There is a bill in Congress called HR 735, Family Building Act of 2005. Here’s the details on it. You can read Julie’s excellent post about it on her blog A Little Pregnant.

This bill would mean that EVERY insurance carrier who covers obstetrics (pregnancies) to also cover infertility treatments. This coverage would be for those who cannot get pregnant as well as those who have had multiple miscarriages.

Coverage would include 4 complete egg retrievals, unless a live birth resulted from one, then 2 more in addition to whatever was needed to get pregnant the first time (lifetime max of 6). It would include IVF, GIFT, ZIFT, cryopreservation, egg or embryo donation, and surrogacy.

The best way to show your support is to write to your representative and ask them to support this bill. Letters written on paper, in your own words, get the most notice. You can call them and ask them in person, too! To find your rep and their contact info, click here.

RESOLVE also has a form letter you can easily send from their website to your representative.

I’m telling everyone I know about this bill and asking them to write in. I’m drafting my letter today.

Since I work with cats and have two of my own, I thought I’d pass on what I learned about Toxoplasmosis. (Toxo is what you could potentially catch from a kitty litter box – not harmful to adults, but dangerous to a fetus.) A few select people will try to tell you that cats aren’t safe to be around while pregnant and you need to get rid of your cat. That’s simply not true. (No animal is 100% safe with a baby, obviously, but that’s another issue!)

When it comes to being pregnant around cats the simplest way to avoid any problems is to get someone else to scoop the kitty litter box. And if you have no one else, use gloves. Also use gloves when gardening, as not everyone keeps their cats indoors and gardens are frequently seen as large, free kitty litter boxes for them.

Here’s some other factoids that might make you feel safer:

Cats get toxoplasmosis from eating raw meat… ie, rodents, birds. If your cats never get outside the chance of them getting it is pretty slim (unless you have mice in your house). They (and you) can also get toxo from raw meat from the butcher… this is the same reason they recommend eating all meat at least medium-well when you’re pregnant.

The parasite in a cat’s feces takes 24 hours to become infectious. So litter boxes are only dangerous if they aren’t scooped daily.

Cats will only be infectious for several weeks after the initial infection.

You get infected by ingesting it – ie, touching your face after touching feces.

What does this mean? If your cat has been indoor only for at least a few months, isn’t fed raw meat, and the litter boxes are scooped daily there is little to no risk. Of course most doctors will advise you to get someone else to scoop the boxes just in case.

In my case I’m going to not be touching the kitty litter boxes at work once I’m pregnant, since we do have new cats come in once in a while and their origins are sometimes unknown. Here at home I’m going to attempt to convince Den to scoop the boxes, but I can just see the whining coming from that one… we’ll see how it goes.

I don’t think my brain has caught up yet. I’m giving myself injections (well, one so far) and I have a huge box of meds and I have calendars up the wazoo to make sure I don’t forget one of the thousand little things I have to remember this cycle, I have nurses on speed dial and doctor’s appointments looming… and none of it seems to have sunk in. I even spend some of my time chatting with people about IVF and explaining what we’re going through. It’s like I’ve done so much research on this and I’m talking about statistics and theories and medical terminology and even friends I know. I don’t have much of a sense of “me” yet.

Sometimes I listen to others talk about their IVF experience in the here-and-now… the emotional turmoil. And then I feel a little guilty because here I am sitting here licking a lollypop. “Yep, gettin’ shots! Egg and sperm! Gonna get me pregnant! Wheee, how fun!” I know a lot of it comes from this being my first IVF cycle and haven’t yet been filled with cynicism and frustration – and trust me, I’m happy to be avoiding that at this point, I’ve had enough of that with other things. But a part of me wonders if I shouldn’t be connecting more with the whole experience.

I’m not sure which is better. I feel very calm about the whole thing as it is. The IVF minutea has become my obsession. It’s like I’ve pushed the “baby” part of the equation into a back closet for a while. I’ll let it out later… much later. Getting pregnant, at this stage, seems like some foreign concept. It’ll happen “someday,” hopefully, maybe. When I see pregnant people, instead of feeling that stab of jealousy that I was feeling so often before, now it’s just a pleasant, fuzzy, Oh that’s nice. How sweet.

The whole experience seems very surreal. Five minutes after getting my injection I was checking my stomach for a mark. (There isn’t one – first all I saw was my lap scar and thought Holy crap, what happened?! See – my brain is just struggling to stay caught up here.) I know I got an injection, I remember getting an injection. I also remember laying on that hospital bed before and after my lap surgery, IV in my hand, mouth dry as cotton. It’s just that the memories feel like they’re dreams, or something I read in a book.

If getting pregnant feels this weird… what’s it going to feel like to be pregnant??

