The Eternal Guest Room

My ovaries are overachievers.

(Ovariechievers?)

Fortunately they didn’t release any eggs yet, but it’s only day 8 and I have 2 big follies – one is 24mm and the other is 26mm. That’s kinda big – I think they only need to be around 18mm to trigger.

The sonogram lady was finally back from vacation, which made me happy, but she couldn’t see much on the left side so I kept having to put pressure on various places on my stomach to try to get my intestines out of the way and it hurt. So it ended up being a very unpleasant sonogram anyway.

My lining was at 13mm (!!) which made me happy, since it was only 5.5mm at this point last time. They like it to be at least 7mm. I don’t know if it was just the lack of clomid or if those red raspberry leaf capsules actually did what they were supposed to, but whatever it was, it worked.

The nurse I don’t like took my blood and gave me the trigger shot. When I closed my eyes for the shot she said “Come on, have I ever hurt you before?” and I was thisclose to saying, “Yeah, last time you gave me a 3-inch dark-purple bruise that hurt like a bitch” but I didn’t. You really want to be on the nurses’ good sides. She’s the nurse that always makes me bleed and bruise and be in pain and I really don’t want her to dislike me.

I’m all triggered up. The trigger shot makes your follicles release the egg(s) about 36 hours later.

The IUI is scheduled for tomorrow and I can finally breathe. I was so worried it would be canceled. They require such precise timing it’s just insane.

This has to be the one.

In fact I have a pretty good feeling it will be, because if it works it will seriously complicate some things next spring. That’s how it goes, right?

Please please please…

This morning’s sonogram yielded good news and bad news – things are progressing correctly, but too quickly. We might miss it.

I have 2 mature follicles on one side that are pretty much ready to go, but it’s too early in the cycle to actually do an IUI. I’ll take one more injection of the regular dose (75mg), then tomorrow evening I’ll have a half dose (37.5mg) and go back in for another sonogram on Thursday to see how things are.

By then it may be too late, but we won’t know until then.

So frustrating.

We were in and out of the RE’s office in 17 minutes this morning – I’m pretty sure that’s a record.

We hadn’t been in what feels like forever – 3 months. It was weirdly comforting to be back.

I wasn’t happy at all to learn that the sonogram lady was on vacation, which meant that the doctor himself did the sonogram. It’s bad enough without having the male doctor do it; I’ll spare you the details, but it’s invasive. Not one of those happy gel-on-the-tummy ultrasounds like pregnant women have. Nope.

It was quick, though. The shortest sonogram I’ve ever had, for sure. There were a few cysts, but just the small blood-filled kind that everyone has. Lovely, right?

I start injections tonight and have one every evening until I go in for a sonogram on Tuesday. At that point they look to see how things are progressing, and then we go from there. He said the IUI would most likely be earlier than the last ones, which were around day 12. That puts us right around next weekend sometime, as long as everything works like it’s supposed to. Fortunately I had the foresight to keep both of these weekends free – it’s like I’m catching on to this stuff.

We’ll keep you posted.

I never say that things can’t get worse – because I know that no matter how bad things are, they can always, always get worse.

Friday afternoon the nurse called me back to tell me that the RE wants us to skip a month. The clomid made my lining too thin so they want to give it an extra month to get back to normal. As if that weren’t upsetting enough, the following month we’ll be out of town during the entire week that everything would need to happen. So our next chance won’t be until the end of June.

The end of June is forever away. I can’t believe it. I feel like this will never end.

I know that 2 months seems like nothing. And really, I know it is. But it doesn’t feel like it, at all. It feels like ages and ages away. It feels like the unattainable future. It feels like forever.

I believe that miracles happen. But not for me.

If I could assign just one adjective to describe an IUI, it would probably be “surreal.”

It’s truly bizarre.

This is the TMI post. Consider yourselves warned.

First the “sample” is delivered to the special office behind the main office, where they “wash” the little guys to weed out the bad ones. You don’t want to put the abnormally shaped and slow ones in there, so they only use the good ones. Then we go back about an hour later to do the procedure.

Going to the RE’s office on Saturday was really weird. We were the only ones there. Between that and being so familiar with the place, I actually threw my sweater across the waiting room to Darek while I was heading off to the bathroom.We didn’t even have to wait; they were ready for us. The office isn’t actually open on Saturdays, but if that’s the day your IUI or sonogram falls on, that’s the day they do it.

They brought us back to a room, where I got ready. The doctor came in to go over the numbers with us, which were pretty good – and definitely much better than last time (yay!!). The IUI itself takes just a couple of minutes. They put the spermies in a catheter and inject them directly into the uterus.

Imagine yourself in a room with a doctor, nurse, and your husband – and this is happening.

Bizarre-o, right?

We feel pretty hopeful. Not counting on this one working, but hoping it does. The doctor said we can do one more round, and if both fail, we move onto something else. Not sure what that is, and hopefully we won’t have to find out.

Now we just wait.