ooooommmmm

Nothing like some weekly forced relaxation to make you question everything.

I’ve now been to the in.fertility cure acupuncturist twice, and have appointments scheduled every Wednesday through the rest of the month. Her style is different from my other person, and she is much more expensive, but I am hoping that w/ something as complicated as high FSH and general wonky-ness that you get what you pay for. I have been trying to feel good about trying something new, moving forward, blah blah blah… but last night I hit a bit of a wall and wound up sobbing into my knitting.

The problem at hand:  How do I know that this is the thing to invest hope in? Why should this work when nothing else has? Am I quickly becoming the desperate infertile woman who is willing to attempt (and pay for) anything that offers even a moniker of hope?

All this is compounded by other things… Super Husband’s father called yesterday to ask if I was pregnant yet. In my sexu.ality class yesterday we had a lecture on birth control, and one at a time the little college students told stories of how they got pregnant on birth control, and then the teacher told us she got pregnant while using birth control. My friend IRL who did IVF at the same time as me is pregnant w/ twins. (Seems everyone who did IVF around the same time ast me is pregnant w/ twins – why did the 100% implantation fairy skip my house?) Our friend the man-hoe’s baby mama is due any day now… frankly, I just don’t understand how fertility can come so damn easily for other people. Oh yah, and the Duggers were just in our town. So they are all over every media outlet around here.

I’ve been going at my fertility with as much estudious vigor (maybe more) then I am putting towards school. I am currently eating a special diet to help w/ my TCM fertilty type and high FSH. Acupuncture, herbs, femoral message… fertility awareness, saliva analysis, BBT, OPKs.   The last four all in an attempt to figure out when I am ovulating. And it really does take all four. As super husband likes to say, I am a very complicated flower.

If you have made it this far, I want to let you in on a little secret. We switched to the digital OPKs because I refuse to try to analyze those silly lines ever again. I thought about splurging on a fertility moniter, but figured I would try the smily face digital sticks first. I figured the pocketbook gougers at Clear.blue would surely make refills for those digital OPKs, right?  Wrong. But after a lot of searching, I found several different people on the internets that claim that you can use the fertility moniter sticks in the digital OPKs. So, I bought a pack of 30 and it turns out that they are exactly the same as the sticks that come with the digital OPKs. Take that Clear.blue!

So, that is what is up in my world. Also, I just saw a great movie, “My Neighbor Totoro.”  It’s by the same guy who did “Spirited Away” which I also love. Add them both to your net.flix queue, they are a fantastic distraction.

Biding my time

Nothing much to post about these days. We are just biding our time, waiting for us both to be healed enough physically and emotionally to move on to the next thing, be it another IVF or something else.  Super Husband is still really having a hard time dealing with our failed cycle. He had really invested a lot of hope in this process. I think he is finally starting to understand why I would not let him talk about things like baby names.

My body is definitely in a state of flux. Last week I had a fever and nausea for 24 hours, then my whole body erupted in a rash. Yesterday the rash was almost totally gone and I managed to celebrate feeling better by going ass over teacups down a hill on my college campus. One minute I was walking along, then I tripped, lost my balance due to my extremely heavy backpack, and wound up sliding on my face in the street.  I’m quite a sight now, scraped up face and hands. Black and blue marks everywhere. <sigh>

To add insult to injury, my period is now 4 days late. My cycles had been pretty regular in the year leading up to IVF thanks to acupuncture, but I think IVF has thrown my system out of wack. I never had any fertile signs this month, never got the smiley face on the OPK. I would like my period to arrive soon, however, as a lack of menses is a symptom that my diminished ovarian reserve is moving in to the next phase of impending doom.  Has anyone experienced IVF screwing up their cycles?

I’ve got two days of self-care ahead:  a trip to the doctor this morning to examine the bump on my head (er… face?)  and then acupuncture with my regular guy this afternoon to help with my nerve damage.  Tomorrow I will visit one of the official “Fer.tility Cure” acupuncturists to see if she is willing to offer up any hope that I can get knocked up on my own.

Looks like I am facing a week of healing – in more ways than one!

