Infertility, won't you be my valentine?

Another doctor’s appointment today…or should I say last doctor’s appointment today.

Let me back up.

Last week I wasn’t doing so well. I didn’t handle the news that this was a failed cycle with much grace, although I would really love to blame that on the daily 200mg of clomid. But I guess it doesn’t really matter too much why.

So, I took the week, got my emotional crap together and had another appointment on Monday. Basically no change, except that my doc actually counted all my follicles on the different planes of my ovaries. I was apparently wrong in my previous post when I said we had 10-15 follicles respond. We actually counted 16…on just the right ovary. So, really I had closer to 25-30 follicles respond, and still no dominant follicle.

Fast forward to today. One more appointment. No change. I still had about 30 follicles, none bigger than 5mm even though this was CD19. So, my doc told me, because I had already paid for it, I could come in for another scan sometime next week to see if I had a follicle start to mature. However, he said that he didn’t think there was a chance of it happening.

We talked a little bit about moving forward and what we were going to do, and I shared with him that my husband and I were thinking about going on birth control pills while we saved up for our IVF. He did not like that idea. He help trying to tell me that there is a chance, an impossibly small chance, that my husband and I could get pregnant on our own because our only problem is that I don’t ovulate regularly. However, I reminded him that the reason I even ended up in his office was because I had gone seven months bleeding three out of every four weeks. I explained that I did not want to go through that again, and I was willing to waive that slim chance of pregnancy in favor of regulating my menstrual cycles.

He then told me that, if I was interested, there was one more medicine that he would be willing to try with me called Letrozole. I have done very minimal research on Letrozole on my own, and didn’t really know much about it. As I have said before, one of the things I like best about my doctor is that he is a straight shooter. He doesn’t lie to me or mislead me, and he gives me the information so I can make my own decisions. So, I really appreciated it when he told me that Letrozole is not FDA approved for treatment of infertility. It is actually a medicine used in patients with breast cancer because it reduces the amount of estrogen and forces the body to produce more FHS (thus causing ovulation). Sounds okay to me so far. I didn’t like that it wasn’t FDA approved, but I was willing to listen. Until he told me that the women who used it for breast cancer and got pregnant had a much higher rate of birth defects. Then I found out that animal studies show the same thing. There really haven’t been any studies done that look at birth defects in women who only use it for fertility, but he informed me that his office does use it for women who are clomiphene resistant and they’ve never had any birth defects. He said this is likely because you take it for a short time, like clomid, and by the time you actually get pregnant the medicine is out of your system.

However, I just don’t know if I feel comfortable using a medicine to try and get pregnant that causes birth defects. From what I’ve read, Letrozole is as effective as clomid at inducing ovulation, however there have been no studies looking at whether or not it increases actual pregnancy or live births (not even discussing whether or not those are healthy births).

So, my husband and I are going to have a nice long talk about whether or not it is something we want to do.

If it is, we will be going back next cycle to try one last medicated round.

If not, I’m going to go on BCP and we’ll take our 2ish years to save up the money to try IVF.

Stay tuned, because the road might be getting a little bumpy up ahead.

Forget love...infertility is a battlefield

Today was a bad day.

Today was one of those days where I let my grief and my pain overwhelm me.

Today was one of those days where I came home from work and collapsed at the foot of my bed, dropped my head to my arms and just let go.

Today I cried (and I mean ugly cried), I screamed, I wallowed.

Today I let despair take over, and I lost myself in it.

For me, infertility is a daily battle. Every single day the pain of what I’m going through, and what I’m being denied, rears up. And every day I have to fight hard to keep it from winning.

Today I lost that battle.

After a long talk last night, my husband and I decided that if this cycle is unsuccessful, we’re going to take a long break. Our doctor has said the next step he’d be willing to take with us is IVF, a procedure we simply can’t afford. At least, we can’t afford it right now. We’re thinking that if this cycle is unsuccessful we might take a break from all the treatments and start saving the money we would have spent. Hopefully, it means in 2 years we might be able to afford one round of IVF. And then we’ll be done. 2 more years of saving, waiting and biding our time - one final infertility treatment. If it is unsuccessful, we’ll walk away from treatment all together and find our peace in another path to parenthood.

We’re not set on this plan yet, but it’s what we’re talking about right now.

Honestly, even after our first failed cycle, I don’t think I realized how much I was depending on this to work, and how much pain was waiting for me if it didn’t.

Today I just don’t have the energy to fight.

