Beta #1 September 2, 2008

I recovered from my Saturday meltdown, and my first beta test was this morning.  It took the nurse (who I think is generally great) two stabs and some digging around to get to my vein.  Yikes.  They don’t call with results of this one – it is just the baseline.  My breasts are getting less sore, just like last time… so that doesn’t seem to be good news.  In 48 hours we’ll know the results, and my money is on the likelihood that I will have opened a bottle of wine and consumed (at least) half of it by this time Thursday.  I like my wine.

The registration form for the adoption agency is filled out and sealed in an addressed envelope sitting on my desk.  I bet it will be in the mailbox across the street Friday morning.  In some ways I am excited about pursuing adoption.  But it also makes me a little sad, because that is not originally how I wanted to build a family, and it will definitely take more than 9 months to be complete.  I just feel like I have been waiting so long already.

But, this two week wait has been easier than the others, I think because I really have had very little hope that it will work – very little expectation of possible success.  And I am not looking forward to the emotional low that will come with a negative result – so I am not wishing every second for Thursday to get here sooner.  I am not obsessing that much about will-it-work, won’t-it-work.  I just don’t believe it will.  I am not going to test before I get my results from the RE. 

I am cooking both tomorrow and Thursday.  Hopefully I’ll get the call after I have already left my client’s house, because she (and maybe her inlaws) will be there when I am cooking…

Meltdown August 30, 2008

I am too fucking fat to fit into any of my clothes because I can’t stop eating junk.

Mike’s friend’s horrible, materialistic, totally non-maternal wife got pregnant after one cycle on “hormone therapy” and I can’t get pregnant with IVF. 

I just cried hysterically and screamed at Mike on the phone because of the above.

He’s headed to the bar after being gone all morning at his fantasy football draft with the guys – they are going to the bar to watch a game.  The game starts in five fucking hours.  Are you kidding me?

I had to wash all the fucking dishes from having people over from dinner last night since we left them in the sink and he was gone when I got home from running three hours of errands. (We don’t have a dishwasher.)

I hate my life right now.  I doubt I am going to like it any more next Thursday.

 

Edited to add: At least one thing is better – Mike came home for an hour or so to cuddle on the couch and comfort me and talk.  So at least I am not irritated with him on top of everything else.

Neat August 27, 2008

My boobs are REALLY sore this time.  I think it started almost as soon as I started the progesterone this time, so I am not reading anything into it.  I don’t remember when they got sore last time, but this seems a little earlier maybe…

My stepmom and my aunt are visiting right now.  They got in yesterday afternoon and are leaving tomorrow afternoon.  I wasn’t sure about the timing of this visit, but since I cancelled all my clients this week, it has actually been a great distraction.  I haven’t been doing the bed-rest thing, but I haven’t been carrying/lifting things or doing anything else strenuous – just walking around the city a bit and driving them around.

Today my aunt declared “I just think it would be so neat if you had twins.”  Yeah, me too lady.  No effing joke.  Actually I don’t think it would be neat, I think it would be an answer to my every prayer (umm, not that I pray).  It would be a total miracle.  It would be the best thing that could possibly happen in these circumstances.  It would mean absolute, spinning-in-circles-in-a-sunny-green-field joy. 

 

No pressure little embryos.

Done August 25, 2008

Well, all four lovely little embryos survived the weekend in the petri dish (is that even where they spend the weekend?).  We transferred all four “not super fantastic” embryos this morning.  I asked what exactly that meant – I guess they grade on a 5-point scale and all four of them were in the 3-range.  So, no great shakes.  But my favorite nurse told me that the lab wouldn’t have recommended transferring them if they didn’t think there was a chance they could make it.  And they were all HLAG positive, meaning that they are all producing the protein needed for implantation.  So that is one question-mark off the table as to why we have not had success yet.  Leaves a lot more though – just one possibility for failure isn’t the culprit.

