peeking in

Just a quick post to say I'm feeling a little better today. All of my resting and protein-ing and hydrating since yesterday seem to have made a difference, so I'm headed back to the couch momentarily to keep doing more of the same.

Surgery is at 7:30am tomorrow. I'll post an update as soon as I'm back on my feet.

Thank you all SO much for all of the well wishes and positive energy and good vibes. It really means a lot. Smooches to my BFF, inlocoparentis, whose post today reminds me that even when the deck feels stacked against me, I am lucky because I have the best friends in the whole world.

we're on deck

I just got the call from my clinic. My ER is scheduled for Wednesday morning.

I have 27 follicles, none of which are quite to the size they like to see before triggering, but my E2 is 3727 which is apparently cause for concern. The nurse did a thorough screening for OHSS symptoms and gave me the medical exchange number and a list of things to watch out for. I'm doing my best not to freak out, but I'm quite the hypochondriac, so there's lots of room for improvement. They're letting me go ahead and trigger tonight and I don't think they'd let me do that if they were overly worried about it.

I didn't have the specific symptoms she asked about (dramatic weight gain, infrequent urination, shortness of breath) but I generally feel like crap - nausea, headache, fatigue - and I have terrible heartburn. My ovaries are killing me and I'm beyond bloated, but the nurse assures me those things are normal.

I'm trying to figure out what to do about work tomorrow. On one hand, it seems like I should be taking it easy and my schedule at work tomorrow won't allow for that. Also, if I'm home, I can do dorky things like measure my urine output and weigh myself every 10 minutes if I want to. On the other hand, I'd be home alone all day and, historically, me being left to my own devices for extended periods does not play well with my medical paranoia. I guess I'll check in with M and see what she thinks.

stim report: day 9

I'm running late for a surprise party, but here's the quick update...

E2: 1492
11 follies over 10mm on right
12 follies over 10mm on left
Follistim reduced to 125 units
next step is another stick/scan on Monday morning

stim report: day 8 - updated

The coin toss is not going well. The current tally is pregnant: 2, not pregnant: 5. I'm sort of hoping the negative trend is a form of karmic preparation for the really big "heads" to come in the form of our actual BFP.

On the flip side (pun intended), my stims seem to be doing their thing. This morning, the sonographer saw 5 follies between 10 and 12.5 on each ovary with 12 more under 10 on the left and 8 more under 10 on the right. It's nice to have confirmation and numbers to obsess over, but the aching in my ovaries alone told me things were progressing nicely. I'm anxious to get my Estradiol results. On Wednesday, they decreased my Follistim to 150 units. Hopefully they'll keep me at the lower dose today. I'd like to stretch the liquid gold as far as I can.

Oh, fun story: I was traveling for work yesterday and I found myself in a cramped, dirty Amtrak station at injection time. I tucked myself into a stall for my daily Lupron and Follistim fix and I couldn't help but wonder how many people had shot up in that very stall before me. It was totally one of those "How did I get here?" moments. Good times.

Updated to add: The clinic call is in. Response is looking good indeed. She said they actually saw 7 measurable follies on the left (still 5 on the right) and my E2 is 893. Meds remain the same and I go back tomorrow for another scan and stick. The nurse today said she'd guess my ER is going to be on Wednesday or Thursday, which is a little later than I hoped for, but oh well. I had to order more Follistim to get me there (ker-ching) but the end is still in sight.

heads or tails

Preparing yourself for IVF is just one giant mindf~ck, best I can tell. It's like this constant balancing act between feeling a need to protect yourself in case this cycle ends up just like all those that came before it and allowing yourself to get appropriately excited about the significant shift in odds. At my clinic, and for my age group, the odds of me becoming pregnant at all are 52% and the odds of me becoming pregnant with a baby I will go on to deliver are 48%. So, it's roughly half and half. It's a coin toss.

M and I really don't know what to think. We talked the other night and realized we're on the same irrational page: We both fully expect IVF to work, because c'mon, it's freaking IVF, right? At the same time, both of us have accepted K Being Pregnant as a state that exists in the same realm as unicorns and the tooth fairy. Reverting back to high school logic (you remember it: If A then B, and so forth), if IVF works, then K will be pregnant. K can't get pregnant, therefore IVF can't work. But... how can IVF not work, because c'mon, it's freaking IVF, right? Cue quagmire.

