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It’s time for another sporadic blog update. I realized that I’m a really crappy blogger when I don’t have anything going on fertility-wise. But this time I have a somewhat valid excuse. You see, about a month and a half ago, one of my best friends told me that she’s very seriously considering filing for divorce. Then, just a few days later, we found out that our favorite couple to do “couple things” with are getting a divorce also. As it turns out, the women in both situations are simply not in love with their husbands anymore. These two tidbits of information came as a HUGE shock to us; I would never have seen either one coming. Apparently neither of the husbands saw it coming either as both claim to be completely caught off guard by the whole thing.
When we first got the news, we were in the heart of our last IVF cycle and I was admittedly a bit distracted by my own situation to really ponder and come to terms with what was going on with my friends. Once our cycle was over, the realization of everything that was going on hit me hard.
Over the past couple of years I’ve fallen into the habit of referring to having a baby as “the one thing that I want most,” which I now realize is just not true. What I really want most is to have a happy life with my husband, whom I value more than anyone else on this earth. I realized that in my desperation to have a baby, I was sacrificing my relationship with the one person that I hold most dear to me. What good would it do me to finally get pregnant, but at the expense of my marriage? I would be infinitely less happy to be pregnant with my marriage in shambles versus happily married and no children. I honestly feel that I could live a happy life without children, but only if my husband were by my side. I guess I can sum it up by saying that I just need to focus less on what I don’t have, and more on what I do have.
Since we’re on a break in between IVF cycles, I’ve been doing my very best to not worry about anything related to babies, IVF or infertility and focus more on enjoying my time with my family, friends and husband. I would say that on the whole, it’s been going pretty well. I feel happier, less stressed, and more optimistic about things. I haven’t even been impatient about waiting through this break cycle, which is quite the accomplishment for me, as I am the most impatient person I know.
So for now, it’s a good start. And I fully intend to keep it up once we start our next cycle. Life’s too short to sit around waiting for eagerly anticipated happy moments to come to you when you could be off making your own happy moments.
Just for fun, here’s a collection of images intended to be a part of our baby book if IVF #1 had worked. It didn’t, so I’m sharing it with all of you instead.
Here is the place where all of my meds come from, Bauder’s Pharmacy. Its an old school pharmacy with a soda fountain and everything. We haven’t had time to stop and sample the food yet, but probably 100% of their menu is prohibited by my no dairy, no sugar, no booze, no anything-that-tastes-delicious diet, so it’s probably unrealistic to expect to get to try it anytime soon.
Here’s where the magic happens (or didn’t happen, in this case), my fertility clinic. It’s kind of goofy architecture for a fertility clinic, don’t you think? I think it looks like a bank or mortgage company, or something like that. This is their custom built building, so they actually intended it to look like this…
Since we have to drive 4 hours to Des Moines after work, and I was on a strict 6:30am and 6:30pm injection schedule, several of my shots had to be done on the way to Iowa. Since we’re too impatient to stop, I just did them in the car. Below is one of the ones I did as a passenger. My mother would absolutely die if she knew that I did one or two as the driver, with Mark’s assistance, of course.
Surprisingly, I never gave myself any bruises when doing car injections. This bruise below was from a home injection. Go figure. Note all of the little pin pricks below the bruise. Good times.
One more quick bruise photo before we move on. This one’s on my butt (have no fear, I cropped out the anatomy features that would allow you to recognize that it’s my butt) and it was too impressive to not share. Since it’s hard to get a feel of just how big this bruise actually is without being able to see too much of my body, here’s how to gain some perspective. The left X is about 2 inches to the outside of my crack and the right one is about one inch to the outside of my hip. This is one badass bruise and I was quite impressed with my ability to make such a disgusting mark on my own body. Needless to say, I obviously did something wrong. After this whopper of a bruise, I decided to move closer to the X on the hip and things went flawlessly after that.
Alright, enough of the bruises. On to urine. By some stroke of bad planning, we’re going to end up going through two cycles during the winter. And it seems to never fail that when we have to make a trip down to IA, it snows. And not just a little bit either. A shitload. A treacherous, slippery, don’t-want-to-drive-more-than-five-miles-in-this-crap kind of snow. In the below photo, we were stopped on the interstate because a truck literally went through the guardrail on a bridge and crashed onto the road below. We were stopped for maybe 20 or 30 minutes. Apparently that was too long for the two guys in front of us. The passenger got out, ran to the side of the road and went down into the ditch below to relieve himself. Maybe the driver was nervous about leaving the car for fear that we may start going again or maybe he’s just lazy, but here’s his strategy. Open the back seat door and use it as a shield so that no one can see his wee wee. Lovely. It made for some nice comic relief in an otherwise stressful situation. We had to drive over his puddle of pee once we got going again.
Here’s a slew of photos from transfer day. We forgot the camera for retrieval day, so only one photo exists of that day, and it’s on Mark’s cell phone. Anyway, here is the shot of the clock when we got in the car that morning, long before the sunrise. We normally go down the night before our appointments because it’s a 4 hour trip, but since my transfer wasn’t until 11:45, we decided to just get up early and drive down that morning. Ignore all of the dust, gross.
Me in the car right before going in for transfer. Again, notice all of the snow. Seriously.
Me in the waiting room patiently waiting for my embryos to be transferred back into me.
Mark and I in our scrubs ready for the transfer.
My fantastic husband (taken after transfer while I was inverted on the bed, trying my hardest not to pee my pants…actually, come to think of it, I was pantsless.)
Our beautiful embryos, once again. Sorry you didn’t make it embryos. We would have loved to have met you!