I think my RE is pretty great, and I trust her, but MAN, she is not gentle with the speculum!  This was the most uncomfortable/painful transfer yet.  She isn’t gentle with the ultrasound wand either, but this was way worse than normal.  She said the embryos are in the exact right place, though, so please little embryos: find a comfy spot, and settle in!

Now for the longest two weeks (really 11 days) of the cycle – nothing to do except take my progesterone suppositories and prenatal vitamins, and wait.  I cancelled all my clients this week, so I can just relax.  At least the physically painful part of the cycle is over.  No more shots, IVs, dildo cams, or specula.  Just two blood draws.  I have a huge bruise on my belly from the shots, another huge bruise on my hand from the IV from retrieval, both of my hips are outrageously sore from the PIO shots, and I feel FAT FAT FAT.  I am ready for all of these things to be gone from my life. 

I think I am done with IVF.  If this round works, I will be over the moon and I promise not to complain about feeling fat anymore.  If it doesn’t work, we are planning on moving on to adoption quickly.  And I will start thinking about another marathon (and maybe qualifying for Boston).  Partly to lose the weight that I gained since we started this process in January and party as a way to prove that I do have control over my body in some way.  Just in the endurance athletics field, not in the reproductive field.  Either way, we are going to take a break from IVF for a while – I am not sure if I will ever come back to it, though we are leaving that option open for the time being. 

In many ways this has been the worst year of my life.  It has certainly been the most depressing, expensive (excluding education), painful (physically and otherwise) rollercoaster I have ever been on.  Yes, there have been good things that have happened this year – my business most especially- but infertility and the drama of IVF overshadows all of it.  It is the determining factor in my life, and I have zero control and no idea how any of this is going to turn out.  All of our decisions – do we buy a place?  where do we buy?  when do we buy?  can we get a dog? where will we go on vacation next year? will we even be able to go on vacation next year? are tied into this totally unkown and unknowable factor that 90% of the population does have control over and many of them take for granted.

I wish I could just take a nap and wake up on September 4, but only if the result is positive.  If not, I’d like to sleep off all the tears and hurt too.

Nothing good to say – should have said nothing at all July 31, 2008

Today for lunch I ate a bag of Doritos and half a box of Dots candy.  Mmmm.  Healthy lunch.  I can’t seem to stay away from the crap.  I am sure it is a stress-coping mechanism…but I wish I could get back to my healthier-eating patterns. 

Last week was draining, and this week isn’t getting a whole lot better.  Before I headed up to Traverse City (almost two weeks ago now) I had a call from the RE saying they needed to talk to me about the genetic test that we were planning on doing for this cycle.  That Monday I found out that the test is “not available”.  Apparently there is some problem with the technology or something, and they are implying that no doctors are able to do this test at the moment, and even if we pushed this cycle off to November or December it probably still wouldn’t be available. 

So, that means that at the end of this cycle, whether it works or fails, we won’t have any additional information about WHY these embryos are not implanting.  When I found this out, I seriously considered scrapping this cycle and trying to find a new doctor, but that process seemed SO overwhelming – I don’t even know where we would start with finding a new doctor – and long – could set us back 6 months to a year – that I just couldn’t do it. 

So here I am on Day 4 of the Lupron shots once again.  I took my last BCP a couple of hours ago and am waiting for my period over the weekend.

After this snafu, I just didn’t feel like doing anything last week after I did what I had to do (cooking for clients).  I didn’t run a single day, and I just laid on the couch and ate crap and didn’t get anything done.  Then we went back to Michigan this past weekend too for a family reunion, so I didn’t get anything done over the weekend either.  Fortunately I wasn’t cooking Monday or Wednesday this week, so I had those days to catch up on things like accounting and other computer-based things that I had promised to other people. 

This week I forced myself to run on Monday, and I was going to today, but I just don’t feel like it.  I don’t feel like doing much.  I tried to take a nap this afternoon, but got woken up by the phone twice.

