Last Day of the Year

Wow, it's been a while. Good thing nothing has happened! Christmas was good. I cried a lot but what else is new right??? We had a good time this year. I needed that.

I started on 10 U Lupron this morning. I had my E2 test yesterday but I haven't heard the results yet. Hopefully I'll be able to start Bravelle this weekend and get this show on the road.

I am really enjoying acu. Too bad it is so expensive. I'd like to keep it up but we won't be able to afford that. It's a lot of money!

New Years Eve. Not much going on. We're going to go out to eat with my brother and SIL and then play games an such. Not the same when you cannot drink!

Update: My RE's office just called and my E2 is 24!! They wanted it below 80 to start stimming. I am so excited!

Still Waiting

These past couple of days are just dragging. Two more weeks until I start Luron injections again. I can't wait. I am getting nervous reading all the posts on thebump. So many are on their 3rd and 4th IVF cycle and we could barely afford this one. If this doesn't work I don't know what I'll do. I love reading all the posts but it also scares me that I'll be one of the BFNs. I must stay positive! I love acupuncture. Hopefully my kidney, spleen and stomach are getting happier so they make my uterus happy to. I keep praying that I get a BFP. I guess that's all I can do, right?!?

The Waiting Game

I had my first acu appointment on the 9th. I was really nervous but it didn't hurt at all. She walked me through everything. When I was done though I was so dizzy -- not sure if it was becuase I was so warm or if I was too relaxed. I really liked her she is Chinese and grew up having acu done on her so she is very familiar with it. She said she's done many women who are fertility-challenged.

Other than that I am just waiting. Waiting for Christmas, waiting for New Years and then waiting to start my stims on January 3rd.

On a positive note I have most of my Christmas shopping done so that is one thing I don't have to dwell on -- which is good becuase I am totally a dweller!

Lupron Depot Hell

I am a crying mess. I looked up Lupron Depot's side effects and a bawling freak isn't one of them but looks like that is what I've become. I started crying at church yesterday becuase we sang Happy Birthday to the Sister who run our church. Not much of a ballad I think. I also spontaneously started weeping in Kohl's this weekend when a women with three screaming crying boys came in the store. I need help. Or alcohol. Neither of which I can get anytime soon.

Here We Go Again

I got my Lupron Depot shot last night. Dr. Steve came over late last night to administer it. Wow it was scary looking! Anyway, didn't hurt, just took him a long tim to inject the serum (or whatever you call it). Anyway as of right now no side effects! Yea! So now in 28 days I will start the 10 unit Lupron SC injections again. If I remain supressed Janaury 3rd starts stims. Again, Yea!

After reading all of the posts on thebump.com I decided to look into acupuncture. My mom and husband cautioned me to check with my RE so like a good little patient I did. The RE nurse was actually really excited I was interested in it. She said women love it and may think it helped. So, I have scheduled my first appointment for Tuesday, December 9th. Last night at our office Christmas party I spoke to one of my bosses wives about it as I recently learned that she went for shoulder pain. She waid it was wonderful, that she was so relaxed that she started having "visions" whatever that means! I am so excited to start. I am trying anything to keep me posisitve about my upcoming cycle. Since it is unlikley we can afford a second cycle this will be our one and only hope. Plus it gives me something else to focus on which is really good. I have started knitting again and am trying to do Wii Fit regularly but my brain goes right back to INFERTILITY.

Trying to Stay Positive

I am supposed to get my Lupron Depot tomorrow. I am trying to stay positive. I just can't help thinking that this is not going to work. There have been so many disappointments before and it is hard to fathom something good happening.

Waiting. . .

