We are now in the dreaded time period that is called the 2ww-the two week wait. Everything before this seems easy by comparison. Although this is now my third visit into 2ww territory, it’s still something that weighs heavily on my mind. The stress, it’s true, feels somehow less this time but every other thought dwells on wondering if I am pregnant. Thinking about it. Not thinking about it. Thinking about it. Not thinking about it.
It’s enough to drive a person mad.
On Friday we showed up for the embryo transfer, and I was still incredibly sore. I was in a great deal of pain Wednesday and Thursday, despite being kept in longer on Wednesday for a joyous shot of the hardcore painkiller pethadine. I slept several more hours instead of being discharged (and went through not one, but two rounds of hallucinations from the drugs-the general anesthetic resulted in me apparently telling the nurse in the recovery room that I know I have 19 phone messages, please get them to me later. The pethadine allowed me to get angry that nurses were throwing popcorn and Pringles in my hospital room, despite me telling them not to. I don’t remember any of this but it’s typical of my on any kind of medication, and the truth is although I don’t love it enough to invoke unnecessary surgeries, I LOVE the moment that you realize the anesthetic is working. For this reason, I’ve always avoided drugs.) My last fresh IVF cycle I remember incredible pain before the embryo retrieval, in which I couldn't even walk without crying. This time beforehand I had no problem other than slight bloating-it does indeed line up with the idea that I was hyper-stimulated the first time which could have affected my outcomes. I like to think this time went better.
So Friday we still had 7 embryos. In embryo terms you grade them 1-4, I believe. 1 is the cream of the crop and the highest chances of pregnancy. Grade 2 also has a quite high chance of pregnancy, with grade 3 being listed as above average. Grade 4 basically sums up to “go ahead and have a beer” kind of embryo, from what I can understand. I could look up the scientific details of the grading but I am much too tired-the progesterone has me feeling constantly exhausted.
After advice from the RE and Aidan’s strong negative feelings to any possibility of twins, we went with transferring just one embryo, the best of the lot. Although it was a Grade 2 it was only just a Grade 2 instead of a Grade 1 due to a tiny fragment on one wall, but the RE called it “textbook perfect” and we saw a picture of it before it went in, a 4-celled little wonder. It was transferred and we agreed to freeze the rest, although one of our remaining 6 stopped dividing so we now have 5 dreamsicles in deep freeze. The remaining 5 are divided thus-3 of them at 4-cells and of those 3 2 are Grade 2 and one is Grade 3. The other two went on to keep dividing and are 5 cells, one at Grade 2 and one at Grade 3. This all sounds very technical but what the RE’s recommendation was is to consider putting two back, if this fails. To do this, as I understand it, they will have to thaw the lot as not every thaw succeeds.
I know it’s a lot to take on board.
Imagine being the one with hormones, pain killers, anesthetic and great quantities of hopes and dreams who has to process it.
So as of writing this we are now 2dp2dt. This means 2 days past a 2 day transfer, as the embryo had two days to keep dividing and growing. I take a seriously sensitive home pregnancy test on May 12, and between now and then there are twelve days. Twelve more days. Twelve very long days indeed.
Twelve days to either hope continuing or me taking to my bed with serious amounts of alcohol.
Twice a day I have to insert progesterone suppositories into the rear passage, which is far from comfortable but I hope it helps. I imagine the little embryo in there bobbing along to R.E.M. (the good old albums) deciding if it does indeed like that nice thick uterine lining I worked hard for. Aidan doesn’t want to name it as he’s terrified of personalizing something that may decide we’re not the parents we want, but I have a name for the embryo inside my head that I just can't shake.
As we left on Friday, me wearing my lucky socks from Statia and my lucky sweater that had just arrived from Stinkerbell, I was sore, tired, and utterly confused and worried. I turned to the nurse as we left.
“Tell that other woman good luck. I really hope it works out for her.”
She smiled. “You’ve done a good thing, Vanessa. Go home and think about yourself.”
