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1. Since it’s a special night for your and your husband, make sure that you take a test before you go out. If it’s somehow miraculously positive, you want to be able to celebrate, right?
2. When that second pink line miraculously shows up, faint, but definitely there, prepare a special way to tell your husband that after 18 months and 5 IUI’s, you’ve finally done it!
3. When your husband comes home from work, tell him in that special way and share a brief moment of sheer happiness.
4. When your husband asks how you know, you pull that test out of your pocket to show him those two beautiful pink lines, only to realize that the 2nd pink line has faded away to nearly nothing.
5. Assure husband that you know way more about pregnancy tests than he does, and a line is a line, therefore you’re pregnant! Besides, the pee you used to test with was REALLY diluted and most women get darker lines in the morning. Tomorrow morning’s test will undoubtedly be very obviously positive.
6. Be sure to chat about how great it is that you finally got pregnant the cycle before you were going to move on to IVF and discuss all of the ways that you can spend the money you were planning to put towards IVF.
7. Continue to celebrate and discuss all of the fun things that you happily won’t get to do now that you’re pregnant, like take cruises, go to amusement parks, etc.
8. If your husband is still a bit hesitant to let himself get excited about this pregnancy because of the “barely there” second line, just remind him that no matter what happens, for this moment, you are pregnant.
9. The next morning take a test using some super concentrated pee. When the line shows up even fainter than yesterday’s (or maybe it’s not there at all, you’ve just convinced yourself that it has to be there since you ARE pregnant, after all), chalk it up to the fact that some women get better results in the afternoons instead of the mornings.
10. Run to the store at lunch to get more tests so that you can see those two beautiful lines when you test again after work.
11. When only one line shows up after work, find someway to tell your husband that you must have been wrong somehow.
12. Realize how absolutely foolish you were to jump the gun and the pain that you have caused your husband and yourself. Promise yourself that you will never, ever get so caught up in two faint lines again.
So that’s my Monday evening and Tuesday in a nutshell. Why the second pink line? I have no idea. It’s definitely not an evap because the line came up within a minute or two and it’s definitely pink, just faded very much from how it originally looked. It could be a chemical, I suppose. If not a chemical, then I have no explanation.
I feel absolutely horrible for getting Mark all worked up only to have it taken away today. When I saw that second pink line come up yesterday, the feeling was unbelievable and I couldn’t believe how narrowly we’d escaped having to do IVF. But more than anything, I was looking forward to sharing my excitement with my husband. He was so excited and happy for us, despite the fact that he wasn’t completely sure if it was real or not. What hurts me the most is knowing the hurt I created for him. I cried today. Not for myself, but for the confusion, disappointment, and pain I created for him. I’ve learned my lesson and will not say anything in the future unless the test is blaringly positive or if a digital test says pregnant.
So I’m back into research mode since we will be moving on to IVF next. There are lots of small things that we need answers to in order to select where we will be doing our IVF cycles and it seems that answers are difficult to come by sometimes. But we will keep plugging away and know that someday we’ll get ours too.
The spotting started at two days past ovulation this time around and has not let up at all. I’m puzzled as to why I’m spotting because I took the HCG trigger, which in the past has kept the spotting away until much later in my cycle, and also because I’m taking progesterone. Those two things in combination have kept the spotting away for the last two cycles, so this cycle is a mystery to me. Part of me wonders if it could be due to a ruptured cyst? Either way, I’m frustrated and losing hope again.
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.
Yesterday I fell in love. Not with another man, but with Reiki and Divine Coding. This is funny and strange to me because Reiki is not something that I really even believe in or understand. Just telling Mark about my session makes me feel embarrassed and silly because it sounds so hokey and ridiculous, but it really does work wonders for me.
While my Reiki lady Lisa is doing the Reiki, she uses her Devine Coding skills (which I’m even more skeptical about than the Reiki itself) to intuit how I’m feeling and what’s going on with me. It’s absolutely amazing what she is able to glean from placing her hands on my face for just a few moments. She uses whatever vibes she’s getting from me to guide our session and to talk through things.
This second session was very different from our first session. At our first session, after she determined that I was “all inside my head” and told me that I needed to find a creative outlet, the rest of the session was just Reiki and quiet time, no more talking.
Yesterday’s session was much more like a mini therapy session. We did so much more talking than we did last time and tried to come up with ways to cope. The first thing that we worked on was the fact that I need to not be mad or upset with my body, regardless of how betrayed or upset I am by it. She made an analogy about how if I were to go to my place of work and I knew that everyone there didn’t like me and thought I was doing a crappy job, would I want to go to work and do a good job? The answer is no, of course not. That’s how I need to view my ovaries and reproductive system. If I’m feeling negative towards my body and my ovaries, of course they won’t respond in the way I want them to. Instead of projecting animosity towards them, I need to give them love.
So she had me imagine sifts or screens beginning at my feet and sifting all the way up through my body and up to the top of my head that would filter out any negative feelings towards my body. Then she had me imagine tossing those screens full of negative gunk into a bonfire so that all of the negative energy burned up and then she had me replace the empty spaces where the negativity was with love. I felt so much lighter after the screens had sifted all of the negative energy away and then when I replaced those empty spaces with love I felt a tingling swirling sensation, which was really cool. Again, it sounds silly, I know, but it really works for me.
The second thing that we worked on is that I need to focus on the here and now. Instead of getting myself all worked up about IVF right now, I need to focus on this cycle. There is a potential that we may not even need IVF and I really need to focus my energy on this cycle right now, and send good positive thoughts towards what we’re dealing with at this moment. This struck a chord with me because I mentioned in my last post that I’m pretty much dismissing this cycle and already looking towards IVF. So I will renew my focus and try to work as hard as I can to stay positive about this cycle and where we are now and not stress about the possibilities of what might happen in the future.
Throughout all of this, I found it very interesting that while I was laying there, my mind kept wandering back to two specific trips that I taken when I was younger. One was a trip to DC in the summer after 8th grade and the second one was a three week trip to Europe in the summer after my sophomore year. While I thoroughly enjoyed both of these trips, I don’t often think about them, so I wondered if there was some significance. I mentioned these images to Lisa and she kind of helped me to discern what importance they might have for me and why I would keep conjuring them up.
Ultimately, I think that these images were coming to me because these were journeys that I went on that I really had no part in planning. I’ve been on lots of trips since those two trips, but I’ve been the coordinator and planner extraordinaire for said trips. These two particular trips were different in that I paid my money, went on the trip and enjoyed myself. Someone else did all of the planning, research, and coordinating for me…all I had to do was show up. I’m sure that this is some way of my subconscious telling me that I need to just go with the flow a bit more and trust in my care providers so that I can enjoy my life as it is now without all of the worry of this other, very different, journey that I’m on.
Anyway, that’s the recap of my Reiki session for this month…definitely worth the money and time investment. I took my last 5 Femara pills last night, and I’m sending lots of love and appreciation to those ovaries of mine so we’ll see what it all adds up to on Monday when I go for my ultrasound.
One Small Wish...Granted 