Clomid and criminal incompetence

What has happened to me today beggars belief.

My period came, as you know, on Saturday. I attended the fertility clinic this morning and explained I was on day three and had come for my first course of Clomid. The nurse took blood, because it'd be rude not to; after all, I donate several vials of the stuff every time I cross the threshold - it's almost like visiting a vampire.

She said she'd call later with the results but that they were basically checking my FSH levels (again) and I should be fine to start my Clomid tonight. She then gave me the prescription and told me I had to go to the hospital pharmacy to collect the drug, as the fertility clinic don't (for reasons that baffle me) keep it on the premises.

The hospital is a good long walk from where I work and it was already gone nine, so I called my mum and she offered to pop by my office, collect the prescription, fill it at the pharmacy and drop the pills off at my house ready for me to take the first one on arriving home from work.

This afternoon at work, I missed a call from the clinic when I was in a meeting with my boss. The nurse who'd foraged for my blood (in both arms, it's worth saying, as she couldn't find a vein - just another fun fact that contributes to the nightmarish whole of this day) said to call her but that it was nothing to worry about.

I rang the clinic but they'd closed for the day. After much soul-searching I decided she'd have said so or tried again to call me if something about my bloodwork indicated that I shouldn't proceed with the drug, so I planned on taking the first pill on getting home. After all, I didn't (and don't) want to have to wait another cycle.

I had it all ready with my glass of water but decided to read through the leaflet first to get a feel for the side effects, as well as any info on activities I should avoid, like alcohol.

Thank fuck I did that. For I hadn't been given the clomiphene I was prescribed by the hospital pharmacy. Oh no. I had been given a drug called clomipramene instead. It is an anti-psychotic, anti-depressant used to treat severe phobias, narcolepsy and obsessive conditions.

As soon as I saw the name I thought something was wrong, but when I read on and it listed the conditions the drug was used to treat, I knew for sure. Hubby was infuriating during this, piping up with fatuous little comments like "Maybe it's got a dual purpose" - the stupidity of which defies belief; I mean we all know infertility can induce psychotic episodes but let's be realistic here - and "The pharmacy knows what it's doing".

Oh no it doesn't. Right now there is probably some psychotic dude somewhere in the city, crouching in the corner eating his own faeces and wondering why he is ovulating.

I rang my mum and together we rang the pharmacy and the on-call doctor at the clinic, and raised a level of hell previously unseen outside the scarier parts of the Bible. I mean, I know I am reporting this in a slightly wry and facetious way but this could actually have been very serious had I taken the drug. I could have had any manner of adverse reaction. And worst of all, I might have persisted with it, believing any ill feeling simply to be a side effect.

Anyway, the upshot is the pharmacy - fearing, I think, being sued - were extremely horrifed and apologetic, and offered to exchange clomi-psych for the correct drug this evening. Cue a trip for my mum and I to the hospital where we exchanged white paper bags with a very sheepish gentleman in the foyer in a scene reminiscent of a film - except for the fact that the plot would be too preposterous to believe.

It being dark in the car, it was only when I got home just now that I realised there were no instructions in the box and that clomiphene was spelled clomifene. With absolutely no faith whatsoever that the drug was correct, I was forced to put in another call to the on-call doctor, who just so happened to be my favourite dice-rolling professor.

She was actually very nice - again probably due to her horror at what had, and could have, happened - and she assured me that the 'f' spelling was just the US name for the drug. She talked me through the dosage instructions and the side effects, and advised me that since this was day three, I should go for it.

I have just taken the pill. It felt somewhat momentous, a bit like the red pill/blue pill scene in The Matrix. I am now going to run a bath and contemplate the prospect of my ovaries rupturing, which my old friend the internet tells me can be a very rare reaction.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: you couldn't make this up.

Managing Mother's Day

When I awoke yesterday morning and my period still hadn't come after 42 days, I decided to get the weekend pregnancy test over with as I figured starting Mothering Sunday by failing another one would not be enjoyable.

It was inevitably negative. My period then descended at about 6pm yesterday evening, while I was at my mum's helping to create a series of curries for a dinner party we were having. It came in a big, unannounced-by-symptoms gush as I was halfway up the stairs, ruining a pair of pants and meaning I had to borrow some of my mum's.

