Saline and Mock

Well, everything went great today! I was worried for nothing, which does tend to happen.

We started off with a consultation with the doctor.  He is great and I really enjoy him as a person and a doctor.  He went over the procedure again, from the meds to the transfer.  There was something I was surprised to hear though.  I have read and heard that a lot of women who go through IVF are on birth control while they do the meds.  This is the wrong way to go about it.  I mean, each clinic has their own way of doing things, so shouldn’t say it’s wrong, but my doctor pointed out that if you do that, your lining is not growing like it needs to because the birth control won’t let it plump up like it needs to.  Huh.  Wonder why other places have women stay on birth control while they do the meds?

I also learned that he is fearful that because of my PCOS and my past experience with meds for IUI (the first round I was on the lowest recommended starting dose and I produced 9 follicles), he is worried about over-stimulation.  He says there are a few ways to handle that, which will come if and when we need to worry about that, but that might mean I’ll need more monitoring visits.  $300 a pop.  Eep.

I couldn’t get into a nursing class until September 11th.  Kind of stinks because I wanted to start, like, today!  It’s okay though, that will give me time to finish getting rid of this blasted cough!  It still lingers….

The saline showed that I had no cysts on the ovaries and my uterus has nothing strange in it.  He said it looked perfect.  Nice compliment for my baby holder.  Hopefully it will want to hold a baby or two for me.

The Mock also went well.  He had a little trouble with the bend in the catheter to get it to go in nice and smooth, but that is why they do the mock, so that they have the perfect measurements, bends and catheter size for the actual transfer day.  Don’t want any hold ups with your little embryos hanging out in there!

Both the Saline and the Mock gave me some wicked cramps.  I also wasn’t aware of how quickly the saline was going to revisit me.  I peed right after and I thought that should have got rid of the majority of it, but as I was checking out I felt it all come down.  Luckily you could only see it if you were really looking.  And if you were really looking, you’d think I had peed my pants.  Lovely what we go through for babies!

Now I sit here and wait.  I’m going to skip my next period by just continuing onto the next BC pack.  Then after the nursing class, i’ll stop the BC and start the meds.  He said I may bleed a little, but that it would not be a real period and the meds would stop it from coming all the way.  Then after about a week and a half of meds, they will do the egg retrieval.  They said by the time I wake up from the anesthesia, they will know how many eggs were retrieved.  Exciting to know so soon!  By the next morning they will know how many fertilized and by day three they will know how many are looking good.  He said worst case senerio would be that only 2 or 3 are still fertilized and looking alright on day three, and that means they will just go ahead and implant those on day 3.  If we have a lot and they are progressing well, we will do a day 5 transfer.  Let’s hope for a day 5!

Oh, and check out all the free swag I got!  He said it wouldn’t be enough for the cycle, but hey, every little bit helps!  I am very appreciative!

Preliminary Tests Tomorrow!

Tomorrow is our IVF consultation (#2 — our first consultation was over six months ago, so we have to do it again), saline ultrasound and mock transplant.  I decided to read up on both of them to see if there is anything I need to do tonight to prepare.  Looks like everything is pretty simple.  The saline ultrasound is to check to make sure there aren’t polyps, scar tissue, or anything else that could obstruct implantation.  The mock is to make the the right catheter is used for the distance into my uterus for when they transfer the embryos.  Neat!

The only thing that concerns me is that they say the saline is usually done at the beginning of the menstrual cycle.  Days 5-12 typically.  I’m not sure why that’s important, but I hope it’s not actually important because i’m at the end of this cycle (about day 22).  The lady who scheduled the appointment did not ask about where I was in the cycle, and my doctor only said to make sure that I was no longer bleeding when I came in for the appointments.  So I’m hoping the “early” thing is more of a suggestion and not the rule.  I’d hate to be postponed because someone forgot to ask the right questions!  The office I go to is usually really good about this sort of thing though, so I’m not too worried.  I guess it’s normal to be worried about every tiny thing at this point though?  Eh?