I have taken a lot of statistics courses over the years and I get that they are only useful in aggregate. My own odds are skewed by my relative age within the group, my other identified health issues (or lack thereof, thank you unexplained infertility), my response to the medications, and a thousand other tiny variables no one can know. Still, I feel the need to embrace this concept of having a 50/50 shot. I feel like it's my best hope for preparing myself mentally for what is to come. It helps me to wrap my head around both possible outcomes in equal measure and keep an even balance of optimism and pragmatism. I'm also hopeful that, if faced with a BFN, it will help me not to give up hope. All it will mean is we landed on the wrong side of the fence this time and there's no reason to believe it won't go the other way if we figure out a way to try this again. It may just be the most helpful tool I've stumbled into so far.

To help cement this concept, M and I have begun a daily coin toss where heads means BFP and tails means BFN. For every day since stims started, M has flipped a coin and we see what we get. The score so far is pregnant: 1, not pregnant: 2. We forgot to flip last night, probably on account of the fact that I had a bit of an emotional breakdown, but we'll do it twice tonight to get caught up.

Everything else continues to challenge us. The A/C nightmare drags on - we've pretty much given up the dream of having central air in time for my retrieval. I've started referring to my wedding party cohorts as "The Bridesmaids: Ruining good moods for 20 days and counting." M is caught up in the a particularly intense few weeks of summer-school-slash-full-time-employment hell, and my moods are swinging like Sandra Day O'Connor. It's good times around the old homestead, let me tell you! We're keeping a sense of humor about it. Mostly.

stim report: day 4

The nurse just called. E2 level is 83. This is... normal, I guess? I'm doing my best to stay away from the internet search engines so I have no frame of reference, but the nurse who called with my results seemed unconcerned. All meds stay at their current levels. Next appointment is for bloodwork on Wednesday - no ultrasound on the horizon just yet.

I have acupuncture after work today. Hopefully she can help nudge things forward a bit.

off the ledge

Lest anyone worry that I need to be on suicide watch, I thought I should update and let you know that the initial panic has passed. Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions and sympathy.

We've received a couple more A/C estimates and it turns out the first one we received was ridiculously high. It's still going to be expensive - don't get me wrong, but it looks like we may get away with spending about $1000 less than we originally thought, which is pretty significant. The goal is to make a decision this afternoon in hopes that something can be installed by the end of next week.

I've also received some good information about the cats - specifically, that they can comfortably withstand much higher temperatures than dogs and even humans. Their food and litter box are both in the basement, so they'll be down there several times a day, and we just have to trust that they'll stay down there if they get too hot.

Acupuncture was this morning and stims start tonight. My acupuncturist put a bunch of needles in my tummy and hooked up the electro-stimulus-thingie to them. It was the first time she used that and it was a strange sensation, but she said it'll help me grow lots and lots of follicles so I'm all for it.

I had a great day at work yesterday - lots of exciting changes. It's a subject for another post, but it looks as if the proverbial window is opening in response to the closing of the door that was the other job opportunity.

Speaking of work, I guess I should get back to it. Thanks again for all of your support!

Damn it.

Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.

The A/C repair guy didn't show up until 6:15pm last night, and that only came to pass because I called the office when no one had showed by 5pm (and I'd been sitting in the hot house burning up vacation time for the past three hours) and learned that our appointment had been rescheduled for the next day but no one had bothered to call us. They generously offered to come out after hours, for an overtime fee of course, and I generously offered to take my business elsewhere if they couldn't get someone out to my house ASAP to fix their screw up end my misery. They called back a few minutes later to say someone would be over soon, no extra charge. When said repair person showed up, he informed us that (drumroll please)...

Our A/C is broken. As in, "There's-nothing-I-can-do-you-need-a-whole-new-system" broken. They'd be happy to get a new one in for us as soon as NEXT WEEK for the low low price of $4400.