My periods, when they do come, are so much worse now than when I was a young teenager. It's so odd because I'll go through four or five months of having a regular cycle of about 30 days, and I'll think things are getting back on track, and then I'll just randomly miss one or even two. And then when it does eventually descend, it's like it is wreaking revenge for the hiatus by being super-heavy and super-painful.

The cramps actually woke me up at 5am this morning. I grabbed a hot water bottle and chomped a couple of painkillers, but in the hour or so before heat and analgesic took effect, I was reduced to lying in the foetal position - pause for irony - and whimpering to myself.

It was never, ever that bad when I was a young teenager and twentysomething. I don't understand what is happening to my body. I've said this before but I do often feel I am at war with myself.

Anyway, the upshot is that I intend to present myself at the clinic tomorrow morning when its doors open at 8am with a view to starting my first course of Clomid tomorrow. They told me to come on day two of my next cycle; I have no idea what to expect but feel better for there being at least some course of action to take.

I do know from a colleague at work who has just started Clomid in her quest for a second child that the side effects are unpleasant. She's suffered with headaches and has been sick several times. Her top tip was to take the pill in the evening as she said the worst of the nausea hits quite quickly, so it's better to be dealing with that at home than at work.

I also know that I'll be reunited with my old friend the Renault Espace scan-doppler thing mid-cycle to see if the Clomid has worked and I've ovulated.

My biggest fear is that hubby gets stage fright again due to what he will perceive as the pressure of having to perform at a certain time if the medication succeeds and I do ovulate. I can't voice my fear to him as I don't want to put the idea in his head. If it does happen, I can't imagine finding it easy to be sympathetic. Given that I will be pumping myself full of chemicals and having regular probing visits from the Renault, I feel the least hubby can do is muster an erection.

It's Mother's Day today. My third one since this nightmare began. I haven't found it too hard, mainly because I still think of the day as being about my mum and nana, as I always have done. What's weird is when I hear of the Mother's Day plans and celebrations held by my peers in recognition of them as mothers. Then I feel sad and like a failure, as if I've not properly grown up by being unable to achieve that status myself - always a daughter but never a mum, just like the old mantra 'always a bridesmaid, never a bride'.

I did have one of my typical dark and bitter inner rants while browsing the Mother's Day cards and gifts at the supermarket yesterday, laden with an armful of yellow roses for my mum and tulips for my nana. There were loads of cards with sentiments along the lines of "For my wife on Mother's Day, well done, aren't you BLOODY clever for bearing my children".

Strangely, though, there wasn't a single card that read: "For my wife on Mother's Day, I'm really sorry you're barren".

More crazy behaviour

I'm not, as my nana would say, in the best of fettles at the moment.

A colleague and my best friend from university have just announced pregnancies - in my mate's case, it's her second.

I have done the gracious congratulations and I am happy for her, inasmuch as you can apply the word "happy" to a situation that makes you feel like you are being stabbed repeatedly in the throat with an ice pick.

I don't mean to sound like a bad friend - and in fact, it is worth saying that she is an exceptionally good one to me, because she broke the news as she knew I'd prefer her to, in an email which ended with her saying that I wasn't to feel pressured to send my congrats and that she'd understand if I needed some time before getting in touch.

Unfortunately, I read the email shortly after arriving at work one morning, and had to repair to the toilets to cry for twenty minutes before being able to control myself, but she wasn't to know that. The thoughtfulness of allowing me the privacy and reflection time afforded by an email was an extremely graceful gesture on her part. After all, she has nothing to be sorry for. This literally is just the way the cookie crumbles.

No, one of the things that makes me sad is that these circumstances have inevitably meant we've grown apart a bit. I still love her dearly and deeply, but we don't see enough of each other and try as we both might to empathise with the other, there's a slight lack of understanding between us now that can't be helped by either of us.

I can't really fathom her frustrations with the tiredness and difficulty of motherhood any more than she can imagine what it's like to yearn for pregnancy so badly that it physically hurts.