I’m also a little worried that the amount of medication I’ve been on recently might factor in somehow.  I’m on nasal spray, mucinex and alternating nights between Tylenol and Nyquil. I’ve only been dosing myself up for about four days though, so I imagine everything should be somewhat normal.  My mucus might be a little thinner down there from the mucinex.  Sexy.  *Wink*  I tried the mucinex thing when we were naturally trying to conceive. You know, thins your mucus to the guys don’t have to struggle to swim up stream so much?  I hear it’s very effective.  Too bad I didn’t know that mucus was the least of our problems.

I’m assuming the doctor will have me wait until after my next cycle anyway.  I’m not sure why I’m kind of freaking out about this right now.  It’ll be about 12 hours before I know exactly what is going to happen and when…. I’m just so antsy!

Getting Worried

I’m getting worried.  I’ve been sick for almost five full weeks.  Starting with a virus that caused a severe sore throat and fever, to a cough, to an ear infection to another cough.  For the past three days I’ve been coughing up all of my insides along with having a runny nose and sneezing.  I am on nasal spray to relieve the congestion in my head, and mucinex to relieve the congestion in my chest, but i’m worried that it’s not going to go away fast enough.

My Saline Ultrasound and Mock Transplant are Wednesday at 9:00am!  That gives me almost exactly 48 hours from right now to feel better.  I doubt he will want to do those tests if I’m hacking and convulsing all over the table.  Ugh!  What do I do?  I’ve taken steamy showers, hot tea with lemon, mucinex, nasal spray and I’ve been relaxing as much as possible.

I just can’t believe that out of all the time in the past nine months I could have been sick, my body chooses now.  Now, when I’m so close to starting IVF!  Ahhhhh! I’m SO Frustrated!!!

If you could find a couple seconds in your day to send out some feel good vibes into the universe for me, I’d appreciate it! 48 hours…. I can do this!!

Anticipation!

I am becoming quite antsy thinking about next week.  One week from today!  Actually, less than that because it’s already 9:20pm here and my appointment is at 7:45am next Wednesday.  Ah!  So excited!

The appointment is for my IVF consultation (#2 — because it’s been over six months since we went to our first), Mock transplant, saline ultrasound and blood tests.  I know those things aren’t going to be very exciting (at least, they shouldn’t be!) but it means that this IVF thing is really happening.  It’s finally here… so close!

I hope that they let us start right away, but I’m afraid they may postpone us a little bit because they don’t have a nursing class available until mid-September.  Boo!  I don’t want to wait until mid-September to start!  I’m hoping they will be able to have us come in for a one-on-one with a nurse or a doctor so that we can start sooner.  We’ve already done IUI, so I hope my expertise with stabbing myself with needles can come into play and get us moving along a little faster.

Tick Tock, Clock.  It’s been nine months already since our last IUI failed.  It’s time to go!

Purging All Of The Sick

It’s official.  I’ve been sick for a solid month. A MONTH! Four full weeks of aching and ickiness.  Needless to say, I am exhausted by it all.

I’d like to blame the Chiropractor, sense blaming someone seems like the best idea.  I first got sick after my second adjustment.  Maybe because they see a hundred people a day and they are all laying on the same chair to get adjusted?  Yea, that thin piece of tissue paper will protect us from the cooties!  Maybe because they are touching person after person all day long?  Not going to wash your hands before you touch my face? Mmkay.  Whatever it is, I’m going to blame them and not the possibility that I picked it up out in the world somewhere else.

So, I got sick four weeks ago.  Sore throat and fever.  I was pretty sure it was strep.  I haven’t had strep since I was a child, but I felt like my throat was on fire and swollen to the point of possibly exploding.  Strep test was negative.  Ugh.  A week later it was time to go on vacation.  A beautiful vacation to an exotic land.  It required 12 hours of flying to get there.  Have you ever had a sore throat, fever, cough and ear pain while on a plane?  It is the most miserable time in your life.  I felt like crying the entire time.  So when my mother in law popped up happily in the seat in front of me and asked why I wasn’t excited….. lets just say that I had very nasty thoughts running through my head, and I love my mother in law.  Imagine if I didn’t!

