7dp5dt:: a story

I thought I saw a line, but I didn't. The end.

Wanna hear it again?

6dt5dt: the right way to get a BFN

5:30 a.m. Wake up when 2-year old decides to join you in bed.

5:35 a.m. Lie awake trying to convince yourself that you don't have to pee.

5:36 a.m. Consider that this pee will be FMU (that's First Morning Urine, for any of you not on the crazytrain).

5:38 a.m. Pee. Test.

5:38-6:00 a.m. Stare at pristine white test, willing a shadow of a line to appear.

6:01 a.m. Give up, crawl back into bed.

6:02 a.m. Have toddler jam chubby arm around your neck, nestling fragrant head under your chin. Breathe. Think about how lucky you are to have this small, strange, snuggly person unfolding before your eyes every single day. Twine ankles with your best beloved, in your comfortable bed, with your healthy child between the two of you. Cry a bit from the happy, and also the hormones.

6:15 a.m. Drift off for a second sleep, smiling.


So... yeah. Still BFN. Still wish it weren't. But you know, I think I'm on to something here. I'm going to start scheduling my HPTs for right before a designated snuggletime. There's a depth I just can't plunge to when the Small Boy shoves his arm around me and sighs.

I have also been thinking a bit about the Slow Path. A year or two ago, I was sure that my struggles to conceive had done nothing but damage me as a person. I was more guarded, anxious, cynical, angry, bitter. Damaged. I thought that I was a worse mother than I would have been if I had traveled a smoother path.

But I've started to think that it's not true. I think that I genuinely have, to a great extent, healed. I can tell, because some of the patterns I feel myself bending into now are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar: my brain bends that way, but it hasn't for a long time. And that's very, very good.

I don't know if I'm a better mother because of infertility, but I'm starting to cautiously think that I might not be a worse one.

5dp5dt:: BFN

Sparkling white, glittering white, white like an Alpine peak, white like a Tea Party rally.

Some might say that it's early to feel pessimistic about this cycle, but I don't like to leave things till the last minute¹. I don't know. I've felt sort of off, grungy, a bit wrong -- I thought maybe it Meant Something -- but right this second I think maybe it means that I'm taking large amounts of exogenous hormones.

So I'm looking forward a bit. I can do probably one more FET. Just one? you might ask. But I thought you had a cool dozen-plus-two embryos on ice!

On transfer day, we had the unpleasant surprise of learning that seven embryos had to be defrosted in order for us to get two to transfer. This is an abysmal thaw rate; thaw rates (for vitrified embryos) are usually between 50-90%. I don't know whether there's something about my embryos that makes them freeze/thaw badly, whether the lab didn't do a good job freezing them, or whether the lab didn't do a good job thawing them. Regardless, I now have 7 embryos left, two frozen using the rapid-vitrification and five slow-frozen. Slow-frozen embryos usually have much worse thaw rates than vitrified, although much worse than 2/7 is *scribbles on piece of paper* approximately crap%. So... I don't have quite the bounty that I thought I had. I can probably get one more FET out of it, though. And after that, it's back into the fray.

¹This is a lie.

4dp5dt, 6am

Woke up at 4, couldn't get back to sleep. At 6, got up and peed on stick. Result: a negative so white it could cause snow blindness. Took my glasses off, tilted it hither and yon. Not even a decent evap to entertain myself with.

So it begins...


ETA Lest it all sound too desolate: spending a splendid cuddly day with Small Boy. I set up a pop-up tent-tunnel combination that I scored at Value Village last year and have just now realized that he's old enough for. Later on we'll go to the library, maybe to Whole Foods. It will be a nice Sunday, regardless.

3dp5dt

Symptoms: few. I swing between wild optimism and wild pessimism. Things that help: snuggling Small Boy, eating nice food. Things that don't help: reading various fertility boards.

I think I have a touch of PTSD over the last time we did this. I keep losing track of where and when I am now. The despair licks at the edges of my brain, and I realize that I've forgotten, once again, that this is not the same as it was. Once I look around and connect with the present, I feel a thousand percent better.

