Uncharacteristic sentimentality

I had the massage on Saturday afternoon, and it was lovely. I'm really glad I waited till after the HSG and had it as a treat/reward, as I think my body appreciated that more than it would a pre-emptive massage when I was still scared.

Before we got started, the therapist asked me if I was stressed about anything in particular. (Wild laughter ensued.) I explained what had happened on Friday, and her reaction was great.

"How did they get the dye into your tubes?" she asked. "Oh, through my cervix," I said, with the casual detachment of the war-wounded. "With a big, huge catheter."

"So were you unconscious?" she queried, goggle-eyed now with horror. "Oh no," said the valiant cowgirl, with a breezy sniff. "They don't anaesthetise you. I took ibuprofen."

"But that's HORRIFIC!"

"Oh, it wasn't so bad - but that's why I'm here..."

Joking aside, I've had some time now to reflect on the experience and my main reaction, aside from relief at the result and that it's over, is massive gratitude.

Regular readers will know (and very possibly love) me as a cynical, bitter cow who rants in an occasionally comical way about her experiences, and indeed this is a very apt description of me in everyday life. However, I do have a squidgy side, and all the lovely comments, messages and support I've had - both from complete strangers, and from my network of friends and family - has brought it to the fore.

My overwhelming gratitude naturally lies with my mum. To accompany me to such a nasty procedure, and to spend the rest of the day - which she'd booked off work as a holiday, as had I - nurturing me and looking after me as if I were a sick child was just so selfless and caring. And of course my previous post described my gratitude to the nursing staff, to whom I've already sent a thank-you card.

But I also want to extend a huge flood of thanks to all my friends and family. My mobile phone didn't stop beeping on Friday with "how r u?" texts, and I can't put into words how much they all meant.

I'm equally grateful - and this is REALLY rare for me, as I generally tend to view the fact of my infertility as evidence of my catastrophically bad luck - that my tubes were clear and I had a good experience. By and large, those women who had an awful time seem to be the ones whose tubes were blocked. I am quietly in awe of my huge good fortune at getting a clear result.

God, will you hark at me?! I started this blog partially because so much stuff I'd read in inevitably pink books about infertility was mawkish, sentimental dross. And yet here I am spouting it!

I do apologise - the moaning me will be back soon...

Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things...

After a fantastic reunion weekend in my university town, and two days into a restorative week off work, I find myself in the unfamiliar position of feeling quite good.

The weekend comprised lots of reminiscing, lots of good food, a decent amount of gin (but not so much that the days were blighted by hangovers), and a healthy dose of proper laughing. The fact I've returned home to a week's holiday rather than to the usual routine means I've held on to the happy hormones, too, instead of going back to my ranty, miserable self immediately.

As a result, things have been calm between hubby and me, and I find myself in this weirdly positive frame of mind. I can't really put it into words other than that I feel we've turned a corner of some sort.

Which is daft, as we haven't - still no HSG summons or other correspondence from the hospital, so we're no further forward. It's looking like we'll have to cancel our April follow-up at the clinic, since they told me not to darken their door again till I'd had the HSG.

So why the optimism? I'm stupidly trying to over-analyse what's probably just a serotonin hangover from a fun weekend. But the Thing - the Thing I'm thinking all the time but have avoided saying for four paragraphs of drivel because I'm scared to voice it - is that I feel really, properly hopeful this month, for the first time in ages.

What I mean is that I feel genuine excitement that it might have worked. I obviously feel what you could broadly label as "hope" every month, but usually it's competing with my own deep-down knowledge that my period's on its way. This cycle feels different, and I want to believe so much that it feels different because I feel different, and that I feel different because, actually, I'm pregnant.

God, typing those words is so amazing... if only it were true.