The vacation went by fine.  Lots of early bedtimes and a couple late sleep-ins, but I made the most of it and didn’t let this super bug drag me down.  I took my antibiotics (that didn’t do a thing to help) and dosed up on some Nyquil the majority of the nights (5 out of 9).  I made it and had a great time!  Then it was time to fly back.  12 more hours…. three more planes.  By now my sister in law had the monster bug.  I took some Nyquil for the return flights and slept through 7 hours, which was a good idea considering my sister in law was keeping the rest of the plane up with her coughing.  I guess that had been my job on the trip there.

After we landed I realized that I couldn’t really hear very well out of my right ear.  Awesome.  Ear infection!  I’ve had 6-7 tubes between my two ears, so I knew exactly what was going on.  I went in last Monday, was given steroids.  Steroids are apparently supposed to help absorb the water into your bloodstream?  Eh, didn’t work.  Got a tube put in yesterday.

I still can’t hear and now I had a sore throat again due to the drainage/swelling in my ear.  When will it end?!  Is my body just purging all of the sick before IVF?  I’d like to think that this is the case.  If so, thanks body!  I appreciate you putting me through four weeks of torture so that my body will be PERFECT for IVF!  …..right?

Update on Sexual Education, Please!

Over the past three years, I’ve realized that I was never prepared for the possibility of having reproductive problems.  In school I was taught that if you have sex without protection, you WILL get pregnant and you WILL get an STD.  I get the scare tactics, it’s important to scare teenagers out of sex.  Of course, TV shows like 16 and Pregnant glorify teenage pregnancy so much, that I’m sure teenagers are now taking detailed notes on how to get pregnant so they can get on TV.  Scare tactics aside, there needs to be more information on what to do if your body is not functioning correctly.

I had a period when I was 13 years old.  It was my first one, seemed typical (from what I remember, it was 15 years ago) and afterwards, I spent a lot of time awaiting the next.  Not because I wanted another, but because I didn’t want to be caught off guard with an accident.  I’d heard the horror stories about that.  Well, a month went by with nothing.  A year went by with nothing… and before I knew it, I was 16 and finally getting my second period.  Yes, that’s right, 16 years old.  Old enough to drive.  I continued to have periods, but only every 4-5 months.

Did anything seem strange to me about this?  Sure! Of course!  My friends went on and on about them every month.  They envied me and my 2-3 times a year periods.  I guess I was pretty excited about it too.  Who actually thinks about the need to have one of those?  They are a pain in the uterus!  Shouldn’t I have had the notion to get checked out?  I guess I should have, but I was never taught to think about that.  Every time I told someone, I’d get a “Hey! That must be nice!”  So I learned to think of my missing periods as something that was considered a fantastic blessing.  Little did I know!

Sexual Education focuses on three things.  Anatomy, Sex and STD’s.  Did I know where parts were located? Yes.  Did I know how sex works? Eh… I had a pretty good idea.  Did I know that STD’s were out there, lurking in every penis that passed by?  Oh yes.  But did I know that not having a standard period every month was a sign of something wrong?  No.  No I didn’t.

Just from starting this blog, I’ve learned that there are more girls out in the world with infertility problems then I would have ever imagined.  We are everywhere, and we are just now learning that things we’ve lived with our whole lives are wrong.  Missing periods, cramps that literally feel like they are killing you, excess hair growth in places where hair doesn’t belong on a lady, no sex drive…  These are very big things.  Huge things, and yet, most of us didn’t even think to get these things checked out.  If you are anything like me, you shrugged your shoulders, picked up your tweezers and went to work to hide your embarrassing hair growth.  Or you bragged a little about missing periods, or maybe even talked about how you had to miss three days of work because your period was so bad you were hunched over a toilet.

Why don’t they educate on these things?  I don’t think it would add to the curriculum too much.  “Ladies, if you do not have regular periods, or vomit every month when you have a period, you could have a hormone imbalance or Endometriosis!  Go chat with your gynecologist!”  How long would that take to say?  Only took me a couple seconds to type!  Although I am only using two examples, there are many other symptoms that could point to problems, so it may take a day or two on the subject to fully cover it in a classroom situation.

