About Sylvia Freedman

Posts by Sylvia Freedman:

EndoActive has gone troppo yo.

IMG_3016  IMG_3012I am comin’ at you live from beneath the Pandanus. Although I’m currently in Noosa on holidays with my family, EndoActive HQ has traveled with us and is fully functioning in the tropics. We’ve literally gone troppo. So much exciting news to tell you so be sure to read to the bottom ok! First things first. Happy new year err’body. I hope this finds you well. It’s been so hectic up here organising the inaugural EndoActive consumer conference (eeee!!!) and getting in touch with lots of brave, enthusiastic EndoActive supporters from Brisbane & the Sunshine Coast who we’re going to interview and film while we’re up here. On top of that, A Current Affair popped in to see us. They were lovely. We ate Tim Tams together! I’ll tell you about that further down.

For those of you who aren’t aware, my Mum and I started EndoActive Australia & NZ a few months ago as a result of the publicity we were receiving after our petition on change.org went viral and received a whopping 74,500 signatures. You can check it out here. Now we are a non-profit, legally incorporated association which feels FANTASTIC and sounds very grown up and legit. We are so proud to have started this little thing from our living room and watched it grow and grow. Our mission is to promote education, awareness and activism about Endo as much as we can. We’ve already achieved a lot with the help of our fantastic supporters and have lots of exciting things in the pipeline. Mum has ideas coming out of her eyeballs, even while she’s asleep! She is an absolute powerhouse and I’m learning a lot. Together, we make a great team. We are currently planning the first ever consumer conference on Endo to be held in Sydney in the first half of 2015.

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A sea of flowers after the Sydney Siege

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Watching the siege unfold last night didn’t feel like real life. The magnitude of what happened took a while to sink in and when it did I was surprised at how quickly I crumbled and felt almost guilty and self-indulgent for being so affected when this was not my tragedy. I shocked myself. Mum explained to me through my tears that some events can open the gateway to release all the emotions we’ve been bottling up.  Continuing to watch the news on TV began to feel too sad, too overwhelming and too passive so as a family we went to the memorial at Martin Place. What an incredibly powerful experience.

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It felt like a sacred ground where every type of person came together to grieve and show their support. Behind us in the mile long line of people waiting to put down flowers was a homeless looking man named John. He had cerebral palsy, he walked with difficulty with a cane and looked like he’d lived a hard life but even he came to pay his respects. He didn’t have any flowers so I gave him some from our huge bunch, then another woman did the same. It was a nice moment. A group of people began singing John Lennon’s Imagine while hundreds of us silently let our thoughts wander. The expanse of flowers is unbelievably moving. It was so sad being right there where it all happened but what an amazingly uniting experience on a gorgeous Sydney night. Still getting goosebumps thinking about that gorgeous sea of flowers at the makeshift memorial and the thousands of people standing together in humbled silence after the longest night – something positive and meaningful to come out of such senseless horror. Thinking of the victims and their families tonight x
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46 days since egg freezing

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It’s been 4 weeks since my last bog entry and 46 days since egg freezing. Sorry it’s been so long between drinks! Half that time I spent still recovering and the other half I had to bury my head in the books and finish my last uni assignment without distraction. Today I’m feeling 1000 times better than the last time I wrote, which is why it’s so important to diarise the bad days in life so you can see how far you’ve come. I’m not completely back to my old self but by tracking my progress I know that I’m getting stronger and fitter every day. I’m going to give you a long list of everything I’ve felt over the past 46 days since my egg retrieval so you can get a real idea of my experience – which of course will likely not be the same as your experience because we’re all so wonderfully different. It’s been a long a difficult recovery so it’s a pretty extensive list but I’m sharing it because it’s something I would’ve liked to read coming from another girl with endo before I embarked on this wild voyage. Reading another person’s experience would not have made my decision for me but it would have prepared me for the things you aren’t warned about. First of all, I hope I didn’t scare anybody off egg freezing with the last description of how I was feeling…

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Egg retrieval recovery Day 18

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I am literally forcing myself to type this right now because I feel so fucking weird that I know I need to document it while I’m in the moment. Days of feeling like this are awful but you tend to ride them out then forget about them. I haven’t blogged since my egg retrieval because I’ve literally been too tired to type. Here’s what I managed to jot down in my notes on my iphone when I tried really hard to concentrate on what I was feeling:

Sort of feel like there’s two of me – one inside the other but they’re disconnected.
Pins and needs in left hand.
Slight falling sensation or that my inner body is much further away from my outer skin.
Inner eyeballs are further away from my real eyes. Everything feels far away.
I feel weak within in my body and not grounded or connected.
I feel lost and small inside myself, not outside of myself as people say sometimes.
Loud Noises are too loud too much
I feel overwhelmed by looking at my screen filled with emails or anything that requires too much thinking and processing.
My vision starts to blur and warp.
Left hand getting more numb.

Reading that back is very scary and creepy.

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Day 11 egg freezing

Here’s a video of me doing my final round of hormone injections. I developed a ‘bang bang bang’ method towards the end of my egg freezing process which basically means I lock and load up all the syringes with the solutions and medicines, replace the caps on the needles to ensure they’re 100% sterile, lay them out on the bathroom counter then BANG BANG BANG shoot em up one after the other. That may seem a little extreme to some and even warranted a “Oh Sylvie, NO!” from my mum but I didn’t do this for shock value I can assure you. I actually found this method safer for me for a number of reasons. Keep reading for more details on Day 11…

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Cravinggggggz

Salted caramel buttered popcorn & passionfruit brulee zumbarons because my body said so and one must listen to the body.

Salted caramel buttered popcorn & passionfruit brulee zumbarons because my body said so and one must listen to the body.

Day 10 sugar cravings 2.0. I blame the 50 half children in my ovaries. I tended to their needs like any mother would… with salted caramel buttered popcorn macarons.

My photo shoot with Cosmo

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I took this photo while I was perving on all the sparkly spangly things at my photo shoot for Cosmo on October 14. Sadly none of them were meant for me so I just drooled and fantasised about being a modern bridal-wear model dripping in sequins and fluffed with fur coats while I sat on the couch waiting until it was my go. (There was a real model before me which pissed me off royally because I knew I’d look like even more of a dick trying incredibly hard to look totally natural. Bitch.)

Time for makeup. I was very excited to see what I’d be styled in and how many different outfits I’d get to try which is hilarious in hindsight because I was given a plain white singlet to throw on for a single head-shot. What a dick. Thinking I was gonna get some sort of fashion spread like I was Kate bloody Moss or something HA! I’m still baffled by my unbridled self-indulgence in that moment – what on earth was I thinking? As I had one squinty eye on the model pose pose posing while my hot pink lippy was applied and my eyebrows were coloured in, I watched my glossy 6-page-spread vision droop and deflate like a sad penis on a cold day.

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How to Inject Yo’self egg freezing

Here’s a quick video of me doing one of my daily injections for egg freezing. Every day I get more and more confident and I can do it quicker each time. It helps that I’ve never been afraid of needles and like a challenge. I reckon day after tomorrow I’ll be shooting up so fast you’ll be eating your brekkie and think you saw a lightning bolt at the other end of kitchen table but it’ll just be me. With my ninja shooting up skillz. A flash before your eyes. Cap off, needle on, wind it up, bang it in, yank it out, sharps bin shut, all before you can say “eggs benedict”.

Enjoy x