Part of why I am so exhausted today, I think, is dealing with this newest client this morning, who has turned out to be a huge challenge.  Not only does he only have certain things that he likes and is on an extremely limited diet anyway due to medical reasons, but he (an 80 year old overweight man) sits in the kitchen while I am cooking with his robe open wide and no underwear on – yes, I horrifyingly saw everything this morning – and watches me work.  It is in no way threatening – he just does not understand that this is unacceptable.  He is something else.  So, I had to e-mail his daughter-in-law who hired me today and see what she can do to improve this situation.  If it doesn’t get a lot better in a hurry, I think I am going to have to fire them as clients.  I can’t work like that.

One of my friends had a baby three weeks ago and I haven’t been able to bring myself to call her.  She gave birth at home (I can’t IMAGINE trusting that your body is going to work the way it is supposed to enough to try that), and seems blissful in her e-mails and pictures.  I feel really bad about it, but I just can’t hear it right now.  I can’t hear it if she is blissfully happy and I can’t hear it if she has complaints.  I just can’t do it.  I hope to god I don’t come out of this horrible period of infertility in two years or five years or ten and have no friends because I can’t bring myself to call them when they have children…

So here I am procrastinating again.  I need to make some reheating labels for next week’s client, then I’ll make some Pad Thai out of a box for us for dinner.  Maybe in the meantime, before Mike gets home, I’ll be motivated enough to cross a couple more things off my growing to-do list…

Shows I Really Should Hate June 26, 2008

I get totally sucked into reality TV.  Not shows like Survivor and Big Brother and some of the other popular ones (was Big Brother popular?), but the ones on Oxygen, Bravo, and VH1.  The last couple days I have been totally sucked into two new-to-me-shows – Tori and Dean Home Sweet Hollywood and Jon and Kate Plus 8.  There are a lot of reasons that I should hate these shows -

 

Tori and Dean – She got pregnant so fast with her first baby, and then RIGHT AWAY got pregnant again.  It does kind of rub it in how easy it is for some/most people and JUST HOW infertile I really am… Also, she is the little spoiled rich girl from Hollywood that everyone loves to hate.  When we watched 9-0 (our affectionate name for it) in college, we would always make fun of her looks.  BUT, now I find that I kind of like her because of this show.  She is nice, and doesn’t act super-spoiled and is really sweet with her little boy.  She so clearly wants to be a good mom to both Liam and the baby on the way and is making such an effort to be different from her own mother, with whom she has a difficult relationship.  I can kind of relate to that – in a less extreme way.  It’s part of why I want to have kids too – so I can have a better relationship with them than I had with my family growing up, and to some degree even now.

 

Jon and Kate Plus Eight – Again, this rubs in exactly how infertile I am.  They used fertility treatments too, but theirs were successful, and then some.  Even though Kate can be a total bitch sometimes (I would for sure be divorced by now if I spoke to my husband the way she speaks to hers), and she needs to let go of the OCD a little bit (with everything she has to do, she still feels she MUST mop the kitchen floor three times a day?? no wonder she is always so pressed for time!), the kids are SO cute, and it is interesting to see how they manage their life – and try to actually go out and do things with the kids.  I think they really try to make each of the 8 kids feel special, which is great to see. 

I guess it’s just voyeurism to some degree – don’t we all want to see how other people live so we can compare our lives with theirs?  I think that’s the attraction with all these shows for me.  Even The Girls Next Door, which I never would have thought I would like – but I get totally sucked in every time.  Thank God Mike isn’t around to make fun of me. 

Estress June 1, 2008

Whenever I think of the word stress, I think of it said the way they say it in Ecuador.  It is the same word in English and Spanish, but they put an “eh” sound before the “sss” sound.  They did this to my name too – I think Spanish speakers are not accustomed to the “sss” sound starting a word…

Anyway, I don’t feel particularly estressed.  Yes, this process sucks, and yes, I am eating a lot more junk than I have in the last four or five years (estress eating?), but I feel like I have been managing the stress pretty well between seeing a psychologist, getting massages, going running, etc.  But – I have had a twitch in my left eyelid for almost three weeks.  It is REALLY ANNOYING.  It happens every day, maybe 75 – 100 or so times a day – I am not kidding.  It happens most when I blink, but seems to happen equally in the morning and evening.  I just read a little on the internet (oh, diagnostic wonder that you are) and it looks like mostly eyelid twitches are caused by stress and lack of sleep and there aren’t too many remedies except reducing stress and getting more sleep.  (Or Botox, which is kind of hilarious and unappealing.)