Circling, with nowhere to land

Everyone in the house with the PMS weepies raise your hand!

Three weeks after a negative beta, ok, not just a negative beta… an epic FAIL of an IVF cycle (so epic, I am suprised to not see a link back here on failblog), and I find myself flying in circles, with nowhere to land.

None of our available options are appealing to me:

Option #1:  Try on our own. Lucy and Desi tried for 10 years and wound up with two children. Sure, it’s not totally out of the question that this might work for us, but what if waiting even one more year renders my eggs totally useless?  SuperHusband refuses to believe that there is anything wrong with my eggs, that the doctors do not know what they are talking about. But I wonder, how many people try for three years to have a baby, fail 4 medicated IUIs, and 1 IVF and then go on to get spontaniously knocked up?  I am slightly considering flying to New York to see this guy, the first doctor to preform IVF and now no longer does it, but instead tries to help couples overcome any issues to be able to conceive naturally. No one I have seen in my own area thinks that they are able to help me. I am in the process of getting an appointment with one of the ladies who runs the Infertility Cure seminars. Turns out that they are based in my town. Who knew?

Option #2:  Try IVF again. This was my first instinct as to what we would do. But, as we have already established, it was an epic FAIL. Who is to say that the next time wouldn’t be as well? I’d love to meet with my RE to ask him what he would do differently next time to increases the chances of success, but I don’t feel like paying him another $2oo just to talk to me for 10 minutes. And like option #1, it raises the question, If the problem with my eggscan not be fixed, how can I expect to get pregnant? And if it can, why do I need IVF?

Option #3: Adoption. Thinking about this more and more. And with no disrespect to adopted people, or people who adopt, I am not 100% sure that it is right for me. SuperHusband would do it in an instant, he wants to adopt an older child from the foster system, not an infant. If we do adopt, I want an infant. I feel like that is our best chance to really feel as though it is “our” child, and a part of our family. I’m worried that an older child will always feel like someone else’s child, and a stranger in our home. I know that is shallow. I also know that infants come with gigantic price tags, home studies, waiting lists… the possibility of even more heartbreak. I’m not sure that our lower-middle class income (or lack of church attendence) would even qualify us. I’m not sure we would ever be able to afford it without selling our house. And, because it is worth repeating, I am not sure that it is right for me.

Option #4:  Live child-free. This breaks my heart. But I am coming to terms with it being a possibility, especially if we choose option #1 or #2.

So for now I guess we are going with option #1 – we have another 2 months before we have to decide about winter break IVF. Anyone have any assvice to put forth? I welcome it with open arms, I can’t keep flying in circles forever.

Adventures at the RE

First, thanks to everyone for your words of support these last few days. I appreciate it more then you could imagine. We are slowly coming around out of our daze. I think the hardest part is having so much hope invested, along with all of the time and energy that it takes to do all the injections, go to all the appointments, etc…. Coming down from that can be so overwhelming.

My period arrived Saturday after a day of spotting and fanfare. I’ve had nonstop cramps since Friday afternoon. My skin is broken out and I’ve been intensely moody. I think my body is really suffering from some major hormone withdrawel symptoms.  Honestly, with all the fear I had about side effects from the medications, I felt really good the whole time I did IVF, especially on the stims. I was actually less anxious, less moody, less depressed… I lost weight, gained energy, went for a short jog nearly every morning… Yah, I found it a little difficult to focus, and my abdomen got a little sore once my ovaries swelled up… but I would take meno.pur all the time if I could!  It has me wondering… if I have some sort of deficiency somewhere that is causing the elevated FSH. It’s something to ponder.

My last remaining side effects from the whole experience is a gigantic green bruise in the crook of my elbow from my Beta blood draw (I look like a junkie!) and extreme pain in my hips from the PIO injections. My right hip still is very tender to the touch and hurts when I walk. My last injection on that side was last Wednesday, almost a week ago.  My left side is extremely sore and hurts all the time… the last injection on that side was on Thursday. Is it normal to still be hurting from PIO injections? I’m worried that I am having an allergic reaction (a la the HSG from hell.) or an infection…?