And I smile back and agree. The other woman has 9 whole eggs to work with, but my thoughts are going to be on my one floating around in Innerspace, trying to decide if I’m the mommy they want me to be.
She did it!
Yesterday the wonderful and very professional people at the hospital harvested 19 eggs from Vanessa. Since she is egg-sharing this means nine go to the other lucky lady and we get to keep 10.
This morning we received the anxiously awaited call from the clinic to tell us that seven had fertilised. We will not know until tomorrow, after they have had a chance to develop overnight tonight, how viable they are.
Back tomorrow morning for you know what.....
Sorry for the less-than-effervescent post. Blogging not really my thing but thought you may like an update and since Vanessa (my absolute jewel) is still feeling a bit uncomfortable even though essentially well, I have to do this.
Aidan
The visit to the doctor this morning was a big one.
We were nervous, and we ran late as we always do. The world outside the car window was a hazy, foggy dark spot. Windshield wipers ticked silently across a path, unblurring the blurred.
When we got there it was clear we are old hats. We see the same people in the office now, and they know us by sight. We sit in the same seats and get ready for the same exam room. We know the procedure by now, we now the rota.
As I change in the exam room I see an enormous tub of scanning lube. I pick it up and ask Aidan if he's interested in a fun weekend. He laughs, but the nurse is not amused. I sigh at my weak attempt and mount up on the hobby horse.
The scan begins.
I silently tick off numbers in my head and on my fingers, and I can't believe it.
The minimum size the clinic wants for them to be considered a safe bet that they are mature is 16mm. On Friday, I had only 9 at 16mm. I was petrified that they wouldn't grow.
Her first measurement was incredible. The first follicle was a whopping 26cm. They kept on coming in at the 20+ mark, too. In the end, I had only 5 follicles that were under 16mm, one of them at 10mm the rest between 13-15. In total, I have 18 follicles. 18, and many of them big enough to see with the naked eye.
I get dressed and we go talk to the fertility nurse, a fabulous woman with a smoker's cough and a penchance for using the word "bloody", not as in "your beaver is bloody" but as in "I'm so bloody hungry". I like a health professional that swears.
She draws blood and then sits us down. "Your eggs are cooked," she says with a grin. "You're ready."
We're ready.
She gives us details-tonight I take my final Buserelin, or down-regulation medication at 6pm. I take the trigger shot tonight. This is the final shot, the last thing to do. I take the shot and in 36 hours the eggs come out. They rang me this afternoon with details of the blood test-my estradiol levels are really high, so the follicles I have are packing eggs, they're not just empty follicle sacs. They have a "very high degree of certainty" that there are enough eggs for me and my donee.
We talked a bit about one embryo versus two and she strongly advises two in women my age (which is 32). They say we'll know more after extraction and during fertilization, but that in their clinic the success rates go way down wih one embryo versus two.
Much thinking will have to be done in this house-we're trying to manage it all, and he's trying to keep from freaking out too badly while I'm trying to help him, too.
But in the meantime, it's nearly here.
36 hours to go.
I can't stop from crying, and I don't think it's the hormones.
It’s a constant whirwind of thoughts in my mind, all of this. It’s so amazingly hard to take in, while at the same time it’s the one thing that is never far from my mind, ever.
As the follicles grow my discomfort is growing, too. Standing, walking, lifting things, it’s all very difficult. When I walk I waddle a bit from side to side, I have a swollen abdomen and suffer from bouts of nausea from the medications. That I have the symptoms of pregnancy but none of the end benefits is an irony that’s not lost on me.
My final egg count is something that I won’t know until they go in and get them all out on Wednesday. I won’t know about it until then but it doesn’t mean that I don’t think about it a million times a day. I can’t stop thinking about how many I will wind up with in the end. Even more than that, I can’t stop worrying about how many will fertilize. Further to that, the one-egg/two-egg issue is doing my head in-I dwell on it constantly and with some sense of complete confusion and concern.
