Chugging along on that Lupron train...

It's been a while since I've posted an update! I guess I've run out of interesting things to say for the time being. Anyway, I started my Lupron injections on Monday night so I'm officially on day 3 of those and so far so good! I haven't experienced any of those nasty side effects that I've heard so much about...yet. Hmmm, must go find some wood to knock on. In other news, I only have 4 more days of BCP! Yippee! Things are finally starting to happen!

So, this has been a pretty boring week around the R household. Brad is currently on a whirlwind tour of Europe for work. When it's all said and done, he will have officially visited 4 countries in 4 days - whew! Dexter and I are very much looking foward to his return on Friday! Well, I am, not so sure about Dex, he really enjoys his mommy and me time :-).

That's about all that is new with me! Pretty boring post, huh?

Sunday's Sermon

A friend of mine sent me this e-mail today and I thought it was too funny not to share - Thanks Stacy!

Sunday's sermon was, "Forgive Your Enemies"

Toward the end of the service, the Minister asked, "How many of you have forgiven your enemies?" 80% held up their hands. The Minister then repeated his question. All responded this time, except one small elderly lady.

"Mrs. Jones? Are you not willing to forgive your enemies?"

"I don't have any." She replied, smiling sweetly.

"Mrs. Jones, that is very unusual. How old are you?"

"Ninety-eight." she replied.

"Oh Mrs. Jones, would you please come down in front & tell us all how a person can live ninety-eight years & not have an enemy in the
world?"

The little sweetheart of a lady tottered down the aisle, faced the congregation, and said:

"I outlived the bitches."

Is this a sign that I should have become a pharmacist?

My meds arrived today! I had to document this because it was so impressive. You're looking at approximately $3,000 worth of medication here, but fortunately, our insurance covers fertility meds so we only had to pay $150 - woohoo! I am very grateful to have any insurance coverage at all as so many women have absolutely none which is so unfair. If I had gone on my company's insurance plan, I would have zippo coverage. Thank goodness I stayed on Brad's because at the time that I made that decision, I really had no idea what the differences were re infertility coverage. Our insurance covers the meds and will cover all the ultrasound and bloodwork monitoring but will not cover the IVF procedure itself. It's certainly better than nothing!

I had the meds delivered to my office so that someone could sign for them rather than have them sit on my front porch all day unattended. Well, in the past, my meds have come in a non-descript cardboard box, but not this time! Today, they were packaged in a huge white styrofoam cooler. Needless to say, I attracted some attention carrying that thing down the hallway and no less than 4 people stopped me to ask what was in the cooler. I guess it's not everyday that you see someone walking around an office with a cooler in their arms. The first thing that I could think of was to tell them that it was Omaha Steaks, ha ha! We've ordered those before and they do happen to come in a cooler exactly like this. I thought that was pretty funny - those must be some valuable steaks! Anyway, I think that minor little crisis has been averted and I managed to avoid being "outed" at work.

The Magnet of Discontent

We have a silly little magnet on our refrigerator that looks like this one. You can move that little box that says "Today I Feel" around to the appropriate emotion, like happy, lovestruck, hysterical, etc. Well, ever since we started TTC, the magnet has reflected our emotions surrounding the journey, for example, every time AF comes to visit after a failed cycle, I move it to "sad" for a few days. If we have to sit out a cycle, it gets moved to "frustrated". Here is where the battle starts. When we get going on a new cycle, I always move it to the "hopeful" face, because no matter what I have been through, there is always hope, otherwise I wouldn't continue to try. It usually only stays here for a few days until Brad, the eternal optimist, moves it to "confident". Well, I've never been confident that a cycle will be successful, so I move it back to "hopeful" and back and forth we go all cycle. What's funny is that I don't think we've actually ever had a conversation about this so called battle. I've been thinking about this alot lately and am really going to try to maintain a positive attitude during this IVF cycle, so I ask, is "hopeful" not good enough? Maybe not. I think I'm going to go move it to "confident" right now.

Let's get this party started!

