It's been a while.

So, first treatment at the new clinic today. And perhaps a lesson in how far I have come, both literally and mentally.

I've mentioned before that I hate driving, and that this was some sort of weird mental block that happened after an IVF miscarriage.

Today I managed a long drive on the motorway, and didn't feel that old horrible feeling that I was somehow not competent enough to drive a car. In fact, I quite enjoyed it.

I actually figured out the section of the same motorway I'm particularly worried about is right next to the hospital where I've had all my losses diagnosed and three rounds of emergency surgery, and once I realised that it seemed like less of an irrational fear.

So, to the clinic.

I did the usual form filling, got shown into the scan room, and sat on the couch.

Hello stirrups, hello monitor, hello dildocam and KY jelly. I used to spend more time with you than virtually anyone else apart from my husband.

Anyway, I did the whole "taking your bottom* off and getting ready", but stupidly hadn't realised that one of the bits of paper was for modesty purposes.

People still feel alarmed about internal scans? Who knew? These days, I've got a big skin flap that I can practically throw over my head.

Hello ovaries, hello bladder, hello follicles. You're looking better than the rest of me.

Then I went and sat and sat and waited for my husband. Christ knows what he was doing... well, He does and so do I. But you know what I mean.

My husband also has bizarre baggage. Apparently the, ahem, "sample" room at New Clinic is not as nice as the state clinic - although, ironically, the state clinic had the most horrible areas for female patients than anywhere I've been to. Although New Clinic has car magazine for men to look at before they go into The Sample Room.

I feel less wound up about the whole thing than I used to. I read somewhere that patients who are more stressed do better, presumably because they are more likely to be doing the Fertility Olympics with vitamins, exercise, mung beans and so on - this probably makes a marginal difference.

The clinic asked me about drinking, smoking, weight and did an AMH test. It sounds stupid, but if fish oil, reiki, "relaxing", Wiccan rituals or any of the other shit I worried about the last time - or at least worried that I should be worried about - came into it, presumably they'd appear on the questionnaire. There was a card for a counsellor, should I need one, but not a feng sui consultant.

At the moment, I'm more neurotic about the traffic making me late for the Boy's childcare pickup than anything else.

* Weird English. Bottom half of clothes, not actual bottom or butt (or, in a phrase even more ripe for confusion, a 'fanny'. My husband presented me with a box of chocolates 'because you had to get your fanny out today').

I know because he told me

I was sitting in a meeting earlier, and became aware of two colleagues whispering.

I left the meeting and one came out after me.

"Oh, are you pregnant? Donald says you are."

"No, I'm not. Really."

"But Donald was just saying you were pregnant."

"No, I'm just fat."

(Which is enough to make people shut up, you'd think...)

"But Donald said you were pregnant and we were wondering about how you'd cope with another little baby on top of everything else."

"I'm definitely not pregnant."

Possible explanations:

* My stomach is a bit lumpy, partly from needing to lose a bit of weight, but also partly from my previous pregnancy losses and successful pregnancy, which they both know all about. But they forgot because they are stupid.
* I am a freak who looks pregnant without being able to get pregnant.
* There's something about planning an IVF cycle that makes people speculate, they know by some sort of telekinesis that something is up.
* Donald is a weirdo and a bit of a perv. He has form for spreading rumours about me being pregnant, so much so that a few years back I had to have a word with my boss.
* Donald has been conspiring to drug me and take me on repeated visits to an IVF clinic in the dead of night, so I am actually pregnant but have no idea and miraculously few side effects or symptoms. This is why Donald is so certain but I know nothing.

A few years ago I would be thinking 1 and 2, and possibly 3. Now I think a combination of 1 and 4.

5 is the only way in which Donald would be right, and it is just too disturbing.

I don't even like the thought of him checking out my body in any way, shape or form, which he clearly has been (and to make matters worse, I've just realised one of the buttons on the front of my dress was undone. Yuk. Suddenly a niqab seems like a good option).

Anyway, a few years ago I would have been sobbing about this. I think now I know who the people with the problems are, and it is not me.

