Other thoughts

Thank you for all of your comments on my post from last night.  It is deeply helpful to know that I am not alone. For the same reason, I don’t think I can quit my birth club, even though I agree that perhaps it would be helpful to do so in the short-term. They are my friends. They sent us food and gave us a ridiculously large gift-card to Costco and found an Italian coin with Ceres on it and sent it with a card with a quotation from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. They are good, kind women. It is not their fault some of them are pregnant. It is not their fault I am not.

***

The last time I was in at the clinic, when I wanted them to make sure there hadn’t been anything left behind,  I looked through my chart.

Of the two embryos they transferred, one was a 2BC (1AA being my clinic’s highest grade) and the other was still a morula but obviously so close to being a blast they knew it would make it (I can’t read the embryologist’s writing well enough to decipher the exact term he used).

The frozen one is a 1BB.

It’s a better quality embryo than either of the two we transferred.

I suppose that’s something.

***

I realized a little while ago that I’m not sure I made them monitor my thyroid during the FETs last fall.

Post-birth control, absolutely. During the IVF, for sure.

But I don’t know that I did anything during the FETs. FETs when I was taking six Estrace a day. Estrace that would throw out the thyroid.

Fuck.

I might have sabotaged those FETs.

Some days I really wish I could 100% trust that my f/s and my endocrinologist would stay on top of things.

That’s just not the way it is.

***

Something really weird happened at my endocrinologist appointment. I’ve been going there for six years now. He gets one of his medical student assistants to take my pulse, check my blood pressure, weigh me, and write down my medications at every visit. I have always weighed about four pounds more on his scale than I have at home.

I weighed myself at home the morning of the appointment. The result wasn’t pretty

At the appointment, his scale showed me as weighing six pounds LESS than I did on my scale at home.

According to his scale, I’ve lost two pounds since the last time I was in, when I was five weeks pregnant.

According to my scale, I’ve gained seven pounds in that time.

Given his scale is one of those giant ones with the weights and the sliding bar, I’m inclined to think that my scale is the problem. Which would be nice, obviously, but I just don’t feel that light, especially when I’m trying to do up my work pants after I’ve washed them.

***

We have more grandparents visiting us this weekend, and Q. came back from his conference in Europe very ill, and I am just feeling a bit overwhelmed with everything right now and would love a weekend where I could sit in my pjs and read and hide and just decompress.

Oh wait. I have a toddler. I don’t have those weekends anymore.

Anyway, I am not good with Male Illness because I do not have enough sympathy. I do not disagree that Q. is really unwell. I just don’t cope well with the moping. So I was getting grumpy because I was stressed about my class today and I’d cleaned the whole house yesterday and now I was going to have to do the grocery shopping too and do all the cooking this weekend when we had guests over, and then I took a moment and remembered that for some women, probably a lot of women, this is their NORMAL life. Their husbands don’t cook, or clean, or do grocery shopping.  So I tried to stop being a grumple, but I couldn’t stop feeling like my head was going to explode with anxiety. I felt jittery, buggy, like I was souped up on caffeine or had eaten too much sugar.

And then I realized that my thyroid has probably gone into hyper-territory since I’m still on the same dose I was on six weeks ago, when I was pregnant and it was starting to drift into hypo-territory again. It’s two pills higher than my normal dose. Stands to reason my body would start to want a more normal dose right around now. I have a prescription for the new dose and will get it filled this weekend. That will hopefully help me calm down.

***

The spotting appears to have stopped.

I haven’t started the birth control pills yet, because I had to get through my endocrinologist’s appointment first, as it would have wrecked the blood tests if I’d started the pill a week before. But it appears that maybe, just maybe, my body has finally decided to be done with it all. It stopped on Tuesday, so this is the longest it’s gone thus far without starting again.

I’ll start the pill this weekend too. We’ve adjusted my thyroid so it should stay in line even on the pill.

My f/s gave me a prescription that will let me stay on the pill until we get back from Oz in mid-July, at which point we might do that last FET depending on the status of my dissertation.

