Well, I bit the bullet and ordered some mama pads. I had a hard time finding the ones I wanted (I can’t find Threaded Branch ones sold anywhere except DiaperWare which has only one pattern!), so I ended up ordering only 1 Happy Heinys (sage), 3 WAHMarama AIOz (lavendar), and 4 WAHMarama liners (natural and pastel). I’ll need more, obviously, but I just want to test them and see.

Of course I had to go and do this just after I stocked up on disposable pads, but I’ll need them for this cycle anyways, and for during my “testing” period.

I didn’t order a DivaCup yet. I want to, but… eh. Another $32 on top of the mama pads, plus I think if I end up getting pregnant I won’t be able to use it afterwards (they come in two sizes – before childbirth, and after).

I’m looking forward to having cotton between my legs instead of annoying, annoying disposable crap. I’ve tried so many brands and of course the only brand of disposables I loved I can’t find down here in the states.

Earlier today I placed my order for some cloth menstrual pads through Cottontail Baby. I just got an email from Stamps.com saying that my order has been shipped. :shock: Wow! Maybe they will get here in time for this cycle. That would be nice!

Tonight we went out to see a band play… a small, new, local band that one of Den’s brothers is in. While we were there the brother’s girlfriend (who is almost certainly going to become my SIL one day) came over to say hi to me. She says, all hopeful-looking, “Are you pregnant??” Then asked how things were going with our treatment when I gave a negative. Last time I saw her was months ago, and I had told her about our troubles and our plan at that time to do injectibles next. She had told me that her sister was going through the same thing, and doing injectibles too. So today she tells me that her sister did get pregnant during treatment, her second injectibles cycle. I actually felt really good to hear that. It’s a relief to hear of another infertile getting lucky.

We weren’t able to talk too long over the loud music, but it was nice for that brief moment to have someone basically say, I know what you’re going through, and it sucks. I’m not going to debate with you or give you advice. I wish the best for you, and know it will work out in the end.

Blood people – we have blood! Got up this morning at 6am to drive Den into work and found… absolutely nothing. I was pissed! Took a nap when I got home. When I woke up, nothing. Sat at the computer for a little bit. Stomach got queasy. Went to the bathroom and there she was! AF has finally arrived!

I’m not going to call the clinic right this second though… I’m going to wait a few hours to make sure she’s not playing another trick on me. But for right now I’m calling this CD1. :cheer:

Let the IVF cycle begin!!

I did end up calling the nurses today. When I started getting nausea/cramps I figured it really was the real thing, so I called and let them know.

I got a call back from one of the nurses after we got home from work. She said she didn’t have my chart (it was in the other building) but just confirmed with me that I was doing BCP/Lupron, that I’d taken the protocol class already with the nurses, went over a few dates with me (I’ll start lupron injects on May 3rd, and take my last BCP on the 6th), and said they’ll get my meds ordered tomorrow soon as they get my chart from the other building. I also mentioned to her that in the class we were taught with gonal-f, but that the other nurse had said they’d order follistim or gonal-f, whichever was cheaper. So hopefully that’ll work out well for us. I also asked her when to bring in the signed consent forms, she said I can bring them to my baseline scan (which will be during my next period after I’ve started the lupron). All well and good then.

So there you go, my IVF cycle has been put into motion. I get 18 days of nothing except the birth control pill now, so it’s not like it all starts at once. But just setting it all in motion… it’s a little bit surreal.

There was a tiny part of me that thought maybe I was pregnant. After my lap, endo removed, that little part of me held out hope. But I guess that’s just not meant to be.

Oh – I also got my book in the mail. Last week in a fit of some frustration I ordered a book off of my wishlist through Amazon’s Marketplace. (Shopping, even of the internet variety, is a perfectly reasonable way of dealing with frustration… right?) I got How To Get Pregnant by Dr. Sherman Silber. It’s the last infertility book that’s on my to-get list. The rest of my books are all about pregnancy or babies. And while I’m feeling really hopeful at this stage, I didn’t feel quite ready to buy one of those.

