My womb is a greenhouse

While I like to imagine myself as a fertility goddess, my womb a greenhouse, ready to conceive at any moment (I was inspired by a chapter in a fertility book I saw entitled “making your womb a greenhouse”), I also know how many people start out thinking this way before discovering the hard and emotionally exhausting world of endless cycles and 2WWs.

Ideally, I’d like to limit the time spent legs in stirrups, paper-gowned. I’ve decided that we’ll be having a home birth after all this is over. I’ve already seen enough medical intervention in this pregnancy and it hasn’t even started.

Being an A-type personality, I have been dutifully noting down and applying all the fertility boosting tips that are proffered by the numerous lesbian parenting books that line our bookshelf. The New Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy and Birth is the Bible of hard-core life changes. I’ve done my best to take them on:

• I have quit coffee since Jan 08

• I have practically stopped drinking alcohol, with perhaps a glass of wine a month, if that (except for the kd lang concert at the Tempus Two winery – it would have been unlesbian not to have partaken in the Hunter Regions’ delights )

• I exercise regularly, and have added more yoga and swimming to the mix

• I have lost around 3kgs since March, and sit about 2kgs over the ideal weight range, so I am working on getting that down

• I have been taking a pregancy and conception vitamin for about three months

• I have been trying to drink the Maia fertility boosting tea, by the gallon as directed

• We juice religiously and start the day with a tonic of one amazingly healthy fruit and vegetable combination or another (we’ve been doing this for years)

• I have monthly massages and will try and start acupuncture closer to the TTC time

• I have been charting periods, moods, and ovulation indicators, but just can’t master the temperature taking. I find it tedious and never could quite get the hang of it.

Will it be the lack of temperature taking that will be my downfall? Will it be that last glass of fertility tea that I just couldn’t fancy? Oh, for the beauty of hindsight… The one thing I am not doing is actually inseminating! But we expect to start soon, and I wondering where to start and what might we wish we had done differently? I put this question up on a same sex parents’ forum regarding insemination methods. We just don’t know whether to start with IUI (15% chance with drugs) or do we go straight to IVF (45% chance)? Do we have the drugs, trigger shots, or do we attempt without to begin with? Is my womb a fertile greenhouse or will this be an uphill battle?

Most responses were in favour of starting with IUI and no drugs. But in their experience, they all seemed to progress to IVF before having any success. One person said honestly that had they their time again, they would have skipped IUI and gone straight to IVF. I was interested that there were many advocates of IUI, but no success stories of using it were provided.

Lo and I have been going around in circles on this one and we need to make up our minds before our next appointment with the ob/gyn on 27 May. We are really struggling to balance risk, chance and time. . . I will keep you posted, but would welcome any thoughts or advice on what has worked for you.

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