Lupron and Television

Sometimes what I watch on TV seems to fit right in with my life, and sometimes it doesn't.  Anyone following the story-line on Private Practice?  I just finished last week's episode, and all I can say is Yes, you've gotta have hope.  But lady - Hope kills.

And so do crazy hormonal women.  I'm having a rough enough time already, I don't really want to experience the full blown IVF hormonacoaster.  Plus - as much as I love Jakobe, he gets a perverse joy out of making sure I know exactly how crazy and bitchy I am.  Which is totally not fair, especially when he's being just as moody, if more predictable.

In any case, my first Lupron injection was tonight, and then as I was sitting there, feeling kind-of yucky and crampy i discovered that joy of joys now I'm spotting (or more, it *is* red) too.  and I can't figure out which day I'm supposed to be on for my damned fertility meditations....  I think I'll do day 1 tonight, and then day 3 tomorrow - I've gotta shortchange one or two of them, since I have about 10 days, to fit in twelve days of meditations.  I suppose I could meditate more than once a day...  a thought.

Here's to all of us surviving the next few days.  Me, Jakobe and Sasha.

I got smart - tonight I picked out tomorrow's clothes so that I don't have to figure it out in the morning, just find socks.  Speaking of socks - anyone know where I can find some awesome ones before Friday?  I'm just not ready for Christmas socks, and those were the only ones I found today.

Waiting in Line: We're up next

So, here we go again with IVF 2.0.  Tomorrow is my the day that I begin Lupron, and Gonal-F the day after that.  It's good to have changed things a little bit, but at the same time, the whole thing is just scary. Unfortunately it's not the "embarking on a new adventure" scary, but the "I didn't really like this ride the first time" scary.  It's kind of like my sister, who is terrified of heights, who keeps riding the Panic Plunge, even though she knows that the second that she starts to go up, she's going to start crying, change her mind, and ask them to stop the ride and let her off.  (they never do, they might do that for a little kid, but not an adult woman.)  I know what I'm getting myself into, and I'm still getting on.

Right now, I'm sitting at my computer, freshly showered (Ultrasound at o'dark-thirty anyone?) and trying to drink enough water so that I can actually not spend 20 minutes trying to get my blood drawn in the morning, while not drinking enough water to keep me awake all night getting up to pee.  It's a fine line.

Jakobe and I have been doing a lot of talking this week, from what we thought we should do about the adoption situation, to what we're going to do with Embry (his name for our frostie) if stims are totally crappy this time around too.  The current plan is that if we get to transfer day, and we have nothing to transfer, then we're going to go ahead and put Embry back and cross our fingers.  We'd never really planned for a single embryo transfer, but at this point, if things go badly again, I think we'll take what we can get.

Important Dates in IVF 2.0:

October 31 - First Lupron Injection
November 1 - Start Gonal-F
November 6 - My 32nd Birthday
November 12 - Tentative retrieval day (and the 4th anniversary of our first kiss)
November 17 - Tentative Transfer Day
November 24 - Thanksgiving
November 26 - My best guess for Beta day...

Things I plan to do differently this time:

NaNoWriMo - only possible because it's November, but I thought it best to give myself something else to concentrate on, like - did I write my 1,667 words today?  I may end up breaking a lit of the rules, but I need some therapy, and it's really cheap, right?

When we get to transfer, I plan to take two days off of work, and just rest.  I'm self prescribing bed rest, because I want to be sure I did my damnedest  .  This is different, because we didn't even make it to transfer last time.

Not try and do too much.  NaNoWriMo isn't physically demanding, and if it gets to be too much, then I can just stop.  There is no one and nothing holding my feet to the fire.

Try and make sure that I'm supporting Jakobe, and also that I'm doing a better job of communicating what I need from him.  I pretty much suck at asking for what I need.  (Somehow I expect him to be psychic, and then I get mad at him when he doesn't just know.  Totally unfair and bitchy of me - So I'm going to try and do better.)

Fire and ice: the gap between

I know that there's a lot that's happened over here that I don't think that Ive shared with all ofr you yet, so here goes.

