Full of Follies, Full of Hope--Day 13

And then there were five. I was told three times today that I'm an excellent responder to Cl.omid, so I'm allowing myself to feel hopeful this time around. Plus, I didn't have a single side effect with the hormones this month, despite the dosage being doubled--in fact I lost weight. I'm giving my workouts all the credit. If exercise can stave off depression, maybe it wards away the evil Clo.mid spirits, too.

I have 3 follicles on my right: 22, 20, 16 and 2 on my left: 18 and 13. I doubt the 13 will make it...but you never know. Lining looks great, a little thinner, but fine. The blood results showed I wasn't surging yet, so I felt confident about holding off on the trigger. Had I known the drugs were this good, I would've tried them sooner.

Based on the answers I got--thank you so much everyone--and going over my chart with my acupuncturist, we decided to go with 2 IUI's. She says my chart these last two months on the Clom.id are the best she's ever seen for me, so again, I have lots of hope.

The bonus bundle of hope came tonight in the form EWCM. Always nice to see you.

The tricky part was the trigger shot. I usually have them do it at the clinic, but that didn't work for timing. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to give myself a shot in the ass, so I called a friend and bless her heart--she agreed, even though she's never given anyone an injection. My clinic has videos on their website on how to give any kind of injection, so we glued ourselves to the laptop until we felt confident we knew what we were doing. It was so nerve-wracking!! By 9:30pm, I was triggered and she was so awesome! It really does take a village!

And now: I have IUI #1 at 3pm Wed (18 hrs) and IUI #2 at 9am Thursday (36 hrs).

I don't know that I've ever had a cycle that I felt this good about. This is a very nice feeling.

Shot Through the Ass and Sperm's to Blame

That, fellow young internetters, is wordplay on a Bon Jovi song. You may be too young to remember…but it was a really famous song and damn it I’m OLD.
What does it mean?? I took ye ole trigger shot in the ass today my friends.

My temp has been unusually low for days and my body is working really slow this cycle (today is Day 17) possibly due to my wonky cycle last month. I’ve been going to the RE since Day 11 as last month was such a short cycle. I got really down Sunday morning when I saw on the ultrasound that my follicles had hardly grown in 3 days and my LH was no where near peak levels.
So today I went back to the RE where they found two follies, one 18.5. My estrogen is 316 and my LH 14.4.
Also, this morning I woke up to lovely EWCM in the panties and well, if EWCM on Day 17 doesn’t put a smile on your face, really, what will?

Thanks to all of my new online friends and friends in real life who called/emailed/texted to say Happy Birthday! I was feeling a bit down (just a bit, nothing to worry about!) and it made me feel loved and special. Plus, I’m older. Urh. But, on the bright side, I got carded at the last club I went to and still look WELL under 30. Use your SPF moisturizer ladies (and token gay man), it really does work.

I’ve been away from the internets due to no good reason other than I was getting a bit obsessed with blogs and researching. It’s summertime and up until the NYC heat wave sky-rocketed temps to 100, it was rather pleasant outdoors.

I’ve been concentrating on wrapping my head around what’s going on inside my body in healthy ways. What does that mean? Yoga, meditation, pilates, reading, dinner with friends, shopping, cooking, outdoor BBQ’s, foreign films, sitting in the park staring at the grass wishing I could smoke it (OMG, did I just say that!?) and my monthly “damn I’m not pregnant again” sampling of raw fish and wine.

Through conversations with my RE, nurse and acupuncturist we determined that last month was probably a chemical pregnancy (95%). This is partial bad news as it obviously didn’t stick. However, the good news is that my body got pregnant all by itself on a natural cycle—not even a trigger shot. It gave me hope that I can do it and I will do it. That is, me and the help of some progesterone suppositories this cycle, so that itty bitty sticky rice, STICKS.

Tomorrow? 11:30 am, Spermification v.4

Day 11 Bloodwork and Ultrasound

This was our first Day 11 set of tests for my upcoming IUI and we were pretty excited.
Not so excited to get up at 7:30am on a Saturday morning.
Very excited that the young doctor with the dildo cam looked a whole lot like Katherine Heigl of Grey's Anatomy.

She got a great laugh out of "dildo cam"--she'd never heard that one before, but she did say that a lot of husbands have remarked "that thing gets more action than me" Ouch!

So, uterine wall is nice and stripey, thickening away.
E2 was 115 and she found three follicles, all about the same size of 1cm.

I'm happy with all of that, moving along quite nicely for the first month and no drugs.