On betas and babies

It’s been a while, and I’ve been sadly negligent. I know.

Beta #2 was on November 2,  and came back at68.6!  And then #3 was on November 6, at 533, which made me seriously boggle. And then another on Monday, the 9th, which came back at 1604, so my doubling has slowed down a bit, but it’s still going up nicely. I graduated to OB status officially, as well, so now I’m paying copays every time.

I had a scare on Monday night, though. My part-time job is retail, and so I’m on my feet running around a lot. When I got home from work, I had spotting. Bright red spotting. This freaked me out quite a bit, especially as it happened at exactly 5 weeks. That happens to be right when I miscarried when I was pregnancy before, so the spotting? Yeah, not happy-making for me at all.

So I called in on Tuesday morning, and they told me spotting was normal (although I know that, it doesn’t help much!) and schedule me to come in today. I’d been planning to wait for Thursday or Friday, but with the spotting was scared. So I saw an u/s tech rather than my RE, but that’s ok. I’ll see him next time.

Ultrasound this morning went well, though. We found one right away, clear as day, measured right at 5 weeks. I’d technically be 5 weeks, 2 days, today, but I think I implanted a little late perhaps. So that’s close enough. During the scan, I thought I saw something else, but I wasn’t sure. We were talking about there being just one.

Then the tech took a closer look and said ‘Hmm, what’s this? I’m not sure what that is…’ Closer look, and we still weren’t sure and she thought it was something in the muscle we’d have to watch. We printed the picture out, but still saw both. I mentioned I’d had a septum removed, thinking maybe it was a bit of scar tissue. She laughed then, and said ‘OK. There are two. See? Here’s the uterine wall, they’re both perfectly positioned.’

I got a huge case of the giggles. Two? I was convinced, convinced there was just one based on my numbers and the fact that I feel fine. I’m a little freaked out, though. There’s a chance one won’t make it, there always is, but two? Yikes!

Is it bad that I send my husband an email at work days we think we saw two? I hope he doesn’t read it while his kids are there…. There might be some swearing involved.

I’m not sure when the next ultrasound is yet, since we usually set that up when I talk to them about the results. I’m guessing once we see the heartbeat we’ll have a better idea.

Lies!

We’ve sunk to lying to our families.

My MIL has been emailing R every day now, asking for news. She was very quiet while we were stimming and all, but she knew when the retrieval and transfer were. She’s also in the medical field and has friends who have gone to our RE, so she knows the timeline. So now she wants to know if her firstborn is going to be a daddy. We’ve been telling her we don’t know when we’ll know yet.

It’s been the same with my mom, although not every day. She asks me for updates all the times. She usually IMs me on gchat (I thank goodness all the time that she does not have AIM!) to ask, and I tend to ignore it a lot, in hopes that she’ll log off before I feel compelled to answer. It helps that I’m usually NOT in my email window, since I’m doing something else.  But my answer for her is the same. I don’t know yet. And I tell her they’re just checking progesterone and estrogen right now, not the betas.

And of course the truth is, we got that early positive beta. And this morning I gave in and peed on a stick, and it popped up Pregnant after about a minute. Granted, it’s an expired test, so I told R we’d be buying another at the store tomorrow. But still.. it came up. Quickly. I think our real official beta is on Monday.

But we’re trying to put off telling our families as long as we can. I dread them spreading the news around because I’m not sure they’ll keep their mouths shut. The last thing I want is to have to untell more people than necessary if something goes wrong, and given we haven’t made it past 5 weeks before, I am paranoid. So I need at least a couple of good strong betas, and preferably an ultrasound before I tell them. I’m not sure we can delay long enough for an ultrasound, but we’ll try….

I feel some guilt about this, though. We’ve been trying since April of 2007, although a good year of that was going naturally because of our lack of money for IVF. And then IVF #1 comes along and is, well, pretty much perfect. I seriously cannot believe how WELL this cycle went. Gorgeous blasts, 5 to freeze, and a positive test? I am 36, how in the hell did that happen? And I see so many of the other wonderful women whose blogs I read and who I talk to on forums who are going through their second, or third, or fourth or more and I want to know why they don’t have good luck with it, too.

IF is not fair. And that is not a lie.