Before all this we always shared everything and went through lots of life-changing experiences together, not least preparing for our weddings, which were less than a year apart. I remember us traipsing round what felt like every wedding dress shop in Scotland and northern England, having an unseemly amount of fun. We both assumed that sharing baby stuff and all that went with it would naturally follow. But it feels like things have worked out very differently for me than they have for her.

Anyway, there was that, and then a day or two later a colleague made her announcement. She's not a colleague I know well enough that she knows about my situation, so she broke the news with chipper joy and I didn't know how to make my face make the right shapes and my mouth form the right words.

I think she was puzzled by my frosty reaction and I've agonised over whether to email her and explain myself, but have decided against it in the end. I'm sick and tired of feeling like I have to make excuses, as if I'm some irksome toddler, for a situation beyond my control that I hate, hate, hate and never wished for.

But the thing that has vexed me more than anything else of late was the remarks made by a TV presenter last Friday night, which saw the screening of the UK's biennial charity telethon Comic Relief.

The woman in question - the culprit - was Davina McCall, a woman who found fame presenting the braindead shitfest that is Big Brother. She has three children, or twelve, or eighty-seven - I can never remember as she appears to be pregnant every time she graces the screen. I'm amazed they haven't televised her squirting one out during the annual Big Brother bonanza. After all, it must be like shelling peas by now.

Anyway. Davina was presenting a link about children - babies, mostly - in Africa dying of diseases like malaria and AIDS. It was deeply, deeply upsetting television. After the film ended, up pops fucking Davina with: "This call goes out to all the mothers out there. It takes a mother to understand the suffering of these children. Come on, mums, we're all in the same boat..."

It went on and on, and I started to feel like something was crawling up my spine and setting each vertebrae on fire as it went. Because what the fuck? So because I'm barren I'm not entitled or expected to feel any sympathy at the sight of a baby dying in agony? How DARE she?

This sort of idiocy is voiced quite often, though. It's amazing, the stupidity of people. It always happens when some sort of dreadful crime is reported - a child's murder or sexual assault, say - you get these muppets showing up in TV news footage uttering ridiculous statements like "Speaking as a parent..." as if to imply that everyone without children must be sat at home silently applauding the criminal. It's sheer nonsense. It's insensitive and just basically ignorant.

I ought to pause for breath. I'm hammering the shit out of this keyboard.

My period appears to be on its way. I'm on day 37 and actually got a bit hopeful last week that our Parisian love-in might have borne fruit. I bought a two-pack of pregnancy tests in Boots after a lunchtime "craving" sent me in search of a vanilla bean smoothie, and did one of them that night, which allowed me to retain some hope by attributing the negative result to the weak evening wee brew.

By yesterday morning, still with no symptoms when really I should have sore boobs and brown drizzle by now, I did another one and got into a complete fury when it was negative. I actually managed to snap it into three pieces, sustaining minor cuts to my hand in the process.

It's coming to something when you think that a single pink line in a plastic window looks smug.

My plan is to give Clomid a whirl when my period eventually does descend. It can't hurt, and I clearly haven't ovulated since this cycle has grown to epic lengths and those tend to be anovulatory.

I just hope they don't grill me too much about my emotional wellbeing when I present myself at the clinic. I'm too near tears on this most of the time to be able to lie convincingly. And while I very much think I should explore the avenue of infertility counselling, I don't particularly want to stall the process any further by making the clinic think I need to be psychoanalysed before commencing medication.

It's just as well they can't see me in my own time, mind you. I do the strangest things. If the destructiveness with the pregnancy test above isn't odd enough, try this for size as a parting shot: I had a bath an hour or so ago. Standing up to dry myself gives me a full frontal view in my bathroom mirror. I stood there and sang the following in a crazy falsetto to my lower abdomen whilst whacking it with the towel: "Look at you, you pathetic piece of shit that doesn't work."

Now that's not right.

A helpful chat with the doctor (no, really)

I visited my GP this week for the first time in a year or so. The reason was a sore and weepy eye which turned out to be a blocked and infected tear duct - I knew all that crying would catch up with me one day - but after he'd diagnosed and prescribed treatment for that, he asked how fertility stuff was going.

"It's an unending nightmare," I said frankly. He said he'd just heard about a couple he'd referred having success on their first IVF cycle ("Oh fucking DID they," thought I, reflexively bitter as per) and had hoped it was us. It made me happy to think that he cares, as the production-line impersonal nature of the clinic has been one of the things bothering me.