This book I think I could definitely have gone without. I’m quite disappointed. Unfortunately most of the book deals with advanced maternal age/ovarian failure (or at least egg quality declining). Which to me is pretty useless, since I am early-20’s and my eggs have passed every test so far except IVF – even the test that Dr. Silber recommends, which is the antral follicle count. So unfortunately a lot of the book could be really great information but is useless to me.

There were a couple of facts that I bookmarked.

First, within the first paragraph of the book, he states some statistics about infertility rates. It’s all relating back to his whole “older is worse” topic, but at least he mentions my age-group.

It’s always nice to hear that I’m one of a select 2 percent. I’m special, I guess.

The next thing I bookmarked talked about egg retrieval rate corresponding with pregnancy rates in IVF. For women under 30 if fewer than 10 eggs were retrieved the pregnancy rate was 50%. If 10 or more eggs were retrieved the pregnancy rate jumps to 66%. Of course for older patients the pregnancy rate significantly declines if there are less than 10 eggs – but regardless of age if 10 or more eggs were retrieved the pregnancy rate remains nearly 50%! Even in the “over 40 years old” group.

This was Silber’s entire point of the book – that while maternal age is a pretty good indication of declining fertility, the only way to tell where a specific patient is sitting in terms of their fertility is looking at their antral follicle count (which directly correlates to the number of eggs retrieved). That part of the book was a good read, and something I didn’t know. Every day in a woman’s body a group of eggs starts growing into antral follicles. When they hit a certain size (antral follicle size) then they are in the “pool” to be selected by the next cycle. Normally of course only one egg is selected to be the chosen one; the rest die. But from what Silber says it’s a different group of antral follicles every day… every day 30 (or however many) eggs grow to size and then die. Every single day of your life. and only on that one lucky day at the start of your cycle does one of that day’s group get selected. This is how we lose so many eggs over the course of our lifetime. So next time you get an ultrasound when you’re not stimming or ovulating? That’s what the antral follicle count is – how many eggs are in that “pool”… which indicates how fertile you are. (Small number of eggs is a significant sign of declining fertility and decreased chances for pregnancy, according to Dr. Silber.)

Another part I bookmarked was the section in the IVF chapter entitled Rationale for Doing IVF Sooner in All Cases of Infertility. This is the other of Silber’s main points in his book: he fully advocates skipping all the testing, all the clomid, all the IUIs, and moving straight to IVF. I do think he mentions that in the case where a woman isn’t ovulating it makes sense to first get her to ovulate, but in cases of unexplained? His point is exactly what our reasoning was – it appears everything is working fine, you have an egg released every month, and no one knows what exactly is going wrong along the way. So instead of taking shot after shot in the dark, both wasting money and creating a lot of demoralization in the couple, he suggests going straight to IVF and getting pregnant right off the bat. IVF bypasses almost every problem along the way, so it can solve pretty much every fertility problem. Plus of course he says in the cases where women are older and their fertility is declining rapidly wasting time with testing and lesser methods may mean that by the time the couple get to IVF as an option it’s too late, her eggs are already too few.

Another point he makes in the book was ranting a bit about endometriosis and laparoscopic surgery. He claimed that – at least in previous years – it was “popular” to do laps and give diagnoses of “minimal endometriosis.” His suggestion was that doctors feel better giving some sort of diagnosis, plus that insurance is much more willing to pay for these surgeries if something is actually found. So yes, he suggests that a lot of of the “minimal endo” are basically a crock. Which made me feel pretty crappy. There is a part of me that feels in agreement however, because even when talking to my doctor about my “minimal endo” it was clear there were only a couple of tiny spots. And quite obviously lasering them has had NO effect on my menstrual pain and nausea. Den’s point was that at least we know it’s not worse, which is of course why I did it in the first place – and my doctor was not the one requesting the surgery, it was all me, so I certainly can’t say that she’s one of the doctors who are “pushing” for laparoscopies! She was very clear that if I had minimal endo it probably wouldn’t make a difference to our fertility one way or the other.