For my successful pregnancy, I got a (very faint) positive in the evening of 4dp5dt. For my unsuccessful pregnancy, it was 5dp5dt. I currently have in my possession 45 pregnancy tests (shut up. it's a long story. no, it's not.) Peeing will commence tomorrow evening. Who am I kidding: peeing will commence tomorrow morning. In fact, it's a wonder I'm not peeing on something right now.

Schrödinger's Fetus

My uterus
contains two embryos. Quantum theory says, I guess, that they are neither alive nor dead. In general, this explains why quantum theory is something that I never intend to trouble my pretty little mind with in any sort of systematic way.

But right now, specifically, at this moment, I am a fan of quantum theory. I much prefer to spend the next few days thinking of the embryos as neither alive nor dead. It's painful to think that it could be all over already, and I just don't know it yet. Better to think that they are neither until the instant that first drop of pee hits the peestick.

Where we are
1 day past 5 day transfer of 2 embryos (both 3BB).

How we got here
For a while I'd been making noises about trying for another "starting around Small Boy's second birthday." He turned two on Tuesday. Wednesday we transferred two defrosted embryos.

Things that are true #1: this is nothing, nothing, nothing like the past three attempts.
I am in no way discounting the acute pain that secondary infertility causes some people when I say oh my fucking god so much better. Last time, failure was "dangling over the abyss." This time, failure is "not getting what I want". I mean, I know I would have survived, I would have had to, people do. But every time I thought of it, my brain just blurred into pain. Now? I'm not as flippant as I hoped I might be; I care. I care a lot. But... my worst-case scenario is not the abyss. It is (kinnehorah-inshallah-god willin-and-the-creek-don't-rise) only raising my funny, fascinating son.

I can never feel hard-done-by. I have him, and while I may not be grateful every day, I am at least grateful every second or third day.

Things that are true #2: this is nothing compared to the physical devastation of my fresh cycles.
Frozen embryo transfers are so low-key that they barely register. It don't mean a thing if it don't involve a sharps container, you know? Take some pills. Stuff some gel up your vagina. After a couple of weeks, stick a couple of embryos in there and see what happens.

C'mon. At no time during this cycle have I been able to say "breathing hurts". Calling that a win.

Things that are true #3: this is still amazingly nerve-wracking. Maybe it's the hormones; although there are no injections (my protocol was strictly Estrace - Crinone) there are still tons of hormones floating around my brain. Or maybe it's that it's impossible to ignore the magnitude of what we're trying to do and the difference it could make in all of our lives.

So the request I am making to the universe: please. I am so grateful for what I have. Can I have some more?



Procedural notes for record-keeping:
D3 E2 = 52 FSH = 7.9

Aftermath

• It wasn't until after the birth that I found out that the jerking? while I was on the table? that was the doctor and nurse yanking trying to get our son out of me. See, apparently 2.5 hours of hard pushing was enough to wedge him in there really really well. They tried to push him back up. Didn't work. They tried to get some turn on him. Didn't work. As tension mounted in the OR, apparently my sweetie was afraid that they were going to have to break my pelvis to get him the heck out. They ended up with the nurse and doctor each with one knee up on the operating table for more leverage, heaving. I was so drugged I only vaguely noticed.

• Being in the hospital was pretty awesome. It was a safe, contained space for the three of us to concentrate on this new little creature and his requirements. I was not at all sorry to be there for the C-section mandated four days.

• Having said that, I was in pretty rough shape physically. I don't know if it was because of the long labor or what, but I was flattened. By the time I was discharged I was still only hobbling slowly. I had the poor example of my best friend, who is, unlike me, a) in good shape b) tough as nails. She was bopping around days after her C-section, and I expected to be doing the same. Noooooo. I also blew up until my ankles looked like a Cabbage Patch doll's. I didn't retain too much water during pregnancy, so I was surprised and displeased by my giant ankles.
  