I described our diagnostic procedures and consultations to date, and admitted that I wasn't especially happy with the clinic, and particularly with the head professor, who I cannot forgive for her "Don't expect to get a six every time you roll a dice" inanity.

My doctor laughed when I told him what she'd said - not in a nasty way, but in a way that belied incredulity that a fellow medical professional could be so insensitive. "It's OK for her," he said, "she's got four kids!"

"She's in the wrong job, then," I replied, mentally placing another dark mark (indeed, four of them) against her. It's not that I'm opposed to being treated by a woman with children - on the contrary, there's an element of "I'll have what she's having" hope associated with that - but her fecundity certainly explains her inability to empathise with her desperate, infertile patients.

Anyway, I talked through my current concerns - which are that we're being railroaded into Clomid when my periods have actually regulated over the past four or five months. Temperature monitoring and symptom spotting indicate that actually I am ovulating - as did a home ovulation tester kit six weeks or so ago - and I don't believe Clomid is necessarily the answer for us if the issue is not ovulation.

I really want to have the post-coital test to determine whether I'm murdering hubby's swimmers before they even infiltrate my cervix. I have visions of a war movie happening in my vagina every time we have sex, with his sperm gasping their agonised last to the strains of Barber's 'Adagio for Strings'.

(When I say I "really want" to have this test, I obviously don't mean that in the every-girl's-dream sense. Nobody wants to hotfoot it to the clinic with their legs clenched to allow a team of strangers to peer up their hole at the aftermath of what should be a private act of love. I mean that I want the test in the sense that I want to explore every possibility before we identify the most suitable treatment.)

The professor at the clinic had refused me the pleasure, citing the fact that the condition was "very rare" and so their protocol was not to deem it necessary. At the time I argued the toss with her, saying that surely rare meant still a possibility, but she was not for turning. My GP explained things to me in slightly clearer terms. Evidently the test is pretty unreliable - the number of sperm that ooze out or die of natural causes during your post-shag journey to the hospital can skew the result negatively. If only the professor had bothered her arse to explain this to me, I wouldn't have spent the past six months wondering. Ho hum.

My GP also said Clomid was worth a shot. He agreed that my periods regulating was a good sign, but he said I may still be ovulating infrequently and that Clomid may be a chance to right things and conceive naturally - or as near naturally as damn it - with "a minimum" of adverse side effects (those triplets again). He said if I was worried about side effects, I had a lot more to fear from IVF than from a course of Clomid, and that I could try it for a cycle and if I hated it, not do it again.

In short, a twenty-minute chat with a GP who has throughout this ordeal professed that fertility is not his area of specialism has proved more useful to me than countless sessions at that bloody clinic, however many awards it has won.

I discussed the conversation with hubby and we've decided that if we have no success this cycle, we'll give Clomid a bash next. I'm currently just past halfway. Watch this space.

The barren woman's hate list: item #8 - Facebook

The problem with Facebook is that it's full of people you don't really like or care about.

I want to qualify that statement for the select few people who know my real identity and are also friends with me on Facebook. What I mean to say is that I have 100 friends on Facebook. That puts me in a camp of people who, whilst not Facebook sluts, accepting friend requests left, right and centre just to boost their total, certainly have more Facebook "friends" than they have real, genuinely close buddies.

The majority of Facebook friend lists are made up of old schoolmates and fellow university alumni, ex-colleagues and people you worked in shops with during summers when you were 20. I haven't seen many of the people in my Facebook friend list for years; nor do I want to in several cases. But I know the ins and indeed the outs of their reproductive prowess - and in many cases I know what their reproductive systems look like on the inside.

I don't know what planet you'd need to be born on to have the remotest desire to change your Facebook profile picture to a scan photo. The profile pic is meant to be something that represents you - be that a photo or a cartoon, it should be personal and meaningful. It should not be a photo of the contents of your uterus. I elected to use a photo of myself paddling in the Gulf of Mexico as my profile pic. It never occurred to me to use the snap of my Fallopian tubes, taken by the radiologist during my HSG.