And here’s where the magic happens on Mark’s end. Classy, isn’t it? A little sparse I thought.
Presenting the very limited selection of materials to aid in the “collection process.” Not even any videos or Hustler or anything. Mark says that of the three places he’s provided samples, the best was at the University Hospital, which somewhat surprises me because they were the most lacking in amenities on my end. I guess they invested all of their money in porn and DVD’s and not on comforts for the woman who was being violated with all kinds of catheters and probes. To be fair though, the University did invest in those fancy panels that go over the florescent lights so that we have beautiful clouds and flowers to look at while we’re being violated, which is a really nice touch. Sarcasm people, it’s sarcasm.
And last but definitely not least, here is Mark’s favorite place to eat in Des Moines around lunch time (once again, see the snow???). Since I’m forbidden to eat dairy (and what is a burrito without cheese? Nothing, I tell you, nothing.), I prefer to eat at Arby’s instead. One regular roast beef sandwich for me, and one burrito with smoky pepper sour cream for Mark. Of course if it’s breakfast time when we’re there, then it’s Sonic all the way. And even if it isn’t breakfast time, Mark will stop at Sonic to get a Java Chiller to go with his burrito. It helps that they are literally 75 feet away from each other.
As silly as it sounds, going over these photos gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. While this cycle didn’t work out, we really did have a good time with all of our car trips, geocaching and eating along the way. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had trying to get pregnant without having sex.
Alright, I finally have some time to address some lingering tags and awards that have been piling up lately. I guess I don’t have much more to say about that, so here we go!
Note: I’m sharing photos of myself and Mark for the first time. As far as I know, no one in real life knows about this blog, but if someone I know DOES find this post, please just pretend that you know nothing about it. I’m sure there are some people who’ve figured out what we’re going through, but at this point, I’m just not ready to deal with it with people in real life. Thanks!
The first tag from Stacie at La Chambre d’Orchidee is to open my photo folder to you all. Here are the official rules:
1. Go to your Picture Folder on your computer or wherever you store your pictures.
2. Go to the 6th Folder and then pick the 6th Picture.
3. Post it on your bloggy and tell the story that goes with the picture.
4. Tag 5 other people to do the same thing and leave a comment on their blog telling them about it.
Well since I just got a new laptop and don’t have any photos downloaded to it just yet, I had to go to Mark’s computer to get a photo, and here it is.
This photo was taken in March of 2008 and that sexy hunk of a man on the left is my husband. We were hiking on Camelback mountain in Phoenix. It was actually our second attempt at ascending the mountain. The first attempt happened the previous night when we didn’t have anything to do, and after consulting our guidebook we decided to give the hike a try. Well it turned out that while the hike was not long in length, it was very slow going and took much longer than we had anticipated. As the sun continued to sink lower into the sky, we began to realize that there was no way that we would make it to the top and back again before it was pitch dark. The terrain was treacherous and not something that you’d want to have to navigate in the dark, so we decided to turn around and try again in the morning. So this picture is in the morning when we went back to give it another shot. We made it to the top and the view was definitely worth the extra effort.
And since a head cold is kicking my butt, I’m actually going to skip doing the rest of my tags and awards for today, but hope to catch up with the rest this weekend. In the meantime, I tag Kristin at Another Adventure in Life.
Today we had our WTF phone consult with Dr. Cooper and I think that it went well. The very first thing he said was that I stimmed really well last cycle, so that is good news. Right away I asked him what happened with the egg situation last cycle since I was still in the dark on that. He told me that of our 19 retrieved, three were immature, three were over-mature and the remaining 13 were just right. I’ve read that usually 70% of retrieved eggs are mature, and my 13 eggs are almost exactly 70% of 19, so we seem to be alright in that regard.
If you remember, last cycle was supposed to be the micro-dose lupron cycle, but I F’ed it up immediately by taking only 1/10 of the dose of lupron that I was supposed to. Dr. Cooper said that the missed lupron doses may have been a cause for the poor quality eggs, or it could have just been a bad batch. Given my elevated FSH, I’m inclined to think that it was the batch of eggs and not the missed lupron, but I’m no doctor.
Anyway, he suggested that we try the antagonist protocol this time, which is essentially what we ended up doing last time after I messed up the lupron. So after I finish my BCP’s, I’ll go straight to stims and we’ll add in the Cetrotide once the lead follicle gets to a certain size (I think 14mm?). So in all reality, I’ll be doing the exact same thing that I did last time, which is nice since I’m clearly incapable of reading and measuring out the correct dosage of new medicines.
So there weren’t any major revelations during the consult, but Dr. Cooper seems to believe that we will get pregnant eventually, so that is definitely a good thing.
In other reproductive news, I had my colposcopy for my abnormal pap back in November today. Dr. Ass Clown found a small area inside my cervix that had abnormal cells on them. While he doesn’t think it’s anything serious, he took a sample of cervix tissue and another pap from inside my cervix to send off to the lab for further evaluation. Of course a quick google search of “glandular cells pap” does not make me as confident as Dr. Ass Clown is that there is nothing to worry about. But I’m trying not to worry about and hopefully I will get good news on Monday.
Oh yeah, I’m also in the process of gathering statements of how much we spent in medical bills last year for our taxes. The statement I got from my acupuncture office today reveals that I spent just shy of $3,000 on treatments and supplements there. Holy crap. I hate to say it because it’s not entirely true, but boy does it feel like a huge waste of money considering we still don’t have a baby. Oh well…if nothing else, it was a very, very expensive way to get some relaxation in throughout the past year and now we have a nice big tax deduction for last year.
