FET #5, the night before

This cycle has flashed by strangely. I haven't done acupuncture, and my wheatgrass intake has been quite erratic. I still got scanned with the best lining I've had since pre-Small Boy, so that's nice. I think it was the fruity pills.

I feel... quiet. Very quiet. Usually I'm frantically consulting auguries by now, but I haven't looked at a single set of entrails.  This is the last round for a while, at least. If it's not going to work, I don't want to know it quite yet.

Her Indoors can't come with me to the transfer tomorrow, as she'll be trapped at work. I actually feel fine about that. I'm not sentimental about the process at this point.  I'm just going to go in, have a couple of embryos transferred to my uterus, continue with my life. It sort of matches with the quiet I'm feeling now.

FET #5: estrogen day 4

Final grade for the NuvaRing: B+. It did eventually engender in me a certain amount of irritability (ahem) and sore breasts. The most distressing side effect was a cystitis-y bladder irritation. I was annoyed enough that I took it out on 2 am of the day I was supposed to remove it. Overall, though, a solid performance. OCPs get a straight D.

I think my favorite thing about the NuvaRing was the way it did not require me to do anything every day. I couldn't feel it, and for those 21 days  I could just forget about the whole TTC thing. Good stuff.


I'm now on intramuscular injectible estrogen. It's a small quantity, but since the carrier oil is very thick it still hurts sometimes. But it's only every three day, so no biggie.

I am also, following on the lining success of my past two cycles, taking via-oh-god-please-don't-spam-me-gra. Except when I ordered it from my grey market Indian pharmacy I did not order enough for three cycles. I guess I thought it would be... negative? Pessimistic? Evidence of a disturbing lack of faith? Anyway, I got enough for two cycles. But for various reasons, I have just enough now to scrape thinly over the third cycle provided I use the bonus "buy some get a free gift!" tablets, which were a higher dosage. I'm cutting them with a pill cutter, so fine. The funny part is that the free ones? Soft chews. So the ones I am cramming up my nether regions are fruit flavored.

Lining check on the 11th.

Three

Last night I dreamed that I was pregnant with triplets. I gave birth and as each one came out, I found out that it was dead. I kept thinking "surely the next one will be okay" and at the end I was sobbing with grief and anger and disbelief.

Three means a lot of things. My family as it is right now is three. This is my third FET at Big Shiny Fertility Factory. My insurance allows three attempts per live birth. I have had three miscarriages. When I was little, I always thought I'd have three children. I wanted to have my children three years apart. Small Boy has three donor siblings currently in utereo.

It's just a number. My fave bit from Foucault's Pendulum -- actually the only bit I remember much -- is when the protagonist's girlfriend, mother of his child, gives him the big ol' eye-roll for his numerological conspiracy theories.

We move on to the magic numbers your authors are so fond of. You are one and not two, your cock is one and my cunt is one, and we have one nose and one heart; so you see how many important things come in ones. But we have two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, my breasts, your balls, legs, arms, buttocks. Three is the most magical of all, because our body doesn’t know that number; we don’t have three of anything, and it should be a very mysterious number that we attribute to God, wherever we live. But if you think about it, I have one cunt and you have one cock, shut up and don’t joke and if we put these two together, a new thing is made, and we become three. So you don’t have to be a university professor or use a computer to discover that all cultures on earth have ternary structures, trinities.

She moves through all the numbers, the point being: all and none of them are sacred.

I'm on the NuvaRing now, getting ready for FET#5. It's all happening quickly, so quickly that all the bills from FET#4 haven't rolled in (and been disputed by the insurance company) yet. High, high marks for the NuvaRing so far. Only side effects are mild nausea and sore breasts, and vague irritability. Birth control pills give me severe nausea, migraines, and constant blinding rage towards the universe. It's better this way.

This round officially over

Official negative beta. It's not like I didn't know it was coming.

I was -- amused? -- to realized why I was so sure I was pregnant. It's because, prior this, I have had six transfers. For those six transfers, only one of them was an outright negative. One was a chemical, and the other four were positives.

Furthermore, my frank negative cycle was in 2008. So I basically have no idea what the side effects of progesterone are like in the absence of pregnancy. I mean everyone told me that "progesterone makes you feel like you're pregnant", but I rather poo-pooed that -- I mean by now I surely can tell the difference, right? Those heavy cramps and heartburn, that's totally a pregnant thing.

Yeahno. Everyone's right. It's just progesterone. Good thing to remember for the future, I guess.

8dp5dt: nope.