I think I’ve thought about the woman who is receiving half of my eggs almost as much as I’ve been thinking about everything I’m going through. I wonder if she’s as nervous, as hopeful, as excited or as scared as I am. I wonder if she and her husband link fingers and dream about it together at night or if they silently accept her aches and pains and medicated moods, which is the scenario we live in. I wonder if she has to change the channel from shows where a woman is giving birth, announcing her pregnancy, or beaming about how fucking fabulous it is to be a mom. I wonder if she has told anyone in her life about what she’s going through, I wonder how many prayers and wishes and hopes she’s raised up into the air.
I wonder if she’s as constantly plagued by all of the impossible “what-if” questions as I am.
I don’t know. I will never know. I have a green piece of paper to fill out still, as the deadline is tomorrow. It’s a slippery slope from here on, once I trigger it’s all systems go. We go for retrieval and fertilization on Wednesday (most likely, to be confirmed tomorrow morning) and later in the day she and her partner show up and fertilize their eggs (they do this to ensure that we never meet up.) We don’t know each others names, where the other one lives, or any details about each other. She’ll have a green piece of paper that sums me up in half a page, but although we are entitled to know, Aidan and I long ago decided that we don’t want to know the outcome of her IVF-if she fails, I will feel terribly guilty. If she succeeds and I don’t, I have to be honest-it may feel even worse.
It’s just better to not know.
And now that I am staring the days down, now that the whole world is on the line, I have to tell the truth-I don’t think about her as much as I did before we started the cycle and in the beginning of the early one-shot-a-day phase. While it has never once crossed my mind to pull out of this process, I would never even entertain a single thought about not offering up half of my eggs to her, I am a bitch who is now only focused on my own cycle. She’s on her own, but I honestly wish her the best of luck.
Aidan again stated something we had already discussed-we don’t have many shots at this. He is older, and with older means less excitement at midnight infant feedings. We can’t go through this so many times and I feel I have to work so hard to make sure this one goes right, only I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to do to ensure that it will. Even though you get all those comments from people who say things like “You WILL be a mother! You MUST be a mother!” wishful thinking has never been something that gets translated into concrete.
I cry a lot.
I’m not ready to face the prospect that I might spend my life without ever knowing what it’s like to be a mother.
I would make bargains with god, if only I thought that would help.
We have our last scan tomorrow, and I am hoping to talk to the doctor about some of the things on my mind then.
Scan #2 was had yesterday.
The follicles are coming along. I now have 16 follicles, ranging in size between 8mm and 18mm (fyi-follicles are the sacs that hold the eggs inside the ovaries. Women are born with about 450 of them, which will appear during ovulation after puberty strikes you down. In IVf, we race the hormones to get extra follicles from our ovary in one cycle. The problem? The supply, she is limited from birth.) They said most follicles are mature at aounr 16mm, so that's the area I'm hoping to get to.
Looking at my stats, she said that by Wednesday I should have 10 that are at 16mm.
10.
I freaked out.
I need 8, but 8 is that absolute minimum . That's the "you need to be this tall to ride this ride" height. If I have 8 eggs, 4 go to the other woman and 4 go to me. Out of those 4, you can bet at least one won't fertilize (not blaming the swimmers, it's just some relationships are not compatible, so no matter how much wheedling Aidan's sperm do my eggs will just not let him past the door guard.) If I have only 10 that make it, that gives me a shot with 5.
And further to that, Aidan is dead-set on us only replacing one embryo. He's terrified of having twins, it's his worst-case sceanrio. Not having a baby at all is mine. So it looks like we'll have one embryo, as I'm trying to research my stats. Stats show (if I am reading them right) that one egg is enough to do the job sometimes, only...I don't know. Aidan reiterated yesterday that he is getting up there in years, he doesn't want to do this forever. I feel immense time pressure, so shouldn't I go for all I can in my hopes that it will work? Or is that absolutely the wrong way to think?
Will do more research.
I am trying to remain positive-it is possible that many of my follicles will catch up this weekend. They don't knock me out and bust down the ovary doors until next Wednesday which means that there is a shot that some follicles will keep growing. I try to remain positive that all it takes is one embryo, that one embryo can do the job.