It's amazing how many people do it, though. It actually induces a roar of misery in me when I log on and see that "X has changed her profile pic" next to a grainy black-and-white thumbnail of an ultrasound.

Obviously the news of the pregnancy is not a shock, because the smug bastards have already announced that to the world through the medium of Facebook status updates. You know the sort of thing. "X is pregnant!" followed by 807 messages of congratulation; then for weeks thereafter, "X has morning sickness because she's pregnant", "X's back is hurting because of her big fat pregnancy", "X wonders if you're all aware that she's pregnant, isn't she BLOODY clever?"

I've considered - at some length - staging a protest by using Facebook to describe my own progress through the hell of infertility. "Helen is on her way to the hospital to have a series of unpleasant instruments rammed up her bits." "Helen is bleeding like a stuck pig for the 36th month since this nightmare began." "Helen is lying on her back with her legs up the wall as her husband's sperm trickles slowly but surely onto the pillow."

But that wouldn't be appropriate, would it? And not just because many of my Facebook friends are also professional colleagues. It'd make people uncomfortable, for one thing, and it'd force them into lavishing sympathy on me. It would just not be the done thing.

Which is exactly why Facebook shouldn't be used to crow about pregnancy. The people close to a pregnant woman, who really matter in her life - her partner, family, closest friends - should already know and care that she's pregnant, and should be giving her the love, congratulations and support that she needs. The majority of people on Facebook - the ones she went to school with ten years ago - couldn't give the remotest fuck, and nor should they. So stop bragging.

Turning 30

I knew it'd feel like a milestone, but I wasn't expecting a slight surge of positivity.

It seems like I've been in a negative slump for so long now - one that's left me unable to write here, as I felt I had nothing of value to say - that the sudden arrival of go-get-em energy that's hit me since my birthday on Thursday has caught me unawares.

It's not all good - the anger's back too, and I'm crafting, in my head, another of the barren woman's hate list posts like those I wrote when I first started the blog. But then those posts, as grumpy as they are, were quite healthy in that they helped me vent.

I'm annoyed with myself, for slowing down the pursuit of pregnancy, for letting myself be stymied by apathy and defeatism. I think the 30 milestone has made me realise that, actually, there is a finite amount of time left for me to achieve this. I know I'm still young enough for a first pregnancy to be achievable, but what if we have to go through all this again for a second?

I'm also cross with the clinic we're with and the treatment we've been offered. But I also feel proactive. I feel like doing something to try to address the situation, which I haven't felt for weeks - even months. I honestly think I'd started to give up.

For my birthday, hubby took me to Paris. We're coming out of what has been the hardest patch of our relationship to date. But we're coming out of it. And in Paris, walking hand-in-hand along the banks of the Seine in milky February sunlight, I started to feel like we could actually have a baby this year. We deserve a baby. We'd be good parents. We can do this.

We walked into Notre Dame and I paid two euros to light a candle. Hubby asked me why I wanted to do this - I'm not religious - and I just shook my head as I knew I'd cry if I tried to articulate that I planned to ask for a baby.

I think he knew anyway. It may sound crass and selfish - particularly to people who are comforted by their faith - that I just leapt on the bandwagon of a pretty church to pray for what I want, but all I can say is that to me it felt like the right, even the only, thing to do.

We wandered around the cathedral while I tried to decide on the best place to light my candle and say my prayer. I was anxious to get it just right, but I was distracted by the hordes of tourists photographing the staggeringly beautiful stained glass windows and the soaring arches of the ceiling.

In the end I chose a place just beneath the statue of St Theresa. I felt drawn to her and have since learned - thanks to Wikipedia, as my level of theological ignorance is shameful - that she said "Patience obtains everything", which seems germane.

On our way out I discovered a spot that would have been much better - just beneath an effigy of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus - but I still felt I'd done the right thing. All day in Paris I imagined us bringing our child there in years to come; that night in our hotel, I dreamed of having a perfect red-haired boy. Obviously we rutted like rabbits the entire time we were there in the hope of achieving a miracle - though if we have, I shan't be following the Beckhams' example and naming the child after the city. Paris Hilton and her antics have put paid to that notion.