I think I might just stay on the pill.

We’re not going to get pregnant on our own. Not ever.

And maybe a few months on the pill will help sort out my face.

***

Things are getting sorted with E.’s new room. We have the duvet cover (which is a much brighter true red than it appears on the website- it looks almost wine-coloured to me on the computer), and I’ve picked the fabric for curtains (my Mum is going to make them for me, and I’ve decided I don’t care how much it costs, I’m getting the fabric shipped over from the U.K. which may well be the only place I can find it). We have most of the furniture. I’m still undecided on paint. I need some time to go and get some samples and paint a few test patches on the walls to really see what looks best. I’m getting the mattress from one of two places and just need to figure out which one will be the best deal (as one will require a car rental to go and get it).

The downside to all of this organizing is I can’t spend hours trolling Etsy and Pinterest anymore, and I think that’s one reason I’m clenching my jaw so tightly it’s sore pretty much all the time. I need another distraction. Organizing the house is only getting me so far- I’ve already done my clothes, the linen closet, the cupboards and drawers in the basement, and my books. There’s still a lot more I could do, but I can only stand to do it in short bursts of frenzied activity.

I’m a little afraid of how empty I’m going to feel inside when we get E.’s room set up in April.

 

Intralipids infusion (2.0 FET #2- Day 10)

This morning I had my intralipids infusion.

It was pretty straightforward. I went in early, did the usual cycle monitoring bloodwork and ultrasound, and then moved over to the IVF suite where they hooked me up to the IV, and then brought in a bag that really did just look like a bag of fat- thick, white liquid. The nurse hooked that bag and a second bag (of what I assume was a saline solution) to the IV line, and then started them both dripping. It took a little over ninety minutes to empty the bag. I managed to get some work done while also listening to the various conversations. The nurses were trying to schedule a particularly busy day on the weekend and had to boss around the doctors quite a lot. The nurse who runs the IVF suite is one tough cookie, and now I can really see why. It takes some gumption to stand up to the doctors, but I could tell that she wasn’t going to give ground- this was HER turf.

Another woman came in looking for one of the nurses in particular. She was pregnant (seven weeks) and wanted to tell this nurse (who wasn’t working that day). After she had left the nurses had a bit of a conversation because most of them didn’t remember her, which is fair, given how many patients they see every day. But they were all in agreement that it made them uncomfortable to have her in there telling them about the pregnancy at seven weeks. “Ten weeks, ten weeks would be different,” said the boss nurse. “Then it is ok. But seven weeks is too early.” The others agreed.

It was pregnancy day at the clinic, it seemed. The woman in the cubicle next to me was also doing an intralipids infusion, and she was eleven weeks pregnant. The nurses were excited about this. “Almost time to graduate!” said one. When I was back over in the main part of the clinic I started chatting with another woman, who turned out to be ten weeks pregnant. It was her first baby, and it had been a long road. So I told her that I had a nearly two and a half year old at home, who came from that clinic, and that now I was trying again. And I told her that I had a good pregnancy and a good birth and that these helped in a lot of ways to heal how I had felt after being at that clinic for so long, because I could tell from her face that she was EXACTLY where I had been three years ago. Then the nurse called my name, and we both answered, and then laughed as we realized we had the same first name. I shook her hand and wished her well. She’d told me that they were done after this- that it was too hard, that they couldn’t go through it again. I wonder if she’ll still be thinking the same thing three years from now.

After the intralipids infusion was over, I went back to the  main part of the clinic to see my doctor. I was all geared up to have a fight with him because I wanted him to check my TSH again. They checked it on Day 2, and it was at 2.5, which isn’t bad, but my endocrinologist likes to keep it under 2.0, and I know the estrace will have been causing some stress. I’ve been doing my usual “take one extra half a pill every second day” while I’ve been on the estrace, which is what I did during the fresh IVF cycle that led to E., but I wanted some confirmation that this was the right dose.

