Day 8 of stims

I went for another check this morning and here's what I remember offhand:

Lining: 7mm +1 type (Yay for pomegranate juice!!)

Right Ovary: 15mm lead follicle, 2 @ 14, 2 @ 13, 3 @ 12, 3-4 @ 11, 1-2 @ 10, 6-7 more less than 10

Left Ovary: Two 15mm leads, 2 @ 14, 2 @ 13, 2 @ 12, 1 @ 11, 3 @ 10, 6 less than 10

I know, this is way more than before, this was my RE, not the other one I don't care for that's been doing the ultrasounds. I always thought it was a little odd that she could never find more than 18-20 follicles when a.) I have PCOS, so I have a ton, and b.) Last cycle I had 35ish. I guess we'll find out at ER how many are really in there cooking, but boy do I love when my normal RE does my checks.

My RE also seemed to think I would have ER Sunday or Monday too. He didn't think I would be ready for the 4th, but I'm getting much closer now. Two more nights of stims and I go back in on Thursday to see how these eggs are cooking. Lets hope that I'm mostly in the 16-23mm range so that I can trigger and get this show on the road!

Day 6 of stims

Tonight will be day 6 of stims for me. I stimmed for 9 days last time and this time they're expecting me to go for 10 days, for ER on the 4th. At my first check my lining was a bit thin (I had some bleeding and still have a bit) so I started drinking pomegranate juice to try and build it up a little. Here are my numbers from this morning:

Lining: 4mm, +3 type

Right Ovary: 1 @ 11mm, 8 more less than 10mm

Left Ovary: 1 @ 11mm, 12 more less than 10mm

So, we're looking ~22 possible follicles this time. It's less than the first IVF, which kinda scares me given out fertilization rate the first time, but I'm hoping that our quality will be pristine this time. I haven't seen my doctor this cycle yet, only the other female doctor. I'll see him for my ER and ET, so I'm not real worried. I just like him much more than this female doctor. :)

Since we're expecting my ER to be on the 4th, we've been trying to figure out how to handle family get-togethers for that day/weekend. It's so hard to keep this under wraps. We hate lying to people, but at the same time, telling them that we have ER that day will have them counting on their calendars trying to figure out when I'll know if it worked again. -sigh- I just hope we have some good news to give them.

So far, good news

After being in California for a week (it was beautiful and we never wanted to leave), my husband had another work trip this week and I had two appointments today. My suppression check was this morning with my RE and I fully expected my lining to be too thick, just like last time.

My first surprise was that my RE didn't come in the room for the ultrasound. Instead the female doctor in the practice came in with the nurse. The backstory on this particular doctor is long, but basically on my beta day for IVF #1 she argued with me in the waiting room, threw miscarriage rates in my face, and violated HIPPA. I spoke to my normal RE and he made sure he was the only doctor I dealt with for the rest of my pregnancy and miscarriage. I haven't seen or talked to this female doctor at all since mid-February, so I braced myself for her awful bedside manner.

She was completely different. She came in, put her hands over mine and asked if I was ready to do this again. I told her yeah and that I just hoped it worked this time and she squeezed my hands and told me that she knows this is scary but that they're all there for me and hoping this is it for me. It seriously almost made me cry. They both asked how my vacation was and made small talk while doing the ultrasound. She started counting off my follicles (8 visible on the right, 10 visible on the left) and I asked about my lining, waiting for the, "I'm sorry, it's just too thick still." She smiled at me and said, "Nope, it's great. Everything is exactly where it needs to be!" I asked again to confirm I was actually starting stims today and she told me pending blood work, I was starting tonight, with ER scheduled for the 4th of July right now. I'm still kinda in shock that not only did my lining cooperate, but my bloodwork was great too. I only hope that these are all good signs for this cycle.

I was supposed to have my pre-conception counseling appointment with the maternal fetal medicine (MFM, for my MTHFR mutation) doctor at 1pm but I got a call around 8:30am asking me if I could come in immediately. Apparently there was a booking problem and the doctor wasn't going to be in in the afternoon.

The appointment was a lot of talking. Going over history, him reading my file and asking me for clarification here and there. He's ordering some more testing to just confirm my abnormal numbers, after which he'll adjust my folic acid intake (I'm at 4.2mg now, about 6x a normal person's dose) and possibly add in baby aspirin once I'm pregnant again and we see a heartbeat. He seemed rather hesitant about me taking Heparin due to the possible side effects, but wouldn't rule it out completely. I go back for a stim check with my RE on Friday and the MFM will have my test results either Friday or Monday so we can figure out where to go from there.

It's so nerve racking doing this again. The first time I was so on top of everything and this time it's like I'm in a fog. It's overwhelming at times that we're doing this again. I'm drinking my last Diet Pepsi and then it's all water and gatorade from now until after beta. I have to actually start organizing myself and all my meds so I take them at 8:30pm every night. I have to find a way to hide that I'm taking all of these meds from family and friends. That's probably the hardest part of all. Being so open last time and then being so heartbroken when we had to tell everyone that we lost the babies. Then this time telling no one. Trying to think of excuses so they don't ask too many questions. I can't wait to be 13 weeks pregnant so that I can finally tell everyone what we went through this time and show them this page.

Babies, babies, everywhere!

I've been better lately about being around babies and children. It's much easier for me to be around little girls rather than boys though. Yesterday and today though, someone or something I think was trying to test my ability to deal with things.