All of this is preamble to the next big chapter of Aftermath.

I got home on a Thursday. Friday was okay. I woke up Saturday morning feeling awful in every way, short of breath, and with the strong feeling that I was going to die. That was actually my most bothersome symptom: I was terrified. I felt like there was a siren wailing in my head. Get help, you are not okay.

I tested my blood pressure and it was the highest I'd ever seen it, 180/103. My pulse, normally in the 90s, was in the 50s. Off to the hospital we went.

After a few hours of testing, they sent me home. By the time I was there, my blood pressure had gone down to 140s/90s. My bloodwork (testing my liver enzymes) was okay. I wanted to beg them to keep me. I just felt so wrong. I went home. I cried a lot. I couldn't sleep because lying down made me short of breath and, more, I was afraid that I'd die if I slept. It was totally irrational but just so strong.

I got through Sunday somehow, but by Monday I was back in the hospital. By then my stats were more alarming; my blood pressure was staying elevated, my liver function was declining, and there was some fluid (although not a lot) visible in my lungs on a chest x-ray. This time, they kept me. The doctor who told me that I was going to have to stay spoke gently, regretfully. I could have kissed her.

The blood pressure and liver function was a gimme; they see it all the time. What wasn't so obvious was why my heartbeat was so slow. It was in the 50s, then started dipping into the 40s and even the 30s a few times. Alarms kept going off on my monitors. They kept asking me if the rate was normal, did I work out a lot? And I'm all HAHAH do I look like I work out a lot? I had minor tachycardia all through my pregnancy, with my heartbeat well over 100 resting.

They set me up in a room in labor & delivery. They really had no idea where to put me; I was too sick for the postpartum unit, too baby-fresh (and with too many other things going on) for the regular cardiac unit. So labor & delivery it was. I sent my wife and our 9-day old baby home. That was hard enough for me; I can't really imagine what it was like for my darling to be home alone, suddenly a single parent to a brand new baby, worrying about me in the hospital.

They gave me an EEG and an EKG and I don't know which was which; one was a pretty quick monitoring onto a strip of paper, the other an extensive ultrasound of my heart. The person who did the ultrasound was a tech, not a doctor, so couldn't give me any answers. I kept hearing odd shlub-shlubs and wondering is it meant to sound like that? really?

It was a long, long night. They gave me a high dose of diuretic, which was meant to help my lungs and probably my blood pressure. Over the next 12 hours I peed out 6 liters of fluid. So I peed. I watched TV. A M*A*S*H marathon got me through 2-5 a.m. I cried. I thought about dying. I thought about how badly I didn't want to die just now. Every time I dozed off the monitors would start binging that my heart rate was too low. I pumped a few times with a breast pump: not enough, not nearly often enough, but I didn't know that at the time (see My Long Lactational Nightmare, coming soon). I snorted oxygen. At about 4 am a nurse came into check on me and found me crying; she asked me why and I told 'er. I'm scared that I'm going to die, I said.

Nonsense, she said, cheerily measuring my prodigious urine output. If they thought you were going to die they wouldn't have you on this unit.

That bit of logic made me feel infinitely better. It made sense. They didn't want patients falling over dead in Labor & Delivery. If they thought I was going to die they would've sent me somewhere else. It was just those damn binging monitors that made me think of too many medical dramas.

The long night finally ended. My liver function had gotten no worse during the night. A cardiologist swanned in for a consult and told me, in short, that my heart looked fine and he had no idea why my heartrate was so low. I wasn't comforted that he didn't know, but I was comforted that he didn't particularly seem to care. Pregnancy is weird, he said. It'll probably go away.

He was right. They discharged me that evening; I could've stayed, but I didn't want to. After losing all that water, I looked and felt a million times better. I could breathe, I could move, my ankles looked like my ankles, and my overwhelming sense of doom was receding. By the time I left the hospital my pulse was in the 60s.

My milk supply was also almost gone, but that's a story for another day.