Phase 3

Phase 3 (injections) is officially underway!

After going to the injections class provided by our clinic last week, we both felt much more at ease about the whole thing. We got to practice mixing and drawing up the medication and giving a shot to a little fake belly.

Last night was the first night of the real deal. Currently my regimen is Gonal-F at 75 IU and Menopur at 37.5 IU at night. On Thursday morning I will go in for monitoring and from there my dosage may or may not be adjusted. At some point, Cetrotide will be added in the mornings.

I have never been a fan of needles and shots, but luckily the needles are really tiny and don’t hurt at all. What does hurt though is the actual medicine, especially the Menopur. I’m not really sure how it all works, but it stings really bad when going in. The most stressful part of the whole thing though was worrying whether or not Garrison mixed the medicine appropriately (he did).

On another note, my egg retrieval will probably be between the 5th-8th next week. I work retail and I was afraid to request all those days off because it’s a weekend and Christmastime and everything is so busy. Well I just got my work schedule for next week, and I am not scheduled on any of those days! It’s a Christmas miracle! But seriously, I am so relieved I won’t have to try to find someone to cover for me last minute. I am so grateful for all the little blessings that make this process bearable.

It’s so exciting how things keep moving along! I’m just trying to stay realistic about everything. I have moments where I’m so hopeful and really think this will be it, and then others where I’m so worried that we’re investing so much time and energy and emotion and money into something that might not even work. I have to remind myself to take it one day at a time and that whatever happens, it will all be ok in the end!

You Know you are Starting IVF when your Morning Looks Like This:

Wake up, take a shower, get ready, go to the doctor, feel (unintentionally) disappointed about a pregnancy announcement you see on social media while in the waiting room, brush it off, get your blood drawn, have an ultrasound, have more comments made about how young you are, get the official calendar for your cycle, schedule your next appointment for Thanksgiving day, drive home, eat some toast, cry about a different comment made about your infertility, write a blog post. All before 10:00 am.

 

Please tell me I’m not the only one.

Phase 1 and 2

So I’ve been on the birth control pill (phase 1) for almost a week now. I don’t know why, but I’ve had a pretty bad reaction to it. I have been feeling nauseous all the time but especially at night, and even had a lovely night of vomiting (which would be fun if I knew it was because I was pregnant, but I’m obvs not). Anyway, my nurse told me to start taking half of an over the counter sleeping pill before bed each night. That has helped immensely. During the day I just munch on saltines and drink ginger ale. Luckily, I’ve only got a week of that left.

On Monday, I went in for the mock embryo transfer (phase 2). That is where they fill my uterus up with sterilized water and take an ultrasound to “map” it out for the doctor when it’s time for the real embryo transfer. The nurse who did the ultrasound told me I have pretty ovaries. She also seemed so surprised about how young I am, and asked me all these questions about my age and how long I’ve been married and if I’d graduated from college. I’m sure she wasn’t trying to be rude, and just isn’t used to seeing a 22 year old (but hey, I’m almost 23!) around the clinic, but it still felt a little judgey.

Anyways, next Wednesday Garrison and I have our injections class (I hope he pays close attention, because I really do not want to give myself these shots). Then on Friday I have my baseline appointment. Then, the Monday after that is injection time!

 

IVF!!!

I got amazing news this morning: our insurance gave us the green light for an IVF cycle!

If you are unfamiliar with the IVF process, click here to learn what it looks like. Or you can read my very quick summary* below:

• This Thursday I will start taking birth control for the next two weeks.
• Next Monday I will go in for a mock embryo transfer.
• On Wednesday the following week, Garrison and I will attend an injections class to learn how to shoot me up with hormones.
• The week after that, I will start taking the injectable meds (if you’ve got your calendar out then you know that’s Thanksgiving week). I will do those for a week or so (depending on how my body responds) and then the big egg retrieval day will come.
• The same day that the eggs are retrieved, they will be fertilized in a lab. An embryologist will monitor those little guys daily and see how they are growing.
• After 3-7 days of chilling in a petri dish, one or two of the embabies will be transferred to my lush womb that will be extra cozy from all the drugs I’m taking to make sure my uterine lining is nice and thick. The rest of the embryos will be frozen for future cycles if this one fails. Or if it succeeds, then for the next time we need help getting pregnant.
• Finally, I wait an excruciating two weeks(ish) to go in for a blood pregnancy test to see if this whole thing worked.