Cycle Day 10

And yet another in the endless string of doctor’s appointments.

Cycle day 10. Clomid on days 4-8. Had 10-15 follicles respond, no dominant follicle, no follicle over .25cm.

My doctor told me that due to my unpredictable response to the clomid, he won’t be doing another clomid cycle with me. In fact, he isn’t interested in doing any more drug cycles because he can’t control the outcome.

So, appointment Monday to see if I have any dominant follicle growth. If not, he told me the only other treatment he’d be willing to do with us is IVF.

Not a very good day. To say the least I guess.

Another Manic Monday

Okay. So cycle one was a bust. I called my doc’s office Monday morning and let them know I wouldn’t be coming in Tuesday for my lab appointment because Aunt Flo had already arrived and I knew there was no bean. So, they scheduled me for Thursday to come in and start cycle 2. Which was fine…except that Monday at 1:30, the office called and said they had a cancellation and they would really like to get me in that day. I said sure, what time? 2:30…

So, after flying back to the mainland and making it to the office at 2:34 (oops) I got to meet with my doc, who seemed very sincere in his condolences over my failed cycle (he ended my appointment by saying that it was nice to see me again, even though he’d rather he didn’t have to see me because I was off pregnant…but barring that it was nice to see me again, lol).

We did an ultrasound and had a chat.  He said he saw some good things, like no cysts/follicles left behind. He even said starting my period was a good thing because it meant I had ovulated and had responded to both the clomid and the hCG. However, as I said before, he was a little disappointed that I only had 1 follicle mature, even after being on 150mg of clomid. So, what he wanted to do was move me up to 200mg and see if I could get a response and have multiple follicles mature (last cycle he said he was hoping for 2 or 3). Although, he said there was a possibility that he would stair step me up to 250mg if he needed to.

Joy.

As miserable as I was taking the 150mg, I can’t imagine what kind of wonderful is in store for me at 200mg. However, I am most certainly not afraid to try. So, today is Wednesday (cd4) and I get to start my massive dose of clomid tonight. Then, ultrasound on Tuesday to see how things are progressing.

I’m a little nervous that I will have too much of a response and that I’ll have too many follicles mature for it to be safe to try this cycle. But I guess that’s a risk I have to take? This whole medicine tweaking thing kind of blows.

I’m not as excited about this cycle as I was about last cycle. I guess that is to be expected, though. I told my husband that this cycle I want him to back off of all the “just stay positive” crap. It’s not me. I’m cynical and I keep my expectations low to keep from getting hurt. It’s just my way. Staying positive didn’t really do anything last cycle except stress me out that I wasn’t being positive enough for everyone else. Frankly, I don’t particularly care if my husband and my mom think I need to keep a good attitude. Being positive doesn’t make an egg mature. It doesn’t help an egg get fertilized. It most certainly won’t help a fertilized egg stick in my uterus. All it does is set me up for disappointment when the cycle fails.

Maybe that’s the wrong attitude to have, but I don’t really care. I’m not a positive princess. I’m cynical sally.

For now I’m going to take one day at a time, focus on what I need to be doing, and let myself feel whatever it is I am feeling without judgment. If I feel hopeful, then I’m going to be hopeful. If I’m feeling defeated, I’m going to throw myself a pity party and camp out in my bedroom with a book.

Maybe I’m being a little too dramatic. Oh well. I’ll suck it up.

And I’ll probably be keeping my fingers crossed anyway. A friend, colleague and mentor of my once said I always seem to have a unique blend of sarcasm, cynicism and timid hope in my approach to life. I think it probably applies to my approach to fertility as well.

So I guess that’s all I’ve got to hold on to – sarcasm, cynicism, a tiny ribbon of hope. Maybe it will be enough to get me through.

I don’t know if anyone out there even reads this damn blog, but I have to ask (just in case). Anyone know of any success stories at 200mg of clomid with PCOS?

Two Week Wait Over

Aunt Flo arrived on Sunday.

One more week...

So I’ve reached the halfway point of the two week wait and I’m feeling miserable.

Not only do I have a cold, but I’m still getting the rolling nausea that I got after the hCG shot. At first I was only nauseous for the first day or two and had a break. But this weekend it came back full force. I spend Sunday night unable to decide if I should blow my nose or vomit (thankfully I never did throw up) and I got basically no sleep. Monday I woke up still nauseous, but, remembering that eating lunch helped the day of my hCG, I grabbed some cereal to munch on. I felt immediately better, although whenever I had an empty stomach throughout the day the nausea came back. Today (Tuesday) I woke up feeling better, but around lunch time the nausea came back.

