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Mark left yesterday for a business trip and will be out of town until Thursday evening. Knowing that, it totally figures that today on cycle day 13 my OPK is 100% positive. Only twice in my 14 cycles of charting have I ever ovulated on cycle day 14 or earlier, and one of those times was brought on by a trigger shot of HCG so it totally figures that the ONE cycle that Mark is unavailable until cycle day 15 I will ovulate early. There goes the dream of getting a miracle natural BFP during this break cycle before we begin IVF. Oh well. It would have been a long shot anyway.
It will be extremely strange to go through a two week wait with absolutely no chance of being pregnant. I have no idea if that will make things go faster or slower, but there will definitely be less anticipation.
In more positive news, I passed my clomid challenge test! My cycle day 10 blood work showed an FSH of 4.3, so that puts me well under the maximum combined total of 20 for the two FSH scores and means that I passed! I e-mailed our (hopefully) new clinic and told them that we have had almost all of the required pretesting done within the last year. I wanted to know if we would need to repeat all of those tests, or if they would just take them as is and let us into the IVF shared risk program. She stated that if the doctor felt that “the results were within normal range then we would not need to repeat.” This is great news for us as hopefully it means a small cost savings for us, but more importantly it means that we will hopefully be able to get going on an IVF cycle as soon as this cycle is over. Of course I don’t want to be overly optimistic as I know that something will probably come up that will prevent us from getting going right away, but I sure hope that we can start at the end of this cycle.
Great news! I had my blood drawn yesterday for the first of my clomid challenge test FSH levels. Last time I had my FSH measured, it was 12.9, which translates to “diminished reserve.” Of course an FSH of 12.9 will effectively eliminate me from participating in any sort of shared risk IVF program, which is what we ultimately want to do, so yesterday’s draw was really important to me. I was hoping that the months of acupuncture, reiki, meditation and various supplements that I’ve been taking would have had some effect on my FSH.
It seems that all of my hard work has paid off since my FSH was NINE this time around! And I know that FSH does have some variation between months, but holy crap! It dropped 4 points! So this bodes well for us getting into the IVF program that we are most interested in.
Since women who have elevated FSH usually fail the clomid challenge test, I’m not actually going to take Clomid. Dishonest? Yes. Will it (hopefully) help me to get what I want in the end? Yes. Do I feel bad about lying? No. Everyone says that age trumps FSH, and since I’m 29, I have to believe that we’ll still be able to conceive within a few tries at IVF. If fact, I have a feeling that the clinic will be making money off of us since I’m fairly confident that we’ll get pregnant on the first try. So I don’t feel bad about being dishonest.
So now we need to begin the process of requesting that our medical records be sent to me so that I can filter though them and keep the one test sheet that shows my 12.9 FSH to myself. We will be making a consultation appointment this week so we’ll be getting going with everything really soon, hopefully!
So that’s what’s going on! Hopes are high and we’re feeling good!
The IUI yesterday went well. After a 35 minute delay in the waiting room, I was finally taken back. I did a much better job of staying calm this time though, trying to make my body as calm and welcoming to those little spermies as possible. The count was 89.3 million and motility was 87%, so I’m feeling good about that. For some reason the progression stat was missing from the computer and I started to get concerned about that, but then I realized that the numbers are really irrelevant. Last month we had a count of 132 million with a progression of four (which is the best) and still didn’t end up pregnant, so it seems that the numbers are not an indicator of success and therefore not worth stressing about. The nurse did mention that lab technician told her that it was a really good sample when he/she passed it off to the nurse, and that’s good enough for me.
Anyway, now that waiting game begins. I can’t tell if this two week wait will go quickly or slowly. Mark is going to be very busy with work responsibilities through Monday, so that leaves me on my own for large chunks of time. Ideally I would use this time to get things accomplished around the house, take the dogs to the park and generally keep my mind off of anything fertility related. Of course I know myself pretty well, and though I have good intentions, I can’t say that I think I’ll actually follow through with them. I guess we’ll see.
Anyway, my laptop power cord literally blew up (sparks flying and everything) last night, so I’m without power to my home computer until the replacement cord arrives. As such, updates will likely be lacking until the new cord arrives. Hopefully less computer access will make this two week wait go by even faster!
