so was seeping all over the assembled sterile apparatus, but feared I'd be even more bumbling wearing a plaster so I left it.

The next problem was that I couldn't get the frigging syringe to suck up the fluid from the first vial of powder. I kept pulling it up too far and running out of syringe and then leaving a load of liquid in the bottom. If you're not superhumanly quick it seeps out the end of the needle anyway, and for a while I was making absolutely no progress. Time was ticking towards when I needed to leave for work, despite me allowing 20 extra minutes for the injection, and I began to get flustered.

Chanting "fuck, fuck, fuck" in a low but urgent voice, I eventually got all four vials of powder sucked up through a manoeuvre that combined the speed of a panther with the cunning of a fox (essentially, just tilting the vial, ramming the needle in the corner of it and twirling it quickly to attract all the liquid).

However, I had created loads of air with my epic syringe endeavours so the resulting mess looked a bit like a bubble bath by the time I was ready. I started remembering all the films where a murderer injects air into a person and causes a clot that kills them. So I had to tap the syringe for ages to get the bubbles to clear.

After all that, it seemed cruel that I still had to get through the painful bit. I was on my right leg today, which means as a righty that the angle and needle trajectory is more complex, so it hurt more than it did yesterday and I've developed a bruise for my trouble.

All this snorting spray and stabbing needles would be a lot easier if only I were a crack and heroin user. But what am I saying - if I were, I wouldn't need IVF since drug addicts get pregnant at the drop of a hat.

I needed comforting after all that and since hubby had fucked off to work long before I even began my endeavours, I decided waffles, maple syrup and blueberries were the way to go. They were good. But then my car wouldn't start. It has been making a low but insistent beeping noise for a bit now and I've been studiously and foolishly ignoring it. Having consulted the manual and talked to my stepdad, I knew all that was needed was some water in the radiator, but rather than sorting this out at the weekend when I had bags of time, I'd left it till a few minutes before my weekly 50-mile drive to the office I work out of on Thursdays.

I'd never topped up my radiator before but figured if I could inject myself with hormones then surely this couldn't be beyond me. So rather than driving to a garage where I'd be mocked for female incompetence and probably charged for the privilege, I decided, unwisely, to tackle it myself.

Well, I couldn't get the cap off, could I? I tried everything - pulling, twisting, tearing, even prising with my key - but it was all to no avail since my car was manufactured by safety-conscious, obsessive-compulsive Volkswagen. (I believe I howled "Come on, you German bastard" at one point.) Eventually, defeated, hormonal and weeping hysterically, I phoned my mum and yodelled for help which was provided - bless him - within ten minutes by my stepfather.

It remains to be seen what tomorrow will bring. I guess there's a knack to it and that you get better every day. I also think a good night's sleep will help. But the trauma has stayed with me today and I've felt extremely weepy. I suppose it's only natural, given I'm suddenly flooding my system with hormones after suppressing it for nearly a month, that I should feel odd.

I think, though, that being reasonably au fait, if a tad incompetent, with the concept of sticking a needle into my thigh after two days is testament to the fact that you can do anything if you put your mind to it, and want it enough. I think I'll leave it on that reasonably positive note.