So, AF decided to pay me a little visit on Saturday which means that I had to go in for my day 3 sono today to see if my cysts had gone away, and I'm very happy to report that they did!!!! I got my official IVF calendar today which is very exciting because things are finally starting to happen!

I start another pack of BCP tonight and will complete the full 21 days. I will be starting my Lupron injections on March 26, before I'm finished with the pill pack. I will go in on April 5 for a sono and bloodwork for my suppression check (basically to make sure that estrogen levels are sufficiently low and I'm still cyst free), and will start stimming (the shots to make the eggs) the evening of April 8 which happens to be Easter Sunday. My egg retrieval (ER) will be sometime during the week of April 15 and my embryo transfer (ET) will be 5 days later!!

It's so exciting and so terrifying at the same time.

The freaking flu

So, I've been sick with the flu since Tues night - nice. The fever hit both Brad and I at the same time. We were quite a pathetic sight huddled under the covers Tuesday night in our sweats shivering away from the fever. Brad is totally fine now, lucky him!!

The main reason for this posting is that we had our IVF orientation class yesterday! Yippee! Yes, we went flu and all. There must have been 15 couples there. It's amazing how many people suffer from infertility. They basically explained the whole process, complete with photos of various embies, grading charts, etc. They offer an interesting program to only a select few to encourage the transfer of only one embryo at a time. Apparently, very few 5 day blasts are rated "excellent", as most are rated "good" or "average", but if we are overacheivers and lucky enough to have 2 excellent blasts, then they will encourage us to only transfer one with a chance of pregnancy of 75% and they will freeze the second one for free and if pregnancy fails with the first one, they will transfer the second one for free. Hmmm, some food for thought. For some reason, I'm starting to get excited about the idea of twins and kind of envision our future with twins. My clinic's stats are about 47% of all pregnancies are twin - that's a lot! I just don't know how I'd feel about reducing the chance of pregnancy by only putting one back (granted, it wouldn't be much of a reduction - per the embryologist 75% with one "perfect" blast vs. 80% with two "perfect" blasts and extremely high twin rate). I am certainly not intentionally trying to get pregnant with twins, just want to maximize our chances of one healthy baby, but it sure would be nice to get two for the price of one - literally!! I guess I shouldn't worry about this until I'm in that situation and I'm not going to hold my breath that we'll even be candidates.

Reliving the due date

I've always associated our lost baby with a butterfly for some reason. Soon after the miscarriage I decided that I wanted a piece of jewelry in remembrance of our baby, so we went to James Avery and even though I had planned to get one of their angel pieces, I was drawn to a butterfly necklace. I never really could express why the butterfly made so much sense to me, until I came across this little poem that expresses it so beautifully -

A Butterfly Lights Beside Us

A butterfly lights beside us, like a sunbeam...
and for a brief moment it's glory
and beauty belong to our world...
but then it flies on again, and although
we wish it could have stayed,
we are so thankful to have seen it at all.

Author Unknown

We will never forget...

So, today we should be celebrating our first child's first birthday, but instead we have no baby, no pregnancy and instead are gearing up for the very stressful IVF procedure - excuse me for a minute while I go kick something...

On this day that should be a celebration of the miracle of life that we created, I am mourning our loss, still in limbo, and it sucks more than you can imagine.

Random thoughts...

I just ate a fortune cookie from our dinner last night (yes, I know it's only 8 AM), and my fortune said, "You will get what your heart desires." Cool! Too bad the cookie didn't tell me when! So, how do I feel about going through IVF...well, I have so many mixed emotions...it's very complicated. Before I get into my feelings, it might be helpful to explain the entire process.

The first step in most IVF's and mine will be the suppression phase. This is done with a combination of BCP and Lupron. Lupron is an injectible med that essentially induces menopause and supposedly comes along with all those fun side effects. In preparation for IVF the dosage is very small, but it is administered daily. When these cysts that we are trying to resolve go away, I will start another round of BCP and 2 weeks into that, I will start Lupron and continue for another 2 weeks. Once AF arrives, which will happen sometime during that fourth week of suppression as a result of stopping the BCP, I will have a suppression check, which will be an u/s and probably bloodwork to make sure that my body is quiet and that my ovaries are prepared to grow a bunch of eggs at hopefully the same rate.

