Stims Day 10: The Rollercoaster Continues

So yesterday, I was sad. I went to see my spiritual adviser acupuncturist, with whom I thankfully had an appointment that afternoon. She hmmmmmed and felt my pulses and needled me here and there and let me drip tears on her table. I love her.

She then advised me to do some visualization, eat red meat, wear some red, and soak my feet in hot water. I wandered down to a local hippie-dippy shop and bought some red candles and a red scarf. Then I went home and had a spicy dinner, soaked my feet, chugged 2 oz of wheatgrass juice, and went to bed.

This morning, my lining was 9.1-9.5, with a triple stripe pattern.

Who the hell saw that coming? Overnight! I don't know whether to credit the acupuncture, the wheatgrass, the visualization, or, you know, possibly the Follistim. I don't care. My lining is where it needs to be and I am delighted. One more hurdle, cleared.

The next hurdle: defrosting. I'm pretty nervous about that. Maybe I should eat pomegranate. I totally need someone to lead my embryos out of the frozen underworld.

E2: 964
LH: 31

37 weeks, 1 day

A bullet style post is always a good way to overcome the not-posting inertia. I think the bullets relieve me of any sense that I must make the whole thing hang together into some sort of coherant narrative. Either that or years of staring at contentless Powerpoints has reminded me that, if you have bullets, you don't need meaning.

So:

• 37 weeks rocks. I know there are no guarantees, but having made it this far puts a spring in my not-so-nimble-anymore step.
  
  
• Being an insulin-dependent diabetic (that's "A2 GDM" as it's fondly known at the hospital) I now get twice-weekly non-stress tests and once weekly sonograms. This is a beautiful thing for the paranoid pregnant lady. I mean, throughout this whole pregnancy I've been convinced that our fetus is in terrible terrible danger and concerned about the fact that no one else besides me is panicking, probably because of some meaningless datapoints like "all test results are normal" and "low risk". I'm not happy that I'm high-risk now, but I must say it more closely matches my feelings. Now that the doctors are watching with some greater sense of urgency, I'm about 1000% more relaxed.
  
  
• I am, officially, medically, scientifically speaking, huge. As in measuring 42 weeks, 5 weeks ahead. Strangely, Little Guy is measuring absolutely normal; 65th percentile for weight, everything else measuring within a week. My amniotic fluid is normal. I asked the OB why I was so huge, then. She shrugged and said "some women just get huge." OK then!
  
  
• Since I am freaking huge, everyone naturally assumes I am about to give birth any minute. At the hospital yesterday *five* people commented as I was walking down the hall. Samples:
  
  Stranger: Today must be the day!
  Me: Nope, three weeks left.
  
  Stranger: Not much longer now!
  Me: Yes, three weeks isn't long.
  
  (as I trundle slowly down the long hall)
  Stranger: You gonna make it?
  Me: Just rollin' along.
  
  And, the oddest:
  Stranger: Lucky you (in a downbeat, rueful tone)
  Me: pause as I parse this What?
  Stranger: I said, lucky you.
  Me: finally figure out that she's being sarcastic It could be a lot worse!
  Afterwards I wished I'd just sincerely said "Thank you. I do feel lucky." But I also didn't want to make her feel bad when she was just being sociable. I don't know. If anyone else says that, I'll be prepared.
  
  
• I'm positive for Group B Strep. This is not uncommon, and all it means for the delivery is that I will have IV antibiotics. I still wish I weren't. I was hoping to avoid the IV and go for a heplock, but that won't be possible.
  

26w3d: lilacs out of the dead land

All month I've had the slightly itchy feeling I'll be glad when April's over.

Today is April 30, the one year anniversary of the end of my first pregnancy. I mean, it probably isn't the anniversary of the end; April 30, 2008 was a Wednesday, and the pregnancy probably ended the Thursday prior, which I guess would be April 24. But it was the end of my thinking I was pregnant, and that's the important part, as anyone with a blighted ovum or headless fetus could tell you. It's not what's there. It's the end of the dream, of what you want to be there.

The Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival is this weekend, again. We were planning on going last year, but by Saturday I was spotting and by Sunday I was bleeding and cramping but good. This year? I don't know. We love the Sheep & Wool Festival, but these days my feet get sore really fast. And we've got stuff to do, lots of stuff, tiny-guy's-room stuff.

I'm... I don't know. Breathing quietly through this day. The little guy has given me several reassuring thumps. If he were born today, he'd have about a 75% chance of survival and a 60% chance of escaping with no or mild neurologic disability.