OK, so the logistics. Right now I'm 23 days into my cycle. Were I following a 28-day pattern, my period would be due on Easter Sunday. (What IS it with my cycle and big calendar events, by the way? Luckily I'm not religious so Easter Sunday means little to me other than an excuse for a roast dinner at my mum's and some chocolate. But even so, that's Christmas Day, my birthday and Easter that have coincided with cycle day 28 so far this year. I daren't count forward to our June wedding anniversary...)

Have I ovulated? No idea. TMI alert: I did notice, about 10 days ago, some suspiciously egg-whitey stuff that COULD have been the "cervical mucus" they tell you is a sign. But I symptom spot so dementedly often that it's hard to recall with any degree of accuracy what was real, what was imagined and what was simply dreamt. I found an old ovulation test yesterday and peed on it out of interest - it came up with a faint line to show I had some luteinising hormone, but it wasn't darker than the control line.

Have we tried enough? Well, we've not been as rampant as last month - basically because we're both still knackered - but we've managed it every three/four days or so between my period drying up and now. However, last week, we did it on Thursday night and then, with me being away, not again till last night, so there's a good chance we missed ovulation altogether.

So what next? I have zero symptoms except for vaguely tingly boobs, but that's about normal for this point in the month. It's way too early for symptoms anyway. What I need to do is decide whether I should use either of the early-response pregnancy tests sitting in my bathroom any time soon.

I don't want to do them and lose this nice feeling. I haven't felt upbeat for so very long. But equally, it seems somehow horribly foolish and embarrassing to walk about the place feeling all jaunty and hopeful if there's no reason to.

Does that make sense anywhere other than in my own head?!

Try something new today

I've been trying something of a different approach this weekend. Since not-eating-and-crying-lots isn't getting me anywhere apart from a bit thinner, I thought I'd try the opposite. Well, not the polar opposite, as that'd involve bingeing-and-laughing-lots, neither of which are all that practical to achieve on a daily basis - but you get the idea.

My basic theory is that I need to be kinder to my body - to try to work with it rather than being at war with it. I reckon this should involve equal measures of being good to myself and treating myself - basically acknowledging that right now everything's pretty shit, and trying to compensate in other ways, but also trying to be healthier, both mentally and physically.

So. Out goes the "no food" diet and in comes the "extremely healthy superfood" diet. My fridge is currently groaning with broccoli, bean-crammed soups and blueberries, none of which are a million miles away from the type of fare I consume normally, but this time the idea is I'll put the effort into whipping them into nutritious lunches.

I'm also going for the burn at the gym. This is partly because even though I recognise the risks of the "no food" diet (the chief one being "death"), I DO still want to lose weight. I read in the paper that infertile women who lose 5% of their body weight can improve their chances of conceiving. At nine-and-a-half stone, 5% of my body weight is around six pounds. I've already dropped more than that over the past few weeks, so my goal is to maintain at the same time as toning up and boosting fitness.

The gym makes me feel better, anyway. Must be the endorphins. Today I did a very good cardio and weights workout, followed by the stretching exercises I used to do religiously when I was young and skinny whilst listening to chill-out tunes on my iPod. It was quite therapeutic, and I caught myself enjoying it - actually feeling like I was doing something positive with my body for once, as opposed to glugging wine in the bath and staring at it hatefully.

I also indulged in some retail therapy yesterday, investing in a new red coat and boots to go with the skinny jeans my newly svelte frame has made possible. I do like shopping, though hubby pissed me off by claiming I looked "very red" - a compliment, surely, only if one is a tomato - and then, later, "like Little Red Riding Hood".

All this attempted positivity hasn't completely removed thoughts of babies from my mind, though. This evening we went to see Derren Brown at the theatre. He was really cool - extremely entertaining and infuriatingly bamboozling in equal measure. Just before the interval, he explained he'd be re-enacting the old Oracle-style medium acts from the 1920s and 1930s during the second half. He invited audience members to ask a question - any question - on a piece of card, seal it in a black envelope and drop it into a bowl on the stage.