I got my new IVF calendar. First I have a Lupron Depot 3.75 IM shot on December 3rd. Then I don't start the daily Lupron SC shots again until December 30th. Assuming I am finally freaking suppressed I will start Bravelle then on January 10th. Because I didn't respond well now my RE wants all of my stimming shots to be IM. Looks like Andy will have to step up to the plate since I have to do it twice a day and there's no way I'll be able to do it by myself. Oh well. The RE's office assured me that this doesn't affect how well the drugs stimulate becuase I kind of panicked after reading information on the Bravelle website. I am getting so anxious and trying to stay positive but I keep reading on my favorite websites about woment on their 4th and 5th IVF cycle. Wow, how can people afford it??? Being OOP I am scared this time wont take and then we have to be done becuase we'll never be able to cough up another $15,000.

IVF Cycle 1 - Canceled

Got a call from the RE's office yesterday. Apparently they had their weekly IVF meeting and my file was the topic of coversation. Due to my E2 levels rising from 122 to 694 (WTF!) they are going to cancel my cycle this month. I am supposed to have a heavy-duty Lupron IM shot in two weeks and then will start the 10 unit Lupron injections four weeks after that. They said this IM injection will shock my system into submission They said that ER will be in Mid-January.

How do I feel? Well on the surface I'm pissed, but the more I think about it I am glad they are so careful. Since we are OOP we cannot afford to have cycles that just aren't up to par. If this will help me get a BFP in eight weeks then so be it. In the skeem of things waiting six weeks isn't that long when you've been TTC for 20 or so months.

My How Time Doesn't Fly

Any other time in my life the days just fly by. I can hardly believe we have been TTC for almost 2 years. That's just crazy! However in the last 8ish weeks time has just creeped by. When we went to the RE in September and it was decided that ICSI was our future we were excited we got our bloodests right away, blah, blah blah. All we had to do was wait for my AF to start at the end of September and poof we'd be on our way. The trouble was AF didn't start. It ended up being about 2 weeks late and I had to go on provera (or something) to get it to start. Let's see that was about seven weeks ago and it may as well have been seven years ago because I can barely remember it!

Now some seven weeks later here I am again waiting for my freaking estrogen to go down so I can start the Bravelle injections. I was unbearable two months ago when they said the procedure would take eight weeks that I'd know by mid-December if I was pregnant. Then when the time was FINALLY here, oops your levels aren't good enough you're going to have to hold off another week and we'll check your blood again.

I don't mean to sound ungreatful or anything because my RE is wonderful, his nurses are wonderful and to date my experience has been, if not wonderful, certainly good. I am not a patient person. My husband proposed after 3 1/2 months after I kept asking him if "he'd visited my ring lately". Whether or not that was because of me I don't know, but I do know I'm not patient. Luckily for us he is so he can keep me in check. Anyway, back to my impatience. I waited a long time to find a husband. Not that I wasn't looking mind you, the proverbial he wasn't looking back.

While this post is really fractured I guess the bottom line is this, I am tired of waiting! I want the ER to happen already. I want to be pregnant already. I want to have a happy and health nine months and have the baby already.

Hopefully my blood work will all come back okay on Wednesday and I can start my stim injections and get this ball rolling. I just want to scream "All I want for Christmas is a baby bump, a baby bump, a baby bump. . .

Blood test/Ultrasound I

I had a blood test and ultrasound today in Columbus. The RE (my usual doctor's partner today) said the ultrasound was fine. She measured each of my ovaries and said it looks like both of my ovaries are pushed back behind my uterus and are side by side. She said it would make ER easier. Well that is good news at least. However, my blood test was a different story. They like the estrogen level to be no higher than 80. Mine was 122. She asked if I had a period which I did, so she is scheduling another blood test for next Wednesday. My whole calendar is being thrown out. I won't be have ER the week of Thanksgiving. That makes me really sad and scared. I just hope this isn't the beginning of lots of bad things to come. I am trying to stay positive but so often in my life negative things happen WAY more often than positive ones. Hopefully I'll only be pushed back for a week.