I am sore, uncomfortable, and so tired. The follicles are large enough to actually impact me-they're roughly the size of small screws and I feel like I am carrying around tennis balls inside of me for ovaries. I have a sinus infection, migraines, and am bloated to the point where going to the beach is a bad idea, as surely I'll be harpooned if I flop around in the water. So much is happening and I feel really freaked out and hideously lost.
IVF. It's quite a roller coaster.
So I'm packing pre-babies now. The insides are feeling very swollen now, and one of our cats, when jumping on my lap after doing a half-pike double twist, elicited a scream from me that had her shooting out of the living room at speeds only Chuck Yeager has experienced. Yes. I hurt that much.
And it's a week to go.
I've got other side effects as well-it's Aidan's birthday and that generally includes a round of sex, only sex really doesn't cross my mind as I'm pretty uncomfortable (and it's not just because it's his birthday. It's been 5 days since we had it, and normally we are not that prone to dry spells.)
I am bloated. It could, of course, have to do with all of the water I am sucking down. I'm nursing a full-on addiction to the stuff right now, as I've found with the medications I'm on if I don't drink lots of water I get headaches that are so bad I have license to kill people who are even breathing too loud.
I have wind. And it's sudden stalker-kind of wind. There's something about the medication that has rendered my anal passage entirely beyond my control, I can't even do the old sphincter-tighten-and-absorb routine. The farts, they come and they do not listen to me. I was in a garden center on Saturday and I bent down to look at an apple tree sapling. On my way down I ripped one wide open.
In front of a family of 5.
They regarded me with horror, rather like the emotion I was feeling.
What do you say? "Gee, I'm not normally on the baked beans but I just couldn't help it last night"? Or "I'm cycling in IVF right now, and the shots are beyond my control, I'm very sorry"? Or "Whhooooo-eeeeee! I give that one a 7 out of 10, whatya' say?"
In the end, I said nothing. I just fled with a face redder than the tulips on sale for 10 for £2.99.
The final most horrible part is my knickers look like I am breeding a snail farm in there. The thick uterine lining results in a side effect in that it looks like I am either permanently turned on or that I used my panties to blow my nose and then put them back on. I have to change pants a few times a day, or else I gross myself out so much I wonder if I should cauterize myself shut.
I just don't get much sexier than this.
In order to donate and have my own IVF cycle, I needed 8 follicles.
8.
That's the minimum. Less than 8 and we have a choice-keep all the eggs and pay over £3000 for a cycle. Or give them all to her and then my whole next cycle is free and I keep all the eggs. A version of hell, either way around.
I needed 8.
I have been so worried. My clinic wants to avoid overstimulation so much, could I be understimulated? Did I fuck up in my Buserelin shot, and now am ovulating, thereby wiping out the whole process? I have been feeling discomfort and pain, particularly on the left hand side, but was that because my ovary had turned into a tennis ball at night and Bjorn Borg would come calling? Are the follicles ok, the right size, shape, and in the right tax bracket?
We went to the clinic. I was a pale version of myself as we were running late again. We get to the clinic and I am stressed-I have to get to London for a meeting by 9 am. It was 7:45. Aidan had a phone conference at 9 am and had forgotten his phone.
Did I have at least 8 eggs?
I change into the blue paper sheet and lay down. The scan nurse has handed Aidan a post-it note to note down the amount of follicles and their sizes, which she will read to him. She loads up the fun rod and in it goes.
My lining is perfect, she tells me. Women would give their right arm for my uterine lining. It is thick and perfect, a "dream".
Excellent. So I have a thick lining and I get to keep my right arm. I'm ready for step two, but how the fuck am I doing on step one?
She highlights the follicles on the right ovary. There are not many. They look like big black marbles and range in size from 14 to 8, which she says is just right for my cycle timing.
But are there 8?
She measures and she and Aidan play a game to see who can guess the size. A tear escapes my eye and I roll my head to the table to get it away. Oh God, two whole families depend on what heat I am packing, are there 8?