The most beautiful passage I've read about asking for a baby is in Mitch Albom's 'For One More Day'. I wept like a kid during most of this book but the bit that made me disgrace myself on a train was the passage where the protagonist's mother - who has died; the whole book is about him getting another day with her after her death - tells him about her own efforts to have a baby in an effort to explain to him how much he was wanted. I was going to paraphrase the passage but I won't do it justice, so here it is in full.

"'You know, for three years after I married your father, I wished for a child. In those days, three years to get pregnant, that was a long time. People thought there was something wrong with me. So did I.'

She exhaled softly. 'I couldn't imagine a life without a child. Once, I even...Wait. Let's see.'

She guided me toward the large tree on the corner near our house. 'This was late one night, when I couldn't sleep.' She rubbed her hand over the bark as if unearthing an old treasure. 'Ah. Still there.'

I leaned in. The word PLEASE had been carved into the side. Small, crooked letters. You had to look carefully, but there it was. PLEASE.

'What is it?' 'A prayer.' 'For a child?' She nodded. 'For me?' Another nod. 'On a tree?'

'Trees spend all day looking up at God.'"

I'm going to leave it there for today, but I promise to write soon - it'll help me unwind my confusion over what we should do next. And I may also be posting a good old rant...

One step up and two steps back

It's been a long time. And I have a lot to tell you. I'm sorry I've been away so long - I have not been able to deal with writing about any of this, for many reasons that are too complicated and dull to go into here.

My health is really suffering from all this now. I've lost over a stone since this time last year, and I just feel really rundown and old a lot of the time. I suspect I'm now caught in a vicious circle where my low body mass index, and general drawn and pinched demeanour, are actually contributing to my fucked up menstrual cycle. How in the name of all that's holy does one break such a circle?

Anyway. The update. Firstly, the appointment at the clinic. It went better than I expected, in that it was much better to go with my mum than with hubby - on whom, more later - but it happened on a day when I was really poorly with a horrid gastric 'flu that had me chucking up in the ladies' outside the clinic reception before I ventured in. I thought I may have to excuse myself to be sick halfway through my consultation, but managed to last until we were on our way out.

We saw the same consultant I saw in January - the one who told me I had PCOS, which was then discounted by the professor we saw in May. And herein lies the first confusion: she reiterated my PCOS. I said I'd been told I didn't have PCOS. She looked perplexed and thumbed through my notes, then said my symptoms in fact WERE consistent with PCOS, and that the ovarian scan she'd conducted herself - an aside which gave me a pleasant reminder that she has stared at the inside of my reproductive system - showed an ovary that was, in layman's terms, screwed up. (She didn't say that. She said it looked polycystic.)

I asked why I didn't have any of the other symptoms of the condition. She said it varied. I asked why my periods had been normal for years and then gone daft at the age of 27. She said these things happen. I started to feel the angry worm crawling up my spine. My mum intervened.

After we'd agreed to disagree, I summarised my reason for requesting a new appointment ahead of the one-year sentence imposed on me by Professor Fuckwit - namely, that I had not had a period since July, and it was now November. Annoyingly, some of the wind was removed from my sails of self-righteous indignation by the fact that I was in fact menstruating as I sat there - and I had to admit as much, but I concluded by saying my period had "done this on purpose because it knew I had the appointment coming up". (She looked worried. Note to self: try to appear more sane in future.)

We went over the dates of the paltry few periods I have had in 2008, and I reiterated my concern that of the five or so there have been, only one - the one I had in Florida, weirdly - has been what I'd consider "normal" based on my previous, pre-Pill history. She made a lot of notes. She then weighed me and had a massive go at me for being underweight, which - quite rightly - she said wouldn't be doing my cycle any favours. I countered by observing that weight GAIN and difficulty losing weight were typical symptoms of PCOS. She looked somewhat abashed and moved on.

I then asked what we do next and said I was not prepared to hang about in limbo until next summer. I pointed out that my 30th - and with it, fertility that will dwindle at an alarming rate - was impending. And then she said the magic words: that I don't have enough periods to give me a decent chance of conceiving naturally, and that she was prepared to prescribe clomiphene.