He surprised me by agreeing to the extra test immediately, even before he looked to see what my previous result had been. And then he agreed that 2.5 was very borderline. So he really has finally got the message at some point in the last three years that TSH matters a lot when it comes to getting and staying pregnant. The nurses should call me this afternoon to give me the update. (They actually called while I was writing this: it’s still at 2.5, so I’m holding steady. They want me to stay on the same dose, but I might up it a tiny amount to get it below 2.0 as I know my endocrinologist wouldn’t be happy with 2.5.)

My lining looked great, so he wanted to schedule the FET. I asked if Q. had to be there for the procedure.

“Well,” said my f/s, “he has to be willing to be the baby’s father when it comes out, but he doesn’t have to actually be there for the transfer.”

Q. is going a little insane right now with work stress, and he’s going to lose all of next Friday because he’s going on a field trip with E. and the nursery school. So I scheduled the FET for next Wednesday (the 23rd) when E. will be in nursery school and Q. will be teaching.

It does feel a little odd- this will be the first transfer that Q. has missed, the first time he won’t be there to hold my hand when the f/s starts poking and prodding and things get uncomfortable, the first time he won’t see the embryo up on the monitor or be able to watch the transfer on the ultrasound. But I’m being practical- if we do the transfer Wednesday rather than Thursday we don’t have to worry about finding someone to look after E. (or stress him out by disrupting his routine- Q. had a hard morning with him today because E. knew it was supposed to be a day where he was with me and he didn’t at all like the fact that I had to go see the doctor without him), and Q. doesn’t have a big hole blasted in the middle of his only teaching-free day that week.

Then I saw a nurse and worked through my treatment protocol and picked up more medications and a new sharps container. I got out of there in time to get home for lunch, like I’d told E. I was going to try to do.

PIO shots start up again tomorrow. Luckily the Fragmin shots don’t start until the day of the transfer as I had a really bad reaction to them this time around- one side of my stomach basically turned into one giant deep purple bruise, and it is taking a long time to clear up. It should hopefully be back to normal just in time to start getting jabbed again. Sigh.

—

I wanted to write this down in case anyone is ever googling (as I was) ‘how long does it take after you stop taking progesterone to get your period’, because it took FOREVER to get my period after the last cycle. We hadn’t done the PIO shot on the day of the beta as we were out of needles and progesterone- I picked up more of both at the clinic, but then we had the phone call and they were superfluous. So my last PIO shot had been the Wednesday morning.

It was TUESDAY night before my period finally started.

Six full days. It never takes that long after taking bcps or provera. It took long enough that a sick, tiny part of my mind started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, my clinic had screwed up the beta results. Which was insane, because, really, a fertility clinic that can’t provide accurate beta results to its clients is a fertility clinic that would soon be out of business. But anyway, that’s what my mind insisted on thinking. It was a relief to finally have it arrive.

—

I also had apparently forgotten how bad my periods are after FETs. I guess I should have expected this- after all, we’ve just devoted all that time and energy to building a wonderful cushy lining for the embryo. But it really took me off guard, and I ended up coming straight home after going in to the clinic on Day 2 because I just couldn’t function without some serious pain relief and a hot oatbag. I suppose my last FET was in December 2009, so it was only fair I didn’t remember, but I also didn’t seem to blog about it. So I’m making a note of it for myself and for future readers: periods after FETs really suck.

—

The other note for posterity is when I was talking to the nurse about my medications on Day 2, I told her that the prednisone gave me terrible insomnia.

She looked at me for a minute. “Do you take it in the morning?”

“No,” I said. “I take it at night.”

“There! Take it in the morning!”

I have no idea why this had never occurred to me before. I generally try as much as possible to avoid taking medications in the morning because I don’t want them to interfere with the thyroid meds.

I am definitely having less trouble with waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. and then being unable to get back to sleep. But I was doing this over the summer as well, when I wasn’t on prednisone. So the jury’s still out as to whether or not changing when I’m taking it has reduced the ridiculous sleeping patterns. But I’ll keep monitoring the situation.