The left ovary has more follicles, she says it is the left ovary's turn to do the work this month, that's why there are more. It explains the pain in my left side, it is not psychological on my part-there are follicles in there and they are large. The size is right on target.
I needed 8.
At the end of the scan, she counts them up.
I am carrying at least 14 would-be babies.
When we leave the room, I cry uncontrollably with relief.
I've been doing shots for nearly 4 weeks.
They are hurting now. A lot. I have purply-yellow across my stomach and I learnt a painful lesson this weekend-my legs? They are not for shots. It appears I've done a bit too much yoga as the needle can only find muscle, and those shots hurt like fire. So I continue sticking my stomach, only my stomach is sore and swollen and bruised.
My insides are beginning to be uncomfortable-I feel like I am carrying around two gold balls inside of my stomach. Sex is uncomfortable as things have apparently been rearranged in there with the application of the needles.
I have at least 8 more days to go. To be honest, I'm tired of the process but at least the moods are ok. I have my first scan tomorrow and I have to admit-I'm nervous. Do I have eggs? Do I have a lot of eggs? Do I have enough eggs for the other woman and for me? Are the eggs ok? Is it all ok?
Will I get pregnant?
And I found out that when I get the embryos put back in (or embryo, I'm not sure. Aidan only wants one put back in, I want two, it's a discussion we've yet to have) the progesterone supplement I will have to take is indeed a suppository. A rectal suppository. For two weeks, twice a day, I have to shove something up my ass, and I have a real ass phobia.
6 more days of Buserelin.
5 more days of stims.
6 days to trigger....hopefully.
I'm tired.
I love our new house, despite its problems.
I love the space, I love the light, I love the rural enivornment that suddenly we seem to have thrust ourselves in. A city girl lives at the end of an unpaved road and she loves it so much she surprises even herself. The house is far from perfect but the walls are so full of possibility I can't believe I'm allowed to live here.
Aidan's family was over last weekend. They ooh-ed nd aah-ed as appropriate, and it was agreed that Aidan and I will host Christmas this year for his family. This means us, Aidan's children, Aidan's mother and stepfather and his two brothers and their families all staying overnight with us. Although Aidan's nieces can really get on my nerves, I love the noise of having people over. I love cooking for everyone, even if there are arguments in the kitchen. I love the idea of beds in all rooms taken, Christmas dreams, and a massive tree in our living room, with cats playing beneath it and mounds of wrapped presents for everyone falling into the corners.
And if I'm honest, when I envision this coming Christmas I generally see myself as being incredibly pregnant.
I don't know whether it's good or terrifying to try to have visions like that.
There's a lot you learn about yourself on this IVF journey ("You want me to drink a litre of milk a day? Do you know that means I will never poop again?"). There's a lot you learn about your partner in this, too ("If I have to give you a shot it means we're not doing IVF. I can help you draw the syringes but there's no way I've using the sharp end.") Even more, you learn about IVF and just how utterly confusing it is if you're a woman about to go through it.
We're really happy with our clinic, for example. Although we think the doctor is a tosser, we like the nurses and we like the way they do things-namely, it's run by most of the team that were part of the first IVF baby in the world, and they all do things based on science. Every last bit of it. Everything is measured by statistics. The way they run things is based on proven methodology, and while they examine new methods all the time, they insist that clinical studies must go on for a very long time and in very thorough methods before they will consider taking something new on. The stim drug I am on, Menopur, is just such an "old-fashioned" drug. It's not easy to use and is not new but the clinic has very high success rates with it, it is proven in their clinic and in others, and they will not swap unless new drugs prove their worth.
There's comfort in that.
I like that our clinic doesn't leap on every hopeful bandwagon, some which may indeed lead to the miracle, some which may dash all of our chances.
I read the IVF Connections Board over there on my links sidebar from time to time. It's largely used by Americans and there are way too many uses of terms like "baby dust" and "baby glue" for my comfort, but que sera sera. What stuns me, though, is that some women are heralding the fact that they had 74 eggs in one cycle.