The time between last April 30 and November 20 was the darkest I've ever had. Is it depression if it's about something real, and it goes away when the real thing goes away? Because since November I've had so many waves of realizing what a weight I was under during those eight months, how heavy and dark the hours were, how good it feels just to feel good, how light it feels not to be afraid of quiet time and my own thoughts. My joy has been so palpable not just because of what I have, my happiness and excitement for our life with this upcoming little boy. It's also about the lifting of pain. It feels so good when it stops.

Can't help but think about what this whole experience has meant to me as a person, as a parent. I am not at all convinced that it has made me a better person, but it has made me a different person.

This baby I am carrying, this tiny guy, my little fellow, our son: he is not better than our little solstice baby, the boy or girl or nothing that I was carrying, due December 23, 2008. But he is different. He is someone else entirely.

And the life that we will have together, kinehorah, is not the life that due-on-December-23-me would have had with Solstice Baby. But this is the reality we have, and I think it is going to be pretty damn wonderful.

I'm sorry that I couldn't be with your four-month-old self, little Solstice Baby. I really, really wanted you. But you couldn't be around, and that reality couldn't be ours. Now I am so very glad to be here with our little guy, our summer baby.

I thought that the solstice due date seemed so right: I was born in November, I love the fall and early winter. It's a time of year when I'm comfortable and happy. Summer makes me fussy and restless, trapped in our few air conditioned rooms, constantly scuttling away from the oppressive heat. But the baby we got is a summer baby. He is his own baby, and this will be his time, whether I like it or not. Maybe he will love the summer. Maybe he will love sports, or bagpipe music, or a thousand different things that I cannot even fathom being attracted to. He came along on his time, not my time, and he will be his own baby, and then, kinehorah (I have said that more often during the past six months..) then he'll be his own child, his own boy, his own man, someone I cannot imagine, someone I could not even make up.

I can't wait to meet him.

2dp5dt: the roller coaster continues

After the plunge from Saturday's embryo-quality news, I have been lifted up into the atmosphere again by the following news:

Eight of the remaining embryos turned into "very nice quality" (4AA or 4AB) by day 6 and were frozen! Eight! Eight! I expected to have nothing make it to freeze. And of course this is making me much more hopeful for the ones I have inside me. Maybe this batch of embryos are just slow but good-quality growers. That's okay with me.

56 days later... another openin' of another show!

Man, I am impressed by those Endometrium pills. I admit that I was a bit skeptical that shoving them up my hooha twice a day could actually make a difference the way shoving a 1.5" needle into my ass did, but sure enough, it worked. The proof is in the luteal period; 17 days. I didn't get my period until almost 3 days after stopping the Endometrium. I've never had a luteal period longer than 14 days on my own. That's some good shit.

Yesiree Bob, that's right, I've started bleeding, which makes today CD1. Which makes today the first day of IVF #2. Tomorrow I go for bloods and, if all is well, I start birth control pills in the evening.

Tomorrow I will also start metformin. Doc read my carefully supplicatory-yet-insistent note and agreed that, on the basis of the paper I sent him, I looked like a good candidate for the protocol.
Either that or he glanced at the long paper and long note and thought "the quickest way to make her leave me alone is to write her a prescription for glucophage". Either way works for me.

To do:

1. Stop by SpunkMart and get some sperm. This time I'm going to buy the "ART" vials, which are (even) smaller and (somewhat) cheaper than the standard IUI vials. It's a shame they don't sell the sperm per each. Since we're doing ICSI we only need, like, ten.
   
   
2. Do the math, ask for a few days off around retrieval. Hopefully there'll be fewer eggs and no OHSS and therefore the retrieval won't knock me flat on my ass for five days the way it did last time. In any case, I'm going to try and pass it off as vacation time, not sick time. Everyone's already quite suspicious enough from my two-week bender in April, not to mention my constant needle tracks. Thank goodness I don't bruise.
   
   
3. Order meds from Awesome Online Pharmacy. Last time the doctor's office ordered the meds from a local pharmacy that seems to have a stranglehold on area fertility prescriptions. They'd never heard of my beloved ethyl oleate, and sent (and charged me for) crappy-ass syringes that B disliked so much that she swiped some better ones from her lab. Awesome Online Pharmacy not only overnighted me the P in ethyl oleate for half the price of the only local place that could or would compound it, they also sent, for free, decent syringes, alcohol swabs, and a sharps container. So this time I got the prescriptions myself and I'll be ordered everything from AOP. Actually, why be coy -- it's The Apothecary Shop. The eagle-eyed who know me in real life may be able to spot another random reason for my affection for this particular establishment.