—

My Dad is staying with us for the week as he’s doing some work in the city. We got to chatting last night and he asked about my medical situation, since it’s pretty obvious that something is going on what with my taking a billion pills with every meal and the long conversation I had to have with my increasingly upset toddler about why Mummy had to go in to see the doctor for a few hours the next day and why he couldn’t come with me.

So I told him that we were trying to add to our family, that our first shot at it had failed, that we had one left before we were back to staring down the barrel of a full IVF cycle, that we would probably do one more full cycle but then that would be it.

I got really emotional, which surprised me, but it all just bubbled up to the surface.

It’s hard to be emotional around my father. He is a really tough man- ex-military, really strong personality, etc.- and I don’t really feel comfortable crying in front of him. But I couldn’t stop it last night, and it felt good to let him know where we were at. I never really got into the specifics with him the first time around. He knew that we were trying, and he knew that we were having trouble, and he knew (I’m pretty sure) at the end that it was IVF that worked, but I didn’t get into the details.

He wanted to know if he could help, and then when I said no, wanted to know how expensive it was, because what he clearly meant by ‘help’ was ‘help financially’. So I told him that E. cost $30,000, of which $16,000 came directly out of our pockets (and thank all the gods for Q.’s insurance which covers the medications, or we would never have got to E.- we could never have afforded even one round of IVF if we’d been footing the entire bill), and I told him that we had saved all last year to build a $10,000 2.0 fund, which would get us through both FETs and fund some of an IVF cycle if it came to that, but that if we wanted to continue we’d have to look at cashing in some of our investments. I made it clear that the reason why we haven’t yet redone our floors upstairs, or finished the landscaping in our side garden, both projects he often asks us about, is because that money keeps getting funnelled into trying to expand our family.

“Well,” said Dad. “There are always ways to spend money. It’s better than going to a casino.”

At which point Q. turned up to ask me something and the conversation shifted and I didn’t get the chance to say what I wanted to say to him, which was: “Is it really? Is it really any different to taking that money and gambling it at a casino if we gamble all of it on a child and come up empty handed at the end?”

Anyway. Who knows what Dad will make of that conversation. We couldn’t take money from him even if he wanted to give it to us- because of my stepmother any money that comes from him would inevitably have hidden strings attached, and Q. and I have had a couple of conversations where we’ve agreed that we will stop treatments before we would allow a situation to exist that could lead to comments along the lines of “we paid for our grandchild”.

—

One of the mums I really like on my birth club just announced that she is pregnant (seven weeks along- the birth club generally is horrified that she didn’t tell us as soon as she had POAS, but she said that she was worried about an ectopic, which is fair), and another mum just had her FET transfer on Wednesday. I would love to be pregnant with them.

Fingers crossed. The countdown is on.

Change in plans

Looks like we’re not waiting until December after all.

I went into my clinic this morning.

It was my Day 2, and E. was at nursery school, and it was literally the only day of the week where I could go in to the clinic without it being a juggling act, so I decided to just go in and talk to my f/s. I wanted to touch base with him about what had happened.  I wanted to just double check that if we went ahead with this last FET right now there wouldn’t be time to squeeze in a full IVF cycle in December before Christmas.  This was what I had been assuming.

I was wrong.

“Absolutely,” said my f/s when I asked about the possibility of getting a full IVF cycle done before Christmas.

I pressed him.  “Are you really sure?”

“100%.”

I didn’t hesitate.  “Right,” I said.  “Let’s do the FET now.”

The only thing I can think of is I was assuming I would have to take a full month of the birth control pills before starting stims, and that must not be the case.  Otherwise I can’t see how the calendar works out.

But it’s a result I like much much better.

Yes, I’m potentially spending the entire fall at the clinic, on birth control pills, or preparing for a cycle.  Yes, it will be busy and stressful and hectic.

But it means by Christmas we will have a really good sense of where we stand in our journey to expand our family.

It means I won’t have to wait until July to fit in a full IVF cycle.  My eggs won’t get that little bit older.  The age gap between E. and any potential sibling won’t get that little bit bigger.