Edited:

I’ve been reading more of the book and had to come update my opinions here. It’s true that a lot of the book is not applicable to me… but I’m starting to “feel” it more. He has a whole chapter on emotions and relaxation. Thankfully he does make the point that for any doctor to tell your patient to relax (or anyone tell tell you to relax!) does absolutely nothing but stress the person out more. He says specifically, “Reassurance that is not evidence based only increases a couple’s anxiety.” Which I think we would all agree with. He also talks about how much of the anxiety and stress that infertile couples deal with is directly caused by the infertility – not the other way around.

And I’m glad he starts out the chapter that way, because it put me in a good, open-minded mood. From there he talks about IVF success rates with calm, relaxed patients and stressed out anxious patients. And I’m inclined to listen. I mean I’m never going to be able to not worry at all through this process – but I’ll obviously do everything I can, including trying my utmost best to relax throughout the transfer process. I might even schedule a massage around that time – I’m sure Den would say it would be money well spent. Dr. Silber talks about vibrations/contractions of the uterus of anxious women and how any disturbance is bad. He says his clinic only uses very soft catheters so as not to unintentionally irritate anything.

So I guess I can’t say this book has been completely useless. I’m not 100% sold on it, but it’s an interesting point of view for sure. I do wish I’d read it a couple of months ago though – I might have made a different choice regarding the lap. Oh well, that’s done, and I suffered no ill-effects from it.

One thing it has definitely helped me with is choosing which workshops to go to at the AFA conference. I am not going to go to the endometriosis panel, given my extremely minimal situation. And I am going to go to the panel on relaxation and stress.

Today my cloth pads were delivered!! The Happy Heiny looks really nice, I want to try that one out. But instead I brought my WAHM ones to work. They’re not as exciting to me. The reason I got them is that they come as liners as well, the HH don’t. But there’s no PUL backing so I think on my heavy days it would leak right through. :( I wanna buy more HH ones now… normal and overnight size.

I need to get to bed, but I want to write first.

I am known as a pretty lazy person, in general. It’s well known that I love my sleep. I need I’d say at least 8 hours of sleep a day, and wish I had more. (Not to say I always get 8 hours – some days I function on 3, then sleep for 11 hours the next night. Not real healthy, but life is annoying.) I also tend to get very cranky if interrupted from sleep. Den has given up trying to wake me up and get me out of bed because I can get quite vicious. (Do not EVER pull the covers off me in an attempt to get me out of bed. I will take your head off. I need to be seduced into waking up.)

Because of all this I have a lot of relatives who roll their eyes and shake their head at me wanting to have a baby. I’m pretty sure a lot of them think I’m going to fall to pieces and be a royal screw-up.

But it’s different. I don’t know why people can’t see the difference. Getting up in order to scrub the toilet and finish a couple of projects – not so encouraging. Getting up because your baby needs to be changed and fed, totally different. I embrace that role. I will go on 2 hours of sleep a night if I have to. And I can’t say I’ll love every minute of it, and I’ll probably be cranky and sleep-deprived, but I know I will do what I need to do, and do it lovingly for my baby.

In my lifetime I’ve raised two puppies. My first one was when I was 13 years old. She was 100% my responsibility, she slept in her crate right beside my bed. She was 7 weeks old when I got her. And every single night for many months she woke me up at least once, sometimes twice, to go out. I was a young teenager, I absolutely abhorred mornings (my mom actually took to flicking water on me in order to get my ass out of bed – well, guess I haven’t changed much). But middle of the night when I’d hear my pup cry I would jump out of bed and rush her outside. Even if I was pretty much asleep on my feet. My second pup, Zoe, was older when I got her (4 months) and didn’t have mid-night potty breaks, however at 7am on the dot when she woke up she needed to be outside in less than 30 seconds or she would pee all over the bed. Those were fun mornings, yes indeed.