I couldn't resist. "Will I get pregnant this month, my 23rd of trying?" I wrote. However, 1,300 other people also had burning questions - many of which, IMHO, were fatuous and inane compared with mine - and he didn't get to it. At one point he started picking people at random and guessing stuff about them (with an astounding degree of accuracy), and he instructed us to think hard and thus direct our questions to him.

Well, I can tell you that I had a headache from thinking so hard, but it didn't work. But then, I suppose it'd spoil the show to end on a conversation with an infertile woman who desperately wants to be told it'll all get better, wouldn't it?

See. The old negative me hasn't gone far.

The power of positive thinking?

Engaged in conversation with my uni mate via text message on Friday night, I attempted one of the wisecracks that are beginning to characterise my strategy for dealing with that big, messy bundle of emotion that comes under the generic heading "fertility stuff".

We were debating the logistics of care for her baby during a planned trip from her home in Fife to see her sister play in concert here in March. "If u like, my mum wld b happy 2 babysit," I texted. "She's gr8 wth babs and won't ever get chance 2 use her skills due 2 my fckd repro sys!"

My poor mate probably didn't know how to respond to that, and who can blame her? This is what I'm increasingly tending to do in conversations that veer towards reproduction - I'll attempt (usually crap) "jokes" in an attempt both to make light of the situation and to avoid any uncomfortable silences in which the assembled company wonders if I'm going to get upset.

I did it again last night. We had friends over for hubby's party piece dinner of tuna steaks, salsa verde and spinach. It was a superb night - another much-needed dose of really good fun. After a fair bit of wine, the evening reached the point where we were all demonstrating the various quirks and freakish talents of double-jointedness that we'd been blessed with... as you do. (I seem to have more of these than most - I can do a selection of impressive bendy things with my fingers, and it's comforting to know that should my career ever veer off track, there'll always be a place for me in a circus sideshow.)

Anyway, this was the backdrop for another of my barbed little jibes at my own situation. It had just been revealed that both hubby and I can sit on the floor in a weirdly yogic position that implies doubly-double-jointed hipbones.

Much merriment ensued. "It's such a shame we can't have children," I then unnecessarily pointed out. "Imagine how bendy they'd be!" I don't know why I did it, and continue to do it, other than that taking the piss out of it, and ranting at it, seems to be my natural coping strategy.

The response I got to my text "joke" on Friday was as follows: "Aw mate, don't say that, think positive, it's bound 2 help in some mysterious way".

At the risk of sounding like I'm trying to sound like Carrie Bradshaw, that got me thinking. Thinking positively is not something I've been doing throughout this experience. Optimism's not, as any readers who know me personally will be well aware, something that comes naturally to me anyway. I'm not the most upbeat, life-affirming type of gal in the most ordinary of circumstances, having inherited my father's propensity to "rage against the coming of the night". Being positive in the face of the genuine adversity of infertility is a ridiculous notion.

But would it help? Usually I think that people who skip about the world grinning inanely and proselytizing about the glass being half-full would be immeasurably improved by being shot at dawn. The procedure needed to turn me into one of them would be reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde, and infinitely more traumatic than the HSG!

I categorically doubt the effect of positive thinking anyway. A recent study said that being optimistic and upbeat had absolutely no bearing on the survival rate in cancer patients. Now don't imagine that I've finally disappeared up my own arse in a fit of self-pity by comparing my situation to a terminal illness - I am not (yet) that self-obsessed. All I'm saying is that smiling lots and visualising flowers unfurling is not going to make my ovary magically not polycystic.

To put it more succinctly, I turn to a passage from Ben Elton's Inconceivable - a brilliant novel that's by turns funny and heartbreakingly accurate, and which is far superior to its subsequent film adaptation, Maybe Baby.

"I keep screaming inside, why the hell should I have to imagine a baby? Why can't I just have one?! Far less nice people than me have lots, and it's just not fair."

That's the absolute crux of it. Instead of an egg each month, I have a boiling ball of rage, frustration, jealousy and a sense of plain old Kevin the Teenager injustice.