Infertility Takes Many Things

I had bloodwork again today. Again, they didn’t have me in the schedule when I got to the office near my house. Argh. And then while I was there, the nurse called in sick so I had to drive to the main office anyway.

Regardless I got my numbers back:

Estradiol: 479

Progesterone: 47.6

HCG: 8.07 (!!!)

So does this mean…? Maybe? When I talked to the nurse she said absolutely nothing about it. I think they play cautious. Actually, I know they do.  I’ve been told to double up my Vivelle patches starting tomorrow, which should be interesting as my insurance only covers 10 a month.

But I can’t bring myself to be more than terrified. Excited, cautiously hopeful, but terrified. We’ve been down this road before, with a positive test ending in a miscarriage at the borderline of being considering a chemical pregnancy.  And control freak that I am, I will now sit and obsess over the estrogen and progesterone levels. I have no idea what they mean, I know know they went down.

Sitting here, I can’t help but think that infertility takes so much away from you.

It takes away the idea that you can just have sex and get pregnant, for free. While all of your friends are merrily having babies, you’re just looking at a single line. Or a 60+ day cycle. Or any other number of things that equals the big fat not pregnant.

It steals away the joy you have for your friends when they are pregnant. When we found out some of R’s friends were pregnant, our reaction was not happiness but bitterness and jealousy. Why do they get to get pregnant right away? We spend our time at get-togethers avoiding the baby talk, avoiding the cooing over the children, avoiding those who are currently pregnant. Sometimes we end up hanging out by the dip instead, or the drinks.

It takes away your privacy. By the time you’ve started delving into more advanced treatment, you usually end up having to tell your family. They know when you’re having sex (or not), when you’re doing shots, when you’re likely to find out. You can’t just sit and do this privately anymore. Everybody wants to know, and asks questions.

It steals away the plans you made to surprise people. When R and I first found out I was pregnant, way back when we first were trying, we kept things super quiet for the week and a half I was pregnant. In that time, we planned all sorts of cute ways to tell our parents, ways to surprise them. We knew they would be overjoyed. But it didn’t happen. And now, since they know we are doing treatments, we’ve lost the chance of surprise, as well. They get to hear yes or no, not an out of the blue ‘YOu’re going go be a grandparent.” That sucks. I think we’ll be keeping some other things secret, if we can, but it’s spoiled a lot of the fun. I’ve already had one argument with my mom because she told my aunt and my brother we were doing IVF, and I did not want this spread around. It’s my news. Not hers.

It takes away all your plans for the number of children you were going to have, for the family the way you planned it. R and I always planned on having two. At this point, just one would be fine. We realize that it’s likely not going to happen without help, and we’ve decided that once we have one, we won’t ever do IVF again. We’ll use any frozen ones we have if we want more, but otherwise, we’ve lost the chance to plan how we wanted our family to look. We’ve decided, too, that there will be no more birth control. Any extra children are just bonuses.

Most of all, it takes away the joy you have in being pregnant. I can’t be happy about this potentially positive beta. I can’t, not yet. I am terrified. I’m terrified it won’t stick. My biggest nightmare is that I will get pregnant and miscarry after IVF;  I would rather it not work at all. How can you relax and enjoy it when you’ve gone through so much to get there?  It may happen eventually, if it’s real. But right now? No.

 

Up and Down

This morning was my first post-transfer bloodwork, so I dutifully reported to the office close to my house (closer than where I have been going) so get stuck by the vampires.  And it turns out they didn’t have me on the schedule. Lovely. But they stuck me anyway…

I checked the online portal and found the following numbers:

Progesterone: 60.1

HCG: <1

Estradiol: 616

Color me bummed at a beta of less than 1, of course. Which I realize is absolutely ridiculous. My transfer was on Saturday, but that doesn’t mean that I’m any less of a control freak about this. I want good numbers! Everything else in the cycle has been lovely, by and large. Why can’t be getting a positive test? Yes, I am mental.

But then I called to check on my dosages and everything to make sure it was still good. I was told to continue the meds as I was doing them, as the levels are fine. And then I asked how many we had make it to freeze. I moment on hold as I got transferred to the person in charge of that…

Five. We had five make it to freeze! I would have been happy with two! That is two more tries, if we aren’t lucky this time. I am just blown away. I seriously can’t believe that we had 7 of 8 fertilized good enough quality, and were able to freeze five (and transfer two into me, of course.)