In order to progress this, I now have to present myself back at the clinic on day two of my next period. They'll give me the drug, which I take for five days, and then I go back for regular blood tests and scans to determine my ovulation pattern, if any. If any because they start you on a low dose and up it depending on how you respond.

She then listed the side effects. Mother of God. In no particular order: depression, irritability (ha! got you beat on that one), spots, nausea, migraines, hot flushes, night sweats, vaginal dryness (and let's face it, after nearly three years of TTC it's hardly Angel Falls in there already), dizziness. Slightly more serious side effects include a 25% chance of twins and a 10% chance of triplets per cycle on the drug. Oh and if you believe the papers, an increased risk of womb, ovarian, breast and stomach cancer. Let's be clear: this drug is no fucking walk in the park.

Because it's not a cakewalk, she then asked about my support network. She explained Professor Prat had last time noted that I "seemed unduly anxious" (let's pause for OUTRAGE at the use of that particular adverb) and was concerned at my ability to cope, although my "record showed I'd dealt well with the HSG".

My mum - sensing, I think, apoplexy on my part - stepped in and smoothly explained that I had a devoted support network in herself, my dad, my stepdad, my grandparents and friends, all of whom know about my plight. She glossed over hubby but that's because my mum is pissed off with him at present - again, of which more later.

Here's the thing. It's currently, as I type, day two of my next period. And I haven't been to the clinic to get my clomiphene.

Partly it's that I'm scared. I'm just a great, big wimp. The side effects are not to be sniffed at - and as much as I want a family, twins are in the "oh my god that would be amazing" camp but triplets are very firmly in the "now, hang on a second" one.

Partly it's timing. It's nearly Christmas; I'm really busy at work, which is good as it gives me a lot to focus on to distract me from babies, but also means I'd struggle with daily migraines and/or any one of the other side effects you care to mention. So part of me thinks, what's one or two more months in the grand scheme of the 30 we've been trying?

But mostly it's because I actually do doubt my support network - and not my family or friends, but hubby. As this has gone on, he has grown more and more distant from me. He refuses - point blank refuses - to discuss his feelings. He wants nothing to do with this blog, which in some respects is a good thing as it's personal and I'm not always complimentary towards him (though I'd argue that when I'm not, it's warranted). But he has equally pooh-poohed the concept of couples' infertility counselling, which I'm keen on, and even of just discussing it between the two of us.

And we're fighting a lot. They're nastier and nastier each time. We had a humdinger a couple of weekends ago which culminated in me throwing him out of the bedroom for saying to me that I would "die alone and childless". Yes, he really did say that.

And we're not having sex. An increasingly insistent voice in my head keeps saying that if we were dutifully doing the bad thing three times a week, I'd be pregnant by now. Once or twice a month does not constitute dedicated TTC, and I actually have started to feel that by implying we ARE having regular sex - or at the very least, by not admitting we're not - is tantamount to lying to the clinic.

And another thing. His sister's pregnant. With her second. This news was hurled rather spitefully at me during the aforementioned fucker of a fight. He's known for a while but apparently there was "never a right time" to tell me. (To which, I am ashamed to say, I responded: "Oh, grow a pair!")

We're meant to be going to see her for a pre-Christmas visit very shortly, and as much of an arse as I know this makes me, I really don't want to go. She's far enough along that she will be starting to show and I just don't want to deal with that, not a few days before my third Christmas of this.

So there you have it. My big update. I've got the prescription I wanted, but am too scared to take it. I don't know whether infertility has damaged my marriage beyond repair. I don't know if there genuinely is something wrong with me or whether our dwindling sex life is to blame.

In short, I'm the very definition of the Bruce Springsteen song 'One Step Up', which I quote here (slightly paraphased in order to assign myself the correct gender) to end this post:

"Woke up this morning, the house was cold,
Checked the furnace, she wasn't burning.
Went out and hopped in my old Ford,
Checked the engine but she ain't turning.
Given each other some hard lessons lately,
But we ain't learning.
Same sad story, that's a fact,
We're one step up and two steps back.

It's the same thing night on night,
Who's wrong, baby who's right?
Another fight and I slam the door on
Another battle in our dirty little war.
When I look at myself I don't see
The girl I wanted to be.
Somewhere along the line I stepped off track,
Going one step up and two steps back."