74 eggs.
Apparently, one clinic one of the women goes to boasts of retrieving 93 eggs.
Maybe I've been blemished by my clinic, but I remember the RE saying that anything over 18 is potential for OHSS (over-hyperstimulation syndrome, I believe). OHSS is bad for the mother in that it hurts the body and can have drastic consequences. Based on the fact that I was in so much incredible pain when I had my first round of IVF, that I had 18 eggs but only 11 fertilized and of those only 8 were good enough to use, they believe I was hyper-stimulated. They are incredibly wary of hyper-stimulation and as a result I have more scans than my Outlook calendar can take.
It just reminds me that IVF is a crap shoot, really. One clinic has one philosophy, one clinic has another, and through it all they are carrying handbaskets of women who have invested their life savings, their time, and above all their hopes and dreams.
I'll just drink my milkshake and hope for the best.
So I start stimming tonight. This is not a process by which I spend many hours in front of the PC controlling electronic lives (which I would like to do, only currently the study looks like a bomb went off in there, so I try to avoid it). Stims are the drugs that take your sleepy, dozy pre-menopausal ovaries and slap them. Really hard. So hard that they reverse speeds and go into mass egg production. The Easter Bunny, she is stopping by this weekend to pick up a bunch and dye them green.
The stims start tonight. And as I am fighting the plague of mankind otherwise known as the flu, I am really looking forward to it. The next two weeks are the slippery slope to the end of the IVF cycle, egg retrieval is still idealistically set for 28 April and I really hope it happens then or before then. The buserelin gives me headaches if I haven't connected my lips to the water faucet on a permanent basis. The doctors now want me to drink at least 2 litres of water and one litre of milk a day. This from a chick who's lactose intolerant, so Aidan and I are going into milkshake production (and not the kind that goes into the small plastic cup, either.) No one ever said an IVF cycle was a guaranteed weight loss plan.
So on Monday when I had the scan (they come at you with a dildo-shaped device, topped with a condom and some KY. It was the least sexual experience I have ever had with a sexually-shaped device. I would have asked her to turn it on vibrate but the nurse gave out waves of "sense of humor bypass", so I knew it wouldn't be popular.) we were running late. Heinously late. The traffic on the M3 was so bad that I was a coiled ball of tension, up until Aidan casually reached over and took my hand and told me that they needed me as much as I needed them.
I calmed down.
Previous to that, we'd been to our old house to shower (our new house has no shower, just a bathtub. That is being rectified this weekend, because taking a bath instead of the shower has "Lil Abner" written all over it.) Since we had to take our clothes with us, we showered and changed. I slid on my knickers when I realized they had a hole in the side.
My favorite knickers.
Hole in the side.
A memory flashed back of the new puppy, having swiped them off the line and running rampant with them in the living room.
With horror, I checked out my knickers. They were covered in holes. I only received the damn things for Valentine's Day, they are my favorite, and they looked like they had seen the bad side of an episode of Roseanne.
Aidan was in fits of laughter.
I was distraught. I was going to my first scan with panties that there was no way in hell I wanted to be caught dead in. I wailed a bit, and once we got there I went into the scan room with Aidan and shouted, all in one go:
"Pleaseexplaintothenurseabouttheknickersandthedog. OhmygodI'msoembarrassed."
I took a breath and hid in the bathroom.
As I came out, the nurse looked confused. "You have to strip from the waist down. I won't even see your pants."
Right.
Fuck.
The down-regulating worked. My lining is itty-bitty (and, actually, I am still leaking "old blood", so am not sure if this means my period is on DAY TEN or if god just hates me a whole lot) and the ovaries have no cysts (I am told this is a possible side effect of the Buserelin, so it's fun for the whole family really.)
As I'm cycling for two-or, actually, for three or four or five if you count the embryos-I have to be timed to the other woman. I have to be behind her in terms of scheduling, as the egglets are the part that you cannot change the process on. As of Thursday (since it coincides with her cycle) I will start stimming.