Otherwise… I am job hunting in earnest now. Getting my resume back into Monster has proven a good plan as I’ve received two calls from recruiters today. One was for a job I think would be fantastic. The other is for a job I wasn’t really qualified for, but a very good friend of mine who is also out of work would be perfect for. I sent the recruiter to him. And I think I’m going to be going to a job fair tomorrow.  Might as well, it’ll be good to get out there and will get me into job-hunting mode again

I think I’m also going to get myself a couple of GRE prep books off of Amazon, since I want to go back to graduate school and it’s been so long since I’ve taken the GRE I know my math is going to suck a lot. If job hunting doesn’t work out, then working retail and doing grad school will be fine.

Transfer complete!

So we arrived at the clinic this morning at 9 am, and I’d mostly drunk my bottle of water.  I started on the second once we got in there — you have to have a full bladder for transfer. Given I’ve had to pee a LOT since the retrieval I was afraid to drink too much and I stopped about the time I realized if I drunk too much more I’d be miserable!

So they stick us both in a room, and we’re both given our garb. I have to get more undressed, of course. R, on the other hand, was given a VERY fashionable jumpsuit which made me laugh hysterically. Now, see, R is about 6’4″ and weighs 270. He has very broad shoulders and something of a barrel chest. The jumpsuit was absolutely skin tight on top. He couldn’t lift his arms or move much in any way. Awesome. He couldn’t even bend over to put on the booties. So he unzipped it until we had to go in.

When we got into the room, we were greeted by the RE who told us we had beautiful embryos. I think that’s one of the first things he said to us, actually. He told us we’d be doing two, and when I said good, he told me he was prepared to argue with me if I’d wanted three! I told him no way, I did NOT want more than two.  And he seemed relieved… They had to tell us to stop talking too, though, since we kept laughing. I asked about how many we’d have to freeze, and he thought we’d have several.. I was hoping for at least two, so if we have more, I will be delighted.

For now I’m on bedrest and cheating a bit right now because I’m sitting at the computer — we don’t have a laptop.

Our scanner is working right now, but once it is, I’ll scan in pictures of our embryos. They didn’t give me a scale on them, but they look pretty textbook if I do say so myself!

Transfer is tomorrow!

Or today, depending upon your timezone.

When I got my fert report, they told me that 8 had fertilized. Not sure how many total were mature, but 8 makes me happy. At my last ultrasound before the retrieval, we saw between 7 and 10, and I was estimating we’d probably get 8, so the fact that we got more eggs but had 8 fertilize makes me very happy indeed.

My clinic doesn’t give status updates, so I really have no idea how they’re doing. I’m hoping they’re all little rockstars and that we have two good ones to transfer tomorrow as well as some to freeze. Some to freeze would be just fantastic. Seriously.

I suspect I may have (or had) some mild OHSS. I don’t feel a lot of pain, although I tend to walk more slowly because I’m still a little achy. But the bloat, oh, the bloat. I was terribly bloated and, sorry for more information than you want to know, feeling kinda constipated. I still do, sorta, although it’s better. But I think I was peeing every 2 hours yesterday and this morning my waist was 2 inches smaller, so I’ll take that as a good sign. Although I do seem to bloat up during the day.

But anyway, on Wednesday we started all the other meds. I’ve added baby aspirin into my regimen so we’ll see if that helps any. Of course the prenatal is in there. We also added estradiol sublingually.. I’m glad that stuff doesn’t taste like much, just a little chalky. I was seriously afraid it was going to taste like aspirin or advil or something equally nasty! We also started PIO.

PIO, if you don’t know, is Progesterone in Oil. In my case, it’s in ethyl oleate. Essentially, I get to have 2 ccs of that injected intramuscularly every single night. R is doing it for me, and he was pretty freaked out the first time. He’s experienced the rubbery feeling of needles going into flesh that always freaked me out with the stims, and especially with the ganirelix. But he’s not bad at it, and although the first shot was a disaster (I think we didn’t get the needle on tight enough, it was a HUGE mess, I’m not sure how much actually got in me) the others have been fine. We’ve been injecting slowly.