I ran a 10k race with my girlfriends this morning, and it was a beautiful morning to run.  When we were running along the lakefront I saw this very pregnant women with a tight-fitting shirt on that said ‘Got Baby?’ like the ’Got Milk’ commercials.  I mean, really, what good does that shirt do other than making people like me think - Nope – Thanks for asking.  Then there were approximately thirteen zillion other hugely pregnant women that I saw today.  This is the first day that I noticed feeling angry towards these women who seemed to me to be flaunting their perfect, round bellies.  Couldn’t they just stay home??  Before I just felt jealous.  Now I am starting to hate them too.

Yes, totally irrational.   Ah, the wonderful world of infertility.  Maybe I’ll go have a piece of my blueberry-coconut tart, even though I also had an ice cream cone in the middle of the day today.  I get upset that I have gained weight through this process and haven’t been able to lose any of it yet, and then I go eat all these sweets (and salty goodness too) and justify it by thinking that I need to be nice to myself.  Being nice to myself = eating good food.  Brilliant, brilliant.

My temperature May 28, 2008

I’ve been feeling a little funny in the lower-abdominal area all day.  Like my abdomen was a little swollen or something.  I didn’t think too much of it until I was at a meeting this evening and was really warm – totally unlike me.  And I am so tired too.  So, I started putting all this together and figuring I am getting another infection.  There is no sick-time from an employer now.  I would have to cancel and disappoint clients if I had to spend a week in the hospital and then two more weeks recouperating like last August.  It might even be worse than last time because I actually care about what I am doing now.  I was trying to read my body’s signs and figure out if I was going to have to make an emergency call to the doctor tomorrow, or, god forbid, head to the emergency room tonight.  Then I remembered that my temperature might tell me something about what is going on in there.  97.0.  Ah, perfectly normal.  Probably nothing to worry about.  But, wouldn’t that be the worst-case scenario?  (Well, I guess there could be worse, but that would be really bad.)  Maybe it was just warm in the room and I haven’t gotten enough sleep, and who knows what explains the abdominal issue…

Anyway, we have gone right back into our holding pattern before heading into IVF #3.  This is the last one that insurance will pay for, so we are hoping for better luck this time.  However, they aren’t really doing anything differently, so I am not really holding out a ton of hope that we’ll have a different result.  The doctor thinks that it is possible that I have an egg quality issue – possibly all the infections have damaged my eggs/ovaries – so they are going to do pre-implantation genetic testing to see if that is the case and if that will explain why the first two didn’t work.  Although insurance will pay for the meds and the IVF itself, we will be out of pocket for these tests to the tune of about $5k.  That will take a nice chunk out of the money we have set aside in case we do have to do IVF on our own… But at least if it shows that I have a genetic issue then we would know that our next step is to move on to donor eggs, or adoption.  At this point I lean towards donor eggs, but there is a lot to consider, not the least of which is that we have always joked about having red-headed japanese kids – and donor eggs could majorly disrupt that little fantasy.  I guess that is just a symptom of the real issue – of not being genetically related… but as usual this is about a thousand steps further than I need to be here at the end of May.

We’ll do IVF #3 in August – meaning starting the Lupron shots at the end of July.  Totally opposite from last time, that seems a little too quick.  Last time I couldn’t wait to try again – I needed something active to look forward to.  This time I just want off the roller coaster for a little while.  So we decided to wait one extra month (the soonest I would be able to cycle is July) to give me a little breathing room and also so that I don’t have the stress of whether or not I am going to get my period in time to do the next cycle.  Who knows – I could still have that if my body decides to be particularly uncooperative…

I thought for a little while that maybe we would wait until September or October, but our trip to New England, which I am looking forward to so much that I don’t want to change it to accommodate my preferred month for IVF, would conflict with either month for a cycle.  For the September cycle I would be in New England during the time I would have to have my beta tests – which we could work around, but I am not interested in being a total emotional disaster while I am supposed to be enjoying my vacation and my friend’s wedding.  And for the October cycle, we would be in Boston during the time when I would have to be having some monitoring visits.