*This is my understanding of what the cycle will be like. Obviously, I haven’t done IVF yet, so if anyone notices some glaring errors in my timeline, please forgive me.

I also want to mention that I realize I am incredibly lucky to get insurance coverage for an IVF cycle. This is a luxury that very few people have. My heart truly goes out to those who have to carry the financial as well as the emotional burden of infertility, and my prayers are with you.

I don’t know how this cycle will turn out. I am hoping for success while remaining very aware of the possibility of failure (or success initially but loss later on). I will need all the positive thoughts and prayers I can get to get me through this cycle. Start sending them my way 🙂

 

 

 

Laparoscopy

Yesterday was the big surgery day!

I am still on painkillers, and I don’t think the anesthesia has worn off completely yet, so writing this post feels a lot harder than it should. Come on brain, work!

If you are wondering what a laparoscopic surgery is like and/or why it is done, here is some good info from WebMD.

I got to talk to my doctor shortly after the surgery (while still pretty drugged up, so my memory is a little foggy) but I’m pretty sure he told me he found and removed endometriosis from my left ovary, the back side of my uterus, and my bladder. So that is good news. In two weeks I’ll have a follow up appointment with him and get more details and get to see pictures!

Right now I am sort of riding the struggle bus of recovery. I should have been out of the recovery room by around 4pm yesterday but I was there until around 10:00 because I was so sick coming off the anesthesia. That was no fun. Today I am still pretty woozy and can’t really sit up or walk. So party at my house!

Hopefully I will be back to normal in the next day or so, because I really don’t like feeling like this (who does really?).

Happy thoughts and prayers would be appreciated!

 

An Update and Potential Change of Plans

This morning we had our follow up visit with the RE. I was pretty much expecting him to just tell us we would start up our many IUIs with my next cycle.

Instead, he told us that honestly our chances with IUI are not looking super high, and it would be a better use of time to just head straight to IVF. The only problem is that my insurance wants us to do about 100 IUIs before they’ll cover IVF. So my doctor is going to appeal to the insurance and make a case for why they should cover IVF now. We were prepped for protocol on an IUI cycle and an IVF cycle and now we wait and see what the insurance says and then we’ll know which one we’re going to do.

In the meantime, I am going to get my colonoscopy (ick) on Tuesday, then my family is coming in town, then we are going to California, and then I’m getting my laparoscopy like 2 days after I get home. So I am going to have a busy next couple of weeks! October will hopefully fly by and then November will be the cycle!

At this point, we are hoping and praying that the insurance will approve us to go straight to IVF, since its chances of success are much higher (60-65%). If not, it won’t be the end of the world, we will just hope for the best with the IUIs.

Either way, I am excited to get moving!

Small Victories

Once upon a time, a year ago, we had been trying to get pregnant for about 6 months. Obviously those were the longest 6 months of my life. Lucky for me, I had (and still have) a good friend who has hookups in the medical community and she was able to order some testing for me and Garrison to check for any red flags. We both had blood work done, I had an HSG and pelvic ultra sound, and he had a semen analysis. Everything came back normal, except for in the semen analysis where morphology was slightly on the abnormal side. For those who don’t know, a semen analysis checks for three things: count (how many sperm there are), motility (how well they swim), and morphology (how they are shaped).

Fast forward to March of this year. At this point we had been TTC for a year, so we visited a RE in Utah. Her diagnosis for our infertility was that I probably had endometriosis, and because of the morphology thing, a slight male factor problem as well. She suggested that Garrison take a vitamin E and vitamin C supplement daily to improve the morphology.

Now fast forward again to the present day. Are you with me still? Our new RE here in Virginia wanted a new semen analysis done to see where things stand currently (since the previous one is about a year old now). And guess what? I got a call from my nurse this morning saying that everything came back totally normal!! Including morphology!

So the moral of the story is, take your vitamins! Actually, I don’t know if it was the vitamins that made any difference, or if the morphology on the original SA was a fluke, or what. But no matter what, I am grateful that male factor is not an issue in our infertility after all.

It is the small victories that make a difference in this lovely infertility journey we are taking, so today is a day to celebrate! Nothing is too small to be considered a blessing.