The second night went ok, but took forever. I think R presses down on the needle a bit or something, because it starts to hurt. And I have a huge honkin’ bruise and a lump from it. Ugh. It hurts. Tonight we tried icing less and rubbing  more and I sat on a heating pad for about 20 minutes afterwards, so we’ll know in the morning if it helped or not, I guess. I had to tell him to not warn me before he did it, though, since if he tells me I’ll freak out and probably get stabbed in the bone or something.

I’m really not looking forward to the progesterone side effects. I would like my boobs to not be sore, please. I’d also like to not be a zombie. When I was pregnant before I was just a zombie of exhaustion, and I was barely pregnant. Clomid did the same thing in the luteal phase.

But anyway, transfer is tomorrow. We have to arrive at the clinic at 9 am. Yay for full bladders? We bought some bottles water so I could drink it on the way there.  I told R he got to be in the room, and he wasn’t sure until I pointed out that if he was there at least he could say he was actually there for the conception of the kid. Have to be positive about this, right?

I think in the morning we’re going to run to the grocery store since I have 10% off a grocery order at Kroger and it expires tomorrow. So we’ll go early, before we go to the transfer. After the transfer I am on, get this — 72 hours of bedrest. I think it’s strict, too. I’m only allowed up to go to the bathroom.

I am going to go batshit crazy.

I am not a TV person, I don’t like to stay in bed, even if our bed is super comfy. We have no good cable in the bedroom, although I suppose I could lie on the couch in the living room, too. But still. I love to read, but I can only read for so long. And we don’t own a laptop. This may be why we ended up at Best Buy tonight eyeing the laptops because R was afraid I would stab him in his sleep or something from going crazy with boredom. We didn’t buy anything because anything I’d be happy with is 800+ and while I do need a new computer I’m also not keen on compromising on what I want — and what I REALLY want is a 15-inch Macbook Pro with a dedicated video card. Those run 2K+.

I could handle sitting at home and doing nothing. That’s not a problem at all. I’d happily twiddle my whole day away surfing the net and playing WoW.  But I’m not sure how I’ll handle doing nothing at all, in bed. I may have to end up sending R to buy me a netbook or an ipod touch, if all else fails, although I find a netbook to be a bit useless by and large. But it could be useful if I decide to do NaNoWriMo this year…

So wish me luck. Transfer in the morning! Here’s hoping we have fabulous embryos.

14!

My retrieval was today.  I’m feeling ok, although I don’t think all the anesthesia and such is completely out of my system yet. I’m still occasionally randomly lightheaded, but that could also be because I still feel a bit of a stabbing pain in my right ovary. Not a terrible pain, but pain nevertheless. I think I’ll actually take one of the vicodin before I head to bed.

My morning started around 4:15, when I gave up on sleeping. We had to be at the clinic at 7 am, which meant leaving home around 6:20 to make sure the traffic didn’t catch us unawares. I got up, sat around, griped about being thirsty. R and I were geeks and played a little WoW before we walked the dog and got dressed to head out.

Once we got there, I had to sign all the consents I hadn’t had a chance to do before; I’d already read it all, but hadn’t gotten to sign, whereas R had stopped by one of the nearby offices to electronically do it. I got to manually initial everything (and had to ask him what he selected for the leftover embryo question if we died… for the record, we chose donation to science. I don’t think anyone wants our antique embryos but us!)

Pre-op was, for me, a bit of a nightmare. I hate IVs. I usually have to look away, and this helps. We had a hard time picking which hand to do, but we tried the right hand first since my right arm usually has better veins. She got it in… and then couldn’t feed it in all the way. Owwwwww. It hurt so badly… I told her I felt nauseous. And I know I went white as a sheet.. I was either going to pass out, throw up, or both. She had to take it out and give me a few minutes. I just kept going paler and paler and getting wobbly and they ended up cracking ammonia under my nose, which woke me up right quick. The RE glanced in while this was going on, and made the comment that I was usually pale, but now I was REALLY pale.  They managed to get the IV into the left hand without much incident although it’s never fun, and the nurse apologized the whole while. I was still so out of it that R thought they’d actually already started doping me up when he came in, I was so pale. I got all my color back just in time to go into the operating room.

They got 14 eggs!

I can’t even begin to say how delighted I am with this. At my last monitoring appointment on Friday, we only saw 8 or so likely follicles, so getting almost double that just made my day. No idea how many are mature or how many will fertilize, but the doctor was very pleased with the number and thought it was perfect for my age, so I’m happy with my little antique ovaries.