Game's pretty much over. For some insane reason, Big Shiny Fertility Factory likes to do their betas two goddamn weeks after a 5-day transfer. This makes zero sense, except in the respect that it save them the effort of even dealing with women with short-lived chemical pregnancies. By 19dpo, either you're showing up good and dark on a plain ol' urine test, or you're negative and have been for some time. Which means that you've spent at least a solid week getting painful, expensive, and unnecessary rump-injections. Worse, many women (not me) may have spent an entire extra week consuming neither alcohol, caffeine, nor sushi.

I delicately pointed this out to my nurse, who agreed to let me come in on Friday (15dpo). Much better. At least I can spend the weekend letting my glutes recover.

I'm okay. I'm starting to try to wrap my head around the possibility that this may not be the story of my difficult journey towards the family I have always envisioned. It may be the story of my journey towards letting go of that vision.

I have an embarrassingly large collection of beautiful high-end baby carriers. I guess when the time comes I'll sell them and buy myself something really, really pretty.

5dp5dt: the evidence for and against

Data that support my being pregnant this cycle:

1. I did a super good job of distracting myself. In fact, we decided to up and get married with two weeks' notice, which definitely took my mind off Things.  The planning was a bit crazy, but the wedding was lovely. And three days after the wedding, we transferred two blastocysts to my uterus.
    
2. My lining rocked, which is to say that it was over 8mm, which for an Asherman's patient is awesome.
    
3. It would be hilarious if I got pregnant the same week I got married, so people could count back and make jokes about shotgun weddings.
    
4. I have been chock full of symptoms. Heavy draggy cramps, sore breasts, I got 'em. I have been quietly Sure for days.
    
5. My acupuncturist said I had really good energy. 

Data that support my not being pregnant this cycle:

1. It's 5dp5dt, or 10dpo, and my test strips are stark, stark white. I have been pregnant four times, not counting the lame-o chemical. I have never not had at least a faint line by now. Good betas, bad betas, I always had something by now.

There are 5 reasons why I am pregnant this cycle, and only 1 reason why I am not. The mathematically-inclined observer will note that 5>1.

Sadly, though, I think that single piece of evidence against rather outweighs  the five votes for.

Pills and newborns and ramblings

The first step to an IVF cycle is the taking of birth control pills, and believe me, the irony of this is lost on no one.

I hate this bit. They make me depressed, they make me nauseated, and I have the sneaking suspicion that they're not actually necessary. But I'm also apparently not interested in fighting it, so the little yellow pills I do pop.

I just got back from a solo cross-country visit with my best friend and her family, which consists of a husband, two preschoolers, a two month old baby, and an adolescent dog the size of a Shetland pony.

I had a great time. I was a bit nervous that my Crazy would boil over and get all over the newborn's sweet fuzzy head -- this is the baby that BFF was pregnant with while I was (briefly) pregnant with the Sea Monkeys, and I had so fondly imagined us being the mothers of newborns together.

But it was better than fine.  There was a certain leaning-on-the-bruise aspect, but it was far outweighed by the sensory delight of handling a tiny baby again. I got to wear him a good deal, and I love wearing babies. I smelled his head and stroked his wee crumpled hands and gave him bottles and it was not even bittersweet, just sweet with a side of wistful.

The only really painful moment was an unexpected one -- I was wearing him on my back and BFF and I were picking up the two older kids from nursery school. One of the other moms was chatting and airily said to BFF, upon being told that I was visiting "Oh, my best friend doesn't have kids either, it's great because they can help out, huh?"  It was a perfectly innocent thing to say, but I was just overwhelmed with ouch and couldn't say a thing back. I just froze. What felt like a year and was probably a few seconds later, BFF firmly corrected  her and said "no, she has a little boy at home with her partner".  And the world started again and everything was fine.

I mean, it wasn't a crazy assumption. How many mothers can just take off across the country to visit a friend? (Mothers of one who have a tolerant partner, that's who.) And how was she supposed to know, looking at me, that I am a mother? She couldn't see my c-section scar. I wasn't wearing a pin that said I gestated a child, ask me how!

I don't know why that spiked my grief, or why even remembering it now is so painful. Maybe because just for a minute it dangles me over the cliff of how close I came to not being a mother at all. It's becoming clear that my body doesn't love producing babies. Maybe our little guy was a complete fluke, a one-in-a-million. Maybe someone is going to show up and tell me that it was all a mistake and I don't get to keep him after all.  Nope. I don't care. I'm not giving him back.

This morning I was telling my boss about my trip and seeing the new baby. "It didn't give you ideas, did it?" she joked.

"Hahaha!" said I. "Ha! Ha."





It was a lovely trip. We ate stunningly good food, got massaged, got manicured and pedicure'd, and engaged in plenty of the activity I've missed most: chatting aimlessly with my best friend within hugging range. I'm awfully glad I went.