Additional side effects of the shot have been sore boobies (especially in the nipple region). I would also say tiredness, but that could just be because I haven’t been sleeping well. Lol. Also, my left ovary was very sore/tender all weekend, and is just now starting to feel better.

One more week. Can’t wait to find out. J

All hail the two week wait

So my last post was on Monday. I said that I’d had some cramping starting the night before and a little nausea after taking the hCG shot and I was hoping that would be the end of it.

Ha.

I should have known nothing ever goes easy for me. Today is Wednesday and I have been nauseous pretty much constantly since then (which let me tell you, makes baby dancing feel like I’m lost at sea with 30 foot waves). My ovaries have been crampy and sore, and any quick movement causes them pain (so, double sucky for the baby dancing…not to mention when we were and I had a big O it was excruciating…worst orgasm of my life). Apparently it is common to “feel like someone kicked you in the ovaries,” as I read on so many blogs and forums, after clomid and especially with the hCG shot.

Joy to me.

Additionally, I had some major bloating (like my pants barely fit kind of bloating) and a general feeling of crap.

However, I woke up this morning with no pain. No ovary pain, no bloating, no crap feeling. I am still a tiny bit nauseous, I imagine from the hCG in my system, but nothing I can’t live with. So, I’m assuming that all of that means my doctor was right, and sometime last night my big beautiful follicle released.

And now we enter that hell period known as the two week wait. For those of you unfamiliar with the term (although I can’t imagine why you’d be neck deep in an infertility blog without knowing what the two week wait is) it is the two week period after you ovulate before you find out if you’re preggers. There’s about shit that can be done during that time because your egg has released and all the baby dancing in the world isn’t going to help.

So, now I’m stuck in limbo. And today is only day 1. For, potentially, the first time ever, I’m 1DPO (day past ovulation). It’s also the first time ever that my husband has felt the very real stress of trying to conceive. Friday night I had a break down (and he was a wonderful shoulder) and finally explained to him how awful the last 3 years has been. How broken I felt, how every month we didn’t get pregnant made me feel more distant and hurt, and how I had started resenting him, myself and our sex life as just a big clusterfuck of infertility. He listened and was sympathetic, but I don’t really think he understood.

This week, though, that changed. My husband has always wanted to be a father, and so now that we are going through fertility treatments, he is finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. However, all of the treatment so far has been for me, as our only infertility factor (that we know of) has been my PCOS. Other than coming to all of my appointments and holding my hand during the worst of it (like my HSG), his biggest involvement was his semen analysis.

But this week things changed. I pumped myself full of drugs, we dropped another $80 on a shot, and I endured yet another vaginal ultrasound which revealed one mature follicle. I had done largely everything I could to get us ready. Now, in his eyes, it was on his shoulders to impregnate me (I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t on his shoulders, but he got all boy-ish and brushed me off). He got very stressed out, to the point that he couldn’t even eat without feeling like he was going to throw up. Then, after dinner he took a shower (I think he was trying to work himself up—he was so worried he would mess everything up). When he got out, I laid down in bed with him and we just listened to music and made fun of R Kelly music videos (a midget? Wtf R Kelly?). I think he almost murdered me, haha. He finally told me that he’d been so stressed all day because the doctor told us we HAD to baby dance exactly 34-36 hours after I took the shot, and he was so worried that something would happen and we wouldn’t make it. So, because he was all in his own head, he couldn’t even think about getting into the mood. I told him that realistically, ovulation occurs 34-40 hours after the shot and that it is best to try and catch it early, but that if we don’t make it exactly in that 2 hour window, it will be okay.

It was like I could see the weight come off of his chest. He held me and we laughed and he calmed down significantly (and, amazingly, once he calmed down we were able to still get our baby dance in during the 34-36 hour period, much to his delight). I think it was the first time that he’s ever felt the stress I’ve been under for the last 3 years. And after we baby danced I explained it again to him, and this time I could see the empathy in his eyes, and I think a little bit of wonder, too. I think that, going forward, he might cut me a little more slack when I get all wound up about this baby making stuff.

It’s been a miserable 48 hours. But, now it’s behind us. Hopefully we’ll get pregnant this round (I hope these aren’t words that I will look back on years from now with amusement at their naivety) and we won’t have to go through this again anytime soon. And, even if we do, at least the two week wait exists as a buffer so we have time to gather ourselves before we go through it again.