2dp5dt

Wicked heartburn, which I got really excited about until I googled "progesterone heartburn". Since I get a giant syringe of the stuff shot into my bum every night, one might reasonably expect a few side effects. Durrrrrrrrrrr.

Happy Wednesday, anyway!

1dp5dt

Stuff that's going on:

• Cramps. I'm torn between thinking whoopee, that's implantation right there! and thinking man, I am going to start menstruating the second my progesterone goes down low enough, because my body is dying to expel some lining right now.
• None of yesterday's excess batch made it to freeze. 5 frozen is just fine, a very good outcome, but I'm just amazed at how the numbers winnow at every point in this process. 25 eggs > 21 mature eggs > 16 fertilized > 15 embryos > 6 blastocysts.
• I have officially "peed out" the trigger shot, which is to say that I am no longer getting positive tests on my pee sticks. We will now enter a brief, brief time period of no-stick-peeing before I start peeing in earnest.
• I already have plans for the next cycle if this doesn't work. I don't do positive thinking. I'm all about the defensive pessimism.
  

4AA

One 4AA partially-hatched blastocyst, hopefully burrowing into my endometrium right now and not into my underwear. Made it back to work in time for my 3pm meeting. I don't believe in that bed rest stuff.

Things I didn't like about today:

1. No cute embryo pics like other people have posted on their blogs. Although I guess they all look the same -- I could just right-click one of someone else's. Here! Behold Junior:
2. RE did not use ultrasound to guide the catheter for the transfer. One of the few clear results from studying IVFs is that clinical touch (no ultrasound) is inferior to ultrasound-guided transfers . I'm not happy about that at all, and it may be what prompts me to leave a doctor I otherwise like very much.
3. The paperwork the RE brought out was all filled out for the transfer of two embryos, despite having mentioned in every single conversation on the topic -- including our initial IVF consult -- that we only want to transfer one. When we stuck to our guns he gave us the "this is your best chance" spiel, although he did add "whatever choice you make has to be right for you." Additionally, his presumption of two gave the embryologist a heart attack, since she had to toss #5 in the freezerator at the last minute to get it started in time.
4. Never learned the embryologist's name, never talked directly to her about how the embryos were doing.
   

Things I did like about today:

1. The fact that we have 5 embryos on ice, with more hopefully joining them tomorrow;
2. The transfer room was very homey, not like a hospital, just a room with a fancy split-legged Laz-E-Boy;
   
3. The transfer was painless and relatively swift;
4. RE warmly shook our hands and wished us luck at the end;
   
5. Lying in the twilit room afterwards, holding hands with my darling, stroking each other's faces, dreaming of all that could be;
6. It's over, everything went well, it's over, it's over, it's over.

So yeah. Nothing to do now but keep shooting up the progesterone, and wait.

Right now I could be pregnant...

...even though all embryos are about a mile away, and no sperm has come near me in, well, quite some time.

See, because of the hilarious way in which pregnancy is ret conned, if I get pregnant, then I am pregnant right now. If I don't, I'm not. Pregnancy is usually measured by the first day of the last menstrual period, presumably because your typical member of the female public has no idea when she last ovulated, but might just recall the last time she saw blood coming out of her vagina. Ergo, if I get pregnant, then right now I am nearly three weeks pregnant.

I don't feel any different. I hope that's not a bad sign.

Luckily for y'all I go back to work tomorrow and will likely stop compulsively blogging. That's good because I think I've written about almost every subject except the hideous huge green bruises I have on both of my hands and my wrist. I don't think I mentioned how the worst part of the ER was the four attempts it took to start my IV. I have small thin hands with veins that apparently like to disintegrate the moment you stick a needle in them. Holy god that hurt. I had no idea starting an IV was that painful.

After three tries I was pale and sweating and the nurse called the anesthesiologist, who started it in my arm in about 5 seconds. Afterwards he looked at me and said, rather oddly, "it's nobody's fault, some people just have veins like that." I wasn't sure if he was telling me not to blame the nurse or not to blame myself, and it was odd because it hadn't really occurred to me to blame anyone. Just one of those things.

Thinking more about effort and luck...

This thoughtful comment from the lovely & talented Lil Jimmi sparked off some additional ranting on the subject of luck and achievements:

It's true that luck plays a huge part in how all this having a baby stuff turns out, but when it comes to trying to have a "natural" birth in a US hospital it's also a lot of work.