It gives us the flexibility to then maybe (if needed) do a FET in the new year.  We couldn’t possibly do a full IVF cycle then- we have to schedule them outside of the semester.  They are too difficult otherwise.

I hated the idea of waiting to do the FET until December.

I hated even more the idea of waiting until July to do a full IVF cycle.

I don’t want this process to be drawn out.  I want us to either get our 2.0 or be finished.  I don’t have the emotional fortitude to have this hanging over my head for another year, or even two.

We know what works.  We know what we have to do to manage my thyroid.  We know what medications are needed.

There’s no reason to waste time.

—

I did my usual trick of peeking at my chart while waiting for my doctor.

My chart was amazingly thin.  It took me a minute to realize that it did have my name on it.

I commented on this to the ultrasound technician.

“Sometimes they start a second chart if the first one gets too big,” she told me.

Sure enough, my chart has a label on the front that says, in big letters, “PART 2”.

My chart got so big they had to get me a second chart.

Sigh.

—

I looked at the transfer report.  They defrosted the weaker of the two embryos- the 1BB rather than the 1AB.  I don’t know why they did this, but I assume they must have felt the difference in quality was so minor as to not make much of a difference to the eventual outcome.

The report said the blastocyst was collapsed after it had been thawed, but my doctor said that was normal.  He said the blastocyst came through the thaw just as they would have expected.

—

I’ve said before that one of the things I like about my doctor is he’s not willing to just keep repeating things over and over again when he’s not getting the desired result.  He is always tweaking- always trying to make things better.

This FET is no exception.  He wants me to come in on the day I have my lining check for an intralipid transfer, which is when they hook me up to an IV for a couple of hours and pump in a diluted concentration of fats and other nutritional goodies. It’s the same type of  solution that hospitals use (undiluted) when they have patients that need feeding tubes. Apparently there have been a number of studies that suggest doing this increases the chance that an embryo will implant because it helps keep the maternal body from attacking the embryo.

It costs a little bit, about $300, but that’s small potatoes compared to shelling out for another full round of IVF.

I’m willing to give it a whirl.

We’ve transferred nine embryos now. Six practically perfect Day 3 embryos. Three perfect or very nearly so blastocysts.

Nine embryos for one pregnancy.

Not just one live birth- one pregnancy (and one chemical where the beta was practically zero).

My uterus is perfect. We build perfect linings. We control every variable we can possibly think of. I’m on every possible medication one could suggest.

And yet there it is: nine embryos for one pregnancy.

I’m not surprised my f/s is wondering what is going on.

I’m not surprised he’s wondering if something in my body is attacking the embryos and preventing them from implanting. I already have auto-immune issues- my thyroid problems.

I’m sure we’ve already run all the other tests that would look for auto-immune problems. It may well be there’s something going on that we can’t yet identify.  Maybe what’s happening is beyond our current medical knowledge.

Or maybe we’ve just been really really unlucky.

Whatever the case, I’m glad he’s still got something else up his sleeve.

Resolutions

Next time, I will not entertain even the slightest suggestion that anything I am feeling is potentially indicative of pregnancy. I’ve thought about it, and the nausea was probably on days where I took the estrace on too much of an empty stomach. The head nurse told me it would make me sick if I didn’t take it with food. The dizziness was probably a result of being on two different blood thinners. The cramps? Whatever. That’s two out of three cycles now where cramps proved to be meaningless.

Next time, I think I will change my long-held habit, and will test before the beta. I’m normally too cheap to buy pregnancy tests, and I hate seeing that single line, but if it gives me a day or two to start to come to terms with a likely negative result rather than being hit with it out of the blue on the phone, it will be money well spent. I never want to experience that again.

—

I think we’re probably going to hold off until December for the next FET. We can manage them during semester, but there’s not really any rush, because we don’t have enough time now to get a FET done AND do a full IVF cycle in December. So that means we’re not going to attempt a fresh IVF cycle until April 2014 at the earliest (yes, I am in self-protection mode and am looking ahead), and it’s more likely that we won’t attempt one (if we decide to attempt one) until July, after we come back from visiting Q.’s family. No point then in rushing right into another FET- might as well wait until the semester is over and we can both relax a bit more. It will make juggling E. on mornings I have to go in easier as well.

