Uncharted Territory

We had our first ultrasound late last week. One little inhabitant with a heartbeat, measuring exactly on target. This is a first in our four year journey. There were more than two people with tears in their eyes at the clinic that morning. I swear the nurses came out of the woodwork to congratulate us. It was so very sweet.

I have to admit, it was just a little bittersweet to see that there was only one. We will not be doing another cycle for any reason. We are done, and there are no freezer babies. If this little one makes it, he/she will be an only child. It's hard to explain... we are both only children and I think we are feeling the pressure as our parents begin to age. I suppose a sibling is no guarantee of shared burden or support, but it just seems like it would be nice to have one.

I had blood work done as well and they are beginning to wean me off some of my meds already. I will have one more blood draw in two weeks to determine the next dosage reduction and will be off all meds entirely sometime between Christmas and New Year's. SO SOON!

As my midwife requested, I sent her an email after the scan to let her know the details. She was also very excited and told me to go ahead and call for an appointment. Sadly, I will not be having another scan, probably until the NT scan with my midwife in January (I think).

Results Are In (or Holy Shit! I'm Actually Pregnant!)

There you have it!

12dpD3t - BETA#1 (106)
14dpD3t - BETA#2 (272) YAY!!!!!! More than double in 48 hours. I'm finally starting to think this might just be OK. Definite improvement over my only other BFP ever, at any rate.

That first beta saw the fastest blood results ever at one hour and ten minutes from draw to call. The blood processing lady was actually standing at the door while the tech drew my blood and whisked it away for immediate processing. One hour and ten minutes later and my RE called personally. He gave us a due date at the end of July and told me to stay on all my meds and go for my second beta in 48 hours. The really funny thing was that the nurse called three hours later to give me my numbers. She had no idea my RE had snapped up my results and called me personally.

I will admit to being somewhat in shock. And still half convinced that it will all go wrong somewhere. But RIGHT NOW... I am pregnant.

Just the Facts (UPDATED)

After a certain amount of drama resulting from storm-related issues, our donor took her trigger shot and our retrieval is done!* My original medication calendar has been revised so many times that they had to write me a new one from scratch. It has been... a roller coaster of a week, but for the moment there is hope.

Prof went by himself to drop off the swim team (a first in our ART adventures). Afterwards, he said the crowd in the waiting room was particularly bizarre. So bizarre that he thought perhaps someone slipped some LSD in his coffee.

The nurse called a few hours post-retrieval to let us know that we got eleven eggs. They will do ICSI on half and let the rest fertilize naturally (or as naturally as possible when floating in a petri dish). Don't ask me how they "half" an odd number of eggs...

Welcome to my sci-fi life.

UPDATED:
Nine of the eleven eggs were mature.
Eight fertilized.
We are scheduled for a Day3 transfer.


*You wouldn't believe the amount of tension and relief deceptively encapsulated in that single sentence. Really, I should get some kind of award for understatement there.

Without A Doubt

I've been taking my DHEA for over a week now. The warnings on the bottle are a little alarming. There is even one that warns against use by women of childbearing age... which was, as I'm sure you can imagine, a little confusing. I had a persistent headache for the first five days or so, but that has abated now, thank goodness. I have also had VERY vivid dreams, just before waking, every day since I started taking the DHEA. Not nightmares or sexy dreams, just weird nonsense dreams that I remember clearly after waking (which is unusual for me).

I did a little online research and read some promising things about this treatment. Things that actually gave me hope. I almost wish I hadn't. Because as much as DHEA appears to increase the odds of a successful pregnancy in circumstances like mine, we all know there are NEVER any guarantees are there? There will always be someone for whom things just don't work out. If that's going to be me, it would be so much easier to go into it without much hope. I'd rather not have to deal with the crash. I wish there was some way to know in advance if I will be one of the lucky women for whom DHEA is the answer.

Our local S*bux has a Magic Eight-Ball on the pick-up counter. We stopped in on our way home this evening, and of course I just had to go there. The answer:

Without a doubt.

All the Cool Kids Have One

Happy NIAW!

My sweet friend Jen over at This Is More Personal is doing a fundraiser for Resolve in honor of NIAW. Go check it out and pick a little #hope for yourself!

Siren Song of a Seed Packet

The ground is still covered with a light blanket of snow. The temperatures have been topping out in the low 30's. I hate working out in the yard at any time of year.

And yet.

With the imminent change of seasons, out come the display racks filled with colorful seed packets. And I can never resist. Last year it was parsley. This year, I bought cilantro seeds because I always resent buying the huge bunches in the produce section at the grocery (seriously, who needs that much cilantro?). Whether or not I will actually PLANT the seeds is another question entirely. But I just couldn't resist the little yellow envelope. I never can.

Hope springs eternal in almost every aspect of my life. I cannot for the life of me fathom how or why.

All Quiet on the Uterine Front

The final IUI is done and I am in the two week wait. Everything went well. There is no obvious reason for it not to have worked. But then, there has been no obvious reason for any of the treatments failing over the past year plus. We did what we could and now we wait.