That’s how I know what kind of mother I will be. I thrive in the role. When you are the caretaker of a small being that depends on you everything changes. That’s what I want so badly. Even if it comes with only 2 hours of sleep a night.

I was talking with someone today about all sorts of topics. In reference to another topic she was talking about I mentioned people who get pregnant with high-order multiples (mentioning specifically quintuplets and sextuplets), and how there’s a choice to keep all of them knowing that the risks of severe problems including losing the whole pregnancy, or to reduce to two or three. (I swear the topic really was related to what she was talking about.)

First thing she said was that you don’t hear of that happening very often (losing some or the entire pregnancy, or severe mental retardation in some of them), which made me o.O for a minute. I realized that the success stories are so newsworthy that normal people really don’t get a sense of how dangerous higher-order multiples really are. A few cases of mostly-healthy sextuplets (the new show Jon and Kate Plus 8 comes to mind – though one of the two year olds has to wear glasses; the other set of sextuplets on TV, the ones who are teenagers now, one of the boys was “legally blind” though everyone was otherwise healthy) does not a general population make. This is not to say that people shouldn’t keep higher-order multiples if that’s what they believe in and they’re willing to take on the risks, but to claim that there’s little to no risk is flatly false.

The other thing she said was, “Oh, you mean like when they take fertility drugs? I think that’s wrong. It’s messing with nature.” After that I wisely did not mention us doing IVF.

This person is actually aware that my husband and I want kids and are having problems having them, though she may have forgotten. And when that came up in a round-about way last time I saw her months ago she waved it off with a, “Oh, kids are such a hassle anyways. Enjoy not having any! Just relax. You’re too young to worry about it!”

Why do people insist on having opinions on things they know nothing about?

On the other side of the coin, I got an email from an old college friend that I haven’t talked to in some time. She told me what was happening in her life and asked me how things were going. I mentioned the house, the job, this and that, and told her a bit offhand that we were trying to have a baby but are having problems and are now doing IVF.

This friend of mine, she had the most beautiful reply ever. She said that she’s sure I’ve done a ton of research and no far more than she ever could about the subject so she wasn’t going to try giving advice. She said she actually reads A Little Pregnant (which I do too – and by the way, her last entry has me nearly peeing myself laughing) and that she’s aware of how horrible it is to deal with infertility and have to put yourself through IVF and everything. She added that she knows never to give “assvice”, so that all she’s going to say is that it really sucks that I’m having to deal with it and hopes that everything works out for us.

That email just made me feel so good. I mean, first off she knew what IVF was and I didn’t have to explain it – she knew how horribly heart-wrenching and overwhelming this is. From reading someone’s blog she’s gained a whole new way of seeing things that otherwise she may not have known anything about. This is why it’s so important that us infertiles keep blogging, keep talking. We may not know whose lives we touch, but someday, somewhere, that person may run into another infertile and have the insight and compassion to just say, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

They estimate that 10% of the population is dealing with infertility. The other 90% will someday hopefully realize it.

Nothing much happening of note, lately. Just taking my birth control pills nightly (along with my meds and pre-natal) and chugging along with life. Hubby and I are doing a major home reno right now, which is pretty energy-sapping. We’re doing a complete kitchen redo, and we did some to our breezeway as well. The breezeway at least ties into the baby plans… that will be Den’s future office, the baby gets his old office. So I’m feeling REALLY glad that it has been started. The kitchen is not baby-necessary, but it sure does feel good to finally be getting rid of all our old shit…. new floor, new countertop, new paint! It’ll be an all new kitchen. Score!

So that’s all for now. Another week and a few days before my first injection. I’ll start worrying about that closer to the time. ;)

For now it’s back to work… much more to do before I get to go home. :(

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.