Crossroads

It's been a bit of a strange time here, both as a nation and as an individual.

The "No" side won the referendum, but since then people have been joining the Yes parties en masse - over 2% of the electorate. Opinion polls show that a majority of people now back independence. Everywhere you go, people are talking about politics. We were promised more powers and there's a mood that they must be delivered and soon.

For me, I'm at a bit of a crossroads too. I was getting a bit fed up of my job and have a second interview with another company, but for reasons pertaining to childcare I'm not sure that it is the right path to take.

We're also speaking to a clinic about another IVF round, and need to call up and book an appointment.

Part of me is still torn about this as I'm worried about Huntington's Disease. But then if I am a carrier and the Boy has it, it seems sensible to have another child so the Boy is not alone. I know there's a risk that a second child could also have HD and the whole thing is a moral maze, but I think I just have to hope that everything will be ok.

One of the reasons we've decided to do a straight cycle rather than a donor one is that I could so easily only have found out about my Dad's HD after completing a donor cycle, which makes me think that any potential donor could have their own genetic flaws.

My parents aren't quite as bonkers as they were a few months ago, but my Mum keeps gabbling about HD being sent up into space, which is apparently "what they did with the disease the gay people get." I thought she was talking a lot of old nonsense, like the time she thought my frozen embryos were kept in my domestic fridge freezer.

Despite my initial skepticism, it turns out there is indeed a project to study HD in space but whenever she mentions any of this I get a mental image of my parents orbiting the Earth in a space station dressed up like Freddie in the "I want to break free" video, slightly bewildered but bickering pointlessly, and it I have to go and hide in the toilet until I stop giggling.

Anyway, we are at the point that we need to call up the clinic and do our initial tests.

I feel a bit under-prepared - or, maybe, that's the wrong word. I'm less obsessive about it than I was the last time. I need to start popping my folic acid tabs in short order (I should have started them before this), and I'll be cutting out alcohol and am doing more exercise. But I don't think I'll get to the stage of eschewing carbonated drinks or chilli, or doing any of the more dubious things I did the first time around. At least, I hope not.

So, lots of choices to be made, and things will no doubt change over the next few months. They're going to be interesting.

Making your mind up

I'll catch up with comments and everyone else's blog shortly, I promise.

It has been almost comically busy in our lives, thanks not to individual fertility, childbearing or mad parent issues, but a big national issue that's dominating the whole country; whether to vote Yes or to vote No to independence.

Women have been particularly targeted by both campaigns. Here are two of the main adverts that each side has put out:

The woman who made up her mind:

Yes means...

What do you guys think? Which one works best?

And, for bonus points, which one has been absolutely slated?

The killer in our midst

I woke up this morning, went downstairs, pottered about the living room and then saw something that made me leap backwards.

There is a dead mouse in our living room.

After we moved here eight months ago, the  cat initially refused to go outside. Then she started hanging around the door, watching us sitting in the garden.

I tried to pick her up a couple of times and put her outside, but she ran straight back in.

Then she started tentatively going outside herself, then I looked up from the kitchen window one day and realised she was boldly strolling around the garden.

Now she gets annoyed if she can't go out.

We had thought that she was going to be - if we're completely honest - a bit too crap to hunt. After all, she was eight years old by the time she got access to the outside world. She never shows any inclination to do anything other than sit on my husband's knee.As far as we knew, her hunting instinct had been replaced by her routine of sleeping in our bed, eating nice cat food and watching telly.

But now, not only has she managed to sneak outside when we thought she was inside, she's made her first kill.

Anyway, I am hiding upstairs from the dead mouse, rather pathetically. The cat is sitting on the chair next to me, looking nonchalant. Perhaps she expects my husband will eat the mouse for breakfast.

Point scoring

The Boy has a development check soon. To assist the health visitor with this, I have a form to fill in ahead of time.

It feels like sitting my masters exams again.

Some of it is easy.

"Does your child correctly name at least six body parts?"

"If you point to a picture of a ball or other similar object, can your child correctly name them?"

Well, that's alright.