Scare tactics are fine and necessary, but our health is more important than that.  If I had known when I was 16 what I know now, I might be pregnant, or at least have most of my symptoms under control.  My friend who had to take 3 days off of school every month because she was throwing up every time she had a period, might have been able to have her Endometriosis diagnosed 12 years sooner than she did.  Let’s get some EDUCATION into Sexual education.  Let’s try and make it about a little more than where the penis goes. Let’s make it about health in all aspects.  Let’s get the newest generation of women educated on their bodies, so that if they do have problems they don’t have to wait until they are 26 and ready to have children before they learn the bad news.

You can call me naive and scream that I should have known, but I am not the only one.  I am one of many, and as a sex, we should be aware that we have not been told everything we need to know.  We’ve all been to gynecologists for years and years and still came away with no answers time after time.  We need to be taught to ask the right questions so that we can get started on becoming healthier and happier!

Ugly Babies?

Okay, I’m not sure if I’m the only one on the planet that has never seen an ugly baby, but talking to my friends would have you believe that I am.  Maybe I haven’t been looking hard enough?  I think there is a better answer though… I think I’ve never seen an ugly baby because my inability to have one makes me love every single baby face I can lay my eyes on.  

Now, I’ve seen some goofy looking toddlers and kids, but that makes sense because some adults are goofy looking and they had to come from somewhere, but babies?  No way!  They are all so cute and little and adorable with their cooing and drooling and general excitement for the game peek-a-boo.  How can you not think something is adorable when it laughs hysterically because you sneeze?  Or even if you don’t find any of that cute or adorable, how can you say that a baby is ugly?  Just in general, doesn’t it make you feel a little ashamed?

I was having this conversation with a friend a few months ago and she got a little over-crazy and grabbed her phone shouting “Oh, I’ve got a super ugly baby for you! Wow! You just won’t believe it!”  It made me feel weird that she was so excited to call a baby ugly.  I want to say that she even claimed that it had a face that only a mother could love.  So, she pulls out her phone and shows me “the ugliest baby [she’s] ever seen!”  And you know what?  That baby was beautiful!  She had beautiful red hair, big blue eyes and a huge smile.  I could not figure it out.  That’s when I came up with the theory that it must be because I can’t have one.  

So, if anyone out there has an ugly baby they don’t want, ship it over to me and I will think it is amazing and beautiful!  K? Thanks!

My Permanent Record

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to a new OB/GYN today. All the others I’ve been through have been, for lack of a nicer word, morons.  Or maybe too busy to care would also be a good way to put it.  One gave me very wrong birth control and the other decided that giving me Clomid without first preforming blood work or an HSG would be a good idea.  So I took the advice of a friend and went to the practice she goes to.

Of course you have to fill out all the new paperwork.  Name, Birth Date, Address, Spouses Name, Date of Last Period, Insurance Information… and then history.  Family history and personal.  The family history is always full of fun X’s.  Hypertension? Yes.  Breast Cancer? Yes.  Heart Disease? Yes.  On and On.  My personal history, however, used to be pretty short.  High Cholesterol.  That was it.  No explanation for my high cholesterol except that it was probably genetics.  Had my general practitioner been able to properly read hormone levels on my test results, he would have figured out that my high cholesterol was caused by PCOS.  He still doesn’t believe that I had PCOS though, even though I’ve been diagnosed by a specialist.  He claims that I can’t have PCOS because I’m not overweight. *sigh* Definitely time for a new general practitioner too!… Oops, I’ve lost track….

So, my personal history has always just had High Cholesterol since I was diagnosed five years ago.  Now I’ve added PCOS.  The PCOS isn’t a big deal, it’s actually nice to know why I have so many things wrong with me.  Only having three periods a year, hair on my chin, breasts and stomach, high cholesterol, receding/thinning hairline… yada yada.  The thing that was so hard to do was to have to mark “yes” for “Have you had a miscarriage?”  Ugh.  Talk about a knife in a wound.

