The trials & tribulations of trying to crack an egg: #35 A big fat full stop

Saturday13th March 2021

I'm not entirely sure why i'm writing this, or even if I actually want to. I certainly never thought i'd be revisiting this after all these years, But here I am.
I thought our infertility journey ended with the birth of our daughter Mia, turns out I was wrong. I now look at infertility as on ongoing war with many battles to fight, We just happened to get lucky with one particular fight. So we took our prize & went home. Safe in the knowledge that ignorance is bliss, The war simply didn't matter anymore, we stopped fighting.

I'm not 100% sure if the subject cropped up in previous blog posts, & I don't really want to go back & read through them. Because to be honest, I find them quite painful to read. Theresa log of bad memories there, & i don't really recognise the person the wrote it anymore.
But, anyway... Over the years, we've had another war to fight, whilst not strictly being connected to our infertility, it definitely went hand in hand. My good lady wife suffers with severe endometriosis, which has been often kept at bay by surgery every 18 months or so to cut out the affected tissue. If you're unfamiliar with Endometriosis, Click here for gory details, A lot of people assume its just like a bad period but in a nutshell It's a chronic, often debilitating illness that has left my wife in agony & ruined our sex life for the best part of the last 15 years or more, Libby once described it as being like being chewed to death from the stomach down by a fucking shark!
Anyways, the surgery was getting less & less effective, so the specialists tried an abdominal ablation, where they inflate a balloon in the uterus & fill it with a hot liquid to burn away the uterine lining.
The downside to this is that it seriously reduces the chance of getting successfully carrying a baby full term after the procedure. There was very little chance of this happening anyway given our history. but even with IVF, it would be risky. Whist doing this procedure, they discovered that the endometrium had now spread to the bowels casing even more pain.
Well, it turns out the operation didn't work very well & the pain & bleeding returned a lot faster than usual. The next step would be an hysterectomy to remove the problem all together, because surgery after surgery after surgery isn't good for anyone, especially with diminishing results.

Op booked ....Covid says NO
Op rebooked ....Covid says NO! again
Op rebooked again .... Covid says NO!, hospital says Fuck you covid

Today the operation was carried out & just like that our war with infertility was over. IVF cant solve this one
The jury remains out on whether the war on endo is over, just because the womb is gone, doesn't mean the pain has gone.

We chose not the continue fighting our infertility with the birth of Mia, because of how much it destroyed our mental health, we said we couldn't put ourselves through the potential misery of what we'd previously been through. Even the possibility of another amazing son or daughter wasn't incentive enough. But above all we didn't want to put Mia though our struggles.
So we put the past behind us & moved on, like i said. 'Ignorance is bliss' ...But now that the choice has been taken away altogether, and that full stop has been put on the end of the story, maybe burying our heads in the sand wasn't the best course of action & now we'll never know, That hurts more than I thought it would.

To add insult to injury, tomorrow is Mothers Day here in the UK, & my wife will be spending it in a hospital bed recovering & thanks to covid & its associated restrictions, she can't spend it with her daughter.

Monday 15th March 2021

The curse of the 2020s continues, Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, the surgery was carried out by keyhole & Libby could come home & spend the remainder of Mothers Day with us.
Sadly it was short lived, today we spent a lot of time in Accident & Emergency, due to Libby having acute abdominal pains, temperature spikes, fitting, Blood pressure dropping & regularly falling unconscious. & shall be spending the night in another hospital bed & potentially missing her birthday tomorrow. JOY!