The Eternal Guest Room

OH. MY. GOSH. I have spent the last 48 hours in a state of severe panic, anxiety, and distress. I had myself completely convinced last night that we had missed it. I had no doubt in my mind that we’d have to wait another month. I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I spent pretty much the entire evening crying (I’m going to blame it on all the crazy hormones that were injected & pilled into my body).

This morning was totally stressful.

It’s not often that you get to go to a doctor’s appointment that includes peeing in a cup, getting a shot, having blood drawn, AND having an internal sonogram. Ugh.

The sonogram revealed that my uterine lining was a little thin – 5.5mm when it should be at least 7-9mm. I started to re-panic that it would be canceled.

It also showed my follicles – I had 3 on the right side that were 27, 16, and 14.5mm, and one on the left that was 14mm. They count anything at 15mm or above to be a potential egg-releaser. If you have more than 4 mature follicles, they’ll cancel the IUI because of the high risk of multiples. So those numbers were good. The 27mm one is super mature.

Then they made us wait in a room for over 10 minutes while the nurses decided our fate. I’m so glad Darek came with me – in the past I’ve gone to most of these appointments alone, and it adds to the stress and isolation. Not many guys go to these; last time I brought him along the nurses completely ignored him. Today they actually addressed him though. It’s so nice to have him there. Also, he helps me remember things.

Then we finally got the verdict: It’s happening!!

They have us scheduled for 9:45am tomorrow morning. Apparently things are moving along so quickly that they’re doing it asap. (So, I wasn’t completely crazy last night.) I’m incredibly relieved that it’s happening first thing in the morning; I may not make it through the day otherwise.

The nurse gave me the trigger shot and sent us on our way with all the necessary information and a “good luck!”

We’re so excited. This is our first real shot at this.

At 7:45 tomorrow morning, I go in to get my follicles looked at. They do a sonogram to see how many there are and what their sizes are. If there are the right amount and they’re the right size, they give you a HCG trigger shot to make you ovulate. If they’re not quite ready, the trigger is taken later. The IUI is usually scheduled about 36 hours after the trigger shot.

If there are too many mature follicles, they will cancel the cycle, because you don’t want to have 6 babies at once.

The goal of an IUI is to time things perfectly – to try to get the little guys right where they need to be as soon as the egg is released. It’s a matter of making sure everything happens when it’s supposed to happen, so that everything lines up and gives you the best possible chance.

Sometimes the timing is off, and it gets canceled. This has been worrying me for the past 2 days.

I have a bad feeling.

I hope I’m wrong.

We’re halfway though the shots: 2 down, 2 to go. I’m supposed to have the next one tomorrow and the last one on Friday. I’m a little worried though that Friday might be too late. I’m going to call the RE the minute they open in the morning to voice my concerns. I know their clock is 2 minutes ahead of my phone’s clock.

Yup, I go there a lot.

The shots really aren’t that bad. Still, I always get extremely nervous starting about 30 minutes before each one. I hate needles. I always freak out the person with the needle because they think I’m about to pass out, and then I have to explain that I’m just a big baby, please just get it over with. I hate needles.

It kind of weirds me out that this is in our house:

At the moment, I’m driving myself insane. I just might give myself a heart attack. I’m terrified that something’s going to happen to cancel the IUI.

We’ve waited so long for this.

Easter is one of those days that gets me down. It’s such a child-centric holiday. At least for Halloween and Christmas you can have grown-up parties – but who has Easter parties that don’t involve kids?

We didn’t even consider going to church today. I knew I couldn’t handle seeing all the cute little kids in their new easter outfits, and being surrounded by all those brand-new babies.

For a long time I had hoped (and even stupidly expected) that this easter would be a super happy easter…but it was just like the last two.

We did yard work this morning instead.

We’ve started the process for our IUI, and I’m going to try to explain it for those of you who might want to know and don’t really want to sift through the information on the internets. I’m not super good at explaining things, but I’ll do my best.

First of all, what the heck is an IUI? It stands for intrauterine insemination, which basically means they put the little guys directly into your uterus. Fun. And awkward…

There are several different ways you can do an IUI. The doctor actually gave us a choice between 2 different protocols (the last decision we were able to make, I believe) and we chose the one that had a lower risk of twins. Turns out it involves less shots too, so double bonus (well, if it works).

I start by taking a drug called Clomid for 5 days. Because I’m not good at explaining medical stuff, I’m just going to give you web md’s definition: “It works by stimulating an increase in the amount of hormones that support the growth and release of a mature egg.” Basically it makes you ovulate.

Two days after starting those, I start taking shots. The brand name I take is Gonal-F, and it’s FSH (human follicle stimulating hormone), which basically does what it says – stimulates your follicles. For those of you who had a shoddy sex-ed class like I did, follicles contain the eggs. So they’re pretty important. Normally only one follicle releases an egg, but when you start putting more FSH in your body you’re more likely to release multiple eggs. Hence the risk of twins.

I get an injection every other day for a week, starting today.

It comes in a nifty little pen. You take the top off and put on a needle. One day I might take a picture of the needle…but today, this is what you get.

To get through the shots, I keep my eyes shut and squeeze my little friend, the Flu.

I swing between excited and sad.

Fed Ex brought me a fun package yesterday:

Happy easter to me?

Last time we did an IUI we were very vague – to the point of evasive – about the details. No one really knew when or how things were happening. It was kind of lonely.

This time we’re potentially crossing into the Land of TMI to give you the details.

It feels really weird to talk about, especially when I’m not totally sure who’s in the audience, but I figure if you can just google it to learn what it is, I may as well just talk about it.

So be ready for that.

In the meantime….

We haven’t just been ordering pizzas and drinking wine for the past 3 months (though that sounded extremely appealing…). We’ve been trying to give ourselves an extra boost by eating the right foods. Fish, fruits, veggies, whole grains, sunflower seeds, etc. Darek has been eating vegetables like they’re going out of style. He takes a huge container of them to work every day. I know there are a lot of guys his age whose food tastes haven’t matured past the age of 10, so I’m pretty impressed.

Of course, all the dietary changes in the world won’t fix serious problems, but we figure it can’t hurt, and may even help us out a little.

We spent a Saturday in January reading through a really great book titled “Making Babies.” It had a lot of great stuff and I’d highly recommend it to anyone dealing with IF.

The book said that oranges help fertility and prevent early miscarriages, but I think I may have bought too many at once:

Since that photo, I’ve eaten all of those and bought another box. If I never eat another orange, clementine, tangelo, etc. again, I think I’ll be ok with that.

Darek’s also been doing acupuncture, but if you want those details you’ll have to ask him about that. I’m not super sure what’s going on with that.