But then we get to the following:

"If you give a simple instruction to the child, like "put the ball on the table" do they respond?"

Well, yes, but only if there's nothing else more interesting to do at the time

"If you draw a straight line will your child copy you?" 

I don't know. This question made me worry that I don't do enough drawing straight lines with the Boy, until I realised this was ludicrous.

"Can your child thread beads on a string?"

Well, generally we've discouraged any playing with beads in case he eats them.

One of the questions has a lump with what looks like one arm, one leg, and a face with two eyes but no other features. Your child is meant to identify this as "daddy", "man", "spaceman", or "monkey".

I tried this with the Boy. He looked baffled. He said "Eyes", and when I pushed him, "Peppa". I think he is as confused as I am as to why the NHS needs me to do this (must start reading Weber at bedtime, for both our sakes).

Does your child put objects back in the place where they're meant to be?

Well, sometimes. I struggle with this and I am 32. And define 'meant to be'. We recently found 3 DVDs wedged into the DVD player...

What sentences can your child say?

"No" is a complete sentence.

More parental and HD stress

I'd put off seeing the genetic specialist who'd already seen my sisters. I just couldn't face another appointment, got sucked into other things, kept telling myself it'd be ok.

But my thoughts have been turning to another IVF round and I thought I better find out what exactly the score was with being a donor, recieving eggs, embryo testing and so on.

A lot of what I'd been considering was - and I realise this is going to sound stupid - based on what my parents told me. That although my sisters and I were at risk of carrying HD, it'd only manifest itself in our late 70s, and take another 20 years to kill us. And that, if we were carriers, and our children also inherited the gene, they would get it at the same age we did.

Except, that turns out to be only half right. While my Dad has a mild form of HD, HD is more likely to become stronger if you inherit it from your father than your mother. So if one of us does carry it, it could appear in our 40s.

Which obviously means doing an egg share is a complete non starter.

Things then got a bit frustrating with the genetics man, who I think already thought I was weird; admittedly, years of infertility does change your boundaries when it comes to fertility treatment.

I asked if we could get pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (ie, the embryos get scanned for HD before being transferred).

He said we couldn't in the UK as we already had a child. He said we couldn't. I thought he meant on the NHS, as it is very rare for health boards here to fund someone who already had a child.

I thought this was kind of bizarre, and so asked if we could get PGD privately. He said no, "they" thought it would be unfair if one child had been cleared but not the other.

I then asked about getting it abroad. The guy looked a bit weirded out and waved his arms, saying it would be very expensive and difficult to get (which, frankly, seemed a bit odd; I've read enough about IVF to realise that some countries have very liberal laws about donations and screening).

I can do a test that, if I don't have HD, would clear me to go down the original egg sharing route.

If I do have HD I can find out, practically to the year, when it will onset. Which means I'll roughly find out when I will die, too.

I'm not really sure what to do. In some ways, if I was going to have it at 40, then I'd rather know now so I could get around to writing my novel, stop spending on a pension and try to enjoy life more. I could practically advance book my ticket to Switzerland to be euthanised (if I do have it, I'm fucked if I'm hanging around until the bitter end, choking on cranberry juice in a home somewhere, smelling of wee).

But then, I'm not sure how I'd cope with having the certainty of  HD. Depending on how strong the gene is, it becomes problematic to buy a house as nobody wants to lend money to someone who isn't going to be around in 25 years.

Perhaps most importantly, if I get the test and know, then the Boy will know he has a 50:50 chance. At the moment he has a 25% chance of having HD, and I feel those odds are more comforting.

Having thought about it and done some light research, it appears that the genetics man wasn't entirely familiar with IVF abroad; I've found clinics where IVF with PGD can be done for less than a regular cycle here.

 I think I'm inclined to want to do a PGD cycle abroad, which would eliminate HD, although I don't think I'd want to know if I was a carrier.

I think my husband thinks it would make sense for me to get tested before we do that, which could bring the egg sharing option back into play.

I might need to try and get some expert advice from somewhere - I think the genetics people probably aren't too familiar with IVF, but my normal sources of infertility information don't have much on genetics.