There are some good things to waiting. I can really concentrate on getting this full draft of my dissertation finished. I haven’t been working hard enough over the last month- I prioritized staying relaxed and did everything I could to minimize my stress. But now it’s crunch time.

I’m going to start running again. Two months is enough time to get back into a groove. I hate how I look right now, and I can’t silence the little voice inside of me that keeps commenting that the time I got pregnant was the time when I was in the best shape of my life.

December would be a September baby. That would be ok. I know I should be past this, that I should think that any baby, at any time, would be ok, but I don’t. I am too wary of how close I came to PPD with E., too aware of my own annual melancholy in the winter months, too tied in my moods to the interplay between light and dark, sunset and sunrise. I don’t think I would choose to birth a baby in the depths of winter, even if that decision means delaying an IVF cycle by another few months, means that the age gap between E. and any possible sibling grows ever larger.

Or maybe I would. I don’t know right now.

Maybe we won’t even do another IVF cycle. Maybe this next FET will be the end of our road, one way or the other.

I can’t know that yet, even though I wish I could.

What I do know is I am mourning the loss of this cycle.

A June baby.

A three year age gap.

A happy ending.

—

I took E. to the park in the afternoon after the phone call came. It wasn’t the best idea- we were there after school had let out and it seemed absolutely every mother in the park was chasing around two or more children. Several had three. I worked hard to keep my attention on E. and tried not to let my tears be too obvious.

—

I put the lasagna I was meant to be defrosting back in the freezer and ordered takeaway instead. I wanted Indian, but our local was closed due to a problem with their water main, so I went with Mediterranean mezze instead. E. and I went to pick it up after we’d been at the park. We arrived home at the same time as Q. He saw the bags. “Is it celebratory takeaway?” he asked. He didn’t know yet. He had wanted to be told in person. “No,” I told him. “It’s the other kind.” I saw his shoulders slump. I left him to pick up E. and the stroller and went inside to cry.

—

In the evening we decided to watch a film rather than do any work. We streamed Looper. We probably shouldn’t have as a couple of moments in the film hit me quite hard. Then we went upstairs and went to bed. Q. curled himself around me like an embrace. I buried my head in the pillow so my tears wouldn’t wake him up.

—

At the park in the afternoon, E. was playing with the big yellow dump truck, and he wanted to put some sand in it. The excavator was all the way over on the other side, so I asked him if he’d like me to go and get it. He said yes, so I walked over, picked it up and brought it back to him.

“Thank you, Mummy,” said E. “That was really nice.”

Thank all the gods for E.

Picking up the pieces

I’m trying to refocus. I don’t want to dwell, to wallow. It’s over and done with. I need to move on.

It is hard, though.

I am very sad.

I feel like I’ve gone right back to 2008, when I so naively believed that the first or second IUI would surely work, when I had no idea of the path that lay ahead of me, when I thought getting me to ovulate was the problem and that everything else would be easy.

I thought this time around would be easy. I thought maybe the universe would balance things, even though I know, I know that this is not how things work.

My clinic encouraged this. The doctors praised the quality of my embryos. When I broke down and cried at the first consult because I was staring at my big chart and I was overwhelmed by the thought of doing it all over again, the doctor told me that it had taken a long time to get to that last IVF cycle, the one that produced E. But I didn’t have to do it all over again. We knew what worked now. I had beautiful blastocysts just waiting to become babies.

And that is a new grief.

I’ve posted on here a couple of times about how having E. has fundamentally changed the way I look at our frozen embryos (now embryo).

Before they were just chances.

Now it’s too easy for me to think of them as babies-that-could-be. After all, they were in the same petri dish as E. a little over three years ago. One of them might be here now instead of (or as well as?) him if they had grown differently on that last day. It could have been E.’s embryo that we defrosted two weeks ago. It could have been his embryo that didn’t stick.