Lastly, I wanted to share an adventure from my RE’s office. I was inspired by Kate’s tale of weird-o’s in her RE’s office, and I was going to leave this story in a comment but it got way too long.

I went in for an early morning ultrasound and blood draw… It was the last one of my cycle, I knew that they were most likely going to be giving me the trigger and my retreival instructions so I was a little excited. My office is like other RE offices that I have heard about… there is an unspoken code that no one speaks in the waiting room, and there is minimal eye contact. No sooner had I sat down then a woman breaks both of those rules.

“It sure was cold this morning!” she announced. “It’s a good thing I wore a sweater!”

I looked up at her. “Yah. It’s nice though.”

“We had to leave at 6am to get here!  My daughter slept all the way here. She’s not used to getting up that early.” She said gesturing at the surly and extremely overweight teenager sulking on the opposite side of the waiting room.

It was at this point that I pondered their presence at the RE’s office. Secondary infertility? She had a teenager… Why did the teenager come?  Was the teen infertile?  Now I was curious. But my name was called.

They quickly took my blood and ushered me into the exam room for my ultrasound. When it was over they brought me into a small waiting room so I could wait for the nurse who would explain the retreival and the trigger injection.

And I waited, and waited, and waited. And could hear everything happening next door in the room where they draw blood.

“Don’t stick me with that needle!  No! I don’t want my blood taken!” 

The teenager was putting up quite a fight. The nurses explained that they needed a baseline reading before she drank the glucose beverage. She was suspected to have gestational diabetes.

“I don’t care!  I don’t care about this baby!  I don’t want this baby!  I want to go home!”

And on, and on… for about 1/2 an hour, when the nurse finally took a break and came in to talk to me about HSG.

I guess it hadn’t occured to me that RE’s do things other then infertility, like glucose tests. But the irony of a very overweight and very fertile pregnant teen who did not want her baby shouting within earshot of a dozen infertile women?  It was a little much.

I’ve had strange waiting room experiences at the RE before… the time around Christmas where everyone seemed to have brought their extended family comes to mind. But mostly it’s just quiet lesbian couples and women of advanced maternal age. I’m sure I look like the freak to most of them, with my giant backpack filled with school books, wild hair, and general messy appearance.

I guess we are all a little weird. I kind of miss those freaks.

Finding a fresh outlook

I keep having to remind myself that we didn’t really lose anything here. (Except for most of my grandmother’s inheritence.)

And when we really think about it, we gained quite a bit. This process taught me how strong I am. How I can tolerate things I didn’t think I could. That progesterone in oil isn’t that bad. I learned how much I really want to be pregnant. Before, I wanted to have a baby, but would have bypassed the whole pregnancy part if I could.

Super Husband learned that squemish as he may be, he is awesome at giving me shots. He can have his blood drawn without passing out. He can sit with me and hold my hand when I am in pain on a doctor’s table. Before this experience he never thought that he could be with me in the delivery room when I gave birth, and now he knows that he can. That he wants to be there.

We both learned just how badly that we want this. I never though that we would be those people. Willing to do anything for a child. We learned that the IVF process really isn’t that bad, that it is worth it to have a child. (Which we learned not actually having had a child, which says a lot!)

We learned that what we suspected about my eggs is true.

So, we are trying to move forward in a new light. I’ve been looking for ways to increase my estrogen production naturally. We’re thinking about trying again in December with the rest of the inheritance and a little bit of debt.  That will be the last time.

(Also considering a move to a country that offers IVF as part of a national health plan like the UK. Only mostly joking about that one.  That is more desireable to me then working for Wal.greens for 5 years.)

Ruminations on lucky numbers

I don’t tend to be a superstitious person. Despite the fact that I am knitting myself some lucky socks. That has more to do with keeping my mind occupied, and less with me thinking that the socks actually posess something other then all the hope that I am channeling into them.

The one thing I do tend to be more superstitious about is numbers. One in particular: 311.

