Day 3. We got a home!

Not much to report on the baby making side of things, although nurse H (I.e. Me) has gotten better at administrating injections!

But in other news… Our offer on an apartment got accepted! So fingers crossed we’ll be homeowners before our chicklets come along 🙂

Day 2. Scans and injections!

We went for our baseline scans today to check that everything is healthy, it is 🙂 completed the final paperwork too.

And today we started medication! I’m taking 4 Progynova pills a day and M is having the first of her dreaded injections- Gonal F. The nurse made it look so easy and we even watched tutorials on YouTube. M wanted me to inject her, which I didn’t think would be difficult but it really is! Took me so many attempts just to push the needle in, I was shaking! But M was brave and said it didn’t hurt so I think I’ll be a better nurse tomorrow!

And if the above wasn’t stressful enough, we’ve also been waiting for two days now to hear if our offer on an apartment has been accepted! Eeeeee! And also, I’ve been offered a new and exciting job but that also comes with a tonne of paperwork for security vetting procedures. It’s all happening!

Fingers and toes crossed for everything in our lives at the moment!

Day 1. Finally, we are making a baby!

I’ve started our blog quite late but also just in time. After what feels like an eternity, we’ve finally arrived, we are starting our journey to parenthood!

To summarise, here are the steps we have taken:

1) Decided which treatment: Obviously, as two women, making babies doesn’t come natural to us! But we both wanted as much involvement as possible with the conception. I’ve always wanted to be pregnant, so the perfect solution was to make the embryos with M’s eggs and transfer them to me. This is still a relatively uncommon procedure and is very costly, but we both felt strongly that we wanted to make our babies together and this is ideal.

2) Decided which clinic: This discussion began a long time ago (maybe a year). We first decided to have treatment in N. Cyprus, mainly because it would have been much cheaper. With M’s Turkish, we felt confident that we could trust the clinic more than the average foreigners because there wouldn’t be a language barrier. However, after a lot of research online we slowly lost our trust. The main problem being that the sperm donor would remain completely anonymous meaning that our future children would have no access to any information and we wouldn’t even know if they had used the donor we’d chosen.

So then we decided to play it safe and go with (perhaps) the most well-known fertility clinic in the UK. So far it’s paid off!

3) Attended consultation:  This consisted of a meeting with a consultant to write up a treatment plan and a vaginal ultrasound. This was really exciting. M had 18+ follicles and I had 12, we both looked healthy 🙂

4) Blood tests!!:  These are a normal part of any fertility procedure but our clinic was particularly strict and gave us a lengthy list of tests to have done. Fortunately our GP was very helpful and we managed to get the majority through the NHS, which saved us a lot of money. Here’s what we were tested for:

Me: HIV, Hep. B, Hep. C, Chlamydia, Rubella immunity, Blood group and rhesus factor.

M: HIV 1&2, Hep. B, Hep.C, HTLV 1&2, Syphillis/TPHA, Chlamydia, Gonorrhoea, CMV IgM & IgG, Chromosomes, Cystic Fibrosis, Blood Group and rhesus factor.

All came back normal fortunately although M tested positive for CMV (IgM), which is very common. If you test negative, you would need to ensure your donor is negative too, though our sperm bank only accepts negative donors.

5) Chose a sperm donor:  We must have looked through the entire catalogue a million times in the past few months! There are a lack of donors in the UK and not a lot of information is given, maybe this is a good thing, that’s debatable. As for our choice of donor, that will remain private but we’re satisfied we made the right choice!

6) Ordered medication: We took advice from others on the internet and shopped around for the drugs. We’ve been prescribed; Orgalutron, Gonal-F, Buserelin, Cyclogest and Progynova. I’ll write about them more when we start taking them! We ended up ordering them from a supermarket pharmacy and saved £500 on the clinic’s price!

7) Gonapeptyl injection: I had this injection 7 days ago, it’s meant to lower the levels of oestrogen and progesterone in the body. 

8) Wait for period! We sycronised our periods by using the contraceptive pill. It took a couple of cycles to get it right because M’s period would start sooner than mine after stopping the pill. This month we perfected our syncronisation and both started at the exact same time THIS MORNING!

So that means, we are on DAY 1 of our baby making treatment – it’s finally arrived! Here we go!