I am slightly less hopeful with each failed cycle, but not running on empty just yet. I'm still in a pretty peaceful place and I hope I get to stay there if this cycle doesn't pan out.

Funny story: The morning of the IUI, I went in with Professor to help him out in the collection room. As I always do. Keep in mind, nobody ever offered this as an option and I never asked permission. I've always just followed him in. So this time, we get into the room and he's kinda giggling. I asked him why and he tells me the new lady at the desk gave me quite the funny look when I followed him in this time. Guess I took her by surprise. Heh. God I really hope we're the talk of the staff meetings....

The POAS Test

I seem to be running up against my first series of tests in the Year of Letting Go. Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my miscarriage. I was pleasantly surprised to be totally OK with the anniversary. And admittedly a little surprised not to be more hopeful about my late period.

Yep. According to my iPhone app, my period is three days late. I didn't bother to track this cycle, so I have no idea when I ovulated, but my iPhone has yet to be wrong about CD1. I hesitated to POAS because I don't have any symptoms (of pregnancy or impending period) and I really didn't want to do anything to disturb the peace.

But.

There was ONE stick in the house, and there's always a chance... always a little hope, right? So yesterday, on CD28 (MysteryDPO), I peed on a stick. And the stick said No. Actually, the stick said "Not Pregnant" because the only one in the house was one of those fancy digital ones, but you get my drift.

Amazingly, I passed the POAS test as well.

BFN but the Peace reigns undisturbed.

Peace Be On This Place

50,000 internetz to the first reader to peg that reference...
(HINT: teen fiction)

I don't know how it happened, or why, or to be honest, even when. All I know is that I am suddenly so completely at peace with all of this IF business. I declared 2011 to be the Year of Letting Go. There was Runny Yolk's post that inspired me to confess my Secret Fears and all of your lovely responses to that confession. Thank you so much for those comments! Y'all make this road so much less lonely and you are the reason I keep coming here. Then Jess said this in a post on her blog:

... a child should be icing on the cake, not the cake itself.

What a fabulous reminder of the whole reason the Professor and I waited so long to toss the birth control in the first place. We've had a few really good, clear-the-air type talks lately and I've just been feeling so at peace. It's been coming on for a while now. I'm reaching a point where I'm getting a feeling of closure. Maybe it's that we've been ticking options off our treatment list so steadily. Maybe it's that I'm feeling my age. Maybe it's getting to know ourselves so very well through this process. I wish I could share a map to help anyone who needs to find this peaceful place, but I just sort of woke up here.

We've given this baby making thing our all, and we aren't finished yet. Yes, we still have one IUI left, and then a round of IVF (and depending on the results of that, any FETs we might be so lucky to squeeze out). Really, quite a long way to go yet! But I sense that the time is coming when I will be ready to call it quits. I won't be one of those women who appear to have bottomless reserves of both strength and funding to continue IVF time and again. We will only have the money to do one fresh cycle. IF we get anything to freeze (BIG IF), we might be able to scrape together enough for FET.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I feel hopeful, because what I really am is realistic. One of our last attempts might work. Or none of them might work. We will do everything we can, and that will have to be enough. And whatever the outcome of these next cycles, we will be OK.

I haven't lost hope. I've just let it go.

Please let this feeling stick around.

Happy-Hopeful Blog Award

Yet another TAG - You're IT out of BlogWorld! Big thanks to SoCalled(TTC)Life and thisispersonal who both tagged me for the Happy-Hopeful Blog. I suspect this award is intended to be bestowed upon someone who is perhaps in need of a reason to focus on Happy and Hopeful thoughts. That would certainly be me.

HAPPY

I'm going to refrain from using the most obvious (if accurate) answers: my darling Professor, my adorable furbabies, my recently paid off car. Instead it's something much more momentary and fleeting. I get the most amazing sense of lightness and peace on crisp Fall days with weather like today. There is something awe inspiring about the quality of the light as the sun strikes the changing colors of the leaves on the trees against the backdrop of dark storm clouds on the horizon. The sight never fails to stop me in my tracks and make me think "I am alive and THIS is beautiful".

HOPEFUL

I have to admit, moments of happiness are somewhat easier to come by than moments of hopefulness. Oddly enough, that is exactly what is giving me hope right now. Hope, and dare I say confidence, that however our IF journey plays out, the Professor and I will still have an abundance of reasons to be happy. I don't really have much hope at the moment that we will be able to successfully bring our own offspring into our lives. But I have every hope that we will be able to live happily either way.

I'm tagging the following players for Team #Hope:


The Fertilely-Challenged Black Sheep
NoBabyRuth
Gurlee at Infertility Musings
LowFatLady
GaijinHousewife

Thou Shalt Not Covet (Except I Did)

Maybe five years ago, I saw a woman in the bookstore carrying her baby in the coolest, most beautiful sling. At that point, I had never seen anyone use a sling before. Not only did the concept seem so logical, the fabric was unbelievably lovely. I actually stopped a stranger in a store to ask where she'd bought something.