The Facts:
 I had CD3 blood work done as part of the lead-up to IVF 2.0.  The results weren't great, and weren't terrible.

• E2: 27.3 
• FSH: 9.0
• LH: 4.3

Also, This summer I had my AMH tested, all for myself, so that I could see another metric of what was going on.  Our WTF appointment with the RE in August wasn't very hopeful, and he said that because of my poor response last time, that I probably had diminished reserve, and bad eggs.  Yeah, no fun.  Really kind-of pissed me off because it was the opposite of what he had told me during our cycle, when he said it was probably a fluke.  Queue major irritation.  Anyway, My AMH came back at 0.93 - or Low normal.  So he's not wrong, and not right, and we're just going to have to try and figure things out from here.  We did get him to try a different protocol this time.  Micro-flare with max stims.  Not too worried about OHSS this time anyway.  I have a calendar, and my suppression check labs are this Thursday, with my first dose of Lupron to start on Halloween.  This seems like the perfect opportunity to turn into a monster!

Charts of my hormones & stuff - Because I can!

The wobbly, wishy-washy, completely emotional junk:
I realized today while I was sitting in the exam room in my stylish backless gown, and my totally awesome fuzzy socks that I really didn't want to be there.  I didn't want to have top do this again.  I am afraid of the heartbreak, and I am afraid that this will all turn out to be a waste of time.  t the same time, I keep catching myself thinking about what I'm going to do when this works, when I'm pregnant, when we're expecting one baby or two.  It's like there are two parts of my heart, and they're totally not on the same page.
If that wasn't enough, my emotional state is complicated by having been asked to consider adopting a baby.  Not a maybe someday baby, but a baby that would be born before one we would conceive during this cycle.  The situation is incredibly complicated, and most of it is not my story to tell - so I'm trying valiantly to keep my trap shut.  I talked to my mom, and laid everything out, but we're still in a feedback loop, where we can't think straight, or about anything else, and I bounce back and forth like there's no tomorrow between good idea and bad idea.
I feel like we need to make some sort of decision before we know how the IVF turns out.  I don't want this to be a second-best situation.  I only want to go ahead and say yes if:

• We're sure that we want the baby - regardless of if we have a biological child or not
• We're sure that it's the best choice for everyone involved

But - I don't even know which parts of the considerations have a part in our decision-making process, and which ones might be overstepping our bounds.  I wish that there was someone I could talk to who could help us find the best path.  Jakobe has already stated that he thinks we need an impartial third party, to facilitate he and I talking together, and also to facilitate some hard discussions with the expectant parents.  Sometimes the safest choice isn't the best choice, and sometimes it is, but I don't know how to tell which route is best.  I do know that we currently intend to go through all three tries in the three cycle option IVF that we started in April.

Testing the Waters

I'm back - at least a little bit back.  I don't know how to explain what happened, just that I needed a great big break.  No saving money, no blogging, and no reading blogs.  I just had to get away.  other than the occasional doctor's appointment, the only things infertility related that I have been doing is attending out local support group meetings.

I have a hard time admitting - even too myself, how hurt I was after our IVF attempt in April.  I just shut down.  I took a couple of months before I even really had a prayer of keeping up on housework.  I was broken.  I took on too much, and when it was finally all over, when I no longer had to hold myself together so that IU could just graduate, all the cracks started showing plain as day.  so - I've been mending them, one at a time,  and my heart has a crazed appearance like crackle finish paint, but it's mostly whole again.

This is a good thing, especially since we're on the roller coaster again.  I started the BCPs this week for our next try.  I start stims the first of November.

I am terrified.

Nothing that happened this summer has really done much to make me feel better about or failure.  The doctor has decided that I have diminished ovarian reserve to go along with Jakobe's bunk sperm, and my endometriosis.  I'm not sure I believe him because my labs don't seem to agree with him, but he could be right.  Maybe we just thought we had the shit end of the stick to begin with, but we're really starting to small what we got ourselves into now.  We'll see.  This time it's a micro-flare protocol, with Lupron and the highest dosage of stims we can, from the get go.  We'll see how it turns out.