Ticked Off and Triple Stripe

One more to-do ticked off the list. The mock cycle is complete, right on schedule.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me mention that my E2 blood work earlier this week came back way too low. The ginormous estrogen patches weren't having enough impact, so they added little blue estrogen tablets to my protocol (not to be taken orally) which had the unusual side effect of blue cervical mucus. Good times here in SlackieLand!

The emotional roller coaster evened out quite a bit with the decrease in the lu.pron dose and the addition of the estrogen, though the headaches continued undiminished. I was doing OK until Thursday when I had to increase the number of patches to four and ran out of unused belly real estate. These things are ridiculous! They are perfectly round and about three inches in diameter. As a result, I had to place them higher on my abdomen than I liked and BOY was that a miserable sensation! Every move I made caused the patches to pull and pucker and it was driving me batshit. There was an awful lot of pouting on the couch last night.

This morning was the Big Reveal - my appointment at the RE to check my lining and see how I responded to the mock protocol. When the nurse walked in and asked how things were going, I kind of exploded about the patches. Oops. I felt like she was humoring me a bit, but when I pulled up my shirt and showed her just how big these patches are... she agreed that they were ridiculous and suggested I request a smaller brand when I refill (which, you bet your boots I sure will).

The good news was that I managed to grow a lovely triple stripe lining just under 10mm, even with my earlier sub-par E2 levels. So the mock cycle was declared a success and the nurse let me pull off all my icky patches right then and there. YAY!!! In other way-to-start-the-weekend news, Prof's emergency swim team got an even better report than the crew he dropped off last year when we tried IVF for the first time with my eggs. Smiles all around!

So - the Plan is that I call the nurse coordinator when I start bleeding next week (uh.. didn't I just do that LAST week?) and she will present us with one or two donor profiles to review. I'll go back on BCP and stay on them until our donor starts stims. When the time comes for our real DEIVF cycle, I will start the estrogen patches and the little blue tablets at the same time. Otherwise, they are happy with my plan.

NOTE ABOUT PATCH ADHESIVE: There has been much commentary between here and Twitter regarding the removal of the patch adhesive. The ones I have are less sticky I guess, since after two days most of them started to release on their own even though they were meant to stay on four days. The silver lining is that my Purp.ose facial cleanser got all the sticky bits off with no scrubbing or struggle at all.