Earlier this week I got an email from Huggies congratulating me on reaching week 2o of my pregnancy. Yeah, it's much, much easier to get on all these lists than it is to get off of them apparently. I had to spend almost 10 minutes at one point shortly after my miscarriage trying to remove myself from one baby related website. Apparently, no one thinks that it's possible to lose a child once you get pregnant. That doesn't play into their websites full of smiling happy babies and size 4 drop dead gorgeous moms. But, anyways.

Yesterday I was starting to wake up and didn't have my glasses on yet. We've been sleeping with the window by our heads open so we have some fresh air moving into the room at night. We've been going back and forth about our neighbor possibly being pregnant again (they have a ~3 year old boy) but I thought maybe she was just putting on a little weight. Well, apparently I was wrong, because from what I saw, she looks about 20-24 weeks pregnant. So not only will I have to mourn the fact that I'm not giving birth and holding our son around the end of October, now I quite possibly will have to hear her newborn crying and realize that she has what I was supposed to have too. Our children would have been around the same age and could have played together. It breaks my heart.

Then today, it was round two of the bitter infertile episodes. I was running errands before we leave town for a week and stopped up at the jeweler to have my wedding rings cleaned and re-plated (they're white gold). I was wandering around the store while they were re-plating them when I saw an employee walk past me with a Noah's Ark gift bag. Immediately I started to look anywhere but where the employees were gathering but then the oooing and ahhing started. Every employee in the store decided to stop what they were doing since there was only one customer (me) and have an impromptu baby shower. Like I said, I've been doing much, much better, but superwoman I am not. I'm just thankful I didn't get so upset I started to cry.

I absolutely hate being bitter and jealous of all these women, but I can't help it anymore. I just hope that this will eventually fade. I was never like this before and I hate that this is what infertility has made me.

First Post

I've finally given in and started a blog so I can attempt to get down my feelings and thoughts about our infertility and going through IVF. We're not telling anyone IRL about attempting IVF for the second time after my miscarriage with our first attempt and I find myself wanting to tell anyone, even if it's a stranger on the internet, how I feel. I guess I should start from the beginning.

We tried to have our first child for a year before seeking out medical help. I was diagnosed with mild PCOS along with my hypothyroidism that was at that point under control with medication. Then we looked into my husband before attempting to use Clomid. It was then that our MFI was discovered with a strict morph of 1 and 3% (normal is over 5%). We were advised to go directly to IVF w/ ICSI at the cost of ~$9k per attempt. To say we were heartbroken is putting it mildly. We had money put aside for a baby, but not enough to attempt just to have a baby even once. We ended up getting a loan for $35k. That $35k represented our only chance to try and have a biological child. Even if we exhausted that $35k, coming up with another $20k after that to attempt to adopt a baby would take years, if we were ever able to do it.

On our first attempt with IVF, we put two perfect blasts back and froze another almost perfect one. At 6dp5dt, I got my first faint positive on a HPT. We were so excited, we told everyone. We were convinced we had overcome the low morph and my PCOS. We had our first ultrasound and saw two yolk sacs. We were going to have twins! Nothing could compare to those two weeks that I was pregnant. We prayed for the babies every night, I told them I loved them every day, almost every hour. Then, I went in for my 6w1d ultrasound to see the heartbeats...and that's when it started falling apart.

They found a slow heartbeat on one of the babies. The other had no heartbeat and no clear fetal pole. Our doctor tried to be optimistic, so we came back two days later. I just knew something was wrong. I felt something was wrong. Deep down, I knew we wouldn't see another heartbeat. The one heartbeat that we had seen was now gone. The second sac was now getting smaller, most likely it had stopped developing and was going to become a vanishing twin. My beta had also plateaued and wasn't rising like it should anymore. Just like that, it was over. I wouldn't be a mom. The matching onsies I had bought the week before would be tossed in a bag with every other baby related thing in the house by my husband an hour later and thrown in the bottom of a rarely used closet in his quest to try and protect me from having a panic attack. I started crying in the office and I think I cried on and off for the next 10 days until I elected to have a D&C. Exactly one month after my beta day.

We both sought out therapy while we tried to find answers. They would do genetic testing on the baby and we would learn it was a normal male - a little boy - the day after my husband's grandmother passed away. We mourned them both, both of us crying, curled up together in bed. We mourned our lost first son and the great grandmother he would never know. We sought out therapy to try and understand our anger and despair. We asked question after question of our doctor, trying to find a reason. We needed to know why it had happened, why we were given this perfect little boy, only to lose him.

Two and a half months after my D&C I was diagnosed with Compound Heterozygous MTHFR. Treated with high amounts of folic acid, it can cause blood to clot and cut off blood and nutrients to a fetus. Usually losses happen in the second trimester, but given that everything else was normal, this has to be our answer. A gene mutation that happened before I was even born and lived with for 27 years.

We hold on to this answer because we don't have any others. The emotional burden for this is too high for us to not have something to try and fix for this next time. My stims were changed (because my RE likes to change at least one thing between cycles, hoping it will help, in this case our fert rate) and we hope that this second time we have the issues figured out. We hope that just as easily as I got pregnant the first time, with both blasts we put back implanting, that it'll happen again. That this time, my body with work correctly and we'll be able to bring home a baby.

I will have many more appointments this time. I'll have to see specialists before I even get pregnant and have a plan for what other medicines I'll be taking when I get pregnant this time. I'll be high risk no matter how many I have, whether we're lucky enough to have twins again, or if it's just one we're able to have. Pregnancy this time isn't the happy, uplifting thing it was the first time. We're scared. Terrified might be a better word. We're not telling anyone we're in the middle of our second IVF or pregnant until I'm 13 weeks pregnant. My husband will be keeping me planted on the couch probably my whole pregnancy if he can. But I would do all of that if it meant finally bringing home our living child.