On Friday we have a follow up appointment with the RE to officially create a game plan, so hopefully I will have a good update after that!

 

TMI ALERT and Cats

DISCLAIMER: you really should only read this if you are ok with TMI and poop.

I went to the specialty OB/GYN my RE referred me to see to discuss a possible laparoscopy. Well, his conclusion after our meeting is that I actually need a COLONOSCOPY**!

I think that cat fairly accurately portrays my reaction when I heard that piece of doctorly advice. Although that was probably only my internal reaction. On the outside I was probably more like

Either way, I am not super excited about that prospect. But his reasoning is that he thinks I most likely have endometriosis in my colon, judging by my long and colorful history involving blood in my poop (I warned you this was going to be a TMI post!). In fact, I was supposed to get a colonoscopy a couple years ago when I lived in Utah for that very reason. Except I backed out at the last minute because, who really wants to do that? But you know, after being poked and prodded and losing pretty much all sense of personal space around medical personell, I pretty much just feel like this about the whole thing now:

What’s one more procedure, right? Also, speaking of poop, a bird pooped on my head earlier this week. I guess it was a sign! Also I dropped my phone the other day and had to pay $100 to get my screen fixed! Hope everyone else’s week was less poop-tastic than mine. Happy Friday peeps!

(**This will not be improving my fertility, just hopefully helping with discomfort during my period. And then if that doesn’t work and I still need a laparoscopy, that would also be for period discomfort. So this post was not really a fertility-related update)

A Good Cry and Upcoming Things

Does anyone ever really feel better after a good cry? Because I usually just have a headache.

My mom tells me that when I was a little kid, I would scream and cry until I lost my voice and couldn’t cry anymore. I feel like I do that still as an adult. Not that I actually lose my voice, but after the end of a long cry sesh I usually feel worse instead of better. And then my face is blotchy and I have to fix my mascara. I don’t really know what kind of point I’m trying to make with this, except for that I just cried a bunch to my mom on the phone, and now I feel worse than I did before (by no fault of my mom’s, she just got caught in the emotional crossfire). And so what do I do when I’m feeling upset? Blog of course!

Tomorrow I go in for my day 3 ultrasound and bloodwork. Friday I have an appointment with an OB/GYN to discuss a possible laparoscopy. Has anyone reading this done this surgery? Did it improve your fertility? Or pain during periods?

Anyway, two weeks after that, we will have a follow-up appointment with the RE to bring everything together and set up a treatment plan. Which I’m pretty sure will be a bunch of IUIs. In a perfect world, we would then do the first IUI as soon as my next cycle starts in October. Unfortunately, Garrison has a work trip smack dab in the middle of the cycle, so that will probably put us in November now for IUI #2 (or #1 with this RE). Also, I will accompany Garrison on the trip because it is to California aka my happy place.

So that’s the update for now!

 

More Waiting

Well, today was the much anticipated RE appointment.

The good news is: pretty much just that we got the ball rolling.

The bad news is: pretty much everything else.

Ok, I am being a little dramatic. It’s not really THAT bad. I just went into this appointment with the hope that at the start of my next cycle we could immediately start IUI #2. Well, as it turns out the doctor wants to do some more testing. And for some reason our insurance has very specific stipulations about testing and treatment. For example: the Dr. wants to test my hormone levels at day 3 of my next cycle (because for some reason Utah Fertility Center didn’t do day 3 testing on me with my last IUI so he doesn’t have that to go off of), but the insurance won’t let us start treatment on the same day as testing apparently. I don’t really understand the details of it, but basically the insurance will cover pretty much everything as long as we play by their very stringent rules. So he is thinking we won’t get started on our next IUI all the way until October. And just typing that makes me want to cry. I am so sick of waiting and waiting!

I know it’s not the end of the world. And I should be am grateful to have really great coverage. It just sucks to have to wait so much longer than I anticipated for everything. The other information we found out at this appointment is that our insurance wants us to do 6 IUIs before they will cover IVF. Of course I am hopeful that a few IUIs will do the trick and we won’t have to do IVF. But if IVF is what needs to happen, I am just dreading the thought of having to go through so many failed IUIs before we can do it. 

So basically, instead of bringing peace of mind this appointment just brought more worry and anxiety.

I probably should just do some online shopping and eat some ice cream. Then I’ll feel better. Right?