Could have, might have. I don’t play those games for long. They’re overwhelming. They refuse to be grasped, contemplated, understood. Instead they slide in and around my consciousness, like a flicker in the corner of my eye that isn’t there when I turn to look.

Who might that embryo have been?

A sister for E? A little girl with dark hair and dark eyes like her mother, who I can see so easily when I close my eyes? Or a little brother, less clear to me, but no less possible.

This is the hardest part. The letting go, now that I know what the having means.

Blindsided

The clinic just called.

My beta was negative.

Fuck.

I am an IDIOT.

From now on, nothing counts until the beta results come back. There are no ‘symptoms’. Everything is meaningless.

Damn it.

I really believed that it had worked. I thought I would be lucky. I thought maybe it could be easy this time.

What a fool I was.

12dp5dt- I am slowly going crazy…

In 2010, this was the date of my beta. I actually could have gone in from 10dp5dt, but Q. and I decided to wait the full twelve days to give ourselves the best possible shot. Given I POASed at 10dp5dt and got a clear BFN (thank you dollar store tests), it wasn’t difficult to wait those extra two days.

My clinic makes us wait a full fourteen days after transfer with a FET. I think this is because FETs can take a bit longer to get going, what with having been frozen and all. Fair enough. I doubt I’d be at my best immediately after having spent three years on ice.

Anyway, beta is Thursday. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is not all that far away now. But it feels like it is taking FOREVER.

It is made much worse by the fact that I am pretty much 100% convinced that I am pregnant. I’m still refusing to spend money on pee sticks (although I have been sorely tempted), so I still have nothing to confirm this gut feeling. It is all circumstantial evidence:

• the cramping in the uterus has continued and ebbs and flows from day to day- this is familiar from the cycle that produced E.
• my uterus/lower abdomen in general feels heavy and full- it’s not bloat, just a general sense that there is less space than there used to be- I don’t remember this in the early stages with my pregnancy with E., but I wouldn’t have been as sensitive to it.
• I am dizzy all the time now- head rushes every time I stand up- this was the same in 2010. I’m also out of breath a lot, but that would be the progesterone.
• I am incredibly sensitive to smell- I had a lot of trouble walking around the neighbourhood with E. on garbage day last week. On Saturday we bought a melon at our farmers’ market, and when I cut into it, Q. and I weren’t sure it was still ok to eat. Q. ate a small triangle and said to me that he thought it was off but wasn’t sure. I put a tiny piece in my mouth and had to spit it out immediately or I would have thrown up- the melon had clearly gone off, and my whole body rebelled at the thought of eating it.
• Lastly, I am frequently nauseous, especially in the mid-to-late afternoon, and especially if I’ve let my stomach get empty. I certainly had the queasies with E. (although never any actual vomiting, for which I was eternally grateful), but they definitely had not started this early. Maybe one’s body starts to react faster the second time around because it’s done it before?

So. Either I’m pregnant and we’re getting good news on Thursday, or my body is engaged in the world’s biggest mindfuck.

Two more days.

10dp5dt

So I’m just going to come out and say it.

I have no scientific evidence on which to base this opinion.

It’s a gut feeling, nothing more.

I haven’t POASed.

I’m not going to POAS.

And I’ll look like an idiot on Thursday having said this if I’m wrong.

But I’m going to say it anyway.

I really think this cycle might have worked.

Four more days.

Déjà vu (7dp5dt)

A day or so ago I was reading back through my blog and I read my way through August 2010 and the tww that led to E.

This cycle feels SO similar.

Last time, at exactly 7dp5dt, I wrote:

My body finally decided it wasn’t that big of a fan of the ethyl oleate solution which the progesterone is in. At first I just had two itchy areas, one on each side of my butt. I didn’t realize they were there until I found myself wondering why I kept absentmindedly scratching my butt while reading, talking to Q., staring in the cupboard to see if there’s a good snack on offer, etc.