Now to wait for the fertilization report tomorrow… I really hope we have good results. I’m terrified of something going wrong.

Catching up

I did a lot of stimming in the time I didn’t write. Twelve whole days, in fact! They had me upping my dose almost every time, and I had to buy more meds, unfortunately… those things are, I swear, made of ground diamonds. It’s the only explanation I can come up with.

But we ended up at 300 IU of both Menopur and Follistim, and we started adding in Ganirelix on day 6. It did a good job of keeping my LH down, that’s for sure.. looking at my lab results I could see it drop like a stone. I really hated the ganirelix shots. The needles were not nearly as sharp as I expected, so the first one I had to do, at work, of all places since I had to close, was a nasty surprise. But I couldn’t get too amped up about it because I wasn’t expecting it. No, it was day two that I had a problem with it. Although once I discovered the magic of icing the injection site, I was much much happier with the creepy pushing through rubber sensation.

And my estrogen levels always seemed to level out and then jump again when we upped the dose, although my last few days as the eggs matures they really did hop up. At my last monitoring appointment, on Friday, they were just over 2100… and I stimmed that night. And then triggered on Saturday.

Since we hadn’t had a lesson in doing the IM shots, we drove up north of town to have R’s mom do the trigger  shot for us, and teach him how to do it as well. I mixed it all up, and was rather proud of myself for managing to get it all out. Darn HCG… makes you feel pregnant, even when you’re not really. And evidently my muscles are a bit sensitive, because that darn thing hurt for a couple of days. I dread the PIO. My ovaries were pretty sore the last few days, too.

But it all goes pretty well.

Exhausted

I’ve had a post brewing in my head, things I want to talk about. Today, it’s just not happening.

I am just far too exhausted. I was falling asleep while watching Top Chef…. and I was excited for a new episode! Wednesday is TV night in our hours. Is it the stims doing this to me?

I was successful in giving myself a shot with less drama today, though. Of course, the drama was in the misbehaving syringe, which kept emptying back into the vial. It took some finger gymnastics to get the needle on and not lose a couple hundred dollars of medication. I also learned to make sure I pull the needle straight and way out, since I flicked myself slightly as I removed it.

That’s such a freaky feeling — every shot, I’m feeding a few hundred bucks into my body!

I’m having second thoughts about using WordPress. I love the customizability, but I’m not a coder, really. I’m not sure how to make my blog look like I really want. But Blogger doesn’t quite do it either. I like being able to have pages here. I suffer from ‘know how I want it but lack the skill to do it’ syndrome. Blogger seems easier to follow others on, though.

I did it!

I put it off as long as I could.

First, I had to let dinner digest, because goodness knows I didn’t want to feel all nervous with all that food burbling in my stomach. The  I had to calm myself down by playing some games on Facebook. Then I played Zuma. Then I had to go pee.

But by then it was 8 pm, and I had to have the shot done by 9. So I started prepping it all up.

I wiped down my counter and started pulling out everything I needed. Two vials of menopur, plus the water solution. My follistim pen. Alcohol swabs. The Qcap. The proper syringe. The proper needle. I got it all laid out and considered procrastinating further by going to take a photo. But then I remembered I’d tried to load pictures off the camera earlier and the USB cable wasn’t working. (Hence why there are no photos of the stash right now.)

About this time R came in to see what I was doing. I think he was going to remind me to take the shot, but since he saw I was already prepping he stood around for moral support.

We got it all mixed up, although it took a little time since I was being so careful with it being the first time. I’m sure I’ll be an old hat at this soon enough. But I got it all mixed, the spot on my stomach wiped and pinched. Then I stared at it.

And stared at it.

And stared at it.

And giggled uncontrollably.

R tried to cheer me up, offering up bits of wisdom and trying to tell me how nervous I was, and it was ok.

I finally kicked him out of the room, because his watching me do it was making it worse.

It took me maybe 20 minutes, but I finally managed to stab myself and inject the meds. Menopur burns, the bastard.

Overall, though? It wasn’t that bad. But the idea that you’re going to stab yourself, with a needle (even a tiny one) is a pretty big hurdle to get over.

I’m sure the next one will be easier.

For now, I’m proud of myself for finally managing to do it. This is still more about medications that I ever wanted to know, though.