It all started when super husband and I were on a trip to Miami to see that delicious band that I have mentioned here before for a four night concert run over New Year’s Eve. This was back in 2003. We were still living in the big city and were starting to feel like we needed to make a big life change and move somewhere new. It’s all we talked about during that trip, and we were looking for signs everywhere.

Our tickets for the third night of the show were up in the top level of the arena, the 400 section. The sound wasn’t very good up there, so we wandered down to the 3oo section and looked for an unattended portal that we could sneak in to. During setbreak I needed to use the bathroom and I looked to see what section we had ended up in. It was section 311. This was easy for me to remember because our hotel room in Miami was room number 311. Ha!  Funny coincidence! Later that evening I realized that we were in row number 11, and super husband was sitting in seat 3.

The next night was New Year’s Eve and the band played until past 1am. After the show let out we wandered around a creepy Christmas village that had been set up in a park nearby, and then found a yummy all night Cuban restaurant where we had a delicious meal. When we finally stumbled into our hotel room (#311)  the clock told us that it was 3:11 am.

Freaky, no?

When I went back to work a few days later I told my boss that we would be moving away and that I would not be applying to renew my contract. I asked him when my last day was on my current contract. It was March 11. (or 3/11 for those of us in the US) That was the moment I knew that this whole 3-1-1 thing was a bit cosmic, and that moving was the right thing to do.

(As an aside, it was the right thing to do. Turns out that the Iraq war escalated, and my government job was eliminated to save money. I would not have been able to get my contract renewed, even if I had wanted to…)

So… in the years that followed we always payed special attention to anything with 311 in it. 3:11 pm -if we see the clock at this time and we are together we kiss… or super husband will text me “Happy 311!”  We decided last year that we would take the month off in March of 2011 and go on a vacation.

When we’ve been trying to conceive, three years have gone by where March 11 has rolled around and I have wondered, “is this it?” Maybe I’ll be ovulating on that day, or maybe I’ll test on that day. It hasn’t been lucky for us yet in that way… But we always call March 11th our cosmic anniversary.

Ok, let’s digress to another story…

At my visit to the RE yesterday they gave me an early birthday present.

A big bag of meno.pur and needles and alchohol swabs! I was mixing up my first batch last night when I looked more closely at the vial in my hand. And printed on the label, printed on all the labels of all the vials it turns out, is something that gave me more hope for this cycle then any lucky socks could have given me…

My meno.pur expires in March of 2011.

(ps – It is true what they say!  Ice really helps!  Tonight’s injection was much easier, a lot less like Harry and Dumbledore in the cave.)

I Confess

Welcome to the post in which she admits that she is scared shitless to do IVF.

We’ve touched on this little item before… but back then my fear was more about tempting fate by using intervention to get pregnant. Now it is directly related to the entire IVF process.

I’m not so afraid of giving myself injections as I am of the physical responses my body will undergo. I’m scared of OHSS. I’m scared of the pain, the bloating, the grumpiness. I’m absolutely terrified of the egg retreival, the anesthesia, the aftermath. I’m scared of having to miss too much school and falling behind. I’m scared of ectopic pregnancies and PIO.

Of these fears, the biggest is that of the egg retreival. Anesthesia and I are not good friends. I had a panic attack while it was being administered when I got my wisdom teeth out. Also, super-husband has a major fear of medical “stuff” and I know that there is no way he could come with me for retreival. Which means I would be on my own. Which scares me.

The question is… What am I more afraid of?  IVF? Or of not doing IVF and never having children?

Scheduling Conflicts

So, you mean you can’t schedule a pregnancy for when it is most convenient for you?

You all have unanimously told me what I really should have already known. Especially considering all of the rearranging I did with my life three years ago when we started this whole journey. The big one being not going back to school and sticking with a job I hated, just for the health insurance. My mindset was that I would not go back to work after the baby was born, instead going back to school… then I would utilize the ultra-cheap on campus childcare and re-enter the workforce when the babe was 4 and ready for preschool. Voila!  Baby-rearin’ with minimal daycare… the perfect plan!

Well, we all know how it went from there…  I couldn’t get pregnant, things went downhill at work, eventually I was a great big ball of misery, and now I am back in school and still with no child, making nearly every moment a less then optimal time to get pregnant.