You've get a big fight ahead of you if you want to have a low-intervention birth. Here in Philly there is just one center city hospital that does L&D because it is not profitable. They don't want you to take up a room laboring naturally. They want you in and out. You have to go in with a plan and a team to fight for you.

So yeah I feel like we were the luckiest dykes on the planet being able to get the birth experience we wanted in a hospital, but it wasn't just luck it was work too.

BF too...there's probably 10% of people who have a blissfully easy time BF, but for the other people who are lucky enough to pull it off it's a Hella lot of work.

(please note that below is inspired by but not addressed to Li'l Jimmi, who I absolutely do not believe should be slapped in any way, ever)

Excellent point! I'm in no way saying that it was easy for those who conceived without medical intervention/had their desired unmedicated birth/breast fed/etc. My darling wandered by and looked over my shoulder and, as she is wont to do, dropped a pearl of wisdom:

Lucky doesn't mean you get it for nothing. Lucky means it is within your power to get it.

See, for every person who had to work really really hard for their unmedicated birth etc, there's at least one other person who worked just as hard and still didn't get it. And there might be someone else who worked harder, and still didn't get it.

So should you be proud of your hard work? Yes, of course, just as people should be proud of their hard work no matter the outcome (although they rarely are, unless the outcome is the desired one). But the fact that the ultimate outcome went your way, well, there's a good whack of luck in there, and I think it behooves all of us who have been lucky to be grateful for our luck. My particular rant was about people who are smug about situations that required a large helping of luck, and then think that they got what they got because they're clever, never crediting their luck. En passant they often throw out a few judgey statements that make some less-lucky people feel shitty about their medical interventions/failure to breast feed/etc.

In a broader way, the physical "luck" involved in the reproductive arena is somewhat like the "luck" of social advantage and the whole myth of meritocracy. It's another arena in which people constantly attribute to virtue something that required a whack of luck.

Example: I have a couple of degrees. I had to work hard for them, yeah. But there are plenty of people out there who've worked just as hard and because they didn't have some of my luck, they don't have those degrees. Can I be proud of the work I put into my degrees? Sure! But should I be smug about them, and assert that anyone can have these degrees if they just work as hard as I did? Should I turn up my nose at the degree-less, and make remarks about how I'm just not sure it's right for all those people to be running around out there without degrees? I can, but I should be slapped. My achievements are a blend of my work and my luck, my effort + unearned advantages, and all I can do is acknowledge both sides of the equation, and be grateful for the part I got for free.

In other news, cannot stop thinking about the 15 embryos in a dish, a dozen blocks from where I am sitting right now.

Maybe the reason I'm so engaged with this topic right now is because I am willing to trade not being praised if I get pregnant for not being blamed if I don't.

Two weeks from now it'll be over, one way or another. Two weeks from now I will be very grateful or very cranky.

Holy crap.

Day 3 Report: Our Little Brood

Things're looking good! For the historical record, here's the current crop. The lab's grading scale runs from 1 (highest quality) to 4 (lowest quality).

9 cells, grade 1: 1
8 cells, grade 1: 4
6 cells, grade 1: 1
8 cells, grade 2: 4
7 cells, grade 2: 2
6 cells, grade 2: 1
4 cells, grade 3: 1

There's also one more unknown embryo, because I was writing fast and missed one -- we have a total of 15 at this stage, which seems to me to be a very good attrition rate given that we had 16 fertilize.

Confirmed transfer for 12:30pm Monday. Full steam ahead!

Hey hey I saw two lines...

Peed on a stick this morning. It was to see if the trigger was out of my system, honest. It had nothing to do with any desire to see what a positive pregnancy test looks like. (Note to the curious: it looks just like a negative one, except there's another pink line where the blank white space usually is).

Feeling a million times better today. Some time yesterday afternoon I just suddenly felt that my body had its balance back -- my mouth was moist again, my abdomen less swollen, the searing shoulder pain was gone, and the sense of worry and wrongness just abated. Yippee! Three days off of work is not ideal, though -- and I still haven't mentioned the embryo transfer on Monday (I'm thinking perhaps I can just nip off during lunch, get knocked up?) If I do this again I think I'll have to take a vacation week off. I think the "minor surgery the details of which I don't want to talk about" excuse would sound fishy the second time.

Embryo report tomorrow. *gulp*