Stims start Thursday.
Let the games begin.
PS-this post would be longer, only I'm so fucking tired I think I'm about to die.
PPS-Statia, sorry to upset you, but my RE? Yeah. She said drinking is still totally ok.
Sorry-lost internet access for a few days due to the house move!
The package, she was innocuous. A nice shirt, a pair of earrings, and a card signed on a first name basis. So unless Aidan did remove objects and didn't tell me (which is, in this case, the right thing to do as just now there are a few things in my family I don't want to know about. Scratch that. There are a lot of things I don't want to know about in my family.) then all quiet on the western front. Or, since I live in England, I guess that would make it the eastern front. So this analogy, it doesn't really work at all.
Anyway.
The Buserelin has allowed me to enjoy a major first in my life-I just had my period for EIGHT DAYS. Why yes, it does need to be in caps. EIGHT DAYS. EIGHT DAYS of tampons in an out to the extent that I did resort to pads as my hooch whimpered in terror. My menopausal body has decided it didn't need this uterine lining at all, thank you, and has wrung it out like a Scotch Brite sponge. My ovaries are looking around and adjusting their large aviator mirror glasses as they announce that this house is clean.
Luckily tomorrow is my first scan, or what is euphamistically known in the IVF world as a wanding (it makes me think of fairies flying up there and offering to grant me three wishes, the first of which would be could they please fly right back out of there but before they do how about playing with the G-spot for a minute?) Aidan and I are trooping off to the hospital at the unholy hour of 7:30 to get this done. The scan should tell me if the Buserelin has been doing its job and if I have, indeed, been "down-regulated", which basically means that the ovarian factory has been closed and all the employees sent home to live on unemployment.
If this is the case then I have to possibly wait a day or two, depending on how the donee is with her meds and cycle, and then I start stims this week, if all goes well.
I really hope all goes well.
I'm getting pretty tired of the Buserelin.
A package arrived from my mother, wrapped in a bright blue bubble-wrapped envelope. It sits on our couch, because I'm afraid to open it. I worry that my mother (are you here, Mom? Did you find this site, too?), who has had a sensitivity bypass, has done something incredibly thoughtless like send pictures of my pregnant sister. Or maybe she's made copies of the ultrasound of THE BABY and sent those, since all words from my mother these days have been about THE BABY. Or at least they were-we haven't spoken in three months now, and I wonder if that's ok with all of us.
I thought about just marking it "Return to Sender" and popping it back in the post, but then thought maybe there was word of my grandmother in there, or perhaps something from my non-existent childhood lurking behind the folds. Regardless, I was terrified that something would arrive and something has, I am filled with horror at my hormone-pumped self being confronted with THE BABY. Aidan is going to be my customs security agent and will open it and check it for info about THE BABY later, as well as for other contraband like what a horrible person I am, how I am not part of the family, etc. The poison pen lives.
The package sits on the couch, throbbing and radiating, I just don't know with what.
PS-I love you Statia.
The period started on Saturday which was, amazingly, 28 days since my last one. I am not a 28 days kind of girl. The only thing 28 days means to me is a freaky film or the amount of time a stint in rehab will set you back. 28 days and I, we are foreigners. Now 24 days, we know each other well.
So the period started. I remembered my nurse told me that the period "may be slightly heavier than normal." What she failed to tell me was that it would be like Niagara Falls, and that I would need a barrel to staunch the incredible hemorrhaging that would be my period. I think I've been exsanguinated. Nice.
At one point I was going through the super-heavy-ultimate-maximum-plus (think about your favorite pair of jeans rolled into a ball. Now wrap a thick fleece sweater over that and roll it up and stuff it up your crotch. That's how big one of these tampons is.) every 45 minutes. That's right. Every 45 minutes I had soaked the super-soaker.
Thank God the period is drawing to a close in the next day or two. If I get pregnant, I'm having a C-section because at this point the beaver chute is just too raw to get a being out of, I just won't have it.