(You would think that the less then optimal timing would mean I would get knocked up no problem. That’s how mother nature (murphy’s law?) works, right?)

Anyways, I am going to give mother nature a few more months to wield her trickery and then launch into my first (and only!! got to be optimistic…) IVF cycle in December.  Knowing full well that the whole train could be derailed, things could go wrong, etc.  The wait is more so because I need a break then anything else, because this has been a long three years.

Pondering the Future

Super Husband thinks I spend too much time pondering the future, but I like to be able to have an idea of what to expect in the coming months. This is one of the reasons that IF has been hard on me, while he thinks I am stressing too much.

Well, with the idea that IVF might be in our future, it is giving me WAY too much to have to ponder. Not only do I ponder when a baby might enter our lives, but also when would the least intrusive time to do IVF be?

So, I would like to pose a question to the group and open up the floor to some advice (or assvice, I am game for either!)  Please chime in regardless of weather or not you have done IVF, but I am especially looking for input from folks who have been down that road and know what the landmarks are like.

I have a few times coming up in the next 6 months that would be a “good” time for me to do IVF… what would you think the best circumstances would be?

Option #1  The first two weeks in August I will be on a break from school and work, but it is only for two weeks…. after those two weeks are over I will be starting a new and rather grueling semester. (I signed up for tough classes because I figured I wouldn’t be worrying about IF treatments, hahahaha!)  I have a personal dislike for missing too much school, especially when classes are hard.

Option #2  Having a baby in June  would be ideal, because I could take the summer off from school and still be covered under my student insurance policy. If I have to take a regular semester off then I will loose my insurance and will need to try and qualify for medic.aid.  So that would mean IVF in early September, during school. Of course, it might not work on the first try, but there is no reason to believe it would not.

Option #3  Winter break IVF… I have a whole month off, can achieve maximum relaxation and just focus on the task at hand. However, success would mean taking the following fall semester off of school and I would not be covered under my student policy.

(Let me say as an aside, that I think that Medic.aid has better coverage then my student policy, but there will be the added stress of needing to qualify, which shouldn’t be that hard but you never know… and I will have one major pre-existing condition!)

Thoughts?

She Exists!

I know, I announced I was back and then I disappeared again. I certainly appreciate everyone who has stuck with me despite my flakyness as of late.

The good news is when you are not actively TTC there is actually something new to report when you only post about once a month!  And this month’s news is a bang up bit of news at that.

Last week I had a recurrance of the infections and this time went to my RE instead of urgent care. He wrote me some new scripts and then took advantage of his captive audience and told me that he was done doing IUIs, that he officially reccomended IVF.

Naturally, this didn’t really register anything with me, because we can’t afford to do anything anyway! And I casually mentioned this to my mom who up and asked me how much IVF cost. I looked up the charges for my clinic and shared them with her. And the result?  Well, it turns out that my dad just received an inheritence from his mother who passed away, and it happens to be the same amount as my clinic’s shared risk program.

So, I have the greenlight from them to do shared risk (three attempts, then money back minus cost of drugs if there is no “take home baby”) whenever I want.

Yah, I had a hard time scraping my jaw up off the floor from that one too.

So now it’s really all on hubby… whenever he is ready to start we will. And he is coming around. It’s all quite crazy really, how much things can change over the course of a month.

It’s nice knowing I have IVF on the horizon, and I can fully enjoy spring until then. Without the pressure of TTC.

In other news, we went camping at the beach two weekends back and had a lovely time. We took advantage of being near super-husband’s brother and stopped in to meet their new baby and I got to hold my first niece for the first time. And she really is lovely and precious and all good things and oh how I want to give her a little cousin.

I expected to feel all sad and bitter, and I certainly shed a few tears on the way there. But once I met her that faded away. I don’t want THIS baby, though I already love her to pieces… I just want my own baby. Anyway, I am glad I took the plunge and met her, because now I can start knitting her cute little baby pants w/ no bitterness.  And she gives me the motivation to hold my breath and take the plunge into IVF.

Here I come!!!