It took a while for all of that to penetrate, but the nausea rolled in about an hour after he left and hasn't dissipated much. Our house is unbelievably, torturously hot. The humidity in our house is so severe that it's curling the cover of the paperback book I'm reading. M and I moved into the basement a couple of days ago which means we're at least getting some sleep now, but it also means we're cramming all of our daily activities into about one fifth of our living space. I'm really worried about our pets. For some reason, they refuse to hang out in the basement during the day while we're at work. They'll go down there in the evenings with us, but when we get home from work and/or school, they're all sprawled out on the couch and living room floor, panting and looking at us with squinted, pained expressions. And this is with the house opened up and every fan running. We're about to leave town for a couple of days (luckily for us) and we'll have to close everything up. The dog will be in a kennel but the cats will be home on their own. We're thinking about locking them in the basement to force them to hang out in the cool, but M is worried that will stress them out even more than the heat. I would think that if they got hot enough, they'd figure it out, but they haven't yet and it's really awful, so now my belief is that our cats are just extra-dumb or something.

What timing, huh? Our final payment (of about $4400 - what a coincidence!) to the clinic is due on 6/16, and we're going to have to fix this before then. There's no way I can cope with post ER and ET rest at home with the conditions being what they are. So I've got some phone calls to make today and tonight, I'll go to Home Depot and Lowes and anywhere else that I can think of and we'll just have to figure something out. By pulling from every corner of savings and credit, we'll be able to make this work, but it's going to decimate the cushion we'd built up going into IVF. I'm an underpaid social worker and M is wrapping up a stint as a full time student and looking for a job. It'll take us a year to recover from this financially.

We're just really wondering when we're gonna get our break. I'd love to think it will come in the form of a BFP, but really, why should our luck change at this point?

Damn it.

first hurdle cleared

The call came in. I'm appropriately suppressed. Lupron goes down from 20 to 10 units on Friday and Follistim (225 units) and antibiotics begin. First stim check (bloodwork only) will be on Monday, June 9th.

I didn't get the nitty gritty details (that's not how my clinic rolls) but the nurse said I had "very low" estradiol and there were "lots of small follicles on both sides just waiting to come forward." On we go!

my life in bullets

I thought all day that I'd get around to posting this in a detailed, narrative form, but our air conditioning is broken which means my tolerance for sitting in this hot computer room in the midst of a Lupron headache is very low. I'm ready to head for the basement with my girls (that'd be M and the dog, not... you know, but I'll be taking them too, I guess). So, here's the nutshell, possibly to be fleshed out at a later date (tomorrow?); possibly not.

• Sunday = best day ever. OK, maybe not best ever but darn close. Spent the whole day with M - shopping, eating, going to a play... bliss.
• Yesterday = worst day ever. Again, I'm exaggerating, but can we just agree to let it go? First I found out through the grapevine that the wife of a friend is pregnant and in her second trimester already. This was followed by a conversation with my co-worker (on her first day back from maternity leave) about how perfectly wonderful it is having a 3-month old at home because 3-6 months really is the golden period and blah blah blah. Finally, I had an annoying situation come up with my fellow bridesmaids re: a wedding I'm in later this summer that took out my last nerve. The non-hormonally-challenged me would have just been a little bit put off, but oh no, a normal reaction was not in the cards. I have no fuse these days. I was in tears by the time I hit the parking lot and a complete mess by the time I arrived home.
• My Lupron hell waned over the weekend so I decided I'd given it a bad rap. I was wrong. It now seems the acupuncture I had on Thursday night was just a lot more effective than I realized. Lupron Headache is back in full force and he's brought his friends Muscle Aches and World's Shortest Temper. I am soooo over this stuff. Next acupuncture isn't until Friday morning. I may try move it up, now that I realize how much it was helping.
• Suppression check is tomorrow. If all looks good, stims will start Friday. I can't believe I'm going to be adding an extra shot per day. I'm running out of pincushion acreage.
• I feel very prepared for the chance this won't work, but I'm going to be soooooo unbelievably bummed if that comes to pass.

A/C repair is scheduled for tomorrow, praise the deity of your choice. I'll post the results of the suppression check once I have 'em.