Pamplemousse

PCOS - check. Infertility - check. IVF - check. 43 years young - check. Sick of babydust - fricking double check. Join a Scottish infertile as she slowly swirls down the plughole. Now with added donor egg flava.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

Tomatoes, love apples and infertility

Amyesq mentioned in comments on the gardening post earlier about a link between tomatoes and infertility? What is it about those little red or yellow love apples that join us in gardening fertility land?

Is it because we can lavish all our maternal feelings on them? We nurture them from seeds or plug plants, monitor their feeding, agonise over light and temperature in their beds and pretty much treat those plants like our babies.

I know I was absolutely distraught last summer as here in Scotland, the weather was awful. My poor tomato plants just seemed to stall as it was not warm enough. At the same time, I had endured 3 back-to-back injectible cycles where I could hardly produce even one decent follie whatever the dosage of Gonal-F and was officially labelled a "poor responder". Really? You think? The two events seemed inextricably linked in my mind and it did not matter a jot to me that eventually my tomato babies pulled through and were still fruiting in October. The summer had been lost. I could not even grow tomatoes so no wonder I was never going to have a baby. If tears could have been used as tomato fertilizer, I would have been drowning in tomatoes.

3 Comments:

At 12:29 PM, Blogger Mare said...

This is funny. I wrote about this last summer when I was trying to grow tomatoes as well and a couple other people, i.e. Soper at Uterine Wars and Akeeyu at herVeryOwn picked up on it as well. I did get some tomatoes in the end, but they were very late bloomers.

 
At 1:18 AM, Blogger Amyesq said...

I think you hit the nail on the head, P. We want to lavish our love and nurturing on something and tomatoes seem to be a good way to go. Funny you said that about treatment & tomatoes b/c I took off 5 weeks last summer to do my first IVF round and, consequently, had time for my little darlings every day. Here in the summer we get no rain (189 dry days- May through through early Octboer last year), so drying the tomatoes out is more the concern. Funny, though, when my IVF didn't work, I headed over to Scotland to hike the Great Glen Way and experienced some of the crazy weather you mention. Mudslides near Glasgow. Horrible.

 
At 5:26 PM, Blogger Pamplemousse said...

No rain =O

I cannot even imagine a place like that! Bear in mind, I have to grow my little darlings in a greenhouse to keep the worst of the elements off of them!

Hope you enjoyed our lovely Scottish weather (complete with midgies! They love the rain!)

 

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