We did it!! I came out to the living room and asked Den if he had a few minutes. He stared at me completely blankly. “For what?” I had to tell him. He immediately turned into Mr. Helpful. I grabbed the vial of Lupron from the fridge, he opened up a needle package and got an alchohol wipe ready. I read the dosage out as he wiped the top of the vial and the spot on my stomach I picked. Then he drew up the amount of liquid we needed for one dose (10 units; .1ml). I sat down, pinched my stomach, and he asked, “Are you ready?” In it went.

And you know what? I barely felt a thing! Yes, I know, I’ve had two trigger shots before – but I had forgotten and started to worry again. But nope… not a thing! I admitted that I stung a heck of a lot more on Monday when one of the cats at work scratched my hand (not an unusual occurrence – and those buggers have sharp claws). I did have a little drop of blood form after the needle was pulled out, but a gauze quickly staunched that no problems.

Den was fabulous. He did say I was over-analysing the instructions (“Yes, that’s what it says on the prescription label and what I just read online in injection instructions, but let me check the leaflet that came with the lupron, just to be sure…”), but he handled the syringe expertly and did a fabulous job.

Unfortunately I’ve totally forgotten when I need to take the baby aspirin and the doxycyclin (antibiotics). I’ll have to call the nurse tomorrow. I try so hard to keep organized, but wow this is a lot of info to keep track of.

I finally figured out how to add Blogger blogs to my RSS reader. This makes me very, very happy – now maybe I can keep up with everyone better!

Also, I have put all my blog links into categories for easy surfing. Although a few of them make me scratch my head… when someone is dealing with secondary infertility do they go under infertility? Or baby? Or maybe I should make another category for them? Hrmmm.

First I just want to give a little disclaimer: I am not a doctor, and I am not familiar with most of the studies cited by the doctors. Plus I was scribbling notes really really fast, so there is always a chance I could have screwed up my notes or simply misunderstood with the doctor was trying to say. I am going to try to look up several of the studies referenced during the conference, though, because I would love to see the full statistics. If I find them I’ll post them later.

Also please note that this typed-up version of my notes is not necessarily in the order I got it all in. Some of the topics were indeed stand-alone lectures, but many of the lectures overlapped and I don’t want to be writing out the same thing three times. So I’ve grouped info together for your and my benefit. I’ve tried to reference specific doctors when I have it written down in my notes.

More…

Box arrived today while I was at work. Den’s first comment was, “What did you order this time??” I swore I hadn’t bought anything online recently. Then the lightbulb went off in my head and I knew what it must be – though they said it wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. My meds are here! Syringes and vials and patches and vaginal supplements (those look fun) and a large sharps container. Apparently our co-pay is $98 for the meds (which is everything but the Follistim and the Vivelle patches). Since there’s no tacked on cost it appears we came in under our meds max this cycle, which is great news! I think I may call to find out just how much of that limit we used, just for future reference.

Not quite as overwhelming as I’d feared, and the whole thing still seems a little unreal. It really does. If you had asked me two years ago if I would have been okay with giving myself daily injections I would have said hell no! And yet here I am today, big box of syringes and meds, and it seems very matter-of-course.

Earlier today we had stopped by the clinic to pick up the other meds. We were given some – since most people around here have full coverages by their insurance, we’re kind of looked at as the poor couple who don’t due to our limited meds coverage, which I find very ironic considering that most of my friends online have NO coverage at all. But I guess the clinic gets people donating left-over meds, which they then give to those couples who are paying some out of pocket.

Unfortunately when I went through the big box ‘o meds from the pharmacy I realized they’d only ordered the other stuff, and forgot to order me a Follistim pen to go with the cartridges. Hmmm. So I’ll have to call the nurses to let them know and get that ordered (or can I call the pharmacy directly? I might just do that.)

Also in the mail today I got a copy of a letter that was sent to the RE from my insurance, “officially” authorizing “two (2) cycles of IVF”. Also authorizing the medications, which is good since I already got them.

I am going to be starting my Lupron injections on Thursday.

I also think I am going to have to call my Midwife to cancel the yearly physical I had scheduled for next friday, because since I don’t stop the BCP until the 6th there’s a very good chance I’ll still be on my period on the 11th for the appointment. That sucks. It’ll take a while to get re-scheduled too. All because my last period was late, messed up the schedule.

I’m going to post all the info I got later… but for right now I’m just going to post the how my day went part.

I got up at 2am, after not sleeping at all. Too full of butterflies… I was paranoid about missing my train in New Haven. It was an hour and a half drive in the middle of the night, little traffic, no problems. The train station is gorgeous… a huge old building. I’m still a little giddy that people still use the train stations out here on the east coast… and that they’re still in such great condition. There was only one train leaving that early in the morning, so I just followed the small crowd through the underground passages to the correct train track. Once I was on the train I relaxed immensely.

