Another day, another trip to Manchester. This time to a different hospital, the Bridgewater, for my fertility consultation and various tests and scans.
I tried to walk to the hospital from the train station in Manchester and unfortunately got three quarters of the way before realising I couldn’t get onto the no-pedestrian dual carriageway to complete my journey and had to go all the way back to find a taxi. This was a bit like the time when I tried to save £1.70 to post something in London by attempting to walk there during my lunch break. Unfortunately I spent an hour getting lost in the heart of east London before reaching my destination and finding that the flat had no accessible postbox and I had to go all the way back to the post room at work to send it off… Sometimes my money-saving/exercise-promoting efforts do not pay off.
My charming young Hungarian fertility doctor brought me good news and bad news. The good is that I have an above-average egg-count and in theory stand a very good chance of the treatment being successful, and he believes this success rate is more like 30%, rather than the 10% the other fertility specialist told me last week. The bad news is it all takes weeks and weeks and means my chemotherapy will be delayed for much longer than the oncologist would have liked, and this isn’t great for the cancer. I am torn between wanting to protect my future fertility and wanting to zap the hell out of the cancer so it’s gone forever.
The fertility course is now all planned in fine detail and, if everything goes to schedule, I should be doing my very first self-injection of some sort of hormonal drugs on my 30th birthday. Me with a needle? Seriously? Me, who waited til the age of 28 to get my ears pierced for the first time?! Oh, it just gets better and better! (The good news is that I have to make the injections into my belly, and you guys have done me a favour providing all those biscuits and chocolate to provide a bit of flab around that area to cushion the sting!)
On a lighter note, I have been hearing for the last week about being tested for ‘AMH,’ or Anti-Malarial Hormone, or so I thought. It made sense that they would test me for malaria, like they do when you give blood, because I’ve travelled to malarial zones recently and they can’t let you freeze eggs for future baby creation if you’ve got malaria, right? Erm… apparently not. Mr Hungarian Fertility Man just broke the news to me that it’s actually Anti-Müllerian Hormone – Müller being the German physiologist dude who has something to do with something about hormones. Well, duh.
After a day of not-so-upbeat news, I did cheer up slightly this afternoon when my school-teacher-turned-children’s-ward-radio-DJ mate Bryony did a shout out to a very special 29 year old who’s been a very good girl in hospital all day on her radio show for under-11 year olds. She then made a 7 year old girl’s request to play Mambo No 5, which just happens to be a rather special song for me and my favourite bride girlfriend Michelle. (When I say bride girlfriend, I mean that Michelle is my best friend who’s getting married in 2 ½ weeks. I don’t mean that I am having a lesbian wedding).
Finally, I couldn’t resist buying this magazine in the train station on my way home. It was partly the allure of Mila Kunis, who I want to be, but mainly the promise of an article entitled ‘How to Look Good on Facebook.’ I, of course, have always wanted to look good on Facebook. A Brazilian friend commented last week that I always look good in my blog pictures, and I hastened to point out that one never puts bad pics of oneself on Facebook. All photos used in this blog are under the heavy influence of Instagram, which can turn me from pasty grey to tanned within seconds, and of course I would never post a picture of myself immediately post-puke or sobbing my eyes out. I stank and wandered around in pyjamas for a week after my operation and my skin is worse than it was before I started taking acne treatment 2 years ago, so I could obviously post a beast of a photo on here, but I shan’t, for the time being at least! I will make sure all photos of my bald head and grey skin in a month’s time are Instagrammed and edited accordingly, for such is the nature of Facebook! (Do you think Mila will lend me her hair if I write her a nice letter?)
As a footnote, my parents have gone to Dublin to see Bruce Springsteen (who, it seems, brought the good weather to Dublin in my absence, – yeah, thank you very much, Bruce) and left me in charge of the house/cats/postal situation etc etc. Now, I am about as big a cat lover as you can get, but I draw the line at cleaning up poo from the hallway, and especially poo that one of the little terrors decided to wipe along the floor behind her. I have taken photographic evidence of said excrement, but I shall spare you it, seeing as it doesn’t seem appropriate for the purpose of this blog, and may result in my mother disowning me on her return.
the big scary 'C' word 