Reality hit last week. That I had month to go until I could finally get to actually see my boys for the first time.

Quite excited now. Can’t wait to bring them home and watch them grow.

We have had to have an extra battery of tests, and this has meant a considerable amount of our still short-lived pregnancy has been spent waiting for more test results.  As some of you may have already read in my blog, Alice and I were having fertility treatment and we are very lucky to have had it work (so far at least!) on the first attempt.

As a part of the fertility treatment you are scanned very early on at about 8 weeks, so that they can assess the initial viability of the pregnancy.  This then puts you back in the clutches of the national health service.  Which for most people would be a bloody nightmare I’m sure.  However, Alice and I are extremely fortunate to be living in Cambridge, within the catchment are for the University Hospital, and more importantly it’s Rosie Hospital department.  This hospital is one of the leading units in the UK for fetal medicine.

When we went along for our 12 week scan, the sonographer told us that one of the twins had a very high NT measurement and this put us in to the 99th percentile of risk of the twins having a chromosomal issue like Downs Syndrome, or Turners Syndrome.

This was clearly a shock, but Alice and I knew what we wanted to do immediately, and that was to have the invasive CVS test, which would give us a definitive result as to whether or not the boys have a chromosomal condition.  Those results are what we got today, and they were clear!  A side benefit of such a test is that they can also tell you with certainty the sex of the babies.

So, it has been quite a bumpy road so far, and there are still some potential issues hanging over us and the boys; but we will deal with them one at a time, and as they come up.  For now, I am just so happy that I get to tell people the news that I have been holding onto for over 6 weeks now.

I am going to be a daddy!  Hoorah!

Scan images are here ….

This membership allows to get into some rather pretty and beautiful properties, and venues that the UK has too offer.  With that, we have now been to Wicken Fen [photos] and Wimpole Hall [photos] – not that we haven’t been before, but our membership is forcing us to get out.  So that can only be a good thing.

I have spent the past few months reading an incredible amount of material both online, and materials sent from respective clinics in the UK.  There is a an inordinate amount of information surrounding infertility in general if you really want to read it.  I think I have read most of it.  Sadly.

I think in rather a specific sort of way, that often helps in my line of work.  This unfortunately doesn’t carry over into every day life very well.  Mainly because I find many people dont think the same way, or more often at the same speed as I do.  It is a big personal failing of mine, one which I battle with every day, both at home and at work.  It often limits my involvement in many things as I find it hard to ‘work at the same speed’.

With this in mind, I have been struggling with some aspects of the fertility treatment.  Yes, it is a very scientific process, but a lot of it is still down to natural luck.  This still baffles me, in the modern day, that luck still plays a huge part in becoming pregnant.

You start off, with a 99.9% chance of success.  When you read that you think, hell yeah! This is going to do the trick.  However, as you go through the different phases before having the fertilised embryo’s transferred back, this can drop to as low as approximately 40%.  That is a very big drop.  It all makes sense when you look at the different phases, and break it down into small steps.  But it still galls me, as there if nothing either my wife or I can do to improve this.

So, we actually started the physical treatment in mid November with my wife starting on the daily injections.  We were, of course, warned about all the potential side affects.  None of which presented themselves.  Thank god!  She managed to complete all of these herself, I didn’t have to administer a single one.  I am so very proud of her for that.  She is not the sort of person who would normally be able to do something like this.  However she seems to have found an immense internal strength at a time when a lot of people would break.

Then in December we went off to the clinic, for our tests and the wife’s regular scans to make sure all was ok.  The first scan was ok, nothing out of the ordinary at all. Then the 2nd scan highlighted the she had started to over stimulate.  This is the biggest risk of taking the drugs associated with IVF.  OHSS can be deadly, if left untreated.  So, as a result the dosage was lowered, and we were warned that they may have to collect the eggs as per normal, but freeze them after fertilisation.  As the risk of contracting OHSS is far higher if you become pregnant (following an over stimulated phase of IVF).

So, we went in for the big day in December.  I ‘played my part’ and they collected the eggs from my wife.  There were way too many.  So they took the decision there and then that we would not be allowed to continue.  Whilst I was set in my mind that this would be the case following the warnings earlier in the week, my wife had not set herself up for this.

To see her in the massively distressed state she was in, I watched on wondering what the hell I could do.  The answer?  Nothing.  This was the way it had to be for her safety.  But it still hurts now, to think of how she was that day.  I dont want to go through that again, yet I full expect we may have too.

Now we are waiting for the nod from the clinic for my wife to start the drugs again, so that they can try and complete a ‘frozen embryo transfer‘

In the UK, the council that sets the rules of conduct for fertility clinics strictly prohibits the transfer of more than one embryo, unless:

• The patient is over a certain age. Where using mor than one is expected to help pregnancy.
• The patient(s) are using frozen embryos.

Clearly my wife and I fall into the latter category.  However, we dont want to transfer more than one, as the risk of twins is still high enough to be counted.  In the US for example you are allowed to transfer more than one upon request.

The big thing I have taken away from this whole thing is that you have to have a very patient mentality. This is something I do not have.  The process is drawn out, full of hurdles, red tape, steps, procedures, tests, drugs, and above all stress.

To be honest, Im not sure why I am even writing all of this down, I guess it is just to help me to remember all the steps involved and to help me process it all.

So, go, get your daily dose of apachecon fun, over at http://us.apachecon.com

The wife and I managed to cram our Saturday full of stuff, including the town & country fair event in Cambridge, part of which was to launch national bike week. Where we did a whole bunch of stuff including registering our cycles. On the way home we stopped along the river to watch the May Bumps.

On Sunday we took a drive up to Holkham, in north Norfolk.  We spent an hour or so on the beach admiring the kites and little children who were running around and generally having a great time in the glorius sunshine.  We then made our way to go and see Elton John’s last concert in England for just over 2 years.  This was actually in the grounds of Holkham Hall, which in itself is worth a visit when there isn’t a large concert in the back-yard.  The concert was great, Sir Elton is a consummate public performer and still sounds great 40 years on.  Very cool, lots of fun.  It wasn’t your typical stand up, get crushed kind of concert it was a more relaxed have a picnic take along some chairs, food, drink and generally relax and enjoy what was superb weather.

The whole event was however unfortunately marred by really poor crowd control/management.  At the start of the day we all had to queue up waiting for the gates to open. This was fine, a tad annoying but not unexpected.  However once the gates were opened the whole british mentality of orderly queuing went right out the window and everyone just flooded past as fast as they could.  This then coupled with the extremely poor control of the flow of cars on the way out led us to be in a queue of cars for over 95 mins.  If these were handled with a little more forethought things could have been so much better.  Would I go again? Yes, but I probably wouldn’t bust a gut to get there for gate opening time.

But by far the hardest part of the new job was writing a poster to go in the kitchen, entitled “About Me”. Bah, I really do not like writing about myself in that style, I find it hard not to sound like a knob, which most of you know I fail at most of the time anyway

I now cycle to and from work each day, which shockingly means I cycle 15m a day. Bloody hell! That’s a lot. Right? For someone who is used to getting a train, tube, bus, cab everywhere for work it sure feels like a lot of work for no gain each day. But I’m hoping that over time I wont notice the cycle quite so much. Here’s hoping anyway.

Is this the same for anyone else and their partner?  Or am I just applying geek thinking methodology to normal life?

So next weekend, we are having our first BBQ of the year, and now the house is much tidier for when we have friends over.  Roll on the summer.