Our Story

My name is Danielle or Danni, depending on when in my life I met you. I met my husband Andy while I was bartending on the side. At first a good impression he did not make, but several weeks and several drinks later we hit it off and have been together ever since. We started dating on July 20, 2005, he proposed on November 1, 2005 and we were married November 11, 2006. From the beginning we had a great relationship. We were both from the same small town but had never met (he is 6 years older than I am). We we met I was just about to turn 31. I should have known then that because it took me so long to find the man I was going to marry it would take me about a lifetime to have a family.

From the time we got engaged bad things and disruptive things kept happening. I was diagnosed with Trigeminal Neuralgia (a very painful nerve disorder) which I subsquently had to have surgery for in May of 2006, my now MIL was diagnosed with Ureter Cancer and had to have her ureter and kidney removed. Thank Goodness she is fine now! We also stupidly decided to buy, remodel and add on to a house the same year we were planning our wedding. The house is done now for the most part, but we certainly learned a lesson. We are never going to build or remodel again! So when our honeymoon came around in Feburary 2007 (we went to Nassau, Bahamas for my brother's wedding and decided to kill to birds with one stone), and we decided it was time to start to have a family I should have known it wouldn't be easy.

We officially began TTC in March 2007. The pills were gone, I stopped drinking, I tried to eat healthier, went to the dentist, had already had my yearly, I was ready to go! When it got to me six months TTC and AF kept showing up I started to get bummed out. When my best friend announced she was pregnant after trying for only three months I got pissed off. When a year rolled around and it seemed everyone was pregnant but me I became lost. I finally went to my GYN to discuss my issues. He began by giving my an HSG. Tubes were clear. He then started me on Clomid. During my first Clomid cycle he found a cyst during a mid-cycle U/S. He wanted to keep tabs on it and asked me to come back a couple weeks later. When I did it had nearly doubled in size. He subsequently scheduled me for surgery and essentially drained it. He said it was about the size of an orange. No damage to my ovary. Yea! But it was a small victory because he subsequently told me that I had a huge amount of scar tissue surrounding my uterus and ovaries and he said that if I was able to get pregnant it would most certainly be a tubal pregnancy. My heart dropped. He then gave me a name of an RE and also sent Andy off to be tested so we'd have those results ready.

Well, Andy's results weren't great. I can't rememer the number but I do remember there weren't very many, and they didn't want to go anywhere. The upside was that they were not irregular or deformed. My RE then had him tested again at their facilty and asked that we not have sex for a week before. This numbers went up but not greatly. Subsequently Andy had a whole battery of tests for chromosomal disorders and such and everything came out fine. My RE thinks it is probably just a vericocele. When we went to discuss our next option he said there was a 50% chance that a surgery on Andy would work but that would push back IFV approximately six to nine months. We had already been TTC for 18 months! We decided to start IVF and because of his sperm issues we are doing ICSI. For those of you who ready this and have no idea what that is, it is where the doctor injects one sperm in each egg, rather than a petrie dish free-for-all. That way each egg is fertilized.

So we are now embarking on our first journey of IVF. I started by being on BCP for 21 days. I started to give myself Lupron injections on Day 14. I am no off of BCP and am waiting for my first blood test and ultrasound next week on November 12th.

So far the drug hasn't been too bad. At first I felt nothing at all, but now I am a crying mess. I was watching Grey's Anatomy last night and when there was an emotional part, pre-IVF I would have teared some and moved on but not last night, I cried like a baby for about 20 mintues. Crazy! I am also really quick to get angry and paranoid right now.

Oh, and on a side note, while we don't have any actual human children, we do have four fur-babies who I wouldn't be able to do with without so I want to mention my son Arroyo (dog) and my three cat-daughters Hollie, Sadie & Gertie. They are the best!

I also want to thank all of the ladies on the infertility websites for all their help and support during this stressful time. While I wouldn't wish this on anyone it is nice to know that there are women like me who can identify with the struggles and emotions of this long hard journey into motherhood.