The train wasn’t all that comfortable – at least not for catching a nap. The bright flourescent lights overhead contrasted with the dark outside was really irritating… people were talking… and I couldn’t find a comfortable position. I think I finally fell asleep folded over with my head on my knees. Why I find that my “most comfortable position” I don’t know, but I did nap a tiny bit.

Grand Central Terminal is really really cool. I expected it to be huge, but I didn’t really expect this huge huge vaulted ceiling that goes on forever… and it all looks so old. I think that’s what’s weirdest to me about New York… I always pictured it so clean cut and business-like with skyscrapers, and what I saw was such old architecture. I really wanted to just stand in Grand Central and gawk, but I didn’t want to look like an idiotic tourist. Next time I’ll be bringing my camera.

Finding my way to the hotel was, umm, easy. I walked out the doors onto 42nd street. I started looking around and… oh, there’s the Hyatt. Next building over. I didn’t even have to cross the street. :lol: So much for seeing New York… that was the entire extent of it.

The Hyatt, too, is huge and opulent… but a much more modern opulence. It was also very confusing. Once I got to the Ballroom level I was fine though. I stayed there for the entire conference.

I registered, then awkwardly wandered into the exhibit room – which was still being set up – where a huge buffet of breakfast stuff was set up. I grabbed a couple of things and went off to eat. Unfortunately there weren’t very many tables or chairs to sit at… they need to improve on that one. I know they wanted people to check out the exhibitor tables, but we wanted to eat first! The was so good. Very very delicious. I had a croissant that had some kind of bavarian cream, chocolate and sliced almonds (drool). And then I had two bagels with a seriously divine salmon creamcheese. And it was all provided free of charge for us.

Most of the day was full of lectures, of which I have a ton of notes, but it’s going to take a while to get them typed up and organized. A lot of the lectures overlapped so I’ll have to somehow figure it out.

Lunch was interesting. It was in the same room as the breakfast and coffee break (complete with tons of cookies and dessert loafs) were – the exhibitor’s hall. We knew lunch would be a “concession” where you had to pay for food. But no one expected what we got: the same buffet table had some sandwiches, some salad, some drinks, and some cookies and brownies. I peeked at the price list they had prominently displayed. $10.95 for a sandwich. $3.00 for a cookie. $3.50 for a juice or soda. I called Den to shriek at him, he told me to eat a damn sandwich. So I got in line and got just that – a sandwich. Now other people I guess weren’t paying attention really, because for some reason they thought the salad came with the sandwich. And they didn’t take a peek at the prices beforehand, I saw many astonished, horrified looks at the cashier. Plus people thought a “sandwich” consisted of two halves…. it didn’t. So when they got charged $21.90 for that sandwich they tended to flip out. There ended up being a plate of sandwiches stacked by the cashier as people refused to buy it, lol! A lot of pissed off people saying, “Can you BELIEVE that?!”

Not that I wasn’t completely outraged by an $11 half-sandwich, even if it was New York that’s a crazy price, but I didn’t let it bother me too much because I’d just chowed down on a ton of food for breakfast that was free. So really if you think about $11 for a full day’s meals it wasn’t bad at all.

The most amusing part to me, though, was that an hour later after some more lectures we had another coffee break and there were the same brownies and cookies that had been sold at lunch for $3 each, sitting out beside coffee… for free. Oh such amusement.

Next time, remind me to go next door to Grand Central Terminal for lunch – they had a food court, and the prices were way cheaper than the hotel!

The end of the day was pretty amusing, there was a “debate” panel set up and one of the people on the panel was an old woman. I don’t know why she was on that panel – I know they introduced everyone, but I didn’t really pay attention to it… she had something to do with something. She wasn’t a doctor though, thank god. It was the most horrible “debate” ever. I was laughing hysterically it was so bad. The other two gave a lot of great input and thoughts. Then this older woman, she takes the microphone (and of course doesn’t speak into it, she used it to gesture)… and then proceeds to go on for 5 minutes about a TOTALLY DIFFERENT TOPIC. They kept trying to get her back on track but she insisted it was related. Yet she failed to EVER tie it back into her point. And not only was she talking about the wrong topic? She was saying things that were totally not true, referencing “studies” that no one knows where she came up with it (the doctor on the panel was shaking his head the whole time and was attempting to interject ACTUAL facts into it)…. plus the lady managed to insult the whole room of us, in a manner of speaking. It was truly flabbergasting. She should never, ever have been asked to speak about infertility. She obviously has NO CLUE!!!! (I’ll write more about the details later.) It was so bad it was funny.