I’m using castor oil this time rather than the ethyl oleate, in an effort to prevent another resurgence of the hives from hell, but I’m getting the exact same effect. My butt is seriously itchy. I’m watching (a bit anxiously) to make sure I don’t start getting welts, as it’s a slippery slope from those to full body hives.

I also wrote:

My Frag.min bruises have started up. I’ve only got one nasty blood blister bruise thus far, but I’m now sporting five distinct yellow-green blotches on my stomach. The rest of my stomach is squishy (I’m not so good with the ab workouts). The bruises are really firm to the touch. I’m trying to go around them with each injection, but I’m starting to run out of space.

Yep.

And this:

I felt all weekend like af was trying to break through. I always have a day before af comes where I just feel generally out of sorts- lots of low level cramping in the uterus, and a general heaviness in my abdomen, coupled with emotional instability (i.e., I will cry at anything).

Check, check, and check. I’m not really noticing the emotional instability at the moment, but the cramping and the heaviness, and the feeling that AF is about to start, that’s all exactly the same.

I’d be more excited about this, except that the day after I wrote that post, I went back through my blog and found this post– one that was written at exactly the same stage in our first IVF cycle in 2009 (9dp3dt). The cramping and the feelings I were having were identical.

That convinced me in 2010 that I wasn’t pregnant, which turned out not to be true. It definitely means that I’m taking this round of cramping and uterine heaviness with a big big grain of salt. This might be the first time I’ve had this cramping after a FET, but I can’t be sure- I didn’t post much during the two FETs in 2009, so it could have happened and I just didn’t record it. In 2010 I thought I hadn’t had the cramping with FETs, and my memory should have been better with only ten months of distance, so it is possible that this is something new.

What is certainly new is having a toddler underfoot. My sister made me feel a billion times better about the lifting I had to do on Tuesday (and the other lifting I’ve had to do over the course of the week). This is what she wrote:

Do they just not want you exerting yourself? The 20lb limit seems pretty arbitrary, and I bet they don’t have good medical studies on what would be a good limit. I guess I just think they don’t want you to stress your body by forcing it to lift something unexpectedly heavy, but you are completely and utterly muscularly adapted to lifting E.’s weight. From, you know, all the E.-lifting.

I’m not going to tell you not to worry, because what else are twws for? But in my mind, lifting E. is the absolute norm for your body right now, not something that should cause undue abdominal stress.

She is so clever. In 2010 it would have been a sudden change if I’d started lifting a 25 lb toddler. But right now? That’s my normal. So I’ve stopped stressing about it (although I’m still trying to limit how often I have to pick him up).

The other thing that’s different is my attitude towards my weight. In 2010, I was obsessed with making sure I didn’t gain too much weight during pregnancy. I had to hide the scale mid-way through the first trimester, and I was weighing myself all the time in the tww. Partly that was because I was at risk of OHSS and I had to make sure I wasn’t gaining unexpectedly, but partly it was because I was obsessing. And it was just ridiculous, because I was in the best shape of my life, and super skinny to boot. I look back at my first couple of ‘belly’ photos, and just shake my head. I have a bigger belly now, not being pregnant!

This time around? I can’t be bothered. I weigh more than I did when I got pregnant with E., as I started this cycle five pounds over my pre-pregnancy weight in 2010. More noticeable is I’m unfit- in the absolute chaos that was early September the running fell by the wayside. I’ve done nothing but eat happily since this cycle started (hurray for steroids!). If I’m not pregnant, I’ll get back on track and sort myself out. If I am pregnant, I’ll put the scale away and will ignore it unless told to do otherwise by a medical professional. I know I will drop the weight at the other end of things, and, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter.

One week and counting.

You don’t realize…

how often you pick up your toddler until you’re not supposed to do it.

I picked E. up three times today. No choice in the matter- I’m home alone with him. One of the lifts in particular was a bit awkward.

So now I’m sitting here with my feet up on the couch, cramping like crazy, and hoping I didn’t just screw everything up.