Well, after nearly three months of a concerted effort to not consume any sugar, sugar substitutes, caffeine or alcohol, I’m off the wagon. Mark and I went to a wedding for a former co-worker yesterday and I determined that I was going to allow myself to fully enjoy the day eat and drink whatever I wanted. Since I made the decision early in the morning, I also picked up some peanut butter M&M’s and some Nestle Tollhouse cookies when we were at Target getting the card for the wedding. The M&M’s and cookies didn’t really taste as good as I thought that they should have, so I was wondering if the absence of sugar in my diet had altered my tastes, but the cupcakes that they had at the wedding were FABULOUS, so I guess my theory probably wasn’t correct. Sugar, check. Caffeine, check. Might as well throw some alcohol in there for good measure, so two glasses of white wine were consumed at the wedding as well. It was a great time and totally worth it.

And today I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it, but I am left wondering what to do about things now. I know that eliminating alcohol is something that I will continue to do because I wasn’t a big drinker in the first place so it’s not a huge sacrifice to make. And honestly, cutting the sugar out of my diet was a lot easier than I thought it would be, and even if it doesn’t even directly help me to conceive, it’s still just a healthy thing to do and helped me to lose 6 pounds without any other diet modifications. But dealing with infertility is a stressful thing and there are times that I think that sometimes a little sugar for comfort is nice. So for this moment, I’m planning on getting back on the wagon tomorrow and I guess we’ll just see where things go from there. One thing I’m sure of is that I’m not capable to having a just a little bit of sugar. I’m definitely a binger…once I get that taste in my mouth, there’s no stopping me. As a testament of that, two thirds of the bag of M&M’s is already gone. It’s shameful, I know.

In completely unrelated news, I went to Wal-Mart today to pick up my prescription for Femara. When I picked it up, I was notified that they were only able to partially fill the prescription and that the rest would be in tomorrow. So I only have enough pills to get me through tonight, and then I need to go back tomorrow to get the rest. Sigh. Why is nothing at Wal-Mart easy? Of course the easy solution would be to transfer the prescription to a different pharmacy, but the cost savings at Wal-Mart is pretty significant, and I’m a cheapo.

And as you’ve probably already figured out from the previous paragraph, we are indeed pursuing one more round of IUI with Femara. When we started seeing Dr. P and Dr O, we agreed that we would give them at least three shots at IUI before moving on, so this is it. I’m hoping that the third try is a charm, of course, but if not, then we are ready to move forward with IVF. In fact, we’re so ready to move on to IVF, than I’m pretty much writing this entire cycle off and already thinking ahead and trying to plan our IVF path.

After discussing some options with Mark, he’s ready and willing to throw $30,000 towards one of those “you’ll get a baby within three fresh cycles of IVF or you get 80% of your money back” kind of deals. Of course since I’m stingy (and also partially because I think that we would have a really good shot with IVF and might get lucky on the first try), I’m not as ready as he is to sign up for such a huge financial commitment. If we were lucky enough to succeed at our first try at IVF, then I’d forever be kicking myself for “wasting” that money. Without a doubt, it’d be so worth it to spend the money and get a baby out of it, but I’d rather just give one cycle a shot and see what happens.

Of course the caveat to the whole thing is my FSH. I’m not sure that we would even qualify for any of those “money back” programs with an FSH of 12.9. And what if we did sign up for one of those programs and then find out at the first IVF that my eggs are no good? Can we get a refund for part of that fee and opt out of the rest of the cycles? Domestic donor egg cycles are way too expensive for us, so converting the rest of the package to a DE cycle would be out of the question.

And then there’s the option of doing an IVF vacation, which I’m TOTALLY on board with. This would definitely be my first choice as to treatment options if we need to do IVF. I am most interested in the Czech Republic right now as their costs are very low and they have great success rates. Not to mention that the Czech Republic is a beautiful country to boot! I spent a few days in Prague on vacation when I was studying in France and it was gorgeous and I would absolutely love to go back. The biggest issue with doing IVF abroad would be the time commitment. If we were to do a cycle with my own eggs, we would need to take at least two weeks off of work. Donor egg is a much shorter time commitment since I wouldn’t need to be around for monitoring; we would just need to be there for egg retrieval and again for transfer, probably a week or less, but we aren’t ready to pursue egg donor yet.

Anyway, there are a lot of options out there, so there is much research left to be done. Regardless of what path we choose, I am feeling very hopeful that a baby will be a part of our near future.