I left that panel to catch my train back to New Haven. No problems at all. 2 hours went by pretty quickly too… okay, not “quickly”, but it wasn’t horrible. I was feeling so pleased with myself for doing all of it… for getting out on my own, for seeing New York, for going and DOING something instead of sitting at home wishing I was doing something.

I found my truck without a problem only to discover a very bad noise when I pulled out. I pulled into a no-parking zone and jumped out to check…. only to find that someone had hit our truck!! The plastic fender around the left back wheel had been half pulled off and was rubbing against the wheel. Gaaahhhh!! I pushed it back up to where it’s supposed to be, so I could drive home (and it was going to stay), but it’s going to need to be repaired… maybe even replaced.

It was a really fun day overall.. I’m glad I went. It was great seeing New York for the first time – even if I didn’t see much. I plan on going back to see more.

Somehow it is Saturday already and I’m leaving at 3am for New York. I’m not quite sure how that happened – where did the week go? All I really remember is a lot of exhaustion. Oh, and drinking and eating too much last night. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you I did my drinking before finding out that so-and-so is pregnant. Thankfully someone I only know through association, but it still made me feel so sad… yet another reminder that something’s wrong with us, but for normal people life goes on. And it’s just so disheartening. Thank goodness I’m starting my IVF cycle, though – at least I really do believe that in two months I’ll be pregnant. Without that hope, that knowledge… I really think I would have simply dissolved in tears right there in the bar and asked Den to catch a ride home and left.

In any case, tomorrow is the conference. I’m super excited, but I’m also getting very twitchy. I don’t have a bag to take with me – I guess I’m going shopping in a few minutes to look for one. I have a big backpack, but they’re so bulky in crowds. I have a purse, but it’s hard to carry around. I want a hip-sling bag of some sort that I can keep with me at all times (since I can be rather, umm, absent-minded) but can carry any folders and stuff I want to take with me.

Due to me feeling a bit anxious I’m probably going to spend the night “preparing” for my trip…. getting info printed out and folders ready to go, a notebook for notes, etc. Deciding what to wear. Remind me never to throw my jeans in the dryer again… I can’t even put my socks on without unbuttoning them. Guh. Don’t know how comfortable it’s going to be wearing these for an entire day! But it’s not like I have a lot of options. :? Perhaps I’ll look for some new pants in addition to a bag.

Today has been not a great day in terms of my emotional stability. The last few days I’ve been so busy, so positive and upbeat. I was dead exhausted, but it was a good kind of exhaustion. Today I woke up from a long sleep (catching up on what I missed) to rain and a very dull mood. Trying to get caught up on bills just stressed me out. Then I found cat diarrhea on our new carpet and spent half an hour frantically trying to get the stain out. By the time Den showed up with take out for one – he had phoned several times to find out if I wanted something, but apparently I never heard the damn phone – I was about ready to cry. And for no good reason! I feel like if my body isn’t busy, then my mind is. I’m 99% sure today’s anxiety was thanks to the rain though. I swear, when we got that stretch of sunny, warm weather I felt like a different person. I was in a perpetual good mood. I wake up to rain and spend the day fending off tears for no reason. I just can’t see that as coincidence.

The conference is on sunday. I’m a little nervous about that… not in a bad way, but just in a typical doing something I’ve never done before kind of way. Injections start in one week, I’m also a little nervous about that. I have projects to work on and bills that need to get paid and the kitchen needs to get finished and I’m feeling overwhelmed. Where’s the “slow” button? I feel like pulling on the brakes to set everything in order. I’m one of those people who will spend 3 times as long getting something “properly organized” than it would to just do it in the first place. But when I’m feeling overwhelmed… that’s my first response… to “put things in order”. Even if it’s really quite meaningless. (I tend to make a lot of lists… categorize things… heck just writing them down helps me feel more in control of the situation. It means it’s less likely I’ll forget it.)

For a while now I’ve had this plan to go somewhere (Vermont…. ooo, so far away!) on our anniversary. Spend two nights in a B&B and just be alone and take in the sights and stuff. We budgetted $500 for it (but it’ll end up costing more, as we need to kennel the dogs, and that’s not cheap). Unfortunately now that it’s getting closer (our anniversary is in July) I’m thinking of majorly downsizing our “trip” into maybe just one night away in a cheapish hotel. Something “away”, but not so expensive. I want to put the money towards the baby… or home renos. :( Gosh things get expensive… everything does. I’m only working part-time. I need to be doing something more to bring in some more cash. The extra hours I put in this week earned me a little bonus, which is going to help us finish the kitchen up.

I just feel like we need to be doing more to prepare for a baby. We’re not pregnant NOW, but we’ve been hoping and trying to get pregnant. I know nature gives you 9 months to prepare, but in my crazy-arse brain that doesn’t seem nearly long enough to get everything ready on time.