She told me it was a Hotsling, so I went online and drooled. I wanted one so badly (and we weren't even trying yet) that I went ahead and ordered one for a friend who was expecting. And of course, since I was already ordering, it only made sense that I should be fiscally responsible and order one for myself as well. To save on shipping. Right? And of course, the one I liked was in the "Discontinued - Sale" section, so it was deeply discounted and I might never see it again...

So I have this beautiful sling hidden in the back of my bottom dresser drawer. I used to run across it every now and then and look at it and dream. After a time, I pushed it further back in the drawer and piled stuff on top so I don't do that anymore, but it's still there waiting. I know I'm not alone here. I know some of you have done it too. What baby item did you see before you got your positive (or before you were even TTC), and decide you just had to have? Include a link if you can!

Chemistry Lesson (Learning Mine)

As I said to one of my tweeps after the first couple of injections were done, I'm feeling like the change of protocol has given me a renewed sense of energy and hope. 

I was feeling really worn down by the repetition of the same protocol. After month upon month of Crazy Pills and IUIs followed promptly (or rather, after every interminable 2WW) by BFNs, I had reached a point where I ceased to believe that what we were doing was ever going to work. Perhaps somewhat extreme and melodramatic, but I felt it in my soul. In spite of the dubious success of our first medicated cycle, and my RE's insistence that this would work for us again, I had no hope, even though the Professor and my RE did. Thus the "resting" cycle last month, and the consultation resulting in the change of protocol.

One of the few memories I have of my high school chemistry teacher (I wasn't the BEST science student) is of him explaining that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing, repeating the exact same procedure over and over again and yet expecting to get different results.

TMI alert:

The resting cycle was actually restful. Yes, I used an OPK and we did our best to follow up on the positive reading. Yes, I broke down and used the progesterone through my luteal phase, just in case. But I didn't believe it would work. And my poor Confuterus displayed some of the most bizarre behavior I've seen since stopping the birth control pills over a year and a half ago. For the first time in my life, I had ovulation spotting. Mildly alarming, but proclaimed to be "nothing to be concerned about" by the nurse when I called in about it. Then I started spotting again only 9dpo, and saw bright red blood at 10dpo. Assuming a resounding luteal phase failure, I called into the RE to report CD1 and scheduled my baseline. And immediately stopped bleeding. Too late to cancel the baseline, so I went in anyways. The ultrasound showed a still active corpus luteum* and bloodwork indicated declining progesterone. The nurse predicted my period would be only a few days out. Spotting resumed later that day and continued until 15dpo, which ended by becoming CD1. Repeat baseline on CD3 cleared us to start injections that very evening.

Chemistry lesson: my reproductive bits don't function properly without benefit of modern science.

Lesson learned.

The odd thing is, this undeniable feeling of hope doesn't seem to apply to this particular cycle. I've grown so accustomed to lack of results, that I don't feel like this is quite "my turn". It feels more like a practice run. So I'm just focusing on getting comfortable with the protocol, working up the nerve to do the injections myself and gathering information about how my body responds to these drugs. I'm just glad to feel like there are still options, and that eventually something WILL work.

*Side Note: As a result of our recent Potter-thon, I kept referring to it as "Corpius Luteum" like it was some kind of magical incantation to increase progesterone levels. Unfortunately, now I can't STOP calling it that!

Quote, Un-Quote

My favorite quote since the age of about 12 is really a very short poem, by the amazing Shel Silverstein:

Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. 
Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. 
Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... 
Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

Keeping Hope (and House Plant) Alive

So I have this plant, this very sad plant. I have no idea what kind of plant this is, aside from House Plant. It is the only plant we have inside our home. It was given to us as a housewarming gift by someone who had no idea what a danger I am to green and growing things.*

For the last year, this poor plant has been hanging on by a thread (kind of like me). It looks so pathetic that I actually quit watering it, hoping it would just go ahead and die so I could empty the pot and move on to killing other plants outside. I sometimes wonder if the Professor has been watering it behind my back (though to be fair, I have not expressly forbidden this), because the damn thing simply will not die. It now consists of two stalks bearing a total of three leaves. But it is still green, still alive.

I found myself contemplating this poor little thing the other night, and my thoughts kept jumping from the plant to my infertility and our repeated failed cycles and back to the plant again. I kind of feel like my motivation and hopes in our struggle to conceive are reflected in this indomitable little mess of a plant. Every time a leaf turns brown and dries up, I pick it off only to see a new leaf break out of the top of the stalk. There are always just enough leaves for the little plant to look alive. And cycle after failed cycle, we pick ourselves up, revise our strategy with just enough hope to make another attempt at beating infertility. I've certainly received more love and better care than Plant, and while neither the plant nor I have actually seen much improvement, we both keep pushing forward.

I'm thinking of giving it a name and some water. Maybe some fresh soil. But if I start taking care of it and it dies, what will that mean for me?

*Note to self: Don't forget to go out and be dangerous to the green and growing weeds in the front yard ASAP!