So I went in yesterday morning for my CD11 ultrasound to check and see how many follicles I was growing and how big they were. I couldn’t see the monitor too well and Dr. O wasn’t telling me the sizes, so I really had no idea how they were measuring. I could tell that they were getting pretty big, but he shocked the hell out of me when he removed the wand and said “Well, they’re ready to pop so you’ll trigger tonight and IUI Wednesday morning.” What?!? The last two cycles I’ve ovulated on CD16 (with trigger on CD14), so I was really expecting the same thing this time. In fact, I was so confident that I wouldn’t be doing the trigger until Wednesday or Thursday that I told my mail order pharmacy to deliver the trigger to me today, on Tuesday.
I should preface this with a little history on how my day started yesterday. I arrived at 7:30, right on time for my appointment and I was the first person in the waiting room for my ultrasound yesterday. Within five minutes there were a couple of other women waiting as well and one couple was taken back after about 10 minutes. At that point I started to get pissed off because I had the very first appointment on a Monday morning. Really, what could they possibly be doing that was keeping them from calling me back? At 7:50, 20 minutes after my appointment time, I was finally taken back. I quickly stripped off my pants assuming that the doctor would walk in at any second since they were so far behind. But no. There I sat, watching the minutes tick away on the clock. Every minute that passed I was getting more and more pissed off. I could hear the doctor leaving the room next to me where the couple that was taken back before me was, so I knew that someone would come for me soon. But no.
Finally there was a quiet knock on the door and in walks the nurse practitioner. She said that Dr. P wanted her to come and check to see how my bladder was doing. I looked at her weird and told her that I was just there for an ultrasound, so I didn’t have a full bladder. She said that’s what she thought and that Dr. P was probably talking about someone else. She said she would send one of the doctors in to see me right away, but still the minutes ticked by. At this point I was struggling to stay calm. A good five minutes later Dr. O FINALLY shows up to do the u/s. There were no apologies or explanations for delay, which made me even more frustrated. At this point I had been waiting for 40 minutes for a 10 minute u/s. I usually try to cut doctors some slack when they are late for my appointments because I know that they have other patients who they have to see and they can’t control how long their patients want to talk, etc. But in this case I was the very first appointment of the day, which means that they were delaying my appointment strictly for themselves and not for any other reason, which really ticked me off. I was furious and fighting back tears of frustration.
So add to my very (self inflicted) fragile state the added pressure of having to trigger a full three days before I was expecting it when I didn’t even have the darn trigger in my possession yet, and I was about to lose it. I was also stressed because the follicles were so big already (21.3mm, 20.7mm and 18.8mm) that I was concerned that might be ready to come out on their own without the trigger shot, but since I hadn’t been using OPK’s yet there was a very distinct possibility that I could have missed my surge.
When I FINALLY got back to work, I peed on an OPK and it was very negative, so that alleviated my fear of having missed my surge and I called the mail order pharmacy and they were able to cancel my order so that I didn’t end up with two trigger shots. Mark was able to pick up my trigger shot at the local pharmacy for me over lunch which really helped me out. After work I had an acupuncture appointment and that always helps to relax me, so what started as a very stressful morning actually ended up being a pretty decent day in the end.
Despite the crazy day yesterday, I’m feeling good and optimistic about the IUI tomorrow. And I’ve resolved that no matter how Mark’s sample turns out, I will stay positive about this cycle.
My temp spike this morning indicates that I did indeed ovulate yesterday. Lesson learned…I need to trust my body and the meds a little bit more. So now comes the fun part, two weeks of waiting to see if it worked. I’m hoping that the wonderful spring weather combined with lots of activities will make it fly by!
Not much to report, other than the sample that Mark provided today was PHENOMENAL! 132 million swimmers with a progression of 4! Wow! I’m hoping that this is the last IUI report that I have to do.
U/S today showed three nice sized follicles, two on my right (17.2 and 16.9) and one on my left (19.7) and a couple of smaller ones on the right also (14 and 12.5). Dr. P wants to wait to do the trigger for a bit longer than normal to try to get the 14mm one to catch up enough to be ovulated. So I’m to continue to test for my surges and if there’s no surge by Tuesday, then I will trigger, and the IUI will be on Thursday. I really, really, really hope that this round works.