In other ordered lists news, I have some good life distractions.

1. I got a fat promotion at work, which was extremely soothing to my soul -- at least my life is moving ahead in that way. Since the world has been generally failing to conform to my will lately, it meant a lot to me.
   
   
2. Not coincidentally, we're remodeling the kitchen, which has been in desperate need of help for a long time. We took Friday off from work and went to IKEA and just bought the whole freaking kitchen. It was very exciting. And I love shopping, so picking out the sink, faucet and cabinet knobs are all endlessly thrilling tasks. We're having it installed by the IKEA-branded contractor, mainly because I am unsure of my ability to hang the wall cabinets safely on our masonry exterior walls. Also because I would really like this done without lifting a finger, since my honey-do list is both long and neglected.
   

And that's all the list items I've got today.

18dpo/13dp5dt: the happiest misery ever

This morning's beta: 232, for a doubling time of 50.5 hours. GREAT FANTASTIC CLOSE ENOUGH I'LL TAKE IT!

My hematocrit (how thick and sludgy my blood is) is also greatly improved from Wednesday. This surprises me, because since Wednesday I have just continued to inflate -- I had to borrow clothes from a bodacious friend (thank you dear) because not a thing I own will go over my body, not even my loose t-shirts. And even the jeans I borrowed wouldn't fasten, I had to do the ol' "hair elastic round the button" trick in order to be decent enough to leave the house. I have the perfect pregnancy half-basketball stomach. But despite my startlingly distended abdomen, the OHSS is actually going well. OHSS really only gets scary when your blood gets too sludgy or you stop peeing -- my blood's improving and I am still peeing like a champ (pause for me to accept adulation for this achievement. Thank you, thank you very much.). I'm swilling SmartWater, V8 and Ensure and sloshing gently from the sofa to the bathroom and back again and yeah, that's pretty much my entire range right now.

Part of the cause of my unwieldiness might be my amazing impressive progesterone level -- 352 (normal range for first trimester: 10-47). Holy crap, no wonder I've had heartburn. Anyway, the P4 level could be contributing to poofing me up . RE has dropped my nightly progesterone shot to half of its previous volume. This is good news because a) it might help my various symptoms, and b) it'll hurt less.

Still can't move or eat or sleep too much, but I'm feeling very chipper indeed. I'm hard to convince, but that 50.5-hr doubling time is making me think you know what, I might just be pregnant.

6dp5dt: HOLY CRAP

HOLY CRAP.
I don't seem able to say much else.

I've been randomly yelling "HOLY CRAP" ever since around 8pm last night.

See, I was feeling low. L-O-W. That morning's pee-stick had been stark white, and I was so very sick of staring at thin urine-soaked pieces of cardboard, willing them to say other than what they clearly said.

Just for fun (...) I decided to torture myself by doing one more before going to sleep. And HOLY CRAP. Within 6 minutes, a line, a respectable line, a line that I did not need a full-spectrum light to see.

Quavering, I yelled for my sweetheart. She dashed in, convinced that I was bleeding. I shoved the stick at her, and made her tell me about 10 times that I wasn't hallucinating.

Then I peed on three more (I buy them in bulk lots of 50, okay? shush.) As you can see, results were similar.

It just seemed so unreal. Eventually, after some hysterical typing with BFF, I went to sleep. I often wake up in the middle of the night, and when I wake up, I start thinking and thinking, usually dark thoughts, and I can't get back to sleep. Usually when this happens I pop on my headphones and listen to something soporific from librivox.org (I'm currently working on The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew). It lulls me right to sleep; I haven't had any bad insomnia since discovering this strategy.

Anyway, last night I woke up in the middle of the night, and I didn't put my headphones on. I just lay there, full of thoughts, light thoughts, joyful thoughts, hopeful thoughts.

This morning's first pee (supposedly the most concentrated) came out a good deal fainter than last night. I waited an hour and then tried again and it was a bit darker than last night. Dunno what that's about.

I know I'd be a fool to really celebrate this early. Chemical pregnancies are extremely common, especially with IVF. So, so early. Much too early.

But I've got something to celebrate. I've never seen a second line before, excluding the trigger shot. There's a chance here. There's a real chance. If it doesn't work out I'm going to cuss and try to move on gracefully. But right now, just for this minute, this second, I am pregnant.

And I am grateful beyond belief.

Day 10 of Stims

When some people need to be soothed and inspired, they go to church. I head to Value Village. Today I was richly rewarded for my faith: for $1.21 I picked up a copy of Robot Building for Beginners.

I really think this could change everything for me.