IVF = Stress = Anxiety = Crap sleeps

Clearly IVF is very stressful. Multiple IVF's is even more stressful. Multiple IVF's plus IVF after loss is even more stressful. Multiple IVF's plus IVF after loss plus IVF after neonatal death is just plain fucking awful.

So understandably I am shitting whole bricks for this next IVF. And in spite of being intimately involved with my best friend Prozac, the anxiety is too great to be suppressed by the fluoxetine. I hate feeling anxious, it’s a horrible feeling. It makes you feel as if you have just slammed on breaks to miss an accident. That adrenalin rush that leaves your heart racing and makes your stomach feel as if it has crunched up into your chest cavity and then dropped to your feet. That’s what anxiety feels like. Except there is no ‘incident’ that sparks off the feeling. Its just there. Kind of all the time, lurking beneath the surface. I find if I take deep breaths I can control it, I can calm myself down on the inside. I know how to deal with it, and its not nearly as bad as sometime people have, but it still sucks. And its all got to do with IVF. I don’t get this way about any thing else.

One way that my stress manifests itself (besides in the anxiety of course) is that I have crap sleeps. I wake up frequently and I have the most ridiculous dreams. Disturbing dreams that if they aren’t scary, they are downright disturbing.

A recurrent theme in these IVF time dreams is wild animals. WTF?? Seriously. I dream about wild animals chasing me. Saturday nights dream was about wild elephants chasing me. I was near a beach and trying to hide away from them behind the rocks. I managed to evade them by running into a shopping mall, when it was bombed by terrorists. Not sure what happened to the elephants. Just like my life, there is no logic in my dreams.

I often dream about being in a game park, on foot and having to run away or hide from lions. Now I know I live in Africa but this is ridiculous. Contrary to popular worldwide believe we do not have lions and elephants wondering down our main roads. And I have only been to a game park twice, and I stayed in the car the whole time??? Where do these animal dreams come from?

Even more disturbing, I dreamt in the week that I was best friends with Britney Spears. What the fuck? I hate Britney Spears. I think she is an idiot and I don’t like her music. Why oh why would I dream that I was best friends with her? That was a disturbing dream, I woke up disturbed.

I really do need my sleep (beauty sleep and egg growing sleep, oh and collagen renewal sleep) and these ridiculous dreams are starting to work on my nerves.

Comments

[cheryl b.]

I have wanted to leave you a comment for days now, but your life sucks so god damn bad that I didn't know what to say. Well, I still don't know what to say, but I'm leaving one anyways, so there you have it.

[Julie]

I have bad dreams during cycles, too — very, very realistic and vivid ones (though without, thank God, the wild animals).

What's worse is that I wake up a lot in the middle of the night. The minute I'm awake, my mind starts churning a mile a minute, so furiously that I know I won't get back to sleep. So not only am I psychotic from the drugs, I'm strung out from lack of sleep.

I'm going to see if I can cook up a dream in which you and I are riding wild elephants, running down Britney Spears in a vicious, bloody stampede.

[Lori]

Hello Tertia - glad to meet you but sorry it's through blogs about IVF and infertility drugs.

I once dreamt that Elizabeth Hurley and I were girlfriends and we went shopping for baby clothes for her new baby.