I know that knowing that is very important for an OB/GYN, but it was not very easy to fill out that part of the form, and it certainly wasn’t easy to have the question asked again in person by the nurse and again having to answer yes.  Sometimes I not only feel sad, but also a little worried that people might not understand why I would be so sad about something that I lost after only knowing about it for four days.  Doesn’t that seem silly?  I don’t think I should have to feel judged by that, but I do.  I know others have lost babies further along and had grown much more attached over the weeks or months, but that shouldn’t make mine any less important, especially since it may be the only pregnancy I ever get to experience.  Right?

Well, that’s all over now.  Paperwork is filled out and I don’t have to answer any more questions about all that!  Let’s just hope that next time I step foot in that office, it’s for my first ultrasound to see an actual baby (or two).

A New Baby

Today I went to a new (to me) OB GYN office.  It was a great experience.  I enjoyed having a female doctor for once.  I’ve always gone to a male, except the one time I had a lady nurse practitioner who turned out to not know what she was doing.  She prescribed me Loestrin FE without checking to see if I needed iron.  I didn’t, and the extra iron ended up causing me serious issues.  So, yes, female DOCTOR = lovely.

After my appointment I took a walk over to the connecting building to visit my friends who just had a baby on Monday.  She was still in the hospital because she ended up having to have a C-section.  She looks fantastic.  They are both so happy and their baby is a beautiful, healthy, baby boy.  I know it might sound like i’m lying, but I was not at all jealous.  I am so happy for them.  It took her a full year (almost to the day) to get pregnant once they started trying.  They struggled.  Not as much as me, or others I know, but they struggled and I give them credit for being strong and keeping on when the year mark approached with no results.

I feel like I may be the only infertile woman in the world who feels total and utter joy for her friends who are able to get pregnant.  I mean, they may not be mine, but I get to play with them and buy them cute outfits!  in a way, that means I win a little bit.  If I can’t have the complete joy myself, I’m just glad that I have such loving friends that are willing to share their joy and love with me.  So, I’d like to send a shout out to the universe and thank it for letting me have wonderful friends with adorable babies…… and, you know, universe… if you aren’t busy, maybe give me and my husband a piece of that joy for ourselves?  That would be pretty nice, you know…

Crazy Thoughts

So, I’ve been experiencing some crazy thoughts lately and I’d like to run them by the blogging community here to see what you all think.  

As most of you know, I suffer from PCOS.  Many of you also know that I’ve recently started going to the chiropractor to fix some problems with my neck and a squished lower back.  They’ve discovered that the squished part of my lower back is an injury I’ve had since I was a kid.  The part that is pushed together is crushing very important nerves that control hormone output through my body, which can have a lot to do with my PCOS.  On top of that, I’ve started a gluten-free diet and i’m strongly considering dairy-free, but I haven’t got the guts to do it yet (even though I know I need to) because the research I’ve done on gluten-free, dairy-free diets and PCOS is incredible.  Women who have suffered from PCOS their whole lives are suddenly becoming regular, ovulating and getting pregnant.  That is amazing!  It makes a lot of sense when you look at the fact that PCOS is caused by an insulin problem that results in a hormone problem, so controlling your diet makes so much sense.

So here is the big question —– should I go off birth control for the next five months (giving myself until January), to see if there is a possibility that my body may start regulating itself?  I know it’s a long shot and a totally insane idea since we’ve waited so long and i’m already 28.5 years old, but the thought just keeps sneaking up behind me and shaking me.  I think it might be related to the fact that IVF is going to cost us $17,000 and it’s just so much money.  SO MUCH!  It also has a lot to do with wanting to know if my body has the capability of running like a normal body.  Could diet and the chiropractor do that?  Or, should I just keep in mind that I am making my body perfect FOR IVF?  All of this may make my body the perfect carrier for my little embryos, OR, it may do nothing but make me a healthier person and not touch my hormonal problems.  I think I probably what I will end up doing IVF anyway, but I wanted to see what everyone else thought.

I already have my mock transplant, saline ultrasound and consultation with the doctor set up for August 29th…. so it’s right around the corner.  I can’t see myself having the ability to cancel those appointments after this long, but I’m still so torn!  Am i going crazy?  I sure do feel like it!