A new beginning

I started this blog last year, some 16 months ago, when Logan and I conceived our first baby.
Tragically, the very day after I wrote that post, we lost the baby. I guess you never really look into the future and imagine yourself as someone who could have a miscarriage. Even now, it's a strange thing for me to reflect on the fact that I now share this experience with so very many other women around the world.

So Logan and I have been continuing to try and conceive since not long after losing the last baby. We've had many, many attempts and no success. Our sperm donor went on extended working holiday for 4 months earlier this year and while he was away, we discovered that my progesterone was very low; lower than that of a post-menopausal women and so low, in fact, that they insisted on retesting the sample. There aren't a lot of reasons for having such low progesterone. Some people are just genetically pre-disposed to having a lower concentration than average. A recent miscarriage can cause low progesterone, but my miscarriage was almost a year before the blood test. Another causative factor is high cortisol in the blood - aha! This makes sense. Cortisol is the stress hormone and boy can I tell you all about stress!!!

Running a small shelter that has rescued over 700 animals this year is just the start. I'm a volunteer and have limited human resources available and in my home-shelter there have been somewhere between 30 and 80 cats this whole year. They come and go on a daily basis and have this year been  accompanied by a number of rabbits and guinea pigs too.
I also work part time at a vet clinic, study my Cert IV in dog training/behaviour and support a wonderful partner who happens to have a number of mental health diagnoses including complex-PTSD, generalised anxiety, sensory processing disorder and more. This year, my mum has been really sick. My mum lives with chronic pain and has done for the majority of my life but the first 9 months of this year were so bad that most days I spoke to her she was on the verge of tears and her pain was so bad that at a number of points she considered suicide. My mother is a life-loving, vivacious woman who enjoys gardening, travel and writing - she didn't want to leave the world, but was simply in such unbearable pain that she was struggling to see a future she could enjoy.

So all in all, I know stress! Everyone faces their own trials and challenges and despite all this Logan and I have remained steadfast in our desire to conceive a baby .

We took a few months off from trying, to get my progesterone back on track with the help of a vegan naturopath with a special interest in fertility. The GP recommended I go on the pill but I wasn't keen.

We planned to try again in November. We had spoken at length to our donor about our desire to make it work and our hope that he would be available. A sidenote - our donor is a truly beautiful human being. He is open and honest and so totally himself, who happens to be like no one else. He is committed to animal welfare (I first met him working at the same cat shelter where Logan and I met) and he cares deeply about humans too. He is an anti-dote to my highly-strung and stressy nature though and spends most of his free time travelling and going to festivals to get in touch with nature and humanity. He has been incredibly generous and willing in his role as our sperm donor, though he hasn't always been as available as we would have liked. That's life.

Anyway, we were planning for November. I was due to ovulate on the 20th and we hoped to inseminate once a day for the 3 days leading up to that date. It's always tricky, as we live over an hour from our donor, but we make it work. We were pretty much crushed when we asked him nearly a month in advance about those dates and he let us know that that was his birthday weekend and he was going away. The only day he could do was Tuesday, the 20th.
We discussed cancelling altogether and waiting for the next cycle but then decided we didn't have anything to lose.
I had to work that Tuesday afternoon so we had to get ourselves organised. We got there, we hung out, he showed my partner his new Red Dead Redemption game (too much brutality for me thanks!) and then we did it. We inseminated and we played Tchaikovsky through my phone to the swimming sperm, like we do every time. We hung out a bit more, then left and I went to work for 7 hours.

We knew the timing was good, I had all the signs of ovulating that day. But would it work??