So, assuming that everything is cool, I will then start stimming. This again involves daily injections (these are in my belly and will probably be with the same meds that I used for my IUIs). I will start going for u/s and bloodwork probably at least every other day, and maybe everyday. I will probably also continue injecting Lupron during the stimming phase. This will prevent my body from ovulating on it's own. I'll probably stim for 7-10 days, as in my previous experience, I am a good responsder and tend to grow pretty quick. The difference this time will be that we are trying to get many follicles that are around the same size, ideally 15 or so total but not too many, whereas with IUI, we were trying to encourage only 2-4.

When enough follicles are measuring a mature size, I will trigger which is the shot that makes you ovulate within 36 hours. This will give all the follicles their final "boost" and they will be ready for retrieval in just about 36 hours! The retrieval is out-patient surgery as I will be under general anesthesia. My Dr will go in with an u/s probe and a giant needle and will basically drain each follicle and try to "catch" as many eggs as possible. When the eggs are retrieved, the lab will evaluate them and take all the mature eggs and basically combine then with Brad's sperm in a petri dish and wait. According to my Dr, about 2/3, maybe more will fertilize. When they fertilize and start dividing, they become known as embryos. The embryologists will watch the embies very carefully and will grade them based on all kinds of criteria, like number of cells, shape, etc. During this waiting stage, you begin to take more daily shots, and these are the dreaded progesterone in oil (PIO) shots. They are done in the butt and with what is apparently a pretty large, scary needle. These are often done daily until 10-12 weeks, fun fun. Back to the embies, when they are ready, they will be transfered back into the uterus. The transfer is generally done without anesthesia and is pretty similar to an IUI. I will then be on bed rest for at least 24 hours. My lab generally tries to do 5 day blast transfers which means that 5 days after the retrieval, the little babies are hundreds of cells and are known as blastocysts, but sometimes if the embies just aren't looking so good and the embryologist feels that they would do better in mom than in the petri dish, then a 3 day embryo transfer will be done. At 3 days, embryos are about 8 cells. Our goal is to transfer 2 high quality 5 day blasts because at 5 days, you have weeded out most of those that will not make it and they have the best chances. There are a lot of twin pregnancies in IVF which would be just fine with us!

If there are any blasts left after transfer, then they will be frozen for future use. We're not counting on having any frozen, as my RE said that only 1 out of 3-4 women will have any to freeze, because their philosophy is not to get as many eggs as possible, but rather to get a good number of high quality ones, ideally that magic 15 number. As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, my Dr's pregnancy success rates are 67%.

Ok, so how do I feel about going through this process...

While it feels so good to be moving on to something that has such a high success rate, and I truly believe that this will work for us, hopefully on the first try of course :), I am pretty sad that we have come to this stage. It's definitely scary that we are here staring our "last resort" in the face. When you start treatments, you always say, well there's always IVF! Of course, you never really think that you will actually need to do it. I feel broken and defective, as if my body can't do what it was made to do. I feel like an outcast among friends and family who have moved on to start their families, like I have nothing in common with them anymore, and I'm well aware that my self-imposed distance from preggos and babies is a major culprit here. I hate the bitter/jaded person that I have become and so wish that I could go back to the way I was before all this started, but I'm certain that I'll never completely be that person again - the pain of this experience will be with me always. I very rarely feel pure happiness anymore - there is a constant sadness that I carry in my heart. I am angry that we have already spent $2,000 on wasted treatments and will end up spending at least $6,500 more to get what the "rest of the world" gets for free. I'm really not looking forward to the weeks on end of daily injections of hormones and the wild mood swings that will inevitably come with them. Finally, I am sad that it will literally require a team of Dr's, nurses and scientists to get us pregnant, so much for romance - of course we gave that up a long time ago. Hopefully this will all be worth it in the end!