August isn’t ideal either – that means that I won’t be able to have a glass of wine at the Outstanding in the Field dinner that we are going to for our anniversary, and which I have been looking forward to for months.  I’ll have to take all my drugs with me to a camping trip in Wisconsin – that should be interesting… and just generally – it’s summer in Chicago!  I should be enjoying the best months (the only months) to live in Chicago and not worrying about the shots and the bullshit that goes along with this.  But waiting until November seems a little far away, and also the doctor did not recommend it.  She said that I am still young, but it isn’t going to get any better, and I might as well get on with the next cycle sooner rather than later.  So, August it is. 

Until then, I will concentrate on my business.  I’ve been pretty inspired by a Ladies Who Launch group that I joined, which is proving to be a welcome distraction and hopefully really good for business too.  And I’ll enjoy the weather in Chicago (though not today with a high of 55 at the end of May!), and enjoy being able to run and enjoy the seasonal food and the farmers markets and generally having more flexibility and free time in my life than any of the past three summers.  Tomorrow is my “office” day – I have lots of things on my to-do list, including going to yoga and cooking dinner for friends who are coming over to watch the LOST season finale.  I am making Cajun Oven Fried Chicken, Roasted Potatoes and a Blueberry-Coconut Tart.  Can’t wait for that meal!  (I never thought I would say that about a meal involving potatoes, but I think my tastes may be changing – I have discovered a few ways of preparing potatoes that I actually enjoy.)

Procrastination March 21, 2008

I am sitting here in Pan.era trying to get some work done on this grant that I am supposed to be writing, but I don’t feel like doing it… Unfortunately the due date is coming up quickly and I still have a lot of work to do.  I am out in the suburbs where Mike works because we are going to his parents’ house for dinner tonight since his family from Michigan is visiting.  I don’t mind working out here – actually it can be a nice change of pace.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get lots of work done.

Last night I went to a “Fertility Cleanse” seminar at the offices of an organization that provides all kinds of wholistic-healing approaches to fertility.  I thought I would go there and get a list of foods that I should and should not be eating that I could use for the next round of IVF.  Instead it was a scare-tactic meeting, all about all of these things in the environment and in the food system that can negatively impact your fertility.  Their answer to this is to do a two- to three-week medically supervised “cleanse” which I am sure costs a pretty penny.  They gave us some other ideas of things that are safe to do during a cycle (i.e. hot water with lemon) but mostly they were touting the $2 per dose vitamins and cleansing services they provide. 

They also suggested that you should rid your diet of coffee, artificial sweeteners, anything processed, hydrogenated oils and non-organic produce and dairy.  These things I can probably do – in fact a lot of them I have done already. 

This seminar epitomized something that I have come to really resent in the fertility industry.  Everyone wants you to beleive that they have the magic pill that will help you get pregnant – whether it is the acupunturist, the yogi, the nutritionist, the relaxation specialist, the vitamin seller.  They all tell these anecdotal stories about the woman they know who had been trying to conceive for years and years and they finally did the cleanse (acupuncture, vitamins, yoga, etc.) and *poof* they got pregnant the first month.  I am sure this does happen, but I am also pretty sure it is the exception rather than the rule, but they all want to get your hopes up so that you will buy their ridiculously expensive vitamins or whatever else they are selling.  They are preying on the desperation that so many of us feel in this process.  And in my experience they also give you a guilt trip if you balk at the time or financial commitment.  My (former) acupuncturist for example – says you have to go once a week during a cycle to get the benefit and when I balked at that amount of money that would total up to she suggested that I was using money as an excuse not to do it.  When I said last night that I had tried acupuncture and didn’t like it and also found it expensive, the teacher said that you only have to do it right before and right after transfer and that if it hurt I didn’t have a good acupuncturist… It is impossible to know who or what to beleive – and they all want your money.

