Sticking at it

I'm feeling a bit run down at the moment - my insomnia has been pretty bad the last month or two, and I've got a nasty cold which is showing no signs of abating after a little over a week. So it's time to reassess what I'm doing and try to get myself (and DH) back into peak physical and emotional fitness ready for our final IVF attempt.

One of the things my coach pointed out in our last session is that I keep trying new things for a relatively short period of time and then abandoning them when they don't work straight away and moving on to the next miracle cure I've found on the internet. I need to give things time to work, and stop chopping and changing so much - it's not a wonder my body is a bit confused.

Well, I tried acupuncture for over six months, and eventually came to the conclusion that it had done me more harm than good, so I won't be going back to that.

The Foresight regime had a lot of positive benefits. DH stopped snoring, his sperm improved hugely, we both lost weight, and we both felt healthier, picked up fewer bugs and recovered more quickly when we did pick anything up. My FSH was lower for the months that we were on the regime, although I did have a corresponding rise in my oestradiol.

So why did we stop? Well, it's not so much that we consciously decided not to do it any more - it was a three month programme, following which we were supposed to get another hair analysis to see how we were doing. When we reached the end of all our supplements, we were a few days off the end of a cycle and although we did actually cut our hair and have it ready to send off, we decided to wait and see whether we were able to start in that next cycle - and sure enough, we were, and we got a much better embryo than on the previous two attempts (though I did only produce the one mature egg).

And then after our BFN, we never did send those hair samples off, and then they got too old and we would have had to cut new samples, and then DH got a really short haircut, and we just never got round to it. It takes a couple of weeks to send the hair off and get the results back and then order the supplements, and we just kept putting off deciding to do it.

My coach made a revolutionary suggestion last week. She said it was so long now since we stopped taking the supplements, we were likely to be back to square one, so why not just reorder the same supplements we took last time? Well, that had never occurred to me, but today I'll be searching out the order forms from last time and phoning up the supplier to see if I can do that.

We'll then stay on those supplements until the final IVF attempt has been and gone, however long that is.

I'm also going to stay on DHEA, and I've started taking wheatgrass again - I stopped after a month because I'd read that it could affect immune results, but I definitely felt healthier while I was taking it, so I decided to reorder it and we'll deal with the immune issue if and when it comes up.

During IVF #1 and #2, I listened to a self hypnosis CD. The woman's voice and some of the language that she used annoyed me from the start, but I persevered with it until we got our second BFN, and those CDs are now gathering dust in the spare room. I do like the idea of tapping into the mind-body connection and listening to something to help me relax, though, so I'm now using the Circle + Bloom series.

Coaching is currently helping me to identify and address the sources of stress in my life. Coaching is not meant to be an open-ended thing, as the idea is that it gives you the tools to deal with things yourself, but I am finding it very instructive and in each of the three sessions I've had so far, something has come up which has given me a new perspective and made me see something in a different way, so if there's work still to be done at the end of the 8-week course that I've already booked, I'll carry on with that for as long as necessary.

And the final piece in the jigsaw at the moment is that I finally got hold of the reflexologist who had been recommended to me (it turns out she was on holiday last week), and I have my first appointment with her next week.

So there we have it - a whole raft of extra measures which will hopefully help me to get ready for our final attempt at IVF. And once they're all in place, I'm going to stick at it until those pesky FSH and E2 levels are under control and we get to go ahead on our final IVF attempt.