Day 18: Strange Dreams

Friday 4th March 2016

Erroll is home! He arrived back from a Hong Kong layover at 7 this morning. To welcome him back, I left on the dining table the grainy image our clinic gave me yesterday, of my uterus freshly implanted with our embaby. Surprise darling…and welcome home! He must have heard Kingsley and I making a racket in our family bed this morning, and came to greet us looking smart in his uniform and incredibly dashing all round, a cheeky grin kissing me, and lots of pressies from his trip for us all.

Of course I was chirpy to see him on the outside, yet on the inside I was still sleepy. You see my slumber last night was disjointed and eerily occupied with strange dreamscapes. In fact, my mind didn’t really rest at all. I am putting it down to the strong glucocorticoid steriods I take orally, nightly, to help fight embryo rejection. The hazy memories of prednisolone’s effects on my sleep during past cycles (frank insomnia some nights), came to the fore last night – the first night on this important medication. In those dreams I was part of all sorts of horror-movie images. All night long. It makes me wonder why on earth inhibiting natural killer cells would cause my mind to go a little nuts during the night.

Clinical literature shows that elevated peripheral blood and uterine natural killer cell activity has been correlated with reduced IVF implantation rates. Current best practice is to administer prednisolone (along with aspirin and Clexane) to those of us who are deemed high risk of (repeated) failure. So with my brain armed with this knowledge, I will take the side effects on the chin, and tonight just get on with dealing with another set of strange dreams while my boys merrily snore in my ears, one on either side of me.

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