I guess I am feeling pretty cynical about this whole thing at the moment.  But, I think for the coming cycle I am going to give up alcohol (starting two days ago – though not drinking during Mike’s conference in Miami that I am going to is going to be tough), try to eat only organic produce and dairy, and get massages weekly or every other week – because it makes me feel good and it is also less expensive than acupuncture.  (And I won’t feel guilty about it with the money I am now bringing in from the grant and from my cooking business.)  I am going to stick with my Whole Foods vitamins  and not the super expensive ones and maybe I will look into acupuncture right before and right after transfer with this organization whose offices I went to last night.  If this cycle doesn’t work, I think I will look into the cleanse – at least to find out how much it would cost me.  I think it might be therapeutic to have something active to concentrate on doing after this cycle if it doesn’t work.  So, I’ll do a few things differently and hope really hard for a different result this time.  They have also changed my dosage for the medications, so hopefully all these things together will give me a better result. 

11th hour March 14, 2008

I guess I have been MIA for a while.  It’s not so exciting when all you are doing is waiting for the next round of IVF with nothing productive to do on that front.  I was just waiting and waiting to get my period so that I could schedule day 3 labs and all the various ultrasounds and everything.  And wouldn’t ‘cha know – my body once again looked like it was going to give me a hearty “f- you” when my period was a week late.  They told me at the clinic that if I didn’t get it by the weekend we would have to push the IVF cycle off to May. 

This was distressing news to me as that means that we wouldn’t have a result until early June and that seems like a billion years away, especially with as cold as it has been here in Chicago.  I also am leaving for Arizona for a much needed four-day-vacation on Sunday, which means that even if I got it over the weekend I would be screwed because I wouldn’t be in town to have the 3-day labs done.  Apparently I could go to a hospital and have the blood drawn in Arizona, but who wants to do that when they are trying to relax and escape the drama that is IVF for just a few days?? 

So, miraculously yesterday afternoon I got my period a half-hour before my doctor’s office closed.  It had just bareley started and then I called the doctors office to tell them.  Then I went running and the whole time was questioning whether I had imagined it and whether I was still going to be on the May IVF schedule.  But, I didn’t imagine it, and that meant I was able to schedule my day-3 labs for today (even though it is only day 2, but they said it didn’t matter) and most likely proceed with the April IVF.  I am very happy to be back to this schedule.  I was a crying mess last Friday when they told me that we would have to put it off a month if my period didn’t come – I just knew it was going to be late…

So, in theory shots will start again on March 31 with retreival and transfer at the end of April.  I did get all my medicines in the mail the other day, so I am ready to start when I get the word. 

In business news, I am rolling right along with two confirmed regular clients (and two more in the pipeline) and several catering events (well, 2, plus one that I am assisting with) coming up.  For having been in business 2 1/2 months, I’d say that’s pretty damn good.  My website is also live as of last week and it is beautiful and super-professional looking thanks to Mike’s family friend who is a great graphic designer.  I sent out an “I’m open for business!” e-mail to everyone I know and my favorite chef from school asked me to come speak to his class.  I was very nervous, not being much of a public speaker, but also very flattered.  I went on Wednesday this week, and they asked good questions and apparently enjoyed it.  My friend who is in the class (the best cooking-station-partner EVER) e-mailed me to tell me that the girl sitting next to her said that I had inspired her.  Ego boost for me.

Lots to do tomorrow – cleaning, running, laundry and packing – before heading to Arizona at the ungodly hour of 5:30 am (pick-up time for my ride to the airport) on Sunday.  I am so looking forward to some great food, relaxation (complete with a massage on Tuesday even though I got